Sally Shivnan ~ ~ fiction ~ essays ~ travel

<more writing>

~Here are writing excerpts, not freely available on-line:

From "Airborne" in The Best American Travel Writing 2006, and The Georgia Review, Fall 2005:

        I’m flying, with windows for wings.  Under my nose—literally—are things I would not know any other way, for example, that the predominant color of city lights at night is gold.
        There are also facts that other folks might figure out some other way, but which have come to me only by pressing my nose to the Plexiglas.  For instance, how the design of most golf courses is fan-folded, and how it is possible for people to drive right past huge quarries and never see them.  How the circular pivot-irrigation fields of Oklahoma are racked together like billiard balls for hundreds of square miles, yellow ones, orange ones, lavender, rusty gold, every shade of green.  How horseshoe bends in rivers become, in time, lonely oxbow lakes.  How trees follow even dry watercourses.  How roads don’t take you to all the places that are.
        Some of this is window-seat trivia, of limited interest.  I am after the big picture, or at least, a big picture.  What I’ve figured out so far is this: that from high above, the topography bursts through everything manmade, overwhelms it, and that, from up there, those landforms are astonishingly beautiful.  There are people who disagree—the late geographer John Brinkerhoff Jackson, the writer and pilot William Langewiesche, and the photographer Emmet Gowin, who feel the view from the sky reveals, primarily, not the earth’s brilliant geology but the tracks and designs of humans upon it.  All of these men, though, I would note, have done their observing at small-plane altitudes, flying much lower than I do. 
        In Gowin’s photographs, eerie, wondrous landscapes wear the scars of our scribing and digging, from nuclear test craters and bomb disposal sites to silver mine tailings and abandoned desert trailer parks, though even in these dark pictures there are lovely shapes—the loops and spirals of off-road vehicle tracks on salt flats, the perfect roundness of a giant pivot-irrigation field made delicate by a dusting of snow.  Georgia O’Keeffe had a different vision from the air, which I feel closer to—after a round-the-world airplane tour in 1959 she painted pictures of what she’d seen out the window; Sky Above Clouds IV is an endless flat sea of little white pancakes stretching far away to a faintly pink horizon, an image of unbelievable serenity.  But of course, she was flying at a higher altitude than those others, and she did not look down, but out, at the clouds.  
        Too low or too high, and the view I crave is altered—pictures taken from the space shuttle sweep in too much, at too great a distance; geological features are lost, land masses start to look like maps.  Satellite images of the Grand Canyon, as historian Stephen Pyne puts it, “[reduce] its immense complexity to the status of a mudcrack.” (Planes are prohibited from flying directly over the canyon, but they tell me on some routes it can be seen from not too far away.)  Astronauts always talk in bland platitudes about the beauty of the Earth from orbit.  I have no doubt they are overcome by the view, and find it hard to describe their feelings, but I also think they’re vague because what they’re seeing is vague, losing definition.
        Mine is an ordinary airline-passenger’s view, from an ordinary, cramped, tweedy-upholstered seat by a little oval window, call it 38F or 11A.   Cruising altitude is what I’ve got—what so many of us have got, herded aboard and packed in like the human cargo we are, on our way to meetings and vacations and Thanksgivings and weddings.   I am sympathetic to those who prefer aisle seats, who have other things they want to do—read, sleep, watch the movie.  Sometimes my eyes almost hurt.  I squeeze them tight shut, like some little kid, but then they pop open again.   I pray for clouds, the thick kind that are nothing to look at. 
        I am not unsociable.  Flying offers natural opportunities for chit-chat with the neighbors.  On a recent trip I sat beside a paralegal from Brooklyn and, in the aisle seat, a seventeen-year-old reading a book of funny facts.    The paralegal was sipping at his plastic cup of white zinfandel, the seventeen-year-old was giggling over his book, and I was looking out the window.  We’d already done the who are you and what are you and why are you going so I felt comfortable saying “Hold up, I have an announcement.”
        The paralegal set down his wine.  The giggler lowered his book to his lap.  They’d seen nothing but the back of my head for the last ten minutes, but now my face was turned on them like the sun.  They shrank back from the light, their kidneys pressed against the armrests.  “The country underneath us,” I told them, “has turned flat!” 
        No reaction. 
        “It’s official,” I added.  “The country is officially flat now.”
        “That’s cool,” said the paralegal.
        “Yeah,” said the teenager.
        “It’ll stay flat,” I said, “till we reach the Rockies.”  They nodded; they understood.  “There’s this river down there—the land’s kind of rolling and hilly on one side, flat as a pancake on the other.”  I knew flat as a pancake was a cliché, but at that moment it conveyed absolute flatness better than anything else I could think of.  I turned back to look, but the river was gone.  I saw squares of green and brown, and roads that crossed at right angles and ran straight forever...

From "Women on Board: In Fla., Finding Their Inner Gidget" in The Washington Post, Travel, April 16, 2006:

    I am flat on my belly, pointed straight ahead, traveling in a clean forward line maybe a hundred miles an hour, in the middle of a churning roar -- my wave, my very own wave, how cool is that. But then I have to do the pop-up thing, and I have to do it fast.
    So I spring to full upright in one smooth, graceful motion, piece of cake, except as soon as my feet make it forward, I am spinning like a loose plastic lid in a dishwasher in the middle of the turbo cycle. Just like every other single time I've tried it.
    Wiping out is the ultimate vacation getaway. Forget no phone, no e-mail, no kids -- this is no arms, no legs, no idea which way is up. It lasts just a few seconds and is actually quite relaxing. It's a curious, in-and-out-of-body experience. And then I'm bobbing in the sea in the sunshine again, my trusty long board floating beside me at the end of my ankle leash.
    I am here because I had one of those milestone birthdays -- the big four-seven. I have come with two sisters and three friends for a weekend at Saltwater Cowgirls all-female surf camp in Jacksonville Beach, Fla. Six chicks learning surfing tricks -- trying to, anyway.
    But I did get my teeth flossed on that last one. And I got my bikini line waxed on the one before that. My toenail polish is steadily abrading, and it will take two shampoos to get the sand out of my scalp tonight in the shower...

From "Dicking the Buddha" in The Antioch Review,  Summer 2007:

    I waited for my sister to sit down, before I asked her.  Then I waited a respectable moment, while we sipped our coffee and looked out the kitchen window at the vinyl siding of the house next door.  There is nothing interesting to look at out the windows of my sister’s home.  I set my elbow in something sticky on the tabletop; I didn’t look down but shifted myself discreetly.
    “Would it be okay,” I asked, “if I borrowed the baby?”
    “Again?  Jesus Christ, Tabby”—she looked toward the living room to see if her two-year-old had heard her swear—“this is gettting to be a habit.”
    “Only for about three days.”
    “Four days.”
    “Well, back that morning, on the fourth day.  Or I could bring him back the night before but it would be really late.”
    My sister is strong, angular, with a nice clarity about her.  She looks like the pictures of our mother, who was a perfect likeness of Lauren Bacall only black.  I don’t look like anybody, except I have the same squash-nose our father had.  There at the kitchen table, in her capris and bedroom slippers, Lizelle’s legs, I noted, were ashy.  Her lips were dry and bitten.  She had once plucked her eyebrows but hadn’t in at least a year and they had grown in thick, glowering, a perpetually pissed-off look.  I knew she’d say yes. 
    “Mikie has something to do with all this, doesn’t he?” she said.
    “Only as inspiration.”
    Mikie is our brother, a former entrepeneur who lives in a large RV and follows the lawnmower racing circuit, towing a trailer for his souped-up Snapper—the only thing stranger than my mama as Lauren Bacall is my brother the redneck good ol’ boy.  He says he’s like that pioneering black cowboy, Bill Pickett, except he’s on a lawnmower instead of a horse.  He reinvented himself this way when he sold his internet startup company for a heinous sum shortly before it went bust.  He sends cryptic postcards from obscure towns across the south, always addressed to both of us, ‘dear Tabby and Lizelle,’ or ‘dear Lizelle and Tabby’ though they only come to Lizelle’s address. 
    “That whole ‘dicking the Buddha’ thing, I still don’t get that,” Lizelle said.  “It still bothers me.”  Around the time Mikie went mobile, he started teasing us about it: What do you do if you meet the Buddha on the road?  I don’t know, Lizelle said, feed him? ask him stuff?  I had heard something about killing him, but from the wicked twinkle in Mikie’s eye I knew this wasn’t where we were going.  A ninth-century Zen master, Mikie explained, name of Lin Chi, advised killing the Buddha if you ran into him, to keep yourself from getting too caught up in celebrity worship.  But if you really met the dude, Mikie said, bumped into him, just like that—I tell you what now, don’t dick the Buddha!  When we asked him what that meant he just laughed, looking like a redneck Buddha himself with his beer belly hanging over his Snapper beltbuckle, and his bizarre attempt at a mullet haircut.  This was what money had done to Mikie.  He’s an asshole and I’d just as soon he stopped sending the postcards.
    “I don’t get it either,” I said.  “But I don’t really care anymore.”
    “That’s what worries me.” 
    Around us on the floor were toys, clothes, sippy-cups, an old baby blanket somebody had been dragging around.  I wanted to point these out to her and say, this is what worries me, not this exactly but what goes along with this, what goes into the bargain.
    “How’s Ty?” I asked.  Ty is Lisa’s husband, a reservist deployed in Iraq. 
    She shrugged.  “Okay.  Everything’s okay.  I get emails.”
    “How are you getting along with Monica?”  Monica is Lizelle’s mother-in-law. 
She frowned into her coffee, her eyebrows lowering like a storm, their pissed-off look mutating to enraged.  Just then the two-year-old started dropping things on the baby, who was asleep in the playpen—small, soft things but enough to wake him up, but in any case it was time to pack everybody up and go get the four-year-old from preschool, and so we spoke no more about it, except to agree that I could come pick up baby Cody the following day...

From "Destination: Springtime in March" in The Washington Post, Travel, March 13, 2005: 

        March: the antsy time between seasons. Observed crocus nearby, but let's face it, crocus small. Detected daffodils swelling; however, swellage inconsistent.
        So, resolved, I would seek out spring: Load subsistence gear in truck, secure credit card in wallet and proceed in only logical direction--south. Because March in Washington is a plate of puny appetizers when you haven't eaten all day. 
        The confluence of roads leads, inevitably, to Interstate 95. Driving I-95 will provide the fastest transformation of seasons compared to other routes, which is, after all, the goal—to find springtime in a single day's drive, 10 hours or so. Indeed, just a couple hours south I spy Bradford pear in full, explosive bloom near Richmond—a small tree, size of a Mini Cooper, a perfect oblong in the shape of a giant baked potato, blossoms so blinding white I want to smear zinc on my nose. 
        An hour later, Near Jarratt, Va., I see an isolated mass of yellow daffodils in true blooming profusion in the middle of a median that looks like a dog with mange—tufty onion grass, scraggly dirt-colored weeds. A little farther on, approaching Emporia, Va., along a median that resembles a bad hair transplant that’s been grazed by nervous goats, I find a patchier stretch of daffodils in yellow and cream, the blooms spread out like constellations, all nodding in the wake of the passing tractor trailers. 
        I am in the land of the Slip-In Restaurant and the Dixie Motel. The idea of the Washington suburbs has become just that, an idea. Tractor trailers and RVs have achieved vehicular dominance, not ordinary RVs either but the big diesel pushers, and the fifth-wheel trailers towed by giant pickup trucks. They roll along, conveyer belt style, on this road so straight in places that the Romans could have built it, though the Romans would have felt disoriented here. (I imagine a small group of them, standing in the grass verge beyond the shoulder, looking as if they want to cross the road. They’re in togas and sandals and I know it’s time I took a little break, stretched my legs, had a look around.) At the exits, which roll past with soothing regularity, the towering signs of the Texacos and Citgos, the Wendys and Shoneys and Dennys, loom high and are gone. 
        When I finally stop, in south-central Virginia, I find myself examining rows of pecan products on a shelf, hearing southern voices all around, and realize: I am somewhere else. 
       Dense scrambles of brambles mass the banks beside the road, the only things greening up just yet in these parts.  There are cedars and pines and the occasional holly and lots of hardwoods, too, none in leaf, though some are in bud -- dark red buds I have to strain to see.
       Near Skippers, Va., 200 miles from my starting point, I glimpse a tumble of forsythia blooming crazy against a bridge.  The pines start to come more thickly, with a nice brown needle litter underneath them.  Sometimes I see through the pines to open farm fields, and I notice that the land is truly flat.  The highway is laid down over an ancient wedge of sand and gravel, laid down in turn over a base of really old rock.  The gravelly stuff settled there in two ways -- washed down from the Appalachians, and left behind by the repeated swelling and retreating of prehistoric seas.
        These sediments are the reason for the flatness and mind-numbing dullness of this section of I-95. They pass beneath the blur of my wheels, unseen. They yield the soil that invites the farmer to turn the plow. Through the pines, I see fields disced for spring, the earth folded out in long rows beneath the sun.
        The road looks level but feels as if it trends downhill -- an illusion, caused by two things: the knowledge that I am running, like a river, to the sea; and the fact that every map I have ever seen shows north at the top and south at the bottom. 
        At the North Carolina Welcome Center, I spot, planted in the grass between the parking lot and the picnic tables, a single pink magnolia, four feet tall, flowering hard as if to make up for its size. And as I cross the state line, the speed limit increases for the first time to 70. 
        I start to notice billboards for Florida hotel discounts and I begin to understand where the RVs are headed. One billboard advises "Stay near Mickey for a Minnie price," and I smile because I'm not going that far....

[complete text available from Washington Post's pay-per-view archives or via Lexis-Nexis]

From "Gringa Morisca" in Travelers' Tales Best Travel Writing 2005 anthology:

        When I was fifteen I could still surrender myself, in the way of a child, to pure magic. I went to a place in Spain where I found the palace of the Nasrid sultans riding on a hill like a great ship, high above the plain and beneath the snow-laden Sierra Nevada. Around it, across the low slopes and valleys, lay the city of Granada. The whitewashed walls of the ancient Arab quarter crowded the nearest hillside, and behind that rose the hill called Sacramonte, pockmarked with caves where Gypsies lived.
        I wandered the palace for hours and hours that seemed like days out of time. In trying to describe it since, even to myself, I have had to fall back on poor analogies—a fantastic wedding cake, a Disneyland—because there are no other analogies, no frame of reference. This high flowering of Islamic art in Spain, the last glorious sigh of the Moors’ eight-hundred-year reign—the Alhambra—was an alien aesthetic for an American girl like me. It was so completely alien that I was left, inevitably, with another sorry analogy but one that accurately reflected the experience: I floated around in that place like a visitor from another planet, amazed, uncomprehending, delighted to tears. And so, twenty-five years later, I went back to see if it would be the same. 

        In the center of a marble floored room, a low fountain bubbles in a small round pool. Its overflow is taken away in a narrow channel along the floor to mingle with other waters in an adjoining courtyard. The fountain is the only movement in the room. The walls breathe deep silence, which is strange to contemplate since every inch of surface on those walls, and up to the ceiling, and overhead, is filled with a chaos of decoration—up to about chest-height the walls are covered with geometric knots worked in colorful tile, and above this there is an abrupt transition to pale sculpted stucco, which lofts upward in dense, delicate interweavings of Arabic script and flowers and vines and pomegranates and stars. The eye wanders over this, into this, led by curling lines to other curling lines, bumping suddenly into hard geometric shapes, because the whole system, it turns out, is based on contrasts. It also becomes clear, on dizzy examination, that there is, everywhere, both infinite variety and rhythmic repetition.
        It is seductive to stare into it, and yet it is quite possible to look at it and simply feel soothed; as busy as it is, it makes a gentle music. You can imagine a sultana reclining on pillows on the floor: she is daydreaming and the walls are the soft background of her dreams, and then for no clear reason she notes a certain pattern in the lines, arches enclosing a stylized trefoil of leaves, and her memories sharpen (a remembered look, a word, and what she said in answer), and then she bites a fig and breaks the spell.
        The h is silent in Alhambra; this place holds silence within itself. Luxurious quiet is its essence, in rooms like these, and in the small courtyard nearby with its ethereal, slender alabaster columns, and in the Court of the Myrtles with its long reflecting pool. And down all the shadowy walkways with their arched windows looking out over the city and the plain and the gorge of the River Darro at the foot of the walls, far below; and in the gardens, awash in the scents of orange blossom and jasmine and the lullaby-sounds of flowing water. The quiet is so carefully cultivated that it has made me wonder, what noise were they trying to forget? I think I understand, after two visits there, some of the answer to that question. Or, at least, I understand the question....

From "For Some, Shifting Allegiances Is No Easy Action," in The Washington Post, Style, June 30, 2003:

        The tall blond woman at the podium told us the rule: Always turn and face the largest flag in the room. The room, in fact, was full of flags, three dozen little flags-on-a-stick, gifts from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which each of us held in our new American hands. I'd never known this rule for saying the Pledge of Allegiance in all my years of standing there, greeting the new school day, barking the words in chorus.
        There was one big flag conveniently located next to the podium, so we did not have to move much to face it. I was perhaps the only one there for whom this was just a matter of going through the motions, since I'd lived in the United States most of my life but had never gotten around to becoming a citizen. The people around me all had complicated stories, and this day for them was the end of a long, uncertain journey -- but I was the only one crying.
        The INS woman's eyes met mine, and she misinterpreted my tears, I know.   

        Earlier that day, in the waiting area of Baltimore's Fallon Federal Building, I had sat with about 100 others, all there in pursuit of adjustments of status. A strange music of language spun around me -- lilting African tongues, the rapid syllables of Korean, waterfalls of Spanish. For reasons of Homeland Security, the INS was about to reinvent itself as the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, but only the name would change, not the daily crowd of hopefuls trying for visas, green cards and citizenship.
         The ones waiting for naturalization interviews, like me, were easy to spot, reviewing their 100 questions on much folded and unfolded study sheets. When I'd seen the questions, it looked easy enough -- commit a few numbers to memory, get those 13 Colonies straight. But here I watched men with deep frowns bending their faces close to the paper, going back and forth between questions and answers, and I saw what an anxious task they had, memorizing dozens of largely meaningless responses.
         For instance, No. 73, "Who helped the Pilgrims in America?" -- if you don't know who the Pilgrims were, how can the answer, "the American Indians," make actual sense? I indulged a warped fantasy of an immigration interview featuring No. 79 ("Which president freed the slaves?") to which the interviewee might respond, "Sorry, that was before my time." The interviewee might be, say, from Uganda, with a young nephew or a baby sister kidnapped by the rebel military, and could go on to tell the interviewer a thing or two about slavery.
         For my part, the only thing that interested me -- and interested me a lot -- about the civics test was the one question I felt sure, these days, they'd have to drop from the lineup: No. 84....

[complete text available from Washington Post's pay-per-view archives or via Lexis-Nexis]