You Who Hear Tell the Others
An Anti-civ Travel Story
Written in 29 days for NaNoWriMo 08 while camping in the Californian desert. Influenced by the interviews in Listening to the Land by Derrick Jensen (which I was reading at the time), by Derricks work in general. This is unedited (other then to cut out some of the really shitty parts), what I was thinking about a Novembers ago. Hopefully you can get something out of it.
xo.
Finn
You who hear tell the others is a line from an Audre Lorde poem.
Cover illustration by the amazing Emilja Frances.
kafkaesque@riseup.net
Thanks, love!
youwhohear@gmail.com
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Missoula, MT
59807
Part One: Tree
Someone has written a poem in the snow, shes walking along hunched into her sweatshirt, creating boot prints on the sidewalk, when she sees it under her nose, the city streetlights illuminating the words that were carved there with a warm finger, the impermanence of it all, she thinks, any minute now some asshole kid is going to come along & use his snow boot to sweep away the words, not gingerly step around them with a craned neck, trying to read it all without breaking stride, like the footprints show the others have done, hes going to do a little dance, feet flying out everywhere, & send each syllable into the dirty snow piles along the road, and even if that kid doesnt show up, tomorrows sun will melt the edges of each letter down down flat back into the warm sidewalk, she stops & reads the words over & over, eyes darting, nose cold, this is it, she thinks, this is it.
I just want to live somewhere I can drink the water.
Yeah.
Right from the source.
Yeah...
Sitting in a bus station on a hard plastic navy blue bus station chair. Sleeveless hooded sweatshirt showing her arms & her hairy armpits. She loves looking at pictures and watching movies & TV shows from the dust bowl. The depression. She likes to romanticize that time when everyone was either dirty or knew someone who was. When judgments werent made so quickly about who people were based on how dirty or clean their arms were. She remembers when she lived in a house & took showers daily & the slightest hint of someones body odor made her want to puke. Haha, she thinks, now, smelling the slightly bitter sour musk coming up from her own body. Shes self-conscious about it, sometimes, when around normal people, she cant help it. Usually, down in the desert, wearing cut off shorts & no shirt whenever she can because its too fucking hot, she feels the most herself in this new dirty skin. She thinks personal hygiene is silly, a waste of time. She walks past people hiking trails up steep rocky hills to look at the thing up ahead, some sort of marked park specialty, & with every person passed receives a scented whiff of air. She notices at these parks that men smell more than women. That the men wear more perfume that is. Each man that walks by, freshly shaven in nice hiking clothes (which arent really hiking clothes at all, being nicer than her nicest nice things) is like passing by a bathroom freshly showered in. Spicy sweet. These men who care how they smell. She wonders if theyre getting a whiff or her smelly scent as they pass each other, but reasons that on these occasions the bathed pampered elite of the tourist world cant smell anything other than themselves. Sitting at the bus station she becomes aware of the fact that she might be noticeably smelly to the mixed crowd slumped around her. Nervously she scratches at her arms & looks down at the places where her pale skin is showing through the thin protective covering of dirt. It makes it worse to scratch at it, makes the dirt layer suddenly obvious, no longer just a maybe-tan. Her arms are spotted with small white splotches where an itch has been.
The first time she put her toes in the pacific the water was so cold it turned them bright red. She rolled her pants up farther & waded in to her knees, nothing in front of her but rolling thrashing waves, & a gorgeous beach behind her that was like a dream to a north-easterner. She hadnt known the shore could be so undeveloped, pristine.
I cant believe they wasted all that food. Why didnt they get a container & take it home with them? Theres like a whole half a sandwich on that plate.
Should we grab it?
Of course.
Theyre driving along a river in northern California. The late afternoon sun glints off the meandering curves, the truck pops out into sunlight, then comes back under the shade of the magnificent trees. They pass tiny towns piled around the river whos heartbeats are the lumber mills on the edge of town, but there are miles in between with no one & nothing. Suddenly she feels tiny, miniscule, insignificant. Just one more person scurrying gliding careening around this world. She cracks her knuckles in the fingerless gloves its too warm to be wearing, & smiles towards the streaked passenger window. She watches down along the water & glances up at the mountains heightening everything, up up. She thinks, I love when nature makes me feel very, very small.
Riding in the backseat, squished between the door & one of the kids, her hands between her knees holding the straps of her pack. A small tug on her arm.
Whats your name?
Kit.
Pause. Little kid thinking face.
Is that a boy name or a girl name?
Girl name, I guess. Unless my folks named me after a Kit Fox, because those can be boys or girls.
Oh.
A few minutes go by & she passes the time looking at the back of the parents well groomed heads & staring back at the wide-eyed baby in the car seat over the head of the little girl.
Theres another tug.
So are you a boy or a girl?
A girl.
Shes wrapped around a girl she just met in a sleeping bag in a tent in Iowa. Theyre on one of those farms shes always liked, as she sped past them on the highway, the ones right off the interstate, up there on the hill of the overpass. With a big old two-story clapboard farmhouse, some giant trees perfect for tire swings planted in a rough square around the backyard. Crumbling barn turned garage, gravel driveway, back door opening to a back porch to watch the sunsets from. The girl is gorgeous in a special way, & Kit lays breathing in the scent of her matted hair. She cant sleep, the crickets are loud, her dry dandruff head itches under her messy barely grown out buzz cut. The girl called it guinea pig hair, crumpled in some places, spiky in others, dark & shiny from never being washed. In the evening she touched the girl in the fading light & after a while allowed her belt to be loosened, her shorts to be taken off, allowed herself to be touched. Some days its hard to be close, the girl whispered in her ear. I could love this girl forever, she thinks, running her fingertip lightly over each of the sleeping eyebrows in the loud still prairie night, listening to the rushing hum of the cars on the highway, but I wont.
Towards the beginning, not the beginning, but closer, she slept in the back of her beat up station wagon. One morning she woke up suddenly, urgently, in west Texas with the windows closed, under water, unable to breathe. The humidity running in rivers down her face & neck, lunging to open the door. She used to write postcards on these trips. Little poetic prose bursts in colored pen. Always a postcard from the state before, the buying of postcards never quite catching up with the need to write one. They said things that made road trips sound grand. Adventures. Every sight a sight to behold. Her aunt is a poet & has this one line saying something like, & nothing really terrible had happened to her yet.
