My summer.

What did it mean? What does it mean?
I discovered more strength than I thought I had, but came face to face with my limits, my fears and ingrained carefulness. I always wanted to keep up with the guys, and finally had to admit that they have an advantage--but I still can't quite accept it.
I learned quietness, stillness, the kind that only comes after exerting yourself for days on end and then finally having a chance to stop and rest. And the quietness of not having the distractions, the noise, phone calls and emails and day planners and bus schedules, fashion magazines and television and advertisements (three names for the same thing), the pressure to look good and be in style and have perfect skin. None of that was part of my life. My life was outside. It was my hands and my feet. It was sunrises and stars. Each letter I received was precious, each book I read, each meal I ate. There was nothing extra, but there was enough. And I felt, every day, that I had all the riches in the world.

I miss it already.

Skinny arms meet Big Rock

Rock work. Frustrating. Slow. Hot. I stand around and feel inept most of the time, wander around slowly, stare at a rock, look at the rock bar in my hands, and stand caught in the feeling that I am doing this all wrong. Suggestions swirl in my head. Back straight. Butt down. Pull don't push. Watch your hands. Watch your wrists. Watch your feet.

I position myself, my middle finger grasping the rock through the hole in my glove. I look forward, push up with my legs, push out with my arms. Sometimes, the rock moves. Sometimes, it doesn't budge. Damn it all to hell. I feel like such a girl.

Between the four of us, we have pushed and rolled and slid a collection of smallish-medium to mediumish-medium rocks to the spot above the gully we are working in. The larger boulders stay where they are. We stare at the rocks, at their sides and bottoms. We slide them into place. We roll them back out. We bash them with single jacks and double jacks and watch them chip or fissure or just break.

Rocks are such slow, zen-like creatures. They follow gravity more than anything. Other forces push and nag them- wind, water, human hands, but in the end, it is gravity that they rest in. They are content not to move, to sit in meditation as the rain falls and the sun beats down and the flowers take root in and around them. Eventually, they may crumble into sand and be one. Granite Nirvana.

And here we are, breaking their peaceful concentration, forcing the silent, solitary, heavy monks into close military formation like the terra cotta soldiers of China. Criticizing their imperfections, their unsmooth sides, their lack of symmetry, their rockness. Stoically, they wait out our game, wait to be placed and chipped and forced together and finally left alone. At least, until the water comes again.

There must be an art to this, a way to befriend and appreciate the rock, to see it in the way a Taoist butcher sees a leg joint, to not waste so much effort, to get the rock on our side so that it cooperates willingly and rests close to its new siblings with contentment.

So now the question arises- how do you make a rock happy?

Marla Stress Cries

So, Tuesday night was hell. I woke to the wind at 3:30 and spent the next two hours listening to the snapping, tearing sounds of the wind ripping through my borrowed tent. In the morning, it was halfway collapsed and the poles were bent, and the wind was nowhere near being over.

Trying to stay calm, I ask my crew leader, Agnes, for help. I get the "Yeah, we'll fix it" answer that means, "I want to help you, but I have no time."

I head back to the tent to put bigger rocks in the corners, and watch as as stronger gust of wind knocks it flat and starts blowing it away. I yell "Help!" a couple of times, and Scottie and John and Luis come over and do their best with rocks and stakes to make the damn thing wind-worthy. Meanwhile, I stand back and think to myself, "This isn't going to work. This tent is toast."

As I walk toward the campfire, I realize I'm halfway crying, mostly out of frustration and simple lack of sleep. I walk past the fire and find a solitary rock behind a tree to sit on.

However, 'alone' does not exist here. I have been on my solitary rock for less than a minute before Luis comes up behind me and asks what's wrong. Ah, Luis. A sweetheart and a good soul. He puts his arm on my shoulders and tells me it will be okay and offers to let me sleep in his tent and in general tries to get a smile from me- but, I'm still at the point where human contact just makes the tears fall faster.

Agnes comes over and consoles me as well. I try to explain myself- "This is just what I do when I'm frustrated." She tells me she uses that rock for the same purpose.

Later, I will return from work to find my tent flattened again, and ten feet away from where I left it. Frostt will help me disassemble it and put it away. Hannah will give me a spot in her tent, and we will lay our sleeping bags side by side. And I will sleep. Finally.

Life Here

Today was the second day of the second week of real, actual trail work. I feel I am getting into the swing of things, falling into the routine, and liking it more than I even thought I would. The days are intensely scheduled. Wake at 5:30. Eat breakfast around a campfire. Morning chores. Physical training, including ten different kinds of crunches. Hike to work. Work. Break for lunch. Work. Hike home.

It probably sounds worse than it is. Truthfully, it feels more like I am playing. All the hiking is great, and makes me feel great, and clears my head. And the work itself is fun- swinging picks through thick roots, breaking down dead branches with my hands, chopping foliage that blocks the trail.

But the best part of the day is the evening. I always get my second wind on the hike home, and book it the whole way. Getting back to camp, sweaty and dusty, the creek is the only thing on my mind. We have a great girls-only bathing spot, complete with a huge rock to sit on and water slightly warmed from the nearby hot springs.

After a bath and a change of clothes, I return to camp each evening for some of the best dinners of my life. Tonight, for example, in honor of Cinco de Mayo, we had tacos with shredded chicken, Spanish rice, and sopapillas with honey. We also swung at a pinata made out of branches and duct tape, filled with candy bars.

The rest of the evening is mine, to read, and write, and sit around the campfire and talk. That, in a nutshell, is my life here. I live my life outside, I look at mountains and wildlife everyday, I bathe in a creek and sleep in a tent and do laundry by hand in a plastic bucket. And I love it.

I'm here.

He dropped me off this morning, after drinking some semi-adequate coffee and helping me set up my tent. So, after my whirlwind visits to Seattle and San Francisco, here I am, at the CCC orientation center, waiting for dinner and chatting with new people. I was so nervous about this moment, to be honest, but now that I'm here, it feels completely normal. We are all in the same boat, none of us knows anyone else, and there's always a sort of simple, instant comraderie that happens with strangers thrown together and told to wait. Many of us will meet, and chat, and then not see each other again as we head out on different crews. I've already met a girl from Albany and a guy from Burma who's been in the states for two years, and I like them both, and after Wednesday will probably never see them again. Only one other person from my crew is already here.

We will spend three days here, getting fingerprinted and signing away our life and health and listening to lists of rules and regulations and having our gear inspected.

In the meantime, life is a series of things to wait for. Such as dinner. So I guess, currently, I'm waiting for ham.

time with family.

I was sitting there, eating goat curry and raita and paneer with hot chilies and perfect, perfect jasmine rice, and I thought to myself, "Damn, I will miss this."

It was my last evening to hang out with the Upreti family before I flit off to the California mountains. I painstakingly wrote out my mailing address in clear lettering, and urged them to write. And then all I could do was try to savor the next few hours.

I feel the same way many Peace Corps volunteers do, in that I've fallen in love with these people. Though now I have known them for almost six months, I still sometimes stare at them, transfixed by their coriander skin and glossy black hair and how small they all are. They are best described by a phrase I read in an article about people in the third world, "small but healthy persons." Americans are huge by comparison to most of the world. Part of me wonders if Tara's baby will outgrow them all, raised on American abundance, albeit in Nepali-food form.

They ask me to go shopping with them, which I love. Six months ago, I was the one driving them around and explaining prices and quasi-translating their heavily-accented English for store employees. Now Padma has a car and all the shopping savvy he needs, and I am just along for the ride. We go to the thrift store, the first place they look for anything (which really, makes the most sense for anyone), and Padma picks out three-dollar shoes for work. At Fred Meyer, they peruse fishing poles for their son, Bikash, but put off buying one for another day. As always after shopping with them, I think to myself, "I spend too much money on crap I don't need."

In the late evening, sitting in the living room with Padma, drinking tea with about three tablespoons of sugar dissolved in it, we fall into conversation about religion, my all-time favorite topic with him. His mind is so quick and deep, but his English is still relatively shallow, and so he has to express large thoughts in small and simple words. "If heart is good, it is good," he says, "if outside is different than heart, no good." The matter of sincerity is one he returns to whenever we talk about faith. And this focus on sincerity comes from a man who sees no problem with being a Hindu and worshipping at a Christian church. I'm always trying to ask questions about specifically "Hindu" theology, but Padma has a way of sidestepping those questions and jumping straight to the bigger picture. The sincerity he talks about has little to do with adhering to a specific theology at a specific church. It's a sincerity that starts between man and God, and then person to person, and it has more to do with basic decency and empathy than any specific theology. It's more about relationships, about maintaining ties with family and being open to new friends, about feeding whoever finds their way into your home and sticking close to the person you marry. I noticed early on that both Bikash and Shrijana would refer to friends/cousins/aunts/uncles in Nepal as "my sister" and "my brother," calming ignoring the Western fascination with precise labels like "third-cousin" or anything "in-law". I don't know if it's Hindu theolofy or Nepali/Bhutanese culture or just life in a refugee camp with bamboo huts that connect wall-to-wall, but they see basically every person in their life as family. In my Americanness, it took me a while to realize that included me, as well. But I love it. From now on, I have two sets of family members to visit whenever I am in Idaho. I am looking forward already to Christmas and being able to introduce them to more of the people that they constantly ask me questions about, like my sister and my boyfriend.

I never foresaw being adopted into a family from the other side of the globe when I moved back to small-town Idaho last fall, and now I honestly can't imagine not knowing them, not being a part of their lives. Cheesy? Perhaps. But true.

Esau's feast.

you are a summer's worth of produce.
you are the spring's first asparagus, surprisingly sweet and tender
you are cannelloni beans with olive oil.
gazpacho with crumbled feta,
naan hot from the oven,
cool yogurt and cucumber

you are everything green and fresh,
a thousand tastes, complex, interesting
you are seven grain toast every morning for breakfast,
and chai tea with honey every night before bed

you are a little more work than a pint of haagan daz,
a little less lustful indulgence
not a paper-cup mocha with too much syrup
no dairy-and-sugar stomachache or caffeinated insomnia
you are not overpriced pastries behind windexed glass,
all air and hydrogenated oil
a few sweet bites that leave a bitter stickiness behind

you taste of the earth that you came from,
rooted and genuine,
a little salt, a little oil, a little time,
and all your flavors come out
a steaming bowl of lentils worth trading a birthright for,
an earthy sensuality,
and a satisfying savor.