July 2021 Meditations

Why do I keep this blog? The tagline is that it's my account for high country travel. Sure, but I could do that all the same in a notebook that lives in my nightstand. 

And for whom do I keep these reports? Is it for me? For the anonymous beta-seekers? For family?

I don't really know. What I do know is that I like to write, and sometimes I need to write. And I don't care if anyone reads any of this, as much as I imagine (and even hope) people do. 

And here's another thing: I think things happening in my life outside of the high country are important to and worth writing about. But they're probably less fun to read. Fine. 

Anyhow, July was fucking awesome because I did a hard thing and then did a not so hard thing when I traveled back East and relaxed, no, melted, melted hard. Like, really hard. Like, drink expensive beers on a beach with my brothers and my girlfriend and watch big weather move over the Cape Cod bay while admiring the incoming tide, how it's controlled by the moon and how it inched toward our feet and made everything feel cool and wet and distinctly North Atlantic. In Utah, I can't keep a shirt wet if I want to and the opposite is true in the Cape—even if that shirt is hanging on a clothesline in the sun for an entire day.

There's a place in Dennis Port near my granny's cottage that we would walk to, a jetty, past the private beaches and to the fisherman (whom I've never seen catch a fish, ever) balancing on the weathered rocks and throwing chum into the sea. My Pops liked it there and fished there, too, and I never did see him catch a fish either, but one time when the tide was low and the sky dark with cumulonimbus clouds we walked along the jetty in ankle deep water into which he sunk his hand and picked out a fat brown crab, which pinched him and made him bleed. The blood was deep red and dripped into the water and I thought my Pops was brave and stoic as he held onto the crab and made me look at it. It moved and wriggled and I looked at its beady black eyes and wanted nothing to do with it. My Pops died some time in 2020 but never had a funeral nor a memorial service due in part to the pandemic, but that summer my brothers and I brought his ashes to Dennis Port and to the jetty and, as my granny and parents watched, threw handfuls of them into the cracks of the slippery rocks and some of mine picked up with the wind and blew into Eddie's thick black hair, as he was downwind of me and having his little goodbye Pops moment. 

This summer Libby, Mick and I returned to the jetty at high tide and watched those fat brown crabs float in the current close to the jetty walls. It was hard to tell whether they were fishing or simply getting sucked up and carried in the current out of control. They floated like ghosts below the surface and disappeared in and out of the murky water. We dove in with them and floated on our backs like otters, letting the tide carry us inland until we reached the only flat rock far inside the jetty that lacked scores of skin-thrashing barnacles.

Every summer I have to visit Provincetown, which is an unabashedly queer place and I love that, and I really wanted Libby to love it, too (and I think she did). Maybe some time in 2015 I was there with friends and it was Bear Week and I thought, "Wow, there are a lot of big, hairy gay men all around me and I don't know if I'm supposed to feel uncomfortable," really feeling mostly comfortable but only slightly discomforted by the fact that I was a supposedly straight man surrounded by my supposedly straight friends who probably thought that I felt uncomfortable, because that was what they felt in that moment too. One night, we were deliberating whether to visit this basement bar and had some heteronormative conversation about whether it was actually a gay bar, and whether it would be alright for us supposedly straight men to enter. Somebody overheard our conversation and remarked, coolly, "It's a fuckin' gay bar," and walked right in. We went elsewhere, probably because we didn't want to come across as gay. 

But this time around, Libby and I visited a queer gallery right when we got into town, and there was a blown up image of a big, hairy bear butt. It was right there on the main level directly across from the entrance, greeting me like a welcome mat. It wasn't what I'd call Great Art, but at least it conveyed to me a message. What was it? Get comfortable or get over it. 

We continued throughout the gallery, past other large pictures of bear butts, and then walked down Commercial Street, seeing mostly men. I suppose it's still a man's world, even when you're queer. 

And then there's Commercial Street with all of its quiet side streets and cute Victorian townhomes with inviting porches and steel spiral staircases and window tchotchkes that make me feel this powerful, forward-looking form of nostalgia—I believe it's referred to as "saudade" in Portuguese. There's only a few places that make me feel such a way; Provincetown being one of them, Greenwich Village being another, and El Carmen in Valencia the last that comes to mind.

One day on a whim Mick and I bought fancy bodyboards and took them to Marconi Beach, where we dodged surf schoolers and other foam-bearing tourists. We were kids again in small waves, thrilled at what the ocean could do. The seals came closer to the shore than I'd ever seen them, giving off an old-can-of-tuna-in-the-sink-type odor. For some reason we always found ourselves on the Atlantic side of the Cape during the late afternoon, when the ranger station closes and most of the beachgoers leave. I thought about how dreamy it would be to visit this seashore in the dead of the winter, when opaque slushy waves peak overhead and the air stings your cheeks. We swam over to a clean-looking spot in the beach break, where knee high sets peeled for fifty or so meters before mushing out above deeper water. We sponged around among a couple of longboarders and one shortboarder with an earring who wasn't really good but somehow rode every wave that came to him. He stood up on his board with a certain rigid grace, his back stiff and erect, his legs locked and angular like a digitized trapezoid, but hey, the kid was catching fucking everything, and I wanted some, too. Days later we'd rent a monstrous plastic longboard and Mick would stand up on the first waves of his life, and I don't know whether I've hooted harder at anything Mick's ever done. 

I'm convinced that you could put me anywhere in the country and I'd find something fun to do. If you were to put me back within an hour's drive from the coast, I assuredly would become a waterman. Breathing underwater seems like the greatest super power to have. 

One morning when the sun was hot, the wind still, and the water textureless, I had coffee and just started out over the Nantucket Sound. I didn’t feel like there was anything in particular to think about, nor anywhere else I needed to be. It might have been the closest I’ve come to pure contentedness in a long time—perhaps even ever.

And then we returned back to the house where I grew up, and I snuck out to to go climbing at one of my favorite spots that overlooks the Naugatuck Valley: the Whitestone Cliffs. I rope solo’d the high quality Dreadlock (5.8) and immediately reinvigorated my excitement for rock climbing.

I had a conversation with my brother one time about the Naugatuck River. He's lived in the post-industrial northeast his whole life, and perhaps hasn't developed an appreciation for the idea of a river as the lifeblood of a community.  To him, the Naugatuck seems like an afterthought. But I know it could be so much more (it was once host to the southernmost Atlantic salmon migration), and it breaks my heart that people in the area quickly dismiss it as another polluted river with little to offer. 

The last day in Connecticut, my dad’s side of the family visited. We all played lots of chess, drank some great New England beers, and hopped around to bluegrass.

And before I was even ready, I found myself back in Utah, land of snow, rock, dust, and dry, dry heat. 

People ask me whether I'll ever return to New England. I usually tell them no, and that there's just too many places to explore here out West to justify returning back to scrappy ol' New England. But then I think of the Naugatuck, the Atlantic,  Nonnewaug Falls, and the fifty foot cliffs that I used to amble under when I knew very little about what I could accomplish on ones ten times their size. It's all important and exciting. It's all very, very beautiful.