All of my misery fantasies end the same way: I’m in Wyoming. Alone. As old and as gray as the gray, old sky. I’ve just locked up the diner where I made about forty bucks on the late shift, and it’s windy as all get out, and I’ve got a helluva long walk home, but I don’t really mind because I’ve already lost everything, and the wind’s all I’ve got. Oh, and maybe a pack of cigarettes, and if I have the cigarettes, maybe a lighter, maybe one my brother gave me, years ago, when we were in the habit of picking up bad habits.
I don’t know why. It’s just my go-to, my if-I-lost-everyone-and-everything-I-loved-at-least-I’d-still-have-Wyoming-because-I-sure-do-love-that-sky-and-how-it-makes-me-feel-so-un-alone. Of course, the fantasy has its variations, most of which are apocalyptic and involve my weather-battered husband and our wild-haired infant daughter-turned-teenager, but all of them take place in Wyoming.
I thought of this the other day when Yavuz Burke, a native of Turkey and a Canadian citizen, stole a Cessna 172 from a Canadian flight school and landed it in southern Missouri after almost six hours of eluding F-16 fighter jets. I imagine Burke as a young boy in Turkey, drawing in the dirt with a stick, putting a big X right there in the heartland, Missouri, he’d say to himself, that’s where I want it to all go down.
Reportedly, Burke went into a general store and bought himself a Gatorade. He’d also tried to purchase a Beef Jerky but didn’t have enough cash. Canadian authorities are quoted as saying that Burke is “not a happy individual,” and I love that they bring happiness in. Hmm…happy men do not steal planes, fly them to other countries, walk into a 7-11 and plop down a buck-fifty for a Gatorade. Thirsty men, maybe; happy men, no.
But it’s all got me thinking about place, about how it buoys us and frees us, how it gives us hope or sends shudders down our spines (read: the burbs), how it makes us re-imagine ourselves. If we have the wind, we say, then maybe we can make it. Even just another day. And yea, yea, I know, I know, no matter where you go there you are, but I’m curious, what’s your place? Where does your mind send you? And what, please tell, is it saving you from?
Dearest,
What a lovely post. If I had a tiny plane (I do have one, but it is in my mind), I’d go to my place that saves me. The Sonoma Valley, under an oak tree, the sun strong so it smells like oak and acacia and Astral Weeks is playing. The whole album. And it’s too late to do more work, and too early to go inside. Screen doors and juncos. “If I ventured in the slipstream.” (A homemade wine is poured.) “Between the viaducts of your mind.” (Someone starts the grill. And there is dancing. Not with partners. Just everyone swaying.)
What is it saving me from? From the cement city that I adore. But never from myself, there is no saving us from that, is there? I’d still be there, my little messed up self–thinking, “I wonder what wonderful things are happening in New York right now?”
Much love,
Ada
I am there with you in WY! Well, maybe a little farther south to Utah. The desert is the place of my dreams. It brings me to that perfect internal environment. Ah…
Why, Wyoming….Isn’t that the place where great bald eagles just swoop in from every direction? Where there are eighteen rainbows in the sky at once and stars falling like rocks out of a pocket? Ah, yes…Wyoming.
What about that great salty desert that turns into an endless plain of mud at just the right time of year? What about apinted deserts?
Hammocks and mangos and warm breezes…saving me from me.
painted deserts. painted.
Nicole,
This was the purdiest thing I read all day. One of those gray days when writing is just so lonely, while at the same time so freeing. My airplane, the one I can fly, is not so much an airplane as it is imagination, and when I get the chance to let myself go inside imagination, yeah, it’s like flying.
But writing is lonely, once you turn off the computer and look around and you don’t know anybody around you. Then, it must have been a writer who invented restaurants, and wine, and company. And if there could be a little art on the walls, thank you. And do you have any music? Not too loud, thanks.
Chris
Couldn’t it be in South Louisiana riding in a pirouge among the cypresses, swatting mosquitos the size of small birds while throwing empty crawfish shells at smiling at alligators……this could be more than one Okie turned Nueva Yorker could handle………
Orcas Island, Washington. There’s a Y camp on the east side of the island where i escaped my only child demons learned to live and love with abandon. When the apocalypse comes (or I wake up and realize this life was just a dream), I’m heading back to the Madrona trees, rocky beaches, and poetry-inspiring sunsets. In my disaster fantasy, I go back as the camp cook and spend my days in a hairnet stirring vats of tomato soup and my nights wandering the beach humming Indigo Girls songs.
There’s a place in Maine, a little strip of rocky coast where gulls drop urchins on the rocks to crack them and the Atlantic at high tide slams its full force into a crack in the rocks the length of my forearm, which propels it dramatically up into a frothy plume. That’s what I’ve always hankered for. But as I age I find Minnesota creeping in – less drama there, unless there’s a thunderstorm. It’s a gentle, varied landscape and at this time of year you can smell the thaw and soon, trout lilies in the low places and the little creeks fill and finger their crooked banks. I think as I get older and older, it’s that gentle landscape that I’ll want more of.
Lovely post, friend.
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