I think of the winter years ago when I taught an evening class there made up of a group of nontraditional students studying social work and counseling, many of them driven to do so by the addiction or poverty or general hard times that affected, in one way or another, everyone. I’d leave the southern Willamette Valley in the dark and rain and cross the Calapooya Mountains towards the small city of Roseburg. That stretch of interstate still held remnants from the slower travel of the past where people stopped more often, sat down for meals, and had their cars serviced in the meantime. One exit still operated an all night diner and lounge, gas station and motor lodge, decked out in the original neon glaring through the night like brightly colored clouds; another exit twenty miles away with the same amenities along with roadside carnival rides, stood completely abandoned, as if at some point in 1963, everyone just walked away, not even bothering to flip the faded sign on the door from Open to Closed.
All posts tagged: Essay
Notes from a Box
CRISCO IN A BLOCK
I’m not really sure why it’s all so illegible now. The ink fades to nothing midway through and is gasping for breath where it’s visible at all. I have a vague recollection of the page living on one side of the fridge for a time (reminding us of its existence)—so perhaps the sunlight hit it just so. Or perhaps the pen itself was too weak, not up to the task.
The Return
September 18, 2015
Essays
By AVIYA KUSHER
Here, deep in the thickness of northern Germany, dogs travel glamorously, in their own spacious compartments. Apart from the dogs, who are large and meticulously groomed, there are only a few passengers on the local train heading north from Hamburg. I see a man with black hair, carrying a leather folder bulging with carbon paper—a traveling salesman, perhaps. There are two old ladies in pastel cardigans, their cheeks wrinkled and stern, and three tanned backpackers, loudly sharing Muesli and what looks like bottled carrot juice. Other than that, there is just my blue-eyed mother, nervously staring out the sealed window.
A Boat Ride in Colombia
It’s a small boat with no ladder and so we board by wading into the water, grabbing hold of the edge and pulling ourselves up. Passengers help each other heave themselves forward; a couple older women get lifted like children. Unlike the boat that brought us here, there is no manifest, no recording of passport numbers, no printed tickets—but there is space—kind of—and life jackets, and the men who work on this boat have agreed to take us back to the main port for a reasonable price. The other boats—the one that brought us here and the larger, shinier ones that look more like the ones that brought us here—are full, and it is three thirty, a half hour past the time we have been told all of the boats will be gone.
Notes on Crises
September 4, 2015
Essays
I walked to my apartment in Kathmandu the day after the earthquake. From the news on my iPhone, I had seen that the palace squares had fallen. But when I left the tents where I had slept the night before, I found the flowerpots were still poised upright on the third-story windowsills and on the roof walls at the shop across the lane. The sidewalk had cracked along the water line. The garden walls had collapsed, and it was hot. But those flowers had not moved; they were as they had been. They caught the light. I had envied the plants. In the months I lived in Kathmandu, I had developed the impulse to notice them behind the dust I kicked up in the road as I passed them. That afternoon, there was not any dust because there was no traffic, not even a motorbike, although my landlord had taken her scooter out; she must have been buying emergency rice.
August Reads: Trespassing in Leechburg
We drive on a gray day in October, a scenic four-hour drive from my new home in Baltimore to my old home in Leechburg, a small steel town in the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania, where I lived from ages 8 through 15—the longest stretch of childhood I spent in one location. Though it’s a place I’ve often gone back to in my fiction, I haven’t returned in person in over 15 years. The trip is reconnaissance and romance: scene gathering for a novel and a chance to explore my memory with M.
August Reads: I Believe New Yorkers
For the month of August we are revisiting some of our favorite content from the past year. Publication of new work will resume on September 1.
“I believe New Yorkers. Whether they’ve ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn’t know, because I won’t ever dare ask that question.”
– Dylan Thomas
In my first months in New York City I rode in the back of taxicabs through Central Park thinking, “When will this sink in? When will it feel like I know where I am.” I didn’t think I was dreaming – rather, I felt the whole city was dreaming with me inside of it, a poppy-field illusion, a drug trip induced by hidden valves releasing an experimental hallucinogen. The city needed to pinch itself awake, collectively, and climb out of the hollow to find out what was really going on.
“I stopped at Lexington Avenue,” wrote Joan Didion of her arrival in the city, “and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage.” You arrive, you reach the mirage, and you wait for it to clear.
August Reads: On Naming
To exist humanly, is to name the world, to change it. ~Paulo Freire
When I was 19 my full-time job was bartending a pub called Filthy McNasty’s. McNasty’s sat on Rose Street in Edinburgh, Scotland, one of the roughest streets in the city center at the time. Fights punctuated each hour of the night and later, after I’d moved on up from McNasty’s, a friend was stabbed near there in a skinhead-like attack. Indoors, customers called me “Garth” because of my wild, unkempt hair, like Garth in Wayne’s World. I didn’t wear makeup and favored baggy jeans and t-shirts; I guess this made me infuriatingly gender ambiguous. My fellow bartenders, with their straightened, bleached-blonde hair, penciled-on brows and figure-hugging polyester tolerated Garth to the best of their abilities, aside from one woman, whose actual name I don’t remember, but whose tan outfits—tight pants and jacket—and extremely thick accent conjured the name “Tanner” in my mind. This word, Tanner, also captured the sound of her voice. She clearly despised me/Garth. She would sashay away from us when the bar wasn’t full enough to force us close together. We could barely understand one another’s accents so the physical distance was a welcome relief.
Moussa v. Meursault: Algerian Grudge Match Over “The Stranger”
The gruesome Algerian War ended in 1962 with France walking away empty-handed from a territory that it had held for 130 years and considered not just a colony but an integral part of itself. The refusal of the pieds-noirs, the French colonists in Algeria, to concede meaningful rights to Arab citizens had made a peaceful independence impossible. The war, which featured ideological and tactical use of terrorism and torture on both sides, now a hallmark of intractable conflicts between the West and the Islamic world, brought down multiple French governments and the Fourth Republic before Charles de Gaulle accepted the inevitable. It also brought a flood of immigrants, harkis, Algerians who had fought on the French side; and many more who hadn’t, as France entered les trente glorieuses, its 30-year period of post-war prosperity. During this same period, Algeria’s economy, weighed down by state dominance, corruption, and dependence on hydrocarbons, failed to produce opportunity for its youthful, fast-growing population. Some five million people of Algerian descent live in France today, many in the crime-ridden housing projects of French suburbs, where integration is almost impossible.
The Bodhisattva of Route 128
July 24, 2015
Essays
Once upon a time I fell in love with Jack Kerouac, the words of Jack, the ghost of Jack, the idea of Jack. It started with On the Road, and then it wasn’t long before I set out to read everything he’d ever written, nearly fifty years after he’d written it. I was married, middle-aged with kids, living in the suburbs. My 20s had been spent working, getting married, going to grad school, and having my first child. My 30s were spent raising two children and piecing together part-time work as a writer, urban planner, and volunteer. Then, one month before my 40th birthday, further infatuated with Jack’s Visions of Cody and The Dharma Bums, I latched onto the idea that I myself had never driven across the country before, had never experienced the typically American rite of passage known as “the road trip.” This was something Ineeded to do. Now. Alone. At least that’s the story I told myself and my family and friends as I planned and made my escape.
