Week 3

I’ve had mixed feelings about New York City ever since I was a young Girl Scout making my first trip by boat to circle the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It was beautiful, magnificent, large, and simply awe-inspiring from a distance. On an island stuffed with so many people with ‘places to go and people to see,’ how could it not be a great place for learning and exploring?

Yet whenever I step onto the street outside of Penn Station or whatever parking garage my mom chose, I was horrified: filth, grime, fossilized flattened gum, spit, wrappers, gloves—whatever debris you could think of—it was there. And the people were even more terrifying: the ‘normal’ people with coffee mugs in hand and heels and briefcases and simply no time to make eye contact; and the dirty, possibly homeless people, covered in layers and layers of clothes, who did make eye contact and made you feel just as scummy, just as abandoned and cold.

Overall, my fear won out over my fascination with the city. I often wanted nothing to do with the place, and when I did go, I clung to my mother’s coat for dear life, fighting the wave of people who seemed desperate to elbow me and shake me loose. I could never figure out what they wanted from me. Should I curl up further and take up less space? Should I cling tighter? Should I shove back and hope my mother walks fast enough for me to avoid any retaliation?

Or should I let go and figure it out on my own?

January 28th 10:35am

When Mark and I drove in from New York around 4am, it was negative three degrees. He said he wasn’t going to bother at that point with bringing anything in from the car, so I clung to my purse and toiletry bag (Mark changed his mind and brought in the pillow and blanket I brought along) as we trudged to his apartment from the car.

I wasn’t thinking about nature. At that point, I didn’t care about nature. It was being a dumb little bitch, throwing this arctic-vortex-freezing-cold-whatever-may-have-you temper tantrum, and quite frankly, I was done with all of it.

But I woke myself up early this morning. I left Mark to sleep and creeped to the outside window, craning my neck to see the backyard of the abandoned house. It looks the same as how I left it on Thursday morning, I with the intent on being a good student and getting my work done before my trip. All I wrote for the five minutes I was out there was “freezing cold. no animals. snow.”

I wonder as I sit near the heat-blasting vent if I should even pretend I went outside. I am desperate to avoid going outside at any cost, so I decide there’s no point in hiding it: today I observe my nature from the security of a warm inside. It’s probably zero degrees right now. Surely my instructor can understand that.

I hope.

I decide to finally identify the vine that is covering the majority of the trees outside. After searching desperately through the internet, I find a forum dedicated to this type of plant identifying. A woman is desperate to find out what is plaguing the trees in her backyard, and after scrolling down to avoid the backstory, I find what I am looking for: winter creeper.

It is a perennial and an invasive parasitic vine native to east Asia with a thick, hairy base that attaches itself to trees (sometimes even overtopping them) and with leaves and flowers—“small greenish” ones, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation; I’ve never seen them before—and spreads by the well-meaning birds. At least, I think they are well-meaning.

It is tolerant to nearly everything natural: harsh conditions, shade, sun, except “extremely wet conditions.” (Nearly everything quoted in here is from the website of the Missouri Department of Conservation). While it apparently “occurs infrequently” throughout the United States, when it is present, it is “very aggressive,” growing rapidly and stealing the nutrients and sun from other plants and trees. Because it is so awful to the surrounding environs, the “most effective control is to totally eradicate the species [….] Invading individuals should be pulled and removed as soon as possible after recognition.” 

I think to myself that is quite a harsh reaction. I wonder if I should let Mark know. He has already taken it upon himself to unclog the basement sink and replace the lint trap of the washing machine. Perhaps his landlord, once informed of this, will be willing to negotiate something with him for the removal of the winter creeper. Although the last time I attempted to enlist his service, it was to get him to help my father put a french drain into the backyard—for a fee, of course—and I don’t believe he was too happy about it.

“I used to do french drains all the time,” he said. “As soon as I was able to carry a backpack, daddy bought me one of those backpack leaf blowers.”

I soon afterward dropped the subject.

I can see from the window that, of the leaves that survived, it is the kind I found on the internet: nearly oval, with a point on the end, flat and dark green. I look at the fallen trees, slumped across the yard, covered in jutting and hairy branches, bark covered by a tangle of the winter creeper, now as dead as the tree itself.

The winter creeper (a.k.a. Euonymus fortunei) was named after Robert Fortune, who worked for the Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh and, after the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, was tasked with collecting the various plants of China. As one can assume, the Treaty of Nanjing was simply the first of many British treaties in which China was exploited. While the treaty did end the Opium War, it did not end British attempt to continue its reach further east. Years later, Fortune, under the blessing of the British East India Company, went back to China disguised as a Chinese merchant and was able to successfully transport tea to India; one cannot forget the fact that it was, of course, declared illegal by the Chinese government for Fortune to have bought the tea plants. (All of the above information on Fortune can be found on Wikipedia.)

In “The Signing of the Treaty of Nanjing” painting, only one man looks, as I can tell from my small computerized preview, to be from China; the rest are nearly all clean-shaved, military-uniform-wearing white men, their heads lined in a row, each indistinguishable from the other. 

I look at the clump of ivy choking the trees outside and then think of the axe my father used to cut the thick hairy vine that permeated our backyard trees in both New Jersey and New York. I think of my lame attempt, oblivious to the plant’s history, to put these ideas into a poem. The first version, titled “Scars,” went like this:

Thick scar wrapped around his knee, 

a different color of skin, 

smooth with its own wrinkles

like the parasite on the tree,

vine-like how it clutches the trunk and hauls itself

further up towards the light.

Axe in hand, he’d swing at the bottom, 

near the soil, panting, desperate 

to keep it from scarring the bark.

My poetry mentor at the time said of this poem, “I know what you mean about scars having their own wrinkles and how the parasite it like the scar, but no—this isn’t fully realized, not finished yet. Give it some time—don’t edit it right now—and then try again.”

So I, embarrassed and frustrated by this attempt to write about nature, let it rot in the depths of my computer files. I think about it randomly, but I don’t feel ready just yet to try to write about it again.

I think, maybe the next time I stumble upon it I will be ready. But not right now. Not right now. I need time to clutch on before I feel ready to let go.

Week 2

The Jersey Shore. A term never used before the hit TV show “The Jersey Shore,” full of a cast that mostly hail from Long Island. When someone says, “I’d love to go to the Jersey Shore,” I get cranky. “It’s called ‘the beach,’” I say. “Don’t be such a Benny.” 

(A Benny is an acronym for obnoxious tourists from Bayonne, Elizabeth, New York, and those near such northern areas. When I was eleven, we moved to New York, but I refused to believe I was no longer from the beach.)

As far as I was concerned, Bennys, however obnoxious and prone to cut you off, visited paradise; I lived it.

I like to think I grew up exclusively on the sand and not thirty minutes from Island Beach State Park. My mom and I swatted the green biting beach flies and scrubbed our skin in the public beach showers, scrubbed with our fingernails the black particles of sand that clung on the hardest. I collected beach glass and scallops (not the large clam shells that are remarkable only for their size and ability to survive, compared to other, more beautiful shells).

My freshman year of college was difficult for me because I felt so alone and away from people who cared about me. I think the saddest moments were when I’d walk to my College Composition I class and, passing over the bridge over the creek protected by the state, I’d mistakenly think I could smell low tide. While not the most pleasant of smells, it was welcoming, and I was simultaneously afraid of breathing in air that did not smell like it anymore and of missing any more of the scent. 

It wouldn’t be there when I took another breath.

January 18th 12:35pm

I am trying to think warm thoughts as prepare to go outside. I put on the only pair of long, over-the-knee socks I have left.

“Do you want to climb out the window?” Mark asks.

He is already dressed; he has his hat, gray sweatshirt stained with slashes of red paint, cut-off-at-the-knee pants, pull-up socks, and moccasins. I have only my “post-fall but not quite winter weather yet” jacket. I anticipate the freeze, especially since I lost the most expensive pair of gloves I owned, costing me $22.00.

I tell him, no, not particularly, but if he’d like to do so, he was more than welcome.

“Then do you want to go out the front door or the bottom basement door?”

“Door in the basement, please.”

I am trying to be more adventurous, so I follow him to the basement, where he first inspects all the cracks in the walls. Pen in hand, I follow and focus on a webbed spider hole in the crack in the window. I linger and remember how I would pass by bushes, especially after rain, and look for such holes, the large, crouched spiders within. This particularly hole looks abandoned; its webs are covered in dust and plaster shavings.

We go outside, Mark already stomping through ice-crusted and snow-covered ivy. I can hear a distant neighbor’s TV, the vibrations and echo of the sound. I wonder if he even realizes how obnoxious it is.

There are sticks instead of bushes coming out of the ground, and I follow Mark as he pulls out his Tao Te Ching pocket book and sits down on the concrete steps that lead from the slab that divides his place from the neighbor’s.

I notice a green-painted iron railing that might have been for steps that would have gone further down. They leads my eyes to the large tree that has fallen parallel to the road. 

It is enormous. It looks like it has been cut, and yet at the end, there is rotting on the inside where I stare and see ivy has manifested in there as well. There are also unidentifiable bushes—or, more accurately, sticks that were bushes in the summer—that curve protectively over this dead tree. It’s remarkable to me how they are so thin yet they bend so firmly, unmoving, without any snow on them.

I suddenly feel conscious of where I am standing. I don’t know if we’re allowed back here, so I stay still and wait for someone to tell me to get off immediately. I look back at Mark; he is standing on the fallen tree and whistling at the trees, perhaps hoping to conjure interest for animals to take. The only reply he receives is the scraping off of ice from a nearby car.

I see a lone squirrel jump his run in the distant, but he is oblivious of us. I wonder if it’s true that squirrels don’t retrieve half of the nuts they bury.

Mark jumps off of the tree and walks up the lame set of concrete stairs towards me.

“Do you see that paw print?” he asks, pointing to a lone print in the snow, small and indistinct. “Is that a raccoon?”

I scowl at this. I wonder if one of the reasons he asks is an attempt to get a rise out of me. I hate raccoons. 

It all started when I was five and so easily taken advantage of by my mother and father, who one night decided to tease my narcissism and say, “Miss Kate, there was a raccoon last night who came up to the backdoor, knocked politely, and asked if you were there. But we had to tell him you went to bed, and he was very sad.” Naturally, I went around and told my kindergarden classmates and my teachers. Years later, I was told this never happened, and I was quite angry at them, embarrassed I was not told before I then told the world how special I was.

And it started again one night two weeks ago when I came to Mark’s apartment from work. As I pulled into the abandoned parking space, a giant raccoon raced into my view, darting from across the road and pausing near the door I had to get to.

Terrified, I called Mark.

“There’s a big fat raccoon outside!” I squealed. “He’s, like, huge! Can you come outside? I’m afraid he’s going to claw my face off.”

Yet simultaneously, I was impatient. I quickly grabbed my purse and started shuffling across the pavement, clutching my possessions to my chest and holding my phone out in front of me, the lame light shining on snow. As Mark searched, as he told me later, for an appropriate weapon, I thought I saw the raccoon and nearly fainted. Mark came to the door with a wooden spoon. It was just a bush.

Trying to forget this moment, I ignore the paw print in front of me and look above and try to catalogue the three distinct bird sounds. The nearest-sounding one, coming from the largest tree, is a constant, high-pitched chirp; then there is one that is a distinctly rhythmic three beat; the third one has stopped. I’ve lost it.

As Mark sits down again with his Tao, I slowly walk through further ivy and snow.

Looking down, I see that the largest tree is covered in a hairy vine, the kind my father used to hack away at with an axe.

When I asked him why was he doing that, he’d grunt, “No good for the tree.”

I look around and notice that all of the large trees, and some of the young ones—probably not even twenty years old yet almost as tall—are as well. The young ones that are not burdened by the weight of the ivy sway in the light wind, almost, I think poetically, rocking themselves to sleep. Some of the younger trees nearby still have dead orange-brown shrilled leaves hanging on, each one swaying at its own accord, jerky, twitchy; some leaves sway with the branch they are attached to, and others move on their own, still trying to wiggle off, independent of the tree itself.

I can’t feel my fingers now. Half of the time my pen works. I look up at the abandoned house and the windows on the top floor that are encrusted with ice even as they sit in the sun. I am jealous of Mark in his hoodie sitting on snow-covered concrete.

I walk back towards him and notice that someone has hacked at a thick pice of the vine near the house, but there are baby vines that slowly seem to crawl up towards the windows. Its leaves are black against itself, I notice, but against another object, I can better see the green.

“When the wind stops blowing,” Mark says, “do you notice how neutral it becomes?”

He’s talking about how cold it is, how I’ve complained several times about how I can’t feel my fingers. I tell him I’m done, and I walk back to the basement door without waiting for him. 

Inside the warmth of the apartment, he says, almost as if continuing the conversation I wanted left outside.

“What about Mr. Raccoon? Doesn’t he get as cold as you? His feet are smaller.”

“But he’s fat and has fur. I can’t help him anyway.”

“Well, who says you have to?”

I pause at this, but the tingling in my red fingers, signaling the blood trying to pump back through, is distracting. I look out at the backyard from the kitchen window. Mark says he thinks it’s supposed to reach zero again this Tuesday.

“Do you think all the birds die if they come up from migrating too early? I’ve been hearing a lot more lately. Do you think they’re going to die?”

I say, “Well, I used to hear some when it was snowing bad out like two weeks ago.”

“But what if those ones are dead?”

I don’t have an answer for him. 

“If you don’t like the cold, then how do you jump in the water? Do you?”

“You mean the ocean?” I say. He nods and waits patiently for my answer. “I do; I mean, I jump in that water. It just depends on my mood.”

“Then what’s the difference between going outside in this weather and going in the water?”

I think the answer’s simple: everything.

Abandoned House: Week 1

January 13th 2:05pm

He says out west is goregous. I wouldn’t know: I have always lived in the east and skipped over ‘the west,’ flying straight into Portland, Oregon, for a English conference. During those three days, I wasn’t convinced.

He says Nevada was a new place for him after his attempts to live—and die—in Pittsburgh. A clean start. No Internet, hardly any cellular connection, no beds. It was sleeping in tents in snow, showering in KOA facilities, wandering the area when there was nothing else to do. He shows me pictures, a long computerized reel, of him and his chainsaw crew. They saw down bushes and trees, creating a fifty foot circle around a sapling of a specific species, a type of pine I can’t recall, and flag with orange plastic strips the trees that animals live in.

It looks dusty there; the white shirts the crew wears that appear new in one shot are brown by the next with sawdust, dirt, and sweat.

I don’t like the pictures of the snow, the large clumps that float down seemingly harmlessly onto their tents. I can feel myself start to shiver.

“How did you survive?” I ask.“It looks freezing cold.”

“The tents were right on the snow,” he says. “And you know me. I never get cold.”

It’s true: he radiates heat. He walks barefoot on asphalt in November and leaves windows open in December. I simply have to lay my hand on his t-shirted arm to thaw off.

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see him as a silhouette of red, bright red, like blood freshly oxidized. When I put out my arms, closing my eyes and reaching for him, I am white. I am a clean slate ready to be dipped in dye and dried somewhere warm, bending and hardening how I please. At least, that is what I hope.

He is 24, turning 25 in July. He has seen and experienced more of the world than I ever will. I believe I am missing out, spoiled by inexperience and fear. 

What is there to be afraid of? I can hear him say. Go out and try it.

It’s drizzling—the only way I can tell is by the sound the rain makes against the leaves that coat the ivy and that disintegrate into one another.

The place I’ve chosen to write about is here, in Crafton, PA, on the street where Mark, my boyfriend, lives. On this road, there are three houses clustered together, hardly ten feet from the road it feels like. 

The furtherest one is Mark’s. He lives on the first floor; his neighbor, Ian, lives on the second. I’ve never seen Ian, only heard his steps above and the guitar he plays obsessively for an hour or two once a week. And I know that apparently he doesn’t mind if Mark forgets his laundry in the dryer.

I don’t know the people in the middle house. I once saw a black man standing in front of the gold car that’s always parked crooked. It forces me to walk on the busy road whenever I bring groceries to Mark’s place. The man seems to keep to himself; I feel myself liking him already.

It is this last house I am fascinated with. It is abandoned. Mark’s landlord has been trying for years to buy it off of the owner, who asks for more money than it probably is worth. So abandoned it sits here. I always park my car in the two parking spaces meant for the house’s owners. I often get out of my car and stare.

Now I am sitting next to it, squirming on cement blocks that keep my car from going off the hillside. I look at the ivy, seeing no movement from drops of rain. The ivy crawls up the stone siding of the house and hangs off the basement door in great clumps trying to find a way in. Why? I wonder. What is there inside worth getting into?

The front door of the house has a great curving strip of ivy that makes it look artsy. I tried to take a picture of it once, but it kept coming out crooked. I gave up after three shots.

Near the front door is a window that the ivy has already gotten through. It curls more tightly on the inside, clinging now to the wooden frame. Again, why? Why even bother going inside?

I keep my eyes away from the nature here. I see the blinds inside the house are turned inward, how my mother normally would prefer to have them, to better block the light while letting it in.

But there are some windows, to the back of the house, that have nothing covering them. I wonder if the curtains fell, if the blinds were ripped off, if perhaps there was nothing there to begin with. 

The rain has stopped for the moment in its drops, the kind that are singular and heavy. And now there are birds chirping—I hear various noises from them. I look up into the tree tops but see nothing. Mark keeps calling them with his whistles, but they fall silent, one by one, as the rain picks up again.

I asked Mark to be a part of this, to keep me on track.

“I want to know what you’re writing about,” he says. “But I don’t. Do you notice the bark on these trees? They look like stretch marks.”

The trees here seem massive, but really it is because there is ivy that clumps onto them. They ivy looks different than the kind that creeps into the house, almost like holly but the leaves don’t look spiky or waxy. 

There are some squirrels now. I hear their clicking and see some clump of a tree shake towards the top.

A medium-sized bird swoops down low—a robin, I notice now—and titters and hops along the ground, eventually blending in with the bricks that litter around. I lose sight of her (the breast was not brilliant red as I remember the males having) quite quickly.

There is garbage here: Dunkin’ Donuts clear cups, pipes jutting from the tangled mess of ivy and leaf, tires caught and suspended by the brush.

Despite Mark’s encouragement, for now I won’t go down and further to the backyard slope. I am determined in the idea that I will save that and the plant identifying for another time.

“I have another twelve weeks,” I say. He doesn’t seem impressed.

There are many things here and so little eyes and hands of mine to do it all—to dig into the compost of leaves and see what’s under; to brush back the ivy and see what plants it crushed the life out of; to identify the trees, old and sapling; to most importantly to me, not fall in what seems now like mush and cold; to not disturb what is here; to not put projections on this place when really all I want to do is steer away and write about things I do know.

It is cold here, not the Arctic cold from the week’s before that threatened to keep my car from running, not the naked cold from being in an RV overnight with no heat. Just wet cold, wanting-to-give-up cold. What is there to document or catalogue here in the now when there is the past? The holly bushes in Jackson, NJ; the pygmy bunnies in Nevada Mark nearly killed with his chainsaw; the boulders and vultures in Appalachia, in my backyard in New York—all of this to agonize over?

Mark looks at my notebook full of scribbles. I am ashamed of my rant now. I turn back to the ivy and think, oh, but I must try. 

The rain seems to fall harder.