Combustion

By Erin Ruble:

We walk from the airport into smoke. There are mountains all around but you cannot see them. Roads end, not in horizons, but in brown smudges of indeterminate distance.

Light looks different, pulling the luster of sunset forward into mid-afternoon. Actual sunsets are religious affairs. Exercise is dangerous. Clouds become suspect, especially those that plume at a single point on the horizon.

This morning we watched the sun rise over Vermont’s Green Mountains before lifting off from an earth lush with water. As we flew west the land flattened and broadened like the vowels of those beneath us. By the time we passed the Mississippi, Kelly green had faded to sage and then to tan. Irrigation created strange geometries, perfect circles, rectangles, and stripes across an otherwise sinuous landscape. 

Evidence of water is everywhere here: in the ripples of sandstone, the crooked paths of coulees, the cumulous clouds that stack in the sky. Water is visible in everything but itself. Step off the plane and your skin will crack and dry. Blow your nose and you will find dust and blood. 

My husband and children and I return to Montana every year to visit my parents. This summer, as a hurricane drowns Houston, wildfires have spread across eastern Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. The smoke is thick enough to touch. People follow the Incident Information System, InciWeb, like news junkies watch CNN. 

Grass crackles under our feet, brittle, brown, thin. My mother reports that the Ponderosa pines in the pastures hold less moisture than kiln-dried lumber. I’m not sure how anyone knows this but I do not question her. 

Combustion is my parents’ favorite summertime conversation. Too frequent school fire drills have spooked my seven-year-old, though, so I ask them not to talk about it. But after a few days at my family’s vacation cabin my husband and I, coming back from a hike, see a billow of dirty white down the valley. The cabin is surrounded by mountains on three sides; the only road out is somewhere near that fire. We head back along the ridge in order to keep track of its progress. As we walk it jumps over the top of a hill and starts down the other side. Now, faintly, we can see flames. 

This is a familiar threat. My sister and I used to sit in the bay window during summer nights, watching lightning pulse through clouds. Just half an inch of rain fell during the entire summer of 1988, as Yellowstone burned; by the end of August, ash capped every fencepost. Everything smelled of quenched campfires when the clouds finally broke. When I was twelve I drove our pickup through our rocky back pasture, peering over the windshield for tracks to follow, shuttling firefighting supplies to my parents and neighbors so they could fight a blaze that the city fire department refused to address. The year before my son was born a fire roared through the valley that holds my family’s cabin, missing it only by the grace of a sudden change of wind. 

Now my mother calls the sheriff’s department. The fire began only an hour ago but the powers that be have learned of it already, and are sending helicopters, earth movers, even a slurry bomber. The forest service is adopting a let it burn policy when they can—lodgepole and grasses and all kinds of organisms depend on fire, and it’s too expensive to obey Smokey the Bear’s edicts anyway—but a few years ago a lightning strike just down the road burned over 200,000 acres and cost $22 million, so today they’re taking no chances. 

We pack up the kids and drive down the county road to where the fire eats its way downhill. We pull off and park. Expensive ranches line the river, sagebrush bluffs giving way to emerald pastures. Someone has let their horses out and a black and white pinto trots over to us. 

Helicopters drop what look like thimbles of water on the fire. Each time they seem too small to make difference, but after a moment, the orange glow dims. Bulldozers crawl over a ridge I’d swear was too steep for a horse. 

My parents and son stare at the work. My daughter draws a picture in the car. I pat the pinto. A neighbor stops to pass on news. Everyone seems very calm, and in fact, by evening they will have put out the fire. When we drive home the next day, we will see miles of black stripes across the tan hills, the red stain of retardant like glowing coals. 

Soon another summer will be gone.

***

Erin Ruble’s essays and short fiction have appeared in Boulevard, Green Mountains Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Montana, she now lives in Vermont with her husband and children. You can find her at erinruble.wordpress.com.

Names and Purposes

By Eytan Pol:

There is a juniper tree rooted in the red desert flats south of Twin Rocks in south-central Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park. Like most junipers, its bark and branches are not straight or smooth, but twisted, rolled upward and seemingly folding into itself. Junipers have a way of looking as if they are under constant pressure from within, the veins almost popping out, intensely tightening its muscles so it can.. so it can do what? It almost looks as if they are trying with all their might to get every single drop of water from the nearly-dry desert soil. Every fiber in their being is tensed up in the effort to reach it. 

But this particular juniper tree near Twin Rocks, looks different. Two sunburnt and scarred limbs stick out from the main trunk, reaching upwards and outwards in the soft blue desert sky. The bark is twisted like all others of its kind, but the way in which it is formed can only remind one of a ballerina posing beautifully on a stage. I do not know anything of dance and theater, but in a way, this juniper reminds me of exactly that. Posing on its own desert stage. A constant performance without an audience, a fact that makes it more captivating. 

Overwhelming and soothing serenity. An emancipating sensation of the necessity of self-reliance. If I were to disappear, how long would it take for people to take notice? How long could I wander around undisturbed if I strayed off-trail, disappearing into a side canyon? Hidden in vast and dry fields of red rock, heated by the high summer desert sun. A cottonwood or overhanging cliff to shade my mind and body. A solitary place to nurture and reset the synapses of my brain, a place of everything and nothing. Perhaps I tend to romanticize too much, and I might be a naive idealist. Know that this is by choice after careful consideration of the alternatives. 

A heavy red rock sits sturdy in place, lodged between brothers and sisters, big and small. It has fallen from the crimson Wingate sandstone cliffs hundreds or perhaps thousands of years ago. I see blooming cliffrose with soothing yellow flowers, exuding toughness rather than beauty. It has rooted in vertical nooks and crevices so unlikely and small that even their existence is simply a wonder to behold. A couple of green cottonwood trees are standing somewhere alone hidden in a canyon and filled with dozens of webby nests made by thousands of tent caterpillars. All hanging by a thread. It is a reminder that even here in this wretched wasteland, life does not only find a way, it thrives. A thought which results in joyful, tearful liberation, powerful enough to erode even the fear of death itself. 

The moment inspires elation with my time and place in the world and the finite nature of my existence. I am sitting in a part of the park that has no name. At least, as far as I know. In every direction, there are soft rolling desert hills, steeper to the foot than to the eye. They are sparsely scattered with as many black basalt rocks as green desert shrubs, prickly pear cacti and blooming yellow wildflowers. The occasional but lonely pinyon or juniper sticks out from the red dirt canvas in which it roots. Hidden between these gentle ups and downs are washes, gulches, gorges, and canyons. Invisible to the outsider’s eye, unless you know where to look. Carved by the patient forces of wind and especially water, although most of them exist in a dry state now for much of the year. 

It is becoming clear to me that this desert landscape is a metaphor for desert life. The superficial sameness of these arid hills can be mistaken in the same manner one misinterprets the days in the desert as monotonous. Yet, as this rolling horizon in front of me harbors secret depths and hidden places, so does the seemingly gentle line of time. 

***
After graduating in North American Studies, Eytan spent a number of months living and working in Capitol Reef National Park in Utah during the first wave of the corona pandemic. He is currently working on a larger project on the desert and the American West.

Dispatches from the train: on becoming lost and found somewhere near Jackson, Mississippi

By Anna Evans:

From the train, drifting through the land, America endless passes through windows. We are travelling from New York by train heading south. Long distance train travel foregrounds the journey itself – the hours stretch ahead of us and time passes differently. A whole litany of travel, of escape, of distance. This is travel for its own sake: departures and the unknown destination, the one yet to be arrived at. 

From New York we say goodbye swiftly, disappearing into a tunnel and emerging in New Jersey. Time passes easily: the names of the stations before us like a list unfolding. Counting the states as they roll by … New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, Virginia … 

The landscape filters through the windows. Watching the outskirts of cities becoming central, immersed in the view from the window. Each place is a destination for someone, and at each station we await departure, glad to remain on the train with everything ahead of us, still a plan, an idea of travel; the onward pull of the train tracks. 

Windows frame the scenery, flickering still life by. To be in motion, like so many images coming together as a moving picture. Sitting still on a train this movement is entrancing. It is when I try to catch a moment of stillness and enclose it, that I get some sense of the speed we are travelling. Trying to read a sign at a passing station or recall someone glimpsed from the window. The view from the train is partial; momentary and suggestive.

Stepping out of the train at Washington, feeling the heat, feeling a difference. Sensing the unfamiliar, of places I have imagined but never seen. The names of the places resound through the announcements of the train conductor, coming up and down the carriage . . . Culpepper, Manassas. Small town America, picture perfect, while below the surface history crackles with tales of power struggles and the defeated. The railway tells stories of crossing a continent, of a means of leaving and becoming fugitive. 

As we travel it is hard not to think of all the unknown souls who laid down the tracks, lost to time. Immense bridges and river crossings connecting those vast expanses of land. All the images of pioneers and immigrants, wagons and horses, galloping across the horizon and as far as the eye can see, fabled legends of exploration myths and map-making. The iron road laid out as if to tame the land and mark out its boundaries, to fix and make permanent the story of a new world.

Shortly before our stop in Virginia, just as darkness is falling, the train comes to a stop. The storm has blown trees on the line. We wait in the middle of another huge forest, darkness outside, for news, for updates. Imagining great trees laid across the line, small figures scurrying around them. The falling night brings with it change and uncertainty.

America feels too big to begin, and I know that it makes no sense to think like this when I can track the progress of the train as I go. When it is restlessness that brought me here. I feel far from home, and the two impulses battle within me; my travelling spirit stretched to its limit, to the end of its comprehension. 

As the train travels through the night I am aware that we have barely scratched the surface of what lies beyond the next tree, the next horizon. Now I just feel lost. Is it possible to be lost when the train track winds onwards through the land, laid out piece by piece, when everything has been explained and laid to rest?

Except that no one really knows what lies beyond the measured miles, the boundaries of loss. 

***

We continue the journey by night. Our route passes through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana … People get on and off at stations along the way which I fail to wake at, pulled under by sleep, lulled by the movement, the sound of the train. Dimly aware of change, but cold, too cold, sheltering under the thin blanket, looking for a pillow to rest on. 

The fingers of sleep crept in stealthily and covered your eyes, tousled your hair, pushed you ever downwards, downwards. Sometimes you resurfaced and were crossing cities above like darkened shadows.

Train dreams are the ones that vanish through your fingers like the names of the stations while moving at speed. The train guards walking up and down the train. Good morning! First call for breakfast. Shifting, waking, looking out at the dawn, drifting again …

Onwards through the landscape, small settlements scattered through the tall and unending trees. Cities strung out in-between like troubled dreams. Passing, half imagined, the land divided into counties and marked out by rivers. Gatherings of houses and lights, the city like a dreamscape.  

Train dreams are the falling stars, the sleep that comes suddenly and takes over, the drifting and the sudden call back. The long and convoluted dreams that can only last a moment but that lie in infinite parallels circling back.

From the window, glimpses, snapshots, fleeting: time passing like something remembered you can touch. Travel makes you a stranger everywhere continually seeking for and casting off the sense of home. From the window impossibly long trails of freight cars. I picture the track that runs behind us, spooling away endlessly, lost into distance. The forlorn sound of the train, the sound for which the word was made, stretching outwards for-lorn.

Somewhere in the night we cross over to a time and space that feels different. Where time expands, and space widens. Overnight, recognition becomes replaced by a feeling of disassociation. That sometimes time reels out like so much track laid across the distance, when you try and picture the end of the line.

Waking to the morning light in Georgia. The train conductor passes calling out the names of the stops. Atlanta …

The railroad, the train track, always travelling, always moving on.

***

Travelling across America by train is like every song you ever heard that was melancholy and floated through you … in the telling of travel, departures and long distances, the lack of control over your own destiny, the loss of identity. The railroad reaches on into the distance, like the track spooling away behind, just out of view around the next bend.

Train songs, the names of destinations far away, connected, ever-connected by the railroad. The same music that America has been running from and tracing its way back to ever since. In these songs, departure and longing, distance and loss. Leaving the south, like exile and captivity, the weight of the journey and all those who dreamed of escape.

The longing of train songs; even if after roaming all those thousands of miles brings you to another place where things might be different, might be the same. 

The forlorn sound of the train approaching, like something remembered, already known. 

For a while in Alabama, the train follows the course of the river, a wild and overgrown bridge. The track winds off in the distance to vanished routes. 

As the hours and miles go by, distance starts to overwhelm us and we look out of the window, speaking less and less. The train travels through Alabama and Mississippi, deep and far away. Sitting in the buffet car, listening to the train staff talking. Apprehension comes with the falling of the light, the lengthening of afternoon, and the building clouds across the sky. We lack the words to explain, they hang between us, like the storm beginning to build outside.

Train words are the ones that fall between the ones we say, the ones that float between our window reflections and out into the trees like dandelion seeds; tiny parachutes looking for a safe landing.

Lost railroad tracks leading off into the trees. The lonely cry of the train through one track towns, passing once each day going south and once in the other direction. Long straight roads, white chapels and the highway out of town, past boarded up buildings and lone walkers. Leaving, becoming ghost towns, out on the road beyond the view from the train. The road that runs alongside the rail tracks. Becoming lost in distance. Lonely road, broken down town, marooned. 

The perfect vista as viewed from a train. Flickering sunlight from above, clouds on the horizon. In the viewing carriage of the train you can sit immersed in the landscape, and skylights offer a view of passing skies. I sit with book in hand, unopened, listening to the talk of other passengers, where they are going to, and where they have been. The way the light falls on the trees making some a golden yellow.

Evening comes, and then night falls with a formidable darkness. Something overcomes us, a deep and unending weariness we are unable to explain. Words fail us and we look out to the fading light as if to a great wave. My suffocated soul begins to accept, to comprehend the unending distance, to frame the land as a recognizable space. 

I carry it with me so that I know it will always be there like a longing.

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

Crimes of Miami

Miami Beach Neon by James Walsh is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

By Linda Mannheim:

I used to joke that Miami was the kind of place where, even if you weren’t a writer of crime fiction, you wound up writing crime fiction. I arrived there in the late 1990s. The drug wars of the 1980s were over. Edna Buchanan recalled Lincoln Road shootouts and the 5,000 violent deaths she covered for The Miami Herald in her memoir The Corpse Had a Familiar Face. But by the time I arrived, Lincoln Road was lined with art galleries and gelato parlours, one of Miami’s few good bookstores and buzzing German tourists.

And still there was something explosive in the air. In New York, people screamed at one another on the street, but the aggression didn’t mean anything – they moved on. In Miami, a man hinted he was going to pull a gun out of his car when I dared to challenge his idea that he had right of way when he was turning. Street harassment thrived in the tropical heat. South Beach was supposed to be the city’s most gay friendly neighbourhood, so why were so many men bothering me? The straight men are trying to show they’re straight, ventured a friend. My attempts at solitude were usually interrupted by smacked lips, sonorous sexual pronouncements, whispered profanity. 

I was alone in Miami. Or so it seemed to me. I lived in a little art deco apartment by myself that was mostly one big room. There was a separate little kitchen whose old linoleum tiles frequently came unstuck. Sometimes lizards climbed the walls and a ceiling fan in the main room slowly stirred the air. An old air conditioner drowned out the sounds of neighbours in the courtyard downstairs. When the window was open, you could hear everything – even the guy who lived underneath me complaining about how long it had been since he’d last had sex. You could hear the palm fronds rustling in the breeze. Salty air from the sea drifted over. The beach was only two blocks away.

The mythology of private eye stories and film noir is that the protagonist is always alone, unable to trust anyone. And I, in that place and time, was indeed alone, having discovered exactly who it was I couldn’t trust. And like the protagonists of shadowy black and white films, I’d been betrayed by the person I trusted the most. So it was perfect to be there --  in that city of heavy heat and wide streets, in that city of exiles, that city of unpredictability, that city of breathtakingly blue skies and glaring sunlight. The turquoise sea and the white sand seemed a consolation on some days. On others, the beauty was painful to see because there was no one to share it with. Miami was the perfect place to have a broken heart.

And yet, the fact that I’m still in touch with friends from that time means that I couldn’t have really been as alone as all that. And within weeks of being left, someone new had come along, so my loneliness couldn’t have been as constant as I remember it being either. But being carless meant that it was never easy to socialise. There was one trainline running through the town, a maze of unreliable busses all converging on the Omni Center in the middle of the city. Most people who rode busses stood outside the Omni Center at least twice a day. But when I tried to get friends with cars to meet me there, they had no idea what I was talking about.

Why don’t you buy a car? Asked a gee-whizz-voiced acquaintance. I knew the kind of car I could afford – the kind that broke down, left you by the side of the road, left you stranded. I wasn’t going to buy a car.

The city had brutal past and present. Car jackings, cocaine distribution, and corruption remained part of daily life even after the homicide rate went down, and whether you profited from this or were injured by it depended on who you were and where you lived. Did you live in the bright suburbs that looked like something out of E.T.? Or were you exiled to the bleeding rows of derelict motels lining the main drag of the bashed up downtown? Were you among the agua, fango y factorias of Hialeah? Or were you living in a Fisher Island mansion accessible only by a residents’ ferry others couldn’t board? Money was all that mattered in that time and place, and how that money came to be in your hands didn’t matter to the people that money mattered to. 

The inequality of Miami was part of its design. When the Miami was founded in 1896, it, like other Florida cities, designated a section where black people were permitted to live. That part of Miami was later named Overtown. Count Basie, Nat King Cole, and Billie Holiday were not allowed to stay in Miami Beach when they performed there; they returned to Overtown at night. Liberty City started out as a middle-class black neighbourhood, a housing development that was part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Early films of it show pristine buildings sparkling in the sun, gleeful children leaping into swimming pools. When South Florida’s biggest highways were built, they cut right through Overtown, displacing generations of families and destroying Overtown’s heart. Liberty City succumbed to a deteriorating economy, disinvestment, and drug battles. In its early days, it had been surrounded by an eight foot high ‘segregation wall’ separating it from the white areas.

Don’t go on the public transport at night, I was told. Don’t go anywhere after dark without a car. Don’t leave your part of the city and go the other part. Don’t go through Downtown, or Overtown, or Liberty City. No offence, said the man on the phone, but you sound white and you should know this is a black neighbourhood. Don’t go wandering if you don’t know where you’re going. Don’t let anyone know you don’t know where you are. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I was stuck in South Beach at night. South Beach, one of the few places in Miami where you could walk; it had sidewalks. And I walked everywhere.  I walked past the plastic-faced shoppers and rough sleepers on wide carless Lincoln Road, up to shabby Alton for the breakfast taco and coffee special, over to Fifth street past the gym where Muhammad Ali once trained, down Collins Avenue where the aspiring pretty wives went to get their hair done and buy expensive clothes, and back over to Alton for Pollo Loco’s yuca frita and black beans. I walked up Ocean Drive where the cars gunned at night and the college students gathered outside of nightclubs on the neon bright streets. I went up Washington Avenue where the Nicaraguan diner served café con leche to the old men wanting someplace to sit, and I went back to the beach where the men with tattoos who waxed their chest hair off eyed other men in the outdoor showers beneath the burning sun.

And I rode my bike. I’d bought a cheap, fat-tired ten speed at Target – the cheapest bike they sold. I bought a good bike lock. The lock cost more than the bike did. Bikes were snatched easily, even with two locks on, disappeared fast, were rumoured to be put on boats at the marina and shipped off immediately. I used to ride my bike down the roads and down to the beach and right onto the sand, ride on the damp, flattened down sand along the shore. 

And, one day, while I was riding along the shore, I remembered a joke that a man and I used to have. He’d once told me, ‘I’d do anything for you.’ And I’d goofed back, ‘I want you to kill my husband.’ And then we laughed and started riffing on the dialogue of noir films, kept pretending we were characters in it and laughing. And I thought, that would be a good opening for a story. What if this couple started playing around like that and then things got serious?  And then, like every writer who had come to Miami, I started to write crime fiction.        

***

Linda Mannheim is the author of three books of fiction: Risk, Above Sugar Hill, and This Way to Departures. Her broadcast work has appeared on BBC Witness and KCRW Berlin. She recently launched Barbed Wire Fever, a project that explores what it means to be a refugee through writing and literature.  Originally from New York, Linda divides her time between London and Berlin.

This Way to Departures will launch in London on 3 October at Burley Fisher Books and in Berlin on 12 October at The.Word.Berlin. You can find out more about these and other events on her website.