American Winter - American Shame

211. Remember that number. Imprint it in your mind like 411, or 911. It should come that easy.

What is it? Apparently it is A Great American Secret. You would think it wouldn't be, given that millions of people around the country have gotten help from calling that number. Still, not many people know that if you are in trouble—say your house is being foreclosed, or you can't afford medicine, or you are afraid to take your daughter to the hospital because you don't have insurance, or you husband just died and left you and your kids with bupkis, or you don't have gas money to get to your job, or, or, or...... Or, maybe it's not you, but your neighbor. No electricity. No heat. No food. You don't know what to do. How to help. Well now you do.

Walk over to them, hand them your phone, and tell them to call 211. An operator will answer and link them with help. Just like 911, but this emergency is poverty.

I didn't know about 211 until my husband, Chuck, was asked to be in a film about the help line called American Winter. The show premiers tonight at 6 PM Eastern, 9 PM Pacific time on HBO and will continue to air at various times on HBO through April. (schedule) The film features eight Oregon families who made that phone call, and boy is it eye opening. Raw. Real. We see the courage of people facing situations they never thought they'd face.

And that—their shock, surprise, shame and strength—is what makes American Winter such a powerful film. These people did not see poverty coming, did not notice the out of control economy rounding the bend. And when they did, they certainly didn't expect it to run right over their lives, just like it did millions of others.

American Winter puts a face on this problem, and gives pause to the ludicrous lies that are coming out of congress.

You know what drives a thriving economy? It's not the rich. It's a thriving middle class. They are the ones that create the jobs because they are the ones that create demand for goods. Period. Kill off the middle class, as we have been, and you kill off this economy.

Don't believe me? Watch this. It's stunning.



And so, American Winter. You can watch it tonight. Or you can watch it anytime on HBOGO. Or you can buy the film and show it at your church, or book group, or senior center, or have it playing at the bar, share it on Facebook, but turn it on and let people know.

211—there is help waiting.

-Naseem Rakha 3/18/13

Homesick

I am in a train going south from Seattle, Washington to Oregon, and this is what I see. 

Stacks of lumber and lines of trucks. 
Piles of rebar and blocks of concrete. 
Downed trees and over-grown blackberries. 
Water slick roads. Break lights. Trash. Rain.

It was sunny in Seattle when I arrived on Friday and it stayed that way for a full 48 hours. Two whole days so cloudless and benign, each person I spoke with commented on the phenomena. Can you believe this weather? Are you enjoying the sun? Have you ever seen such a sky? Groups gathered on sidewalks, faces pointed upward. Like storks swallowing fish, they swallowed in that warm glow, trying their best to get their fill. 

Piles of fishing nets, creosote ties.
Rusted bridges, grain elevators. 
Canyons of containers waiting to be stacked on a barge.

And now I sigh. 'Canyons of containers.' I can not seem to get the Grand Canyon out of me. I try, but everywhere I look I am reminded of where I would rather be. Yesterday, while walking though Seattle University I ended up in a strange outdoor alcove, surround on three sides by sandstone colored walls two to three stories tall. Straight ahead was a twisted unfortunate looking tree. A piñon, I thought, knowing it could not be. A piñon in a box canyon. 

Acres of abandoned cars, oil drums,  buoys—orange, blue, green. 
A backyard swing-set hung with a torn and mildewed flag. 

When I got to the Seattle hotel, my computer began to chirp with a weather alert. I looked. I had forgotten to change my settings. It was snowing in the canyon, white-out conditions, it warned. I dropped into the chair and logged onto my web site, hit web cam and stared at the now invisible canyon. Then I looked up and out the window. I could see buildings and cars and hear the buzz of the city. I shut the gauzy curtains and imagined instead that I was looking out the window from my desk at VerKamps on the South Rim of the canyon. Snow swirled, settled in drifts. Instead of city sounds, VerKamp's old steam radiators crooned and clanked in mutiny against the cold. 

Arby's and Burger King. 
Staples and strip clubs. 
Pot bellied homes sitting idly on the shore. 

This is what I think. People buy land, they get titles and pay mortgages. They stake a claim, punch in a post, build a home, erect a monument, dig a grave, and call it theirs. It is not. We can never own place. Place can only own us. And when it does, it does not let go. I belong to the Grand Canyon, or, more broadly, the Colorado Plateau, and there is not a cell in my body that is not being called home.

Puddles. 
More puddles. 
Bigger puddles. 
Ducks landing and swimming in puddles. 
Mallards, coots, buffleheads. 
Seagulls stroll the puddle’s shores. 

Sometime last night the rain returned, and with it descended something else. Melancholia. A furtive sadness. No more people just hanging around outside. No faces looking up. No one saying 'can you believe this weather?'  Because, of course, we can. Hunched backs, collars up, the blank face of resignation. There was a reason Lewis and Clark were happy to leave Fort Clatsop. They spent four and a half months on the Pacific Coast, almost every day of that time cursing the rain. 

It's not that I do not like the Pacific Northwest. I love it in many ways. It has a deep and awe inspiring beauty, more progressive politics then say, Arizona, and I love the fact that I can go from the Great Basin to the ocean in one day. It is just that Oregon has always been my transitional home. I agreed to move here in 1986 under the condition that one day I would return to the southwest. I didn’t know then what I know now—those interceding years—they go by fast. Blink too long and they're gone. Which is why, I believe, I can’t get the canyon out of me. Maybe we are salmon. Maybe we are migratory birds. Maybe we are wildebeest. But the call to return to where rock meets sky is deep in my blood.

Fog on the bay. 
Fog icing the tops of the hills. 
Gray silken scoops of ocean-flavored fog. 
Dense. Drowsy. Desultory fog. 

But I am not a lone salmon, not a wildebeest, or bird. I am a mother. A wife. A daughter, and each of these things keep me here, in the Northwest. It's not a bad confinement. Nothing to whine over, I know. Still, I catch myself watching the skies for chevrons of geese pointing themselves on. 

A ferryboat. 
An island. 
Wicker-colored reeds. 
A motionless heron, its feet planted firmly in the sound.

-Naseem Rakha 3/10/13

Living with Mr. Goodbar - an unhealthy love story

Typical Oregon Day

I got home to Oregon on Sunday, and do you know what was there? The sun.

Yes, my husband and my son were there too, but the surprising member of the 'Welcome back from the Grand Canyon party' was the big guy in the sky. Sun. Sunshine. Warmth and all its perks: scents of spring, daffodils, crocuses and daphne all in bloom. And frogs. The frogs were ribbiting away in the pond, so that was cool too, because I absolutely love the sound of frogs. Tree frogs, bird song and thunder, my three favorite sounds on planet earth. And I thought, okay, this is good. I can deal with this. It's not desert. It's not stone. Still, it has its charm.

But, of course, within 24 hours the big guy was gone.

In his place was regular old Western Oregon. Rain. Gray. People with their shoulders hunched toward their sternums. Chiropractors must make a killing in this state. All these people bent into commas.

At the Grand Canyon - no one hunched.

It could be zero degrees out. Hell, it was minus 13 degrees one morning, and still people walked with their backbones perpendicular to the ground. Why? Because it's dry. Dry makes all the difference. Forty degrees and rain in Oregon makes my bones feel like they've been hollowed out and filled with Slurpee.

And I'm not the only one. Today I spent the day in Portland. My dad was not feeling great so I took him to the doctor's office, and it ended up being a long sit-around-the-doctor-office kind of day, and every once in a while I would leave the office and step outside and be surprised and disgusted by just how cold and ugly the weather was. And as I looked at the faces of the people walking by, all of them in various stages of hunkering, I could see they were just as surprised and disgusted as me. Not one of them smiled. Not even a little. And I thought...

Living in western Oregon is like living in an abusive relationship. 

We fall in love with the beauty of the place—the mountains, the valleys, the green green hills, the coast, the desert, and the food - God the food. The fish, the berries, the beer, the wine. But turn your back for ten minutes - just ten minutes and bam - here comes another Pacific front slapping us along side the head with its big gray sky, and its cold pelting rain. Its ice cold breath blowing right through our wool and fleece.

We've been fleeced, that's it. Come June when we are all still wearing long underwear and wool socks, remember that. This is not a healthy relationship. This is Mr. Goodbar. While everyone else in the country is wearing shorts and playing softball we are in our bookstores holding our tripple-shot Lattes with those fingerless gloves.

It's not normal. And it's not good.

Trust me. I used to think it was normal. In fact I used to get bummed out when that sun broke through and lit the sky so bright I would have to run to Rite Aid to buy a new pair of sunglasses, cause who knows where I put my last pair—it was so long ago....

That's how you know you really have dived off the deep end—when those soggy Oregon clouds become your friend. I think it's called Stockholm Syndrome, where hostages begin to have sympathy, sometimes even love for their captors. That's us. Oregonians. Bound at the hip to our soggy world, we say oh - it's okay. You get used to it. It's not that bad. In fact, I kind of like it.....

Next time your see an 'I ❤ Oregon' bumper sticker, think Patty Hearst.....

-Naseem Rakha 3/6/13

For the People Who Love Kaitlin Kenney

Kaitlin Kenney prior to running Hermit on her birthday, January 6, 2013.
© Sophie Danison 2013

The night before I hiked into the Grand Canyon I was contacted by a friend of Kaitlin Kenney's. He had read an essay I had written about Kaitlin entitled The Way We Die. Kaitlin had gone missing while camped on the banks of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. She had just turned 21. The young man found me though Facebook and we chatted. He told me Kaitlin was his first love. They had been together for three years, and that even after their romance had ended their friendship remained strong. He said he was having a very difficult time since Kaitlin's disappearance. He described her as "a magic maker, an unconditional lover to all and a bright shining light in a weary world."

This young man was not the first to contact me since writing the essay about a young woman I have never met. Since it was first posted, I have heard from other friends and relatives of Kaitlin's. All of them struggling to reconcile themselves with the loss of this young, smart, and clearly vivacious woman. And with each contact I feel touched by and pulled into Kaitlin's story.

So, while chatting with the young woman's dear friend, I offered to do something for him while down at the river.

It is not easy to get to the Colorado. It takes either a river trip or an 8 mile hike down, down and down. I was leaving to take that hike the next morning, so I offered to make a memorial for his friend: a simple stone cairn built on a point with a good vista of the river. I offered to put this young man's name beneath the stones, then he asked me to include another name, and then while hiking down, I thought it needed to be more inclusive still.

I hope I have not invaded anyone's privacy, but for what is worth, here are pictures of what I made for Kaitlin. Perhaps it is the kinship I feel for anyone who loves the Grand Canyon. Or the kinship I feel for those that raft the swift cold water that carved it. Perhaps it is me, my age, or that I am a mother and a sister and a daughter, or that I still clearly remember that deep locked in connection of first love. Whatever it is, this is for the people who love Kaitlin.

Rock cairn made from Vishnu Schist and Zoroaster Granate

The cairn is on river south, across from Bright Angel Camp near Phantom Ranch

This went under the cairn

The Future of the World - Bend, Oregon Muse Conference Changes Lives

Before you read a word, please watch the film above. It features one of the more exciting projects I have heard about in years.

Okay? Watched it? If you did, you saw the future—empowered women from around the world reaching out through the internet to tell their stories. We are talking women living in ghastly poverty, enslaved women, castrated women, refugees, prisoners, women who have had their breasts crushed by their own mothers under the mis-guided assumption that those deformed glands will make their child less likely to be raped. Women who are rarely seen, and never heard.

Jensine Larsen started World Pulse in 2004 so that everyone could hear these stories. But simply hearing was not good enough. In 2007, Jensine started Pulsewire - an interactive web site which links women and their stories to one another. For the first time ever, women from around the world have a way to be heard. Ordinary women have become citizen journalists, sitting in internet cafe's and reporting on their lives and realities. They are not stories you hear from the mouths of the well coiffed cuties on FOX/CNN. This is real, pure and empowering truth, and through it women have been able to find real, pure and empowering solutions. Jensine Larsen was just one of the remarkable women I had the honor to meet and listen to at the Muse Conference in Bend, Oregon yesterday.

The conference was the brainchild of Bend resident Amanda Stuermer, a yoga teacher and social activist who was so energized after attending the Women in the World Summit in New York City last year, that she came home and motivated her friends to create their own conference.

After Jensine, the woman Oprah Winfrey says is her, "favorite all time guest," took the stage. As a female child, Dr. Tererai Trent, a native of Zimbabwe, had the audacity to want an education—to simply sit at a desk, raise her hand and ask a question was her dream. But girls were not educated in her village. Why would they be? They would just be married off and leave the community. There was nothing to be gained for those left behind. And that is just what happened to Tererai. At age 11 she was married to an older, abusive man. By age 18 she had given birth to three children. An impossible situation to escape. Yet, Tererai does. She and her family end up in the United States where she raises her children in a trailer without electricity or running water. She works three jobs, and she earns her Bachelors, her Masters and her PhD in Interdisciplinary Evaluation. She is one of those women whose voice sounds like tumbling water, and as is flowed over me I felt cleansed of any notion of can't or shouldn't. Excuses, I understood, are cowardly things.

It was more than just an honor to be a keynote presenter among these women. It felt like I had been invited into a world where hope and vision are true flames, warming the cold air of apathy and indifference.

After the conference, the speakers attended a dinner. There, Tererai leaned into me and said the key to her achieving her dream was to refuse to be a victim. Instead, she said, "I swam to the other side of the river and became a 'conqueror'."

Today, through Oprah Winfrey and Tererai's work, a new school stands where the old "boys" school once stood. There are more teachers, and equipment, and most pleasing to Tererai, girls are sitting at those desks and asking questions. Many of them may one day be writing reports on Pulsewire, reaching out, finding community, defining answers. This is the future. And they, like all the women I met yesterday, are conquerors.

Dr. Tererai Trent and Naseem Rakha

Saying Goodbye

I left the Grand Canyon before sunrise. I had said my goodbyes the evening before. It was time to move on.

Saying goodbye

So I got in my car and crept out from the park. An hour later, I was nearing Williams Arizona—home of the Grand Canyon Railway. Everyday of the year since before the Grand Canyon became a National Park in 1919, this railway, which has the enviable url thetrain.com, rolls into Grand Canyon National Park around noon, offloads a few hundred people, then leaves again around three. It's whistle would punctuate my day, making me look up from my writing, glance at the canyon. Smile.

When I have to leave a place I love, I think of things I can count on continuing to occur after I'm gone. Eddies corralling debris, mail being dropped in a box, a train's whistle. Simple, ordinary things. And when I remember these things, I don't feel so far away. It helps.

VerKamp's Artist in Residence living room

Right now I am thinking of the morning light coming in through the living room windows at Verkamp's - the place I had the honor to stay as Artist in Residence. I am thinking of the ravens that glide above the canyon, slick black wings licking the thermals. I am thinking of the two stones I received as a going away gift. One, a brachiopod fossil, the other a piece of chert that mimics the pattern and color of the canyon. These were not found in the National Park, but on Forest Service land, so giving them to me was no crime. And right now they are in my pocket, and they will be there for very long time.

But enough of that. This morning I wake 767 miles away from the canyon. I am at Scott's Shady Court Motel in Winnemucca, Nevada (think 1950's). And I had dinner last night at the Martin Hotel - an old Basque family-style restaurant on the railroad line through town. I sat with a bunch of cowboys and listened to stories about pigeon roping, and a father who rode in the first Pendleton Roundup, and how there was a time when all cowboys, in Oregon at least, would wrap dead snakes on their saddles. And they talked about coyote killings and bucks who lose their gems jumping barb wire fences, and how the horns of those poor castrated animals grow all screwy. And I heard about cold, cold winters, and hot, hot summers. I used to work with ranchers a lot, and miss these stories from people who live in a land is so vast they identify their home not by town or county, but by "country." As in, 'I come from that country just east of the Jordan Valley.'

I got to Winnemucca by taking a route I had never been on before. In 250 miles I saw exactly three cars, and was buzzed by exactly one fighter jet. I was in basin and range country. Flat land bracketed by mountains. Land so empty and wide it was perfect for some hotshot pilot to skim right over. It probably took me two minutes to pry my hands loose from the steering wheel after that jet tore over my car from behind. But then the road - my god that road.... It was such a beautiful drive. So open and alone. And then the sky started to darken and clouds came in and the sun went down, and in a moment of spectacular beauty, the sky exploded with color. I pulled over, got out of my car. I could hear the cows mooing, and the air was cool and calm, the ground cracked and heaved from freeze and thaw. And I will carry those small things with me as I go on.

Cougar Crossing

I did wonder, as I stood out alone at 5:30 in the morning, taking a picture of this unique sign, if I was being all that smart.  Or, more likely, being outsmarted.....Off to hike down to the canyon. Last post till Tuesday night (if I have the strength....)