life since high school

OK Beth, you asked for it. Here’s just about every single wingle thing.

The first chance i got after graduating high school i say "later" to Germantown. You gotta understand: I was transplanted there from the hip town of Asheville, NC before 11th grade, and did not ever regret hightailing it out of Germantown when the opportunity arose. Driving thru Memphis this December and seeing Billy Bryan for the first time in fifteen years, i do wish that i had kept my friendships up more from that time, with people like yourself and Anne Lance, Preston Hatley, Billy, Brett Thompson, Devin McSorley. Thankfully i have made contact with all of these people. I just found Gene Goss.

Liz Hankins died, btw (English class Hemingway and Steinbeck stewardess). She gave me a brown tent to "borrow", wink wink, before i left Germantown, which i still have, and it helped set my feet into motion either West or East, but not anywhere close to the Germantown environs.

I go to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga for college. I am stoked to move out of a smoking household to a non-smoking one, and my new roommate shows up really sweet to me but she is a smoker who chose non-smoking because she “plans on quitting.” I grit my teeth because life with mom smoking indoors, from the old generation, was harsh. To ameliorate the situation my new roommate stands in the doorway with the door wide open, and the smoke and cold air just come right in, even though it is supposed to go right out.

I am a shoe-in for the rowing team for my height, and sign on as an art major and a humanities major. I do lots and lots and lots of stoned creative writing, can't you tell? Like a good kid, college is where i smoke pot for the first time (i should say “get high” for the first time). Tee hee HEE hee. Virginity gets lost at 19 to the guy who is ok nice and intelligent, who corrupted me at 15 to the sweet world of sex. Now his foreign girl is probably pregnant with an elf in Romania (truly, he said she was too small to have a kid). He recently forwarded me one of those “get rich, my lawyer says this is legit” emails. What else, o yeah. Here comes summer break after freshman year, and of course i am not going back to Germantown. I hear about becoming a whitewater raft guide on the Ocoee River~ yeeeee haw i am so scared, to where i seize up and don't react fast the first several times down, a silly Billie on the river.

Guide training is interrupted by creative writing class travel to Slovenia and Italy! My first time to Europe! I come back skinny with hairy legs and loving it; but i never get the job as a badass whitewater raft guide that first year, i just learn and hang around with them on the outskirts. I never can really break outta my lesser self esteem shell, bummed that i am not making it and never have the bulk of the summer to unwind with those coolios i so wanted to be like. I even pass up an invite for a long river trip down the Grand Canyon because school is paid for and "gotta go!"

Sophomore year: Yeah i'm cool now. Rowing is great, i win all it seems. It's a perfect sport for me. Still got no steady boyfriends, but i meet one that will ‘do me’. He just wants to be friends, but i am hard-fallen and crushed. Me and my very young, Southern stuff do not take a light sneeze “no”, and we (my Southern stuff and i) follow him around learning to kayak. Anticipating the summer ahead I WILL BE A BADASS AND LEARN TO KAYAK CLASS V, BABY!! I draw so much inspiration from my little unboyfriend with Irish roots and a stone-heart so sweet. You know the type.

Summer: I AM the bad ass raft guide, and i learn to kayak way too fast for sanity. Waterfalls, ouch. Rocks are hard, water is soft. One must learn the eskimo roll well. I have many, many fun times coming into my own. It's like: violin music plays, all of us guides hang out on the huge wooden porch drinking cheap beer. the warm Tennessee pine needle nights waft into my nostrils. Big cracking thunderstorms swell the creeks and rivers just down the road, where tomorrow some of us will go fall down the mountains and live life, yeee haw.

Junior year, i am still gripped by the stone-heart Irishman. I make really great art inspired by my bleeding heart. The rowing team gets boring (all that flat water). My art major gets kicking, as well as all the humanities courses nearly fulfilling another major; and of course so far i have, oh-my-god, like all A's in college, and on full scholarship. You could have gotten one too from UTC honors, i bet. Didn't we ever talk about it on our walks home? Thanks, by the way, for walking with me all those times along the railroad tracks!

That junior year feels like more of the same. But this time, there's some winter paddling and freezing myself to almost puking stage once; and swimming out of my boat after flipping and not rolling up a few times, and O YEAH!-- i sublex (partially dislocate) my left shoulder by putting just a couple pounds of pressure onto the top deck of my kayak (go figure, i wasn't even in the boat!!!). I go to a random chiropractor i find in the phone book, the first time i have ever been to a chiro. Austin Newman from Germantown High lets me use his car to get there. The chiro says "hold still" and JERKS my elbow and arm around "to break up any little solidifying chunks" in the rotator cuff. I still resent that little bastard Polish fucker today.

School just is. I really do nothing very helpful to the public or to others through college, except inspire my very positive attitude and the funny happy joy joy of living, like the first episode of Ren & Stimpy I saw (simultaneous with the first time of a few times i ever took LSD). College is pretty much all about me and learning to deal with my ego, as well as athletics and poetry, and art and love, and trying to get with the international male model who came to school my freshman year. That never happens, though we said to each other that we would one day. Then comes an opportunity—life picks up a notch. I get to go to the Czech Republic for the spring semester! I go there, "djekuju mockrat"- thanks a lot- to the drama teacher at UTC that was probably afraid i was a loser, and afraid of how i might ~represENT~ the United States collegiate academia ov’r thar in Eurp. It was simply hard to show up at the morning meetings on time prior to our departure, and he is strange anyway.

I show up in Brno, Czech Republic in early ’95, just a few years after the doors to the country had opened so widely, to room with a neurotic lesbian i had met just a few times before leaving Chattanooga. She is the first lesbian whom i am aware is one. (can you say “sheltered”?) She gets frustrated with me because she is uptight by my standards, and i smile a lot but forget to take care of myself. I get kinda fat, stay mildly lonely, i forget to have money on me to buy groceries-- after all, college has all been free and the lunchroom at UTC is as easy as: “hello and thank you.” So she learns some guitar over in Czech, and converts a hot(!) straight girl to be gay with her.

I meet myself a married HOT HOT alcoholic man there, and have great secks with him before i know his status later and get introduced to his wife (awkward). After our first nighttime encounter at the bar, we arrange to meet up at Mcdonald’s. He calls me to meet in a place he thinks i will recognize, to make it easier with my being in a foreign country with a language barrier. I barely, but finally, understand his accent as he says that we should meet at the first place he associates with an American girl, the very last place i would have thought of for us to meet--

"MeckaDonealdes."

I learn Czech pretty well, enough to impress; and enough to craft a nice long paragraph correctly announcing in Czech that i will be leaving the country very soon! And how great (and cold and grey and homey and ex-communist-like and diesel fumey) it has been to live in Brno. Seriously, though, what great people they are! Very spirited, they make Americans look like silly; or like anal, somewhat sad muffins. Actually, that is the role i fill somewhat while in Brno—the role of anal sad muffin, as i still pine for some missing piece of me while i am there, like comfortable walking shoes, or feeling fit, or a pair of good jeans. And i pine for my Irish pipe dream stoneheart.

On a solo rail trip from Czech to Poland, i take the return trip by myself in the train car at night. I awaken at one of the stops. I look up, still crusty in the eyes and cold, to see the little incandescent lightbulb outside, swaying in the snow-wind to illuminate the sign for OSWICZ (Auschwitz). brrrrrr! A cold chill to the bone, to this day!

At the end of the semester abroad i get to Turkey via train, with no cash on me, to get away from the cold and so many white people. I lose pounds per every bead of sweat, and trade in the cold and white folks for heat exhaustion and bands of gypsies. Men saying i “loaf” you to me, men doing that always. Turkey is where i have my first scary man experience, as he closes the hotel door behind him with us both inside, and tries to get with me. Yet in turkey, never do i pay for my own dinner, and never since has a teenage man run after a bus i am on, crying after me and throwing kisses and wiping his tears while he runs. All this adoration, and yet all i have with me is one pair of shorts and some Czech national ‘union’-type overalls in the color of forest green that i loved seeing on the guys working. I bought a pair for myself to make up for not feeling fit.

Turkey is where i first learn about the mystic poet Rumi. I crack open the little chapbook that the German guy in a rug shop gives to me. All alone and broken down in a hotel room, in the town where rumi wrote and lived and schooled, i read the poetry. I had had no idea where i had arrived on that tour bus, as my tour was aimless in my perspective. To read rumi right then, for the first time, relating to him as poet and emancipator, set me free on a cry-spree catharsis, and i have never been exactly the same since! Only when i get home to the USA do i start seeing Rumi around, owing partly to my new love for his work, and he had been gaining popularity stateside.

Senior year at utc... uh, hmmm, i don’t remember it. Except ultimate frisbee on the football field at UTC, and feeling good, and attracting hot guy friends, a couple of which by the names of Nathan Marsh and Anthony James i wish would show up again. I remember grabbing Josh's crotch when we parted with a hug at the doors of the anthropology building one afternoon. He jumped feet high.

Then summer, and a sense of relief. I finish undergraduate university with a summer geology course, just in time to swan dive off the top of a school bus, *thud* onto pavement while unloading rafts before a river trip on the Ocoee, exactly onto my head. I happen to be volunteering that day for friends of friends, hoping for a big tip, so worker’s comp is not an option. It is only the beginning of a good day, then the ambulance, hospital, morphine dreams, lucky to be alive and unsevered. I go home to just exist, and wait out the healing. I masturbate 48 times one day, all in a row, while lying on the couch. Maybe it helps—in six weeks time, i am paddling again as hard as ever, and i go to a West Virginia whitewater mecca with the just-a-friend Irishman i want to marry. Great people are there, from real athletes to rednecks to mountain folk; to, presently, a crazy party scene during Gauley season in Fayetteville, West Virginia. The next spring i show up early and a good paddler, and get a job shooting videos of the raft trips for a company called "The Rivermen". Later the owner is so generous to me, including me on a Colorado trip to help with a very intense, multi-day trip down the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. I forgive him for his choice of company name. As a kayak videographer i scoot down the rapids ahead of the rafts and get out on the big rocks, set up, shoot footage of the rafts descending the rapids, come back with the customers and live edit the video for a crowd drinking cheap beer and reflecting on their adventure. They are watching and gloating on their wipeouts and clean lines running the class IV-V river.

OK: here is where it starts to get into the 'tweener life after college. Winters, i stay at home in Asheville, NC. My mom had moved back there because her reason for dragging us to Memphis in the first place was a man who proved to be a cheat and a thief; and thankfully, he was no longer my stepdad. I spend winters “creek boating” mostly and substitute teaching, especially for the autistic kids i relate to so well! The high schoolers i take out on walks, or i ask them what they would be doing if could be doing anything they wanted. I get back the lamest, most uninspired responses, yawn. They all individually say they want just to be asleep. One after the other. Future of USA!

Prior to teaching, in the fall of ’96 after my "fall" off the bus, i complete my honors “thesis” to graduate from UTC. I do so just in time, so that on the last night before it is due i stay up all night finishing. I pack the steel frames, including 6 frames for a total of 18- 18"x24" panes of glass into the back of my truck, drive the four hours from Asheville to Chattanooga, drill with my tools into the brick campus building walls in the Fine Arts Center (yikes!), and secure the frames. My final meeting for the project and my thesis is scheduled to begin twenty minutes or so after finishing hanging the frames. I am still wearing work clothes, which were my usual"uniform" of black turtleneck and "stone" color men's driving slacks for the final meeting. Now the piece is on permanent loan at the university unless someone broke it! I haven't yet gotten good pictures of it because the glass exterior wall is only six feet from the wall with my art work, which itself is 6 feet tall. I can’t get far enough back to capture it on film, and then there are reflections to deal with...

Feeling done with school and successful enough, later that winter i also complete my first commission artwork for some... people. They are just some folks whom i don’t remember (they were brunettes) in Tennessee. The piece is a large but airy, contemporary brass and copper sculpture of birds on a natural slate rock base. I created it in my dad’s metal shop where i built my honors thesis.

They just said that they love the sculpture, and i did too. Thank goodness i got some marginal, washed out photos of it before i delivered the sculpture and picked up my check, because they never call me to the party they said they will invite me to, and i lose their number and never hear from them again. At one point i work out the per hour rate and it came to about 15 cents per hour after all the time and materials cost. The rest of the year into spring i spend falling down the Green River Narrows in my kayak burning up my adrenal glands. I race in the now famous Green Narrows race and run “Gorilla” rapid for the first, and maybe last time. It was great running the drop with so many people-friends-fans egging me on. I got second place out of the girls i think, or first, i don’t remember. There weren’t many girls racing.

'98 is an 'el nino' year, and it means lots of snow out west (which flows into rivers!). I take off in my Toyota Celica that earned the name “little foot” in New Mexico, headed to California "with an achin’ in my heart", like Led Zeppelin sang to me all thru high school. It is St. Patty’s day when i leave town, as planned. I take ‘Cheetah’, a.k.a. ‘Chief’ with me, a little kitten-cat with no tail who spent his formative months in a car. He reaches up and pats my chin when i say “mama” to him in a particular voice. I pet him for hours and say “mama” a lot on the long road trip west, and sleep with him in my car nights, cold as a flagpole.

I drop Cheetah in Colorado with the fellow Mat who gave him to me a half year before. Matt and i had gone out to a car to puff and get to know one another outside of the bar, where we had just met as i walked around a corner to see his shining self looking straight up at me from a half-empty table for two. I sat down immediately without asking, determined not to let him pass by. In the car i mention that i have been wanting an orange and white kitty. Looking back i am sure that i mention this because Mat has such a beautiful lion face, and i had truly been thinking those days of wanting a cat. Mat reaches around into the back seat of the car and presents me with an adorable orange and white kitty to me, asking if i could keep him while he takes a climbing trip to Colorado. So: Ask and you shall receive. The road trip to Colorado is great with Cheetah, but unfortunately his whereabouts are a mystery now because he didn’t stick around with Mat in Boulder, and i have felt some guilt about leaving him there in a new place. I thought Cheetah was the super-adaptor, because he would go with me kayaking. I would leave the hatchback propped open, and Cheetah would go frolic, returning upon my call. He never strayed too far, but i guess i did. I still got Mat though, but not fully. Not yet.

I get on to Cali via free snowboarding (mostly flailing) in Crested Butte, Colorado during the coming of spring; and some epic river runs and new friends in New Mexico and Arizona. I call ‘98, and the lead-up to it, my favorite summer, as i get a job doing overnight raft trips on the lower Kern in southern California. The southern Sierras are THE most beautiful Redwood Oak sculpted white wildflower Granite country, something i can only barely fathom owing to my Southeastern deciduous hardwood forest upbringing. I guide for a superbly fun company called "Whitewater Voyages". I get the job because the manager asks me if i shoot hoops. I say “of course”, and “of course” i can guide rafts too. I flip my first raft that year (see the 6 Asian heads pop up to breathe air in the raging current ahead of me), and wrapped my first raft around a flooded little island with a single tree upon which we wrapped and stayed until the z-drag pulled it off. Fun, no kidding.

Once the owner of “Voyages” parties with us and recognizes my doing “Rishi’s posture”, a hatha yoga asana. In that moment i am so tickled about the west coasters being so coool. And yet the badass factor is high in my Southeastern self, as the east coast initially leads the west in the sharp rise in whitewater kayaking, a wave that i happened to catch at just the right time to be on the cutting edge (now i am considered a bit old school). But my hubris is ahead of my brain, and my first near-death experience except for the fall (and falling asleep at the wheel at 16) is on the Tule River, which is actually just a creek--no--it is just below the headwaters, a little ski-slope, rocky-steep genesis of a creek. I am sucked under a house-sized rock sitting on top of other rocks, creating a “seive” at the end of a rapid. When i go under the rock, all gets dark and i am pushed against the front deck of my kayak, and my life multiple choice test comes up: Live or Die.

I recognize that i have a choice, and i choose to live, passing the test. at the end of that great summer, i take off in Little Foot back to the east coast river season and my sister’s pregnant wedding. I get a speeding ticket in Kansas, but win back about 20 times the amount owed at the casino in Saint Louis to pay for it, thanks to the die-hard lonely guy who asks me to help him put his gobs of coins in. Whatever i win, we split.

The kayak and paddle stay under the rock that i could have stayed under, and they do not come back east with me and Little Foot. When the water is down again in August and my friends hike it out and bring the boat with them to West Virginia for that Gauley season party i mentioned, they look at me with a shake of the head and say they don't know how i got flushed under and downstream from that rock. In other words, quite lucky to be here.

Life is on a roll after making it out alive and having so much great time outdoors. That fall after Gauley season, some of us go to Mexico for whitewater, and I stay for employment doing river tours for paying clients. Once, i doze off in the bunkbed reading about stand-up surfing, my next frontier, and the gas lamp SOMEHOW lights the mosquito netting on fire and burns down the small, one-room house that belongs to an Idaho entrepreneur man for whom i am “working” (have not yet seen any pay). I find out years later through coincidental story-telling with another woman that worked with him, that he is not so good, and my intuition had been at least in the right direction all along.

Early the night that the fire happens, the first client shows up. He’s a short little man with bright blue shoes. He pulls me aside that night and drills me, interrogation in a friendly way, about my life and what i am going to do with it. I go along, and share with him despite his pushy way. He stresses that i am to never feel guilty about anything that happens, repeating himself a few times, because guilt is no good for the spirit. The next day, while cleaning up ash debris and nothing left from a very hot fire, he reminds me not to feel guilty. I tell him i have been asked to leave by the Idaho man for a perplexing accident, and he takes off his little blue shoes that are way too small for me. I step on the heels to wear them like clogs. I thank him and take all my kayaking gear, which had been outside and thus did not burn, to the city to get some shoes, and to sleep for three entire days on the floor of some friends’ house. I have vivid dreams for those three days, then i wake back up again and go get my plane ticket home, along with two beautiful wool blankets to take with me. I forgot to get my friends’ information, and still miss them.

There is some connection here, between the fire and local juju/voodoo there by the rio in Mexico whose name i temporarily forget in the region of La Huasteca Potosina. The combo of my very real anger towards the Idaho entrepreneur; the blue-shoed client ‘prepping’ me for something for which i am never to feel guilty; the Mayan Prophecies book i am reading at the time; and the epiphany when i look up pausing from reading to see that the little bumps on this floodplain ground are actually small, Mayan, pyramidal residence compounds-- all of this with the simple fact that only the clay, Mayan, very very old figurines survived the fire, and nothing else-- it is all way too weird to just write off as ‘coinkidink’. I never have thought since, that Spirit wasn’t working in some big way about that experience.

Pshew, i get home to USA and sleep some more!!! I have one more winter of subbing, year three of it, and feel somewhat over the life of such a degree of danger and adventure!! I ramp it down and go to work for Green Cove, a summer camp near home. I teach class I, II canoeing and kayaking. It’s easy water, and i am too bored with cute and adorable, little shy squirrelly, stubborn lovely 'byotch' girls—ARGGGH—like i used to be. That year at camp, as a counselor, is where i "learn to swim". We go down at night, down to the docks. I get naked and swim the first time just a few strokes and i am winded. Then i do it more and soon i swim just as far as i want, half a mile or so almost every night, while watching the stars with every breath. Warm water, North Carolina, a great time that summer (at night). David and i meet up to talk and "never even kiss."

While substitute teaching that spring before camp starts, a young teacher says hi to me-- actually he marches right into the classroom when i have a break, and asks me what i am going to do with my life. I am reminded of the man with the blue shoes, and tell him that i plan to do something in architecture and design, with nature. He tells me about a certain school i would probably like, and i find out later that the nursery owner's son where i am working as well went there. I apply.

The Conway School of Landscape Design (www.csld.edu) in western Massachussets is a ten month program for a master of arts in ecological landscape design and land use planning. Attending the school is one of the better moves of my adult life. It is intensive and hands-on, with real clients and thus real projects, meetings. There are field trips, and Canada, and hikes to see native plants and the way nature is doing things. It is so intense, that i leave there a tightly wound success-machine, motivated to immediately pay off my $40k school/living loan.

So “i’m goin back to Cali, Cali, Cali..." this time pining over a gay boy who would meet me and hug me in the dark at night, at Green Cove in North Carolina, an olympic whitewater medalist with the swimmer/rock climber body type i love so well. He'd touch my shoulders and waist and say he feels so comfortable with me. We never hook up though, because he is so gay it somehow cannot happen. Meanwhile, he will be in school just minutes from me in Massachusetts, arggh! He invites me over to spend the night in his Amherst College dorm room, and he leaves to go hang with his ~boyz~ down the hall while i sleep. O well: boys will be boys will be girls.

Driving cross-country to Cali i am also pining over a tall arrogant (as hell!) dread head from Asheville who is living in Santa Cruz at the time, a nice guy who came to my graduation from the Conway School. He invites me for a sea kayaking adventure with his dad and sister in Alaska!! Wow!! I drive out in Little Foot with Charles, a friend i "manifested" when i went downtown Asheville to find my passenger going west, and all i am taking for my new West Coast life. I drive to the tippy top of Washington, and park the car. I take the ferry with him and get horny with him, but he is just too... lame to enjoy life. Once, on the first full day of our trip in Glacier Bay National Park, after we are truly arrived and far from civilization and the boats that brought us there, i am stretching out my hamstrings. His Dad is messing around sorting snacks in the packs, and younger sister is looking about. Rude dread head turns and tells me in an annoyed voice to do my yoga “in my own space and time”.

Picture it: We are in a very huge place! I am standing 15 feet or so from him, facing in a different direction than him, with 360 degrees of nothing but wild Alaska and water and glacier and grizzly bears and black flies all around us. Maybe i am cramping his style. Later in the trip, he refuses to even get out of the tent to see the Aurora Borealis, because he has “seen it before.” When i get back into the tent, i always have to sleep on his right side because of some shoulder thing he has. Bleccch!

Somehow i still think he is a catch as i drive Little Foot down the west coast after the Alaska trip, with him on my mind, looking for my new home. "Home is where the work is" becomes the mantra. Another tape playing in my head is "Home is where the heart is for a rude guy." Seattle comes up much too soon in my epic quest for home, but it rocks, and i visit friends there who ask me to bring a white elephant and i arrive having found a picture of one at a gas station. Portland i pass by mostly because of timing. The Oregon coast is lonely. Small towns where friends live are not lonely, but i can’t stop moving, and something calls me to the lower coast. I go back to Portland for a Zap Mama concert, and find myself walking down the street next to Marie Daulne, the leader of the band. When i do not say a word to her, nor do i start singing a little bit like a freak and invite her to join in, like i want to do; i then vow that for the rest of my life i will not hold back with shyness about sharing musical moments. I have held to that promise if i remember correctly!

Coming down the lonely coast of Oregon, i stay at a rural homeless shelter one night and hear heartbreaking stories from people just like me. They are a bit crazy, moreso than me on my scale, but being so close and being so equally human with them, with an uncertain future, i am humbled and enlightened—and ready to get out of there! Next stop is Humboldt, Arcata. The other guy i learned to kayak with, my best friend/crush Jeff has a new girlfriend. Okaaay. And there’s no money in Arcata. So i get to Mendocino and stay in my friends’ van named Sri RAM. I read Hesse. I am feeling home getting nearer. Finally i drive and arrive in Santa Cruz. I know the arrogant loverboy is there, and i am out of cash. So i stop the car, now home. Rest, Little Foot. It is september 11, the year before 2001. Wouldn’t you know it, on that day in 2000 i declare the official anniversary of my arrival in Santa Cruz!

It’s a neat enough town on the outside, though at first glance it does not live up to its legend. The earthquake in ’89 made the products of rebuilding cheesy, and gentrification is absolute and rampant. I immediately miss black people, as well as the productive working class. I am immediately tired of old hippies. Santa Cruz, turns out, is or was at one point the capital of runaway teenagers, and was murder capital at one point as well. Why? And “hmmm, do i want to stay here?” After all, i am so over the tall arrogant dreadhead at this point, after visiting him again and flirtatiously slipping my foot into one of his sandals. He gets miffed that i would “stink up” his shoes, and i make the choice that i will share my life with more the merrier. Years later in Santa Cruz he asks me out and i go, bored as hell. He kisses me goodnight and asks for more... uh, no thanks, ha! Pssh!

Where to live in Santa Cruz? I am invited to stay up on some land from a friend of the Sandy Mush Herb Nursery in North Carolina where i worked. The same nursery that hooked me up very indirectly with the Conway School. The land in Bonny Doon had Grapefruits and Redwoods growing near each other, blowing my mind at that possibility!! There are Red Squirrels that chirp at me as i camp underneath their Fir tree. Bliss, a true California dream, in a very altered state moving here from a colder climate in Mass. I live with a view of the ocean and a young 16 year old gorgeous freaK! There is also an older Englishman freaK! who lives in coattails literally in the woods behind this woman's property. The 16 y.o. is the property owner's son. She is very successful and traveling a lot, and lets me caretake the property a while with her son. Together, we walk barefoot through the mixed Redwood/Oak forest on USA's supposed oldest bituminous (asphalt) road (now more of a trail), and thru old farmland, to the sea. On our way back from the skinny-dip we come upon a mountain lion! We follow it along the trail/road and somehow it never gets a whiff of our scent or never cares. It sexy-walks, casual, a summer day, tail going flip flop. For several long minutes we are close to, in fact almost hanging out with, this wild creature!

I have to choose: Santa Cruz, stay or go. I now have work with a tall, bold, raw foodist metaphysical overworked woman landscape architect who spends her time talking to me about her marriage drama, but i am on the path to paying the bills. Stay or go? I decide to think about it over some hacky sack they are playing in front of the O'Neill surf shop on the main drag of Pacific Ave. A guy named AJ gets me, from that day forward, into footbag net, which is hacky-sack over a net like tennis with the feet. Thru that sport i meet my first ever real and gorgeous and kind and gggrrrrreat boyfriend... except that he is a super stoner and not so responsible for himself with money, or emotion it turns out. He feels too young for me and perhaps too good. But love love love we do, and later we get an invite to live in his friend's house to caretake in the Redwoods while he runs off to get married and live in Chicago with his new wife. Living under the Redwoods, we get a kitty we name Dreefee, who swims in the hot tub with us and drinks from the faucet on slow drip. It’s clean cabin living, and rent free for 5 years!

I get lucky and hook up with the one ecological landscaping company that caught my eye in the phone book, Terra Nova, whom i contacted during graduate school. They need an estimator (a who-what?). I get hired, very green, to make estimates i am not qualified to create at all, and get paid 8% commission on the total price of the installation! Crazy! Sometimes that means a couple hours work for over $1000, and often. As a newbie to the work world outside of restauranting and raft guiding, this is true money. I pay off my school loan in 1.5 years while self-employed. Soon i am also designing landscapes for the company because that is what i know, and the company needs a designer. I am so stoked about my first couple years designing landscapes, because like a musician's first album, there is lots of build up to that first album. The creative juices pour forth!

One client wants an outdoor shower, so i design a bamboo screen spiral that you walk into the center of. I stole the spiral idea from Mexico, and now i have seen it in a plastic version in an upscale catalog. Water drains through the rocks into an underground pipe that goes to a river-rock seep that plants grow out of, using the greywater from the shower. Using greywater to irrigate landscape!! The other job that stands out is saw-cutting two sections of a sidewalk that is slated for removal to the dump. I dye those pieces with iron sulfate and the guys set them into a hillside, two pieces to be both the back and the seat of a bench. The hill exists as fill from digging a pond next to the hill. You can see many of these photos on my website www.ecobydesign.net.

All this while i have a very new life, in a new environment. I have always dreamed of being in a more arid place, and Santa Cruz has hella rain in the winter, along with Redwoods, sunshine, beach, the Big Sur coastline nearby. The quality of the ocean air i miss right now in North Carolina, but not because North Carolina mountain air isn't just great. But, but-- i miss the ocean mist, the fog. The golden hills of California that Kate Wolf sang of! And dark green Oaks. Spanish Moss. Bicyclists. Surfing! Waves! Playing disc golf, and footbag net. Redwoods. Moss. Riding bikes down the highway with one lane closed so that at times there were no cars at all in sight, nor in earshot. Did i mention the Redwoods??? Rent free cabin.

I end up getting cocky with so much money, and so much empowerment from playing so much and having so much fun. But i am also working so hard that i burn out and have to take it easy for a few years. Oops. I have been living fast and hard, but never hardly livin' in California. There have been permaculture courses, eco-farming conferences by the sea that we expedition our bicycles to near Pebble Beach, women’s yoga workshops with Angela Farmer at Harbin Hot Springs for two weeks almost each year. Great stuff! It has been a life of loving each year that goes by; before, during, and after it happens, and traveling each year for weeks for various reasons: To play footbag at the worlds champs in Czech Republic, Germany, Canada. Working and teaching surfing at my friend's surf camp for girls on Maui and Kaua’i (www.mauisurfergirls.com). Costa Rica for worlds surf kayak champs (i went along as baggage because i was no good in ‘05, just an alternate for the US West Coast team i still surf with). Last year it was Ireland and Portugal for surf-kayak comps, and the Greek island of Lesvos for another yoga workshop and work exchange with Angela and her husband Victor, and camping up the hill on my own in a bush camp Olive tree grove where i have the best dreams of my LIFE. I spend many weeks away. Finally, this year i have just won second at the worlds champs for surf kayaking in Pais Vasco (Basque Country), north coast of Spain. Second in women’s "high performance" category.

All this time i am living high and thriving, poor Sage my first boyfriend has taken it hard. I cheated on him and we broke up, then i pulled him back. Then i hooked up with his best friend, and for 4 years now i have been in the throes of on/off with him, angry and unsatisfied, though finding some major gold lessons and learning about myself. I had considered myself behind the curve of couple relationships, and i had to experiment and feel empowered to take MY turn to do some hurtin' to some of the menfolk (tongue-in-cheek). But despite the sarcasm about the reality of my being somewhat unstoppable and wild, i have been stopped in unproductive ways. I am only just now reaching peace and forgiveness about my past and am comfortable being on my own (i know it well). I feel more grown up, life is ever better, and it all truly works out for the best.

In case you are interested, Sage loves me more too much it seems, and he did not know when to walk away. He still hasn’t totally, and for that matter neither have i really. He did not have it together enough for himself, and he turned from healthy radiant gorgeous somewhat purist vegetarian health-nut non-drinker non-smoker happy boy, to drinking smoking meth-ing pissed off meat-eating evil-thinking tripper darkside annoying man. One who was living on the floor with a tarp to cover up at night at our friend's house in which he now pays rent for a room, as he is gradually moving back into the world of the living.

So he has a hot girlfriend from eastern Europe in '03. I chase her off cuz i am not done with Sage yet. After just getting home myself from Europe, and not living apart from him at all for three full years, except for the trip to Europe, i am not ready to accept HER into HIS world (do you get my sarcasm here, and admitting my selfishness!!!?) The night i get back from Europe i assemble the whole household in the living room, including the new girlfriend, and i cry to Sage and the whole group that i love him. She pretty soon, weeks after, runs off. Probably would have anyway.

Soon sage and i get back together, or rather i pull him back from a dull state of comatose la-la land that he is in, and we continue in the pattern of me getting so over him and pulling away and breaking his heart again, then wanting him back; that it's sick and i admit to a certain pathology about it. Or to a certain amount of being 16 about it, if i want to be easier on myself. It was a good time, for i got final with our break up, as well as began surf kayaking that has captured my efforts over the last few years. And so it seems that the true pieces of life are to learn to love and be loved, to learn to let go, and to accept and take responsibility for our choices.

Meanwhile, during my seven years of California life, my family is still far away in North Carolina. Except for one courageous visit from my dad, sister Carmen, and her son Luke; no one in my immediate family really knows the details about my adult life except through formalized bytes of info i have given at instances too seldom to have established much great relationship with any of them. There have been some good long phone conversations, however. They did not like my boyfriend Curt too much during the visit. Their first impressions were very keen, and they know i deserve better than someone who has less than financial 'nada', is often hard to talk to, and is reactive and attracts drama into his life so that he is not often enough stable. He is not boring, but is brilliant, and can be very sweet!!! I have been a similarly reactive, crazed woman that has attracted frog relationships, not the prince kind. I have learned more of who i am and what i want, and i am grateful for the relationships i have.

now i am home in North Carolina with my family, and the distance from Curt always gives me perspective, especially now. Dreefee the kitty lives next door to the cabin so he can stay king of his neighborhood and enjoy the Redwoods he wouldn’t want to leave. Here at home, i am so happy to have my sister be such a friend to me after so many years of living entirely different lives and some painful dividedness at times. She got married to a scary man twice her age when she was a pregnant late teenager, and then was emotionally abused by him. She got into religion and said she saw the devil in my eyes. Now she is single and sane again at times, is super smart and motivated in nursing school, and a great mom. My mom and dad (divorced but friends), and my sister and i, and Luke—we eat dinner together often, and will have Christmas near each other. Curt may come out after Christmas, but for the most part my California friends are just phone comforts and in my heart, because i am home with my mom now who is dying of colon cancer.

Any day now she could go, but instead of seeming like an anytime, unpredictable surprise; it seems more like an observable, somewhat rapid decline that at some point soon will keep her in a peak of suffering for a short time until mercy lets her go. She has "packed all her bags" to go, and she makes deals with God when she is really sick. She tells God to “make me feel better or let me die tonight.” She is spiritually right with dying, and has already had contact with the angels about it all. Once, she felt herself rising up off the bed as the pain sloughed off of her and the light became very very beautiful, only to be told "no no no, it's not quite time yet!!!" She descended back to the bed and the pain all came back when she opened her eyes.

For her hard-working duty and committment to take care of herself during this hard time, i am blown away. For her brave, graceful, and uncomplaining acceptance of what she is going through, i am doubly inspired and very impressed. For her attitude and spirituality about life and dying i am grateful. Surely she owes it in part to her father dying early in her life of a heart attack, inspiring her to serve 40 years as an operating room nurse in order to help save others from dying. My mom and i are aware of how close we are now that i am taking care of her and we are reminded how short life is. We speak upfront and openly about death to each other. There is no denial, and there is already plenty of grieving together, along with the hope and good times. The sad difference is that when she is gone, we won’t be able to talk about it or grieve together!

I never knew we were so close at heart until now!!

So Beth, i just wanted to pop a quick note over to you to let you know a bit about every single thing that's been going on since i last saw you. The future? It holds more song writing and performing live, which is fairly new for me. It will also include an invasion of motivation for a new leg, or entirely new turn, of my design career; focusing on taking much more of a public stance in matters related to human health and the environment.

I want electronic, single dollar bills, transferred over the internet into my bank account, from millions of individuals who care and want to buy my offering for an easy buck, to make me rich (enough) while i am busy doing other things. 5% of each dollar goes back to supporting some good cause. The future also holds some type of activism related to ending this stupid war; and caring for and gaining justice for the veterans. I will be voting in ‘08 and ’09 with something like a vengeance, meaning with most interest, sending in my absentee ballot. Of course, especially in the near term, there will be more travel and fun: Hawai’i again, yoga with Angela Farmer, competing in ’09 to win the gold next time in Portugal and catching air in my surf kayak! And not turning down my third offer for a Grand Canyon River trip in April 2008!

Paragliding is also on the list, but that means full commitment because it is really sketchy and expensive. The garden/dog/cat/bird scenario will take precedence to flying i think. Maybe. I mean, i just need to PLANT the plants, and get some greens rootin’ tootin’... potatoes underground, tomatoes up the spike, pumpkins taking their sweet time, beans going ballistic. Then i can go fly around. The dog will have to stay at home i think, or hang on the ground, shitting and stuff like dogs doo.

It’s very late and i think i may have forgotten to include some things about my life, like making my first cheesecake with my first graham cracker crust just the other day. Yum! What else... Oh, my favorite color changes over time. Right now my fave is yellow, along with light turquoise blue. I like them together, like sun-in-the-sky. I went thru a huge red-to-orange phase. Blues are now creeping up like a Memphis song, but not without cool green where i can breathe again. Dang, i just like colors.

This worldly stuff i mention-- the making money and the travel-- it all has to happen parallel to moving towards a permanent, killer ass home life. A place i can come home to and stay, with a garden and cats and dogs and birds. My own little homeland security. I think of remodeling or building a place amongst a food forest that i plant. Yes, there will be a byootful man right beside me in the picture. I am, like, sO not gay!

Mom, Ruby Jane Mooneyhan Rogerson Hatcher, died on January 16, 2008, but not without first tasting a bite of the cake at her 61st birthday party in her wheelchair at Hospice on January 1. On the day she went to sleep with the phenol-barbitol dose, we said our last words and sang three-part harmony between my father, sister, and i. At the funeral we sang Amazing Grace, at my mom's request, and filled out the rest of the service as per her plan.

We couldn't tell my grandmother Mom died because she had just gone into ICU and would choke on her breathing tube were she to get emotional. So when she insisted we not tell Jane (Mom) about her being sick, and we assured her it would be 'No problem!' Eventually we could tell her, and it was not much of a surprise to her at that point. She just continued to spiral out of this life to where her daughter and her daughter's father were waiting, until the tell-tale rattle sounded, and pneumonia choked her while her weak heart had been working too hard to get around the fluid in her lungs.

My sister and i sang again, this time in two-part harmony, and busted up the congregation into tears as we cried our way through it at the old Wedgefield Baptist Church in South Carolina where my parents were married and my mom played piano as a little girl. We buried mom's ashes in the same box as my grandmother, hoping they would get along better than usual. This, next to my Mom's dad's burial site. All that close to and amongst the roots of a Pine tree in South Carolina.