The house is sparkling aggressively tonight as the last of the sun fades from the sky (it's barely 5:00), and I'm sitting down to plow through emails and learn about the wildfire outside of L.A. I'm not surprised somehow that the state is on fire again. It seems like this has been a season of slow-burning crises, one after the next, and the impression is made stronger by the yearly descent of the Tulare fog and the haze from harvested cotton crops. The valley, in other words, gets hazy and dark around this time of year, making a few misty attempts at rain, and my body clock is spinning its hands wildly in an attempt to orient itself. I'm still not good at meteorological subtlety-- I need rain to come in giant howling storms with green and purple clouds, the kind of overwrought weather-prose of an Old Testament God.
Events of the past weeks have washed over me and I've tried assiduously to react to them, process them, and sift through it all looking for nuggets to write about, but somehow I've failed. Or maybe I'm stuck back at data gathering. Last night I was accidentally up way into the wee hours doing nothing in particular, just the perplexing task of putting small things back where they belong (how does my life get so jumbled?), and I stepped outside for a moment to put something in the mailbox. A full moon was high in the sky and the world looked eerily half-lit and not at all asleep. A massive TV screen flickered wildly through the blinds of a house across the street and a dryer hummed in the garage next door. I stood for a moment and listened-- a door slammed a few doors down and the irregular hum of the highway and some giant industrial machine at the cheese plant added their notes to the busy half gloom. It was 2:30 in the morning and it felt like the whole town was awake in the same shuffling restlessness as me. It gave me the creeps, kind of a sad, skin-crawly feeling.
I know we've just passed a historic election and all, and I'm convinced a part of me is sitting a little better, like a segment of spine that really needed to pop and finally did-- I feel in many ways like I recognize my country again, like I'm still welcome here when I was beginning to suspect otherwise. But another reality is settling in as well. Things are bad right now. The fact that I'm able to fill up my gas tank for less than $30 when just a few months ago it was costing me $65 is an eery testament to just how off-balance everything is. I haven't looked at any of my investment accounts in months, and it's for diametrically opposed reasons. Partly I think the money in those accounts is like a secret colony of wood fairies-- it'll disappear if I look at it too hard-- and partly it's because I'm all too connected to reality of these accounts and what they mean. Another metaphor: it's like stepping on a rusty nail and not wanting to look at your foot and be forced to confirm how gory and bad it is.
Christmas approaches, which means the deployment approaches. I know myself well enough to suspect that various decades-old psychological coping mechanisms are whirring to life, even though intellectually I'm practicing phrases that make me sound well-balanced: "I know it'll be difficult, but if I set small goals and take it one day at a time, it'll be all right"; "I'm looking forward to planning a trip to go and meet him in port"; "I'll get so much writing done, and maybe I'll even take a yoga class."
Last weekend I got to go to San Diego and see the boat for the first time. I've tried to write about my impressions of the experience, but I have a feeling that it's still moving through me and needs to be partially worked out in dreams. Generally, the STENNIS left me with an impression of imposing massiveness, and a cold hum from the nuclear generators I never got to see. Everything smelled like paint and fuel and metal and industrial plastics, which has become a sort of shorthand for my brain that spells hard work and separation. Pants showed me his living quarters and stood in the middle of the room flapping his arms and saying triumphantly, "Look! I can stretch my arms all the way out. Not many people get rooms this big." I smiled at him but it felt more like a grimace. The room he shares with three other guys looked a lot like an industrial janitor's closet, and felt shockingly small to me, though I know I should be grateful for the luxury of it compared to where the enlisted guys sleep. Mostly I just felt lost and found myself thinking absurd thoughts like, "I wonder if a decorator's television show would come in and do a room makeover or something."
The other overwhelming impression was of a fusion of man and machine. No particular space is solely devoted to one thing. A bathroom, for instance, is also a conduit for all kinds of exposed pipe and random red painted valves sticking out into the middle of the room. Pants' room has a locked closet jutting out of the wall and covered in cryptic codes. He has no idea what it is, but figures that if someone needs to get to it, they'll knock. A small "gerbil gym" nearby has a five-foot tall beam running through it horizontally so that if you want to get from the treadmills to the weights, you have to crawl under it. There are six-story drops in holes in the floor and various threatening caution signs everywhere. It would be interesting to assemble a list of all the things that could kill or maim you on this boat. Leaving out the things that are specifically designed for that purpose (i.e., the bombs and guns), the list would still be quite long. In other words, this is not a space built with human comfort in mind. Always, the structure and function of the boat exerts itself over the needs of the people on it-- you are there to serve it, not the other way around.
Neither of these impressions should have been surprising to me-- Pants' space is small and not particularly welcoming, and the boat is a dangerous place where people make all kinds of concessions about their comfort and relative safety-- but both hit me with the force of a strong, cold wave. Since then I've dreamed of being in an entire mall on the seaside that is swallowed by a tsunami, and then of Pants and I being viciously beaten by a group of mobsters and having to kill one of them and bury him in the new concrete of a building foundation. I am dreaming of violence, dark swells of it with masked origins, and the most intricately detailed parts of the dreams are when I take stock of the various physical injuries I've sustained. The impression that I had been punched in the jaw this morning was so strong that I resisted yawning and touched it gingerly as I woke up. I could recall the sandy feeling of the bones grinding upon impact, and the hot swell of a bruise blooming there.
Perhaps the weirdest part of seeing the boat was seeing evidence of the improvised "Hajji attack" that took place at the embarkation checkpoint just minutes before Pants and I arrived. "Hajji" is the slightly racist, all-purpose enemy name for the two wars we're in right now. Evidently, SEALs masquerading as the enemy staged an attack on the checkpoint in order to give the soldiers whose duty it is to let everyone on and off the boat when it's in port some practice at defending it. By the time we strolled up, it was all over, but there was fake blood all over the ground, and the enlisted guys getting off the boat in their freshly unpacked civilian clothes tracked bloody footprints out of the port and into San Diego. I tiptoed around the blood, superstitiously avoiding it, but the air was still electric and every time someone called me "ma'am" it was with a sharp edge of hyper-alertness.
So I still don't know how I feel about this giant thing that Pants will live within for most of 2009. Another wife, a friend of mine, has a three-year-old daughter who hides when she sees an aircraft carrier on TV. She used to think it ate her dad for months at a time, that it was an entity in and of itself that lived off the people inside it. Last weekend, she seemed to have forgotten this impression and detailed to me her plans to become a helicopter pilot when she's six, and then to take up jets so she can make big noises and land on boats. Every time we drove over the bridge from San Diego to Coronado Island where the boat was docked, she strained in her car seat to ask which boat was her dad's, and every time I pointed to the giant gray mass out in the bottle green water. She seemed reassured by its mass, and told me nothing in the world could break it, not even monsters. I wish my impressions were as clear and comforting.
