The End of an Era

I just completed my last semester of college for the foreseeable future, and I’m feeling a little nonplussed.  The past six years of my life were spent forging a career in creative writing (specifically, creative nonfiction), and it’s difficult to imagine moving on from that (as ready as I am).  I plan to continue writing, and I still love reading great pieces and working in literary publishing.  But in many ways, life will be switching gears from here on out.  If I ever go back to school, it will probably be for something unrelated (psychology, mathematics, genetics).  My life is so much more than creative writing.

That said, here’s a little going away present: an excerpt from an in-progress piece (and a sappy one at that), which I began writing three years ago – some old, some new.  Damn, I need to grit this up!

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“I bet it’s by the falls,” Matt said, as I passed him the last of the coke.  The two of us sat beneath a canopy of pine trees on a hill, eating ham sandwiches.  It was Spring Break, March, early afternoon, and our first real outing as friends.  The breeze kept lifting my skirt, and I pushed it down while Matt tried to avert his eyes, both of us laughing.

We were in Riverfront Park in Spokane, Washington, searching for a Sherman Alexie poem in a granite spiral.  We’d already walked by a giant red wagon and a clock tower sounding its four o’clock chimes.  We’d passed an Australian sundial covered in light and pine needles, an abandoned ferris wheel, and a pavilion frame from Expo ’74 whose steel mesh cut the blue sky to geometry.

We stood and brushed the crumbs from our laps, then walked until we reached the wooden bridge over Spokane Falls.  The water rushed under our feet as we surveyed the area, shielding our eyes from the sun.  Still nothing.  On the other side we took turns photographing one another beneath a totem pole.  Matt crouched down, pulled his leather jacket over his head and posed under the wooden god and red paint, sand spreading out to the shadows.

We looped around to where the river slowed and pooled, and the children scattered bread to the ducks and the gulls that swarmed overhead.

“Damn, where is it?” I asked.  Matt wandered over to the concrete steps where I was sitting, after tossing the birds some thawed French fries he’d brought from home.  Off to the right was a small building with glass walls housing an old-fashioned carousel.  The lights were off, the doors closed.

We wandered along, this way and that, going too far in what seemed to be every direction.  We ended up near the carousel again, the street close by, the sun going down.

I sighed.  “We’ve looked everywhere.”

“Wait. Let’s try one more place. Up here,” Matt said, pointing to the intersection at the highway bridge, where a round-walled area began to take shape.  I ran, and he followed me, until we started seeing words twisting over open ground.

“We found it!” I shrieked, examining its shiny granite surface.  I was already familiar with the poem—“That Place Where Ghosts of Salmon Jump”—but I followed the spiral nonetheless, reading the entire poem to its center as the sun set over the city lights.  My focus lay with the lines that spiraled, “Look at the Falls now, if you can see beyond all of the concrete . . . Look at all of this and tell me that concrete ever equals love.”  Its words meant more overlooking the river, as many things did that night.

On the highway home the two of us shared what soon became one of my favorite confections.  Matt had one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding out a finger for me to coat with one of Wonka’s latest creations: a squeezable candy paste in Green Apple.  We took turns sampling it from its little tube, a light green ooze thick with saccharine tang.  Indie rock music filled the car, twisting around us and sliding down the windshield.  Matt talked about something called vertical farming and rubbed the early spring chill from my hands.

I didn’t know what to think about any of it.  But I smiled, leaned back in my seat, and craned my neck to find the stars through the passenger window.  They were there, all tiny lights we rode into, scattered over the upper atmosphere like celestial sugar.