"What is Art?"

Art is not about beauty, not about making a statement, it's not even about executing it well. Art is about communication. 

Bad artists mine. They excavate their life's experiences, go mining for more, seek experiences solely for the sake of turning around and spitting them out. Far worse, once they've exhausted their own landscape of experiences, left pitted and scarred, they'll turn to mining others. Those sorts of people are exhausting to be around, and rightly called toxic. 

Not to say that art doesn't require a little digging into yourself. But it's a gentle excavation, like building a well. You find the right spot, you create the awareness, the opportunities, and then you let the runoff of life fill you up, be it a sudden storm or seeping groundwater. And then you take all those experiences and you draw from them. 

True expression comes from being overfull of life, and not from hollowing yourself out. You should never have to try and find something to say, the struggle is and should be how to say it. 

Artists, I think at their core, are people who are struggling to communicate. It's why they spend so much of their energy and time trying to find the right ways to make something that makes it so people can understand. Be it drawing or dancing or acting or writing, we're all trying say something along the lines of "This is what I think, this is how I feel."

Sometimes what we think is quite complicated, sometimes what we feel is a lot, but getting it out of your well and giving it to someone else, to hold, to consider (even for a passing moment), that is truly something. 

And I think that is art. 

Poem: Headlights

There's a feeling I can't shake

Watching my headlights cut the night;

That there's something there that I can't see

In front of me, not behind. 

Where'd I pick up this certainty?

(Irrationality, no proof.)

There's something which isn't there and Should Be. 

(Irrational, snap out of this mood!)

Look,

The snow's too thick, no lanes, no roads,

Just a vague sense of Where It Should Be. 

Tires grinding through the ice,

Breath freezing on my teeth. 

There's no way it is Meant To Be,

Yet I know it as my name

(Irrational! There's no Meant To Be's)

But I feel it all the same. 

Can you miss someone you've never met?

Can you behold a future you regret?

If it hasn't happened yet. 

And yet...

There's an absence as a presence 

In the road ahead. 

Short Story: Cougar Lake, Pt. 2

[For part one click here]

We had made it.

It was, as the saying goes, all downhill from here and I’d never been so glad. My family trudged wearily down the hill and tried to find a good camping spot. It was surprisingly difficult. There were plenty of level clearings, it just so happened most of them were filled. With other people.

So much for solitude.

But not far from the trail we found a decent spot and everyone could finally sink to the ground. Believe me, we were not above sitting in the dirt at this point. I unslipped my backpack and savored the feeling of only holding up my own deadweight.

“We need to get some water,” my Dad pointed out, and with a sigh a and creak I stood up to go to the lake. The first step felt like I was going to rocket into orbit. Without all that weight, I major overcompensated and nearly skipped right on my face. The affect lasted for a few minutes, letting me know I’d really done a number on my muscles, like when as a kid you spend all day on the trampoline and feel yourself bouncing still in bed that night.

We would have liked to rest there longer, but again, the bugs motivated us to action. And after all that toil to get to a beautiful scenic lake, we rewarded ourselves by setting up our tents and promptly napping in them for the rest of the afternoon.

I’d brought my MP3 player and had the music playing near my ear, cracking up with my sister when Bastille started crooning “How am I going to get myself back home?” over the tinny speakers. But that was tomorrow’s problem.

After everybody passed out for a few hours, the Eiser household emerged from their tents, dazed and drowsy. Once you actually got where you were heading on a backpacking trip, I wasn’t sure what you were supposed to do. Make camp, I suppose. We had brought our dehydrated meals with us, so dinner seemed the natural next thing. However, more pressing problems soon intervened.

Your first time going to the bathroom in the woods is memorable, mostly because it’s so dang awkward and hard. It’s a well-known fact that men have this bit of uncivilized living locked down, but for women? My aunt once summed it up as, “Women pee like elephants.” Your best shot really is to find some secluded log to hang your bare behind over and pray something doesn’t bite it. Our father handed my sister and I a shovel and a roll of toilet paper and wished us luck. We searched a long time to find somewhere that didn’t feel like whizzing in God’s amphitheater but eventually, time wearing on and things becoming urgent, practicality prevailed over modesty.

Thus refreshed, my sister and I were able to return to camp and focus on the real Eiser family camping activity: eating. And you would think this would be another horror story about dehydrated foods but I was so hungry then that to this day I think that was the best reconstituted beef stew I’ve ever eaten out of a paper cup with a plastic spoon. It was an experience never to be fully recreated.

I’d love to say that after that we all relaxed by the fire and had a jolly time, but this was August and it was dry, so there were no fires allowed in the Cascades even if we’d had something to burn. Eventually, the bugs and our tiredness and the failing light drove us back into our tents and we all called it a night.

We’re spoiled, you know, sleeping on mattresses in our level, heated houses. The night was quiet, very quiet, and quickly also became very cold. My sister and I were using our dirty clothes in a plastic bag for a pillow, but she eventually pulled out her second pair of shorts to put over the lower half of her legs to form a sort of pants cocoon to sleep in. It’d have been funny if it hadn’t been so ridiculous. And I could. Not. Get. Comfortable. It was like gravity was relentlessly pushing me into the rocks in the ground, which, even if it had been level, would have been rough enough. But gravity was also pulling me. Every few hours I found myself too far to the foot of the tent and had to inchworm my way uphill again. I kept waking up, drifting off, waking up. It was hard to tell what time it was. At some point, I was wide awake though, because THERE WAS SOEMTHING MOVING OUTSIDE OUR TENT. My sister, in true fashion, rolled over and decided to deal with it in the morning, while I laid wide awake, in true fashion, clutching my sleeping bag as “whatever-it-was” started rubbing against our tent. I stayed awake, in mute terror, until it went away.

It was the longest night of my life. When the dawn finally crawled over the hills I was awake to greet it  with raccoon eyes and I could have wept. I don’t know how much I actually slept, but I didn’t have to keep trying to sleep anymore.

I went down to the lake to get water for breakfast, and there was a fine mist hanging over the water. The world was absolutely still in that moment, just me and the lake, and the early sunlight reaching towards the surface and blushing its way up the cliff face. I paused by the water. So that’s what these moments are I thought, and as I put my pan into the water a frog jumped in and swam away. I shrugged, and pulled out the frog water anyways. I was getting used to things.

The coffee was awful, which was not an encouraging start, but after taking our time with breakfast we broke camp and started the journey home. Mercifully, what had been all uphill yesterday was downhill today. We found ourselves, though footsore, with enough breath for conversation. We talked about yesterday, and nothing else, and I provided profuse and numerous apologies. (I’m still apologizing actually.) I kept walking, digging my walking stick into the ground and pulling myself forward as much as pushing with my feet, until finally, unbelievably, we reached the stream we had first crossed yesterday, a hundred years ago.

I pulled out my flip flops and eyed the stream dubiously, recalling last time I’d crossed it. I’d have to be careful. Cazi, sensing we were nearing the end of our quest, was under no such cautious compulsions and promptly fell on her butt in the water. My Dad picked her up by her backpack with one hand, and they made it across. I was still shambling halfway over when I felt the current tug on my sandals and –oh no!– lost one to the water. I tried to grab it but in so doing –oops!– there went the other, and they both floated merrily as you please to where, I assume, they are still in Bumping Lake to this day.

Leaving me barefoot in the middle of the river. But what are you going to do? I just crossed it the rest of the way, and put my socks back on over muddy toes on the other side.

At any rate, we were in the homestretch now, and saw a glint of metallic light through the trees as we came up on our parked cars and the pure relief I felt was indescribable.

We’d made it. After all that, we’d survived our adventure. We drove home, cleaned up, and swore we’d never do it again.

We did do it again, but that’s another story.

The World's a Stage

There was an actor playing a part in a movie
Who had to tell this stranger he loved her dearly.
But the director said, “Again, with feeling.”

Hollow, hollow, telling truth with lies,
The lines are memorized.
Playing a part, being pulled apart,
Trembling at earnest thought.

Over and over again,
He had to tell her he loved her.
“Again, again,” they said, “say it again.”
Until you almost believe it’s true,
And the audience will believe you too.

Short Story: Cougar Lake Pt. 1

There are two types of experiences in life: good experiences which make bad stories and bad experiences which make good stories. This is the latter kind.

The summer that I turned twenty I was very excited for, in addition to our yearly family camping trip, my Dad was taking my sister and I backpacking in the Cascades. As a kid, I had listened wide eyed to my Dad’s stories of his younger, more adventurous days, when he did things like backpacking, motorcycling, and that one time he smoked his school out with “essence of banana” in chemistry class. Such stories were usually told against the backdrop of Chinook or Snoqualmie pass when we went to go visit the folks in Eastern Washington. Even the things that went bad sounded kind of fun; like the time their camp was swarmed by a gang of starving chipmunks which bored holes into their packs in an attempt to get their food, or the time one of Dad’s buddies ended up with hundreds of mosquito bites on one arm and counted them, or when they had to split two packages of ramen amongst eight young men. But there was cool stuff too, like Jade Lake in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness area, which nestled in a hollow and was a pale jade green color, and when the sun rose in the morning the wind whipped red-orange clouds above it so they looked like licks of fire. Or at night, when the alpine waters would be still, and reflect the myriad of stars, freed from city lights, that were bursting out of the sky.

I was entranced. I wanted to try it. And besides, how may stories involve the intrepid hero setting off into the unknown, facing the wilderness with nothing but their wits and what they carry on their back?

So it was with an immense feeling of satisfaction that I viewed our table in the garage, laden with our supplies and backpacks one Friday evening in August.

I had carefully selected the trail after researching online short, easy hikes in the nearby area that led to a campsite. Dad had stipulated that the trail must be near water (there was a story there, no doubt) and not too difficult for us. I, while not exactly the pinnacle of human fitness, was most definitely not out of shape, and pretty confident in my abilities to simply walk for miles. I didn’t worry about Dad. While not exactly a thin man, his weight was never for lack of exercise, and I knew his job kept him in good walking shape. My sister, Cazi, seven years my junior, was in the same boat as me, and well, young. So when I found a place called Cougar Lake that was a five-ish mile trail to a pretty lake and rated “easy,” I was pretty sure I’d found the right one. I walked three miles up and down hills pretty regularly just to get to the library and back, and we had all day to cover five. No big.

There are many things in life which can only be learned through experience, and one of them is that hiking reviews are always made by people who do far more hiking than you. Always.

At any rate, this revelation was far away when Saturday dawned calm and clear, and after loading the car and taking the ubiquitous photo for our relieved-to-not-be-going mother, three intrepid members of the Eiser family set off for their Grand Adventure.

Just finding the trailhead itself proved to be a mini-adventure;­ it involved fourbying the maze of forest service roads that criss-cross the Cascades and driving past a perfectly functional campground at Bumping Lake. But that was pedestrian, urban. You could drive up to it. We were here for an experience.

But eventually we found the trailhead and parked the car. I noticed, with some concern, that there were perhaps a half dozen other cars already parked there. But hey- it’s a big forest. We’d probably find some solitude regardless. So we unloaded the car, adjusted our packs, checked our equipment, and filled out the paperwork.*

Walking sticks in hand, we set out. The first jaunt consisted of a half-mile downhill walk to a small river which we would then have to ford on foot. It seemed like an awfully long half mile as we walked and chatted, but the sound of running water kept getting closer and we eventually spilled out onto the river bank.

Thankfully, the Bumping River was tame that day, shallow and broad, and we’d come prepared with our sandals affixed to the outside of our pack. Dad went first, picking his way across, and we girls followed, all three sticking pretty close together in case one of us slipped.

For some reason, instead of bringing my Velcro athletic sandals I had elected to pack my bargain bucket one buck flip-flops which I usually only wore in campground showers. The river kept annoyingly and persistently trying to drag them off my feet and I kept having to twist myself and squeeze my toes together to keep from losing them in the current. It was slow going, and in this strange, shambling fashion I eventually reached the other side with dry shoes in hand.

All good? Not quite. My socks were dry, yes, but my feet were wet, and I had no towel, and well, we weren’t able to sit around and wait for my feet to air dry. There were bugs this close to the water. So I did the best I could to get my feet clean and dry and put my shoes back on.

The first hurdle cleared, we continued on, enthusiasm and feet only slightly dampened.

Honestly, I don’t remember much of the next leg. It was a very pretty woods, and we took our time, stopping to rest every now and then, and I very quickly worked my way through my easily accessible snacks and water. And still, the trail wound on.

We were huffing our way uphill at this point, and nobody had any extra breath to speak with, for which I was grateful. I had been dropping little nuggets of encouragement for the last couple of hours, pulling out my map, estimating distances, pointing out differences in the vegetation and landscape. “Just a little further! We’ll be reaching Swamp Lake soon! That hill! That bend!” (And yes, our next landmark on the way to Cougar Lake was a body of water aptly named ‘Swamp Lake,’ about a mile out from our final destination. A portent of things to come.) Eventually, I stopped speaking altogether, mumbling into silence and trying to remember just where I’d packed my inhaler. I could feel my sister drilling holes into the back of my head with her eyes. I had touted this hike to them with words like ‘easy’ and ‘beginner,’ words I’d been told and foolishly believed. During one of our many rests (at this point we were stopping whenever we found something roughly horizontal we could sit on) I pulled out my map again and looked at it with a slightly more critical eye.

Don’t ever download free maps on the internet. Pony up the ten bucks and buy a real one. Mine was grainy, inaccurate, and worse yet, I only now realized part of the trail was cut off by the edge of the paper. For all I knew it could have looped on out to Seattle before coming back.

“Soon…” I panted. Cazi groaned. Dad didn’t comment. I didn’t even believe myself anymore.

Worse yet, we kept getting passed by people in both directions. They were all insufferably chipper, not at all taxed or sweaty. There was a family who walked past us with children, all backs gloriously unburdened, and a group going opposite, travelling downhill and all smiles and poorly concealed sympathy.

“Soon…” they said, and I didn’t believe them.

There was nothing but the weight of the pack and my feet, dragging one after another.

Finally, there was a flash of blue in the trees, and I never thought I’d be so relieved to reach a place called Swamp Lake. It was indeed, buggy and a little marshy, but we stopped for a bit and took our packs off. After resting for a moment, we were forced to move around and explore by the swarms of mosquitoes and our own curiosity. And lo and behold! We found evidence of a campsite. So a question was raised: should we stop here, or press on?

Everybody huddled around my insufficient, shoddy little map and squinted at it.

“It’s only a mile more,” I pointed out, racking my brain to remember what the website had said. “And this is Swamp Lake. Maybe Cougar Lake won’t be quite as buggy,” I said, waving my hand in front of my face. “Do we really want to quit now?”

We didn’t want to quit. We were fools, proud, stubborn, glorious fools. We were finishing this and going home to Mom with heads held high. With renewed determination, we put the dreaded packs back on and continued forward.

Apparently, not a lot of people did. The trail became rutted, flooded, and difficult. In a few meadows, we were forced to break one of the cardinal rules of hiking and walked alongside the trail. In our defense though, the trail had sunk into the ground about six inches and filled with water. I remember looking at that meadow with fascination. It was undoubtedly pretty, but at this point I was fatigued and my mind was starting to drift. I imagined some large, furry creature bursting through the treeline, a moose or perhaps even a bear, and wondered what I should do in such a situation. Make for the other trees? Stay still? There was a sense in the air that at any moment anything could happen, though really, the most wildlife we saw was two shirtless young “bucks” come bounding down the trail, in full health and in disgustingly good shape. Mercifully, other than them, we hadn’t seen a soul in a while, which was good, because we were in a pitiable condition by then.

Somehow, impossibly, the trail had started going uphill again, and we were having to pick our way through loose rocks and roots to find good footing. We were stopping every ten or twenty feet to rest now, driven on only by the horseflies which had followed us up from Swamp Lake. I remember looking out at the view and dimly thinking “Wow, what a view! You had to work so hard to see this.” But of course I was too tired to appreciate it.

Until at last, with trembling legs and aching lungs we crested the ridge and looked down at Cougar Lake, a pretty if ordinary and unenchanting body of water, definitely not worth this toil, but I didn’t care. At that moment it could have been Mosquito Valley (which is a real place, by the way) and I still would have thought it the most wondrous sight. It was downhill from here, and more than that, I could take the pack off once we reached the bottom.

We’d made it.

END PART ONE

*For those unaware of it, exploring Washington forests is a maze of beauracracy and permits, the difficulty compounded by the fact that there are different rules for state and federal forest lands. The rules are constantly shifting and outlined in unhelpful, dense websites. Eventually, I just had to suck it up and call the nearest Ranger Station and talk to a human being. After a confusing fifteen minute phone call (have I mentioned I’m bad on the phone?) we finally figured out that I did not need a special permit to camp overnight on the trail but that I did need a permit to park the car at the trailhead. Also, I really ought to sign the log book at the trailhead with our itinerary so they would know where to look in case a rockslide killed us, or a cougar mauled and ate us, or we got hopelessly lost, or a hundred other things which could result in three morons entering the woods and never coming out. At any rate, we got the paperwork right. I hope.

Hiatus Update

Sorry folks, I know it's been a while since I've posted anything. I've recently moved, and it's been absolutely hectic around here. I have worked a little on some projects, and undoubtedly as things settle down into a normal routine my output will start to go up again. Remember, it's okay to take breaks every now and then; just make sure not to pause for too long! More to follow.

--C.T. Eiser

Poem: Fabric

I crafted thread and needle
For when the cosmos begins to tear,
But only my patch of space and time
Could I hope to repair.

So I let the rest unravel,
Without giving in to despair.
In the patchwork quilt of the universe
I'm responsible for just one square.