Tranquility and possibility
Dear friends —
One evening a few weeks ago, I got lost in the mountains. I was on a road I was pretty sure I’d been on before, but in the post-sunset dark, all the pine trees looked the same. Google Maps wouldn’t work — I’d crossed into an AT&T dead zone. Then my phone died altogether.
Bears will be out soon, I thought. Meaning I could be dead soon. I started panicking. I broke into a run.
Then I turned a corner, and suddenly there it was: home.
Home right now is my friend Zach’s big cabin in the San Bernardino mountains in Lake Arrowhead, Calif. To get here you have to drive up narrow switchback roads that are marked, inconsistently, with rustic wooden signs. It’s a beautiful rural area of mostly vacation homes, many of them available for rental on Airbnb. But Zach lives here full time, because he works for the San Bernardino National Forest.
Before this job, Zach did a short stint at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, a gig I asked him about one night then immediately regretted — he regaled me with stories of all the people who’d died in the park during his two months there.
One guy got caught in a bad storm, drifted off the trail in the dark, and presumably froze to death in his tent.
A college student drowned.
A professor, an off duty search-and-rescue volunteer, and a young woman — each separately and alone — died due to falls.
As someone who often has nightmares about falling, I kept thinking about these deaths long after I got into bed that night. I didn’t sleep well.
When I can’t sleep, I read. In Lake Arrowhead, I read five plays by Chekhov. His characters kept dying, some slowly of consumption, others quickly by gunshot, often self-inflicted.
There are so many creative ways to die.
Another night, I did sleep well — so well that I didn’t even hear Zach come in and out of the cabin between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. The next morning I woke up and saw his text: “Something very bad happened.” A firefighter had died battling the nearby El Dorado fire.
A few days later, another firefighter — off-duty this time — went missing under mysterious circumstances. His car and backpack were found, but he himself had disappeared. A search began.
Meanwhile my quiet life in the mountains continued. I went on a paddleboat tour of Lake Arrowhead. I slept through an earthquake. My friend Libby came to visit from Brooklyn and we walked a loop around Lake Gregory. I got the flu shot at a Rite-Aid that made me incredibly anxious because I’m no longer comfortable sharing indoor spaces with strangers. The shot hurt — not the needle so much as the fluid as it seeped into my muscle. The next day, I was achy and started running a fever — my body’s not-uncommon reaction to getting vaccinated.
I took Tylenol and read Chekhov’s Three Sisters — a play about three sisters in a small, provincial town who dream of moving to Moscow, the big city. Ah, Moscow, where we might go to exciting parties and hold scintillating conversations in French and Italian! Where we might be swept off their feet by handsome, sophisticated men! If we only lived in Moscow, our lives would glamorous, uninhibited, exciting, urbane — and we would be happy —
Isn’t that, really, the lure of the city for all of us that feel its pull? This feeling that you’ll get there, turn the corner, and maybe, suddenly, there it’ll be, everything you ever wanted: success, money, fame or at least recognition, witty repartee with friends and enemies, thrillingly high stakes, beauty.
What the city gives you, more than anything, is the sense of possibility. That’s one thing I miss about Los Angeles — not so much what my actual life was like there, day to day, but that day to day feeling something unexpected and incredible might happen.
In the mountains, there’s a lovely sense of tranquility, but not much of a sense of possibility.
Is it possible to find the right mix of the two — tranquility and possibility? Or will I eventually have to choose one or the other, one day when I decide to give up this nomadic lifestyle?
Of course, the three sisters (spoiler!) do not move to Moscow. Instead, at the end of the play, there’s a duel. A gun goes off, and a guy one of the sisters didn’t love but planned to marry winds up dead.
Chekhov’s perhaps best known for his dramatic principle called “Chekhov’s gun.” His idea was that everything brought into a story must serve a purpose. If a gun is shown hanging over the mantlepiece in act one, that gun must go off by act four.
Which act are we in, do you think? Right now Trump is hospitalized with the coronavirus. California ballots have started arriving in mailboxes. The missing San Bernardino firefighter still hasn’t been found.
Has the gun already gone off, or are we still in the foreshadowing of what’s to come?
Until next month, when I’ll be writing you from wine country, stay well —
Love,
Siel
P.S. Three links you might enjoy:
Open a new window somewhere in the world.
Has the quarantine made you rethink your grooming habits?
P.P.S. Recent plays I read are by Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett, and Alfred Jarry. Other books: Stray by Stephanie Danler, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, and the essay collection Slouching Towards Los Angeles.