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I suppose everyone has a particular way of dealing with rock bottom. Some folks eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s “Chocolate Therapy.” Others watch 6 seasons of Lost, 10 episodes at a shot for a week or two, just to escape.

For me? I always know when I’ve hit rock bottom because I go to Monster.com and start looking for “real” jobs. This never helps, because I quickly realize how unemployable I am. When you put writing into a job search, mostly what comes up  are notices for insurance sales, or telemarketing. Or paid ads for MFA programs.

My breathing slows and I start to consider how embarrassing it will be to move back in with my parents. I consider all of the more nefarious ways I could generate income, such as selling my organs on the black market or off-loading bodily fluids for cash.

* * * * *

The Amarillo sky was low and gray today, the clouds providing welcome relief from a sun that torched us yesterday with high temperatures around 99 degrees. And the wind. There is always the wind. The trees bent towards the north, the pale undersides of their leaves glaring silver.

I sat outside the Starbucks today and considered the fact that my current projects end in a few months, and I have no guaranteed income beyond that. I considered the cost of diesel. The cost of four children going to college. And I opened up Monster.com.

* * * * *

On the Sunday morning that we left Tulsa, almost a week ago, it was cool and windy. I went outside to get the bus ready for departure. This involves, among other things, emptying the waste tank and filling the fresh water. I sat down on the ground beside the hose, turned it on, and then waited.

As I sat there, one week ago, I realized that it had been quite some time since I just sat quietly. Not writing. Not driving. Not messing around on my phone. Just sitting, available, listening to the muse or to God or to the wind.

Strange. Tangled up knots inside of me started to loosen. I sensed God there. Maybe it was the quiet, or the cold. or the sense of adventure that always fills me before we embark on the next leg of our journey. But it was a spiritual experience, sitting quietly, emptying the bus’s waste tank. Filling the fresh water.

* * * * *

Tonight, after leaving another great writers’ gathering, I drove west on I-40 towards the RV park where our bus is parked. Tomorrow we begin the 600-mile trek to the Grand Canyon.

Huge puddles remained after the hail storm that passed through earlier today. I came into the dark bus and sat down to write this post. I listened to The National’s song “About Today.” The wind pounded the bus, swaying it back and forth. Cade came out to ask if we would tip over. I assured him we would not. Inside, I wondered.

I feel scattered tonight (can you tell by the ridiculous jumps this post is taking?). I feel uncertain. Yet there’s a simple assurance in the quiet. A sense of peace in the wind. It’s the same peace I felt sitting outside the bus in Tulsa a week ago. The kind of peace that wraps around you, even when you’re emptying the waste tank.

I think of the poet Billy Collins’ words,

What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one

And I realize, there is no other scene I would rather be enveloped in.

Thursday’s lineup of eye-popping articles and literary brain candy:

Dickens and Tolkien Collaborate? (via Poets and Writers)

The Prisoner Poet (via Poets and Writers)

Letters of Note (via Jason Boyett)

In 1975, Norman Maclean‘s book, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, was rejected by publishers Alfred A. Knopf after initially being green-lit — thankfully, it was eventually released by University of Chicago Press, to much acclaim. Some years after the rejection, in 1981, an editor at Knopf named Charles Elliott wrote to Maclean and expressed an early interest in his next book.

The following letter was written by Maclean, to Elliott, soon after. Maclean later called it, “one of the best things I ever wrote […] I really told those bastards off. What a pleasure! What a pleasure! Right into my hands! Probably the only dream I ever had in life that came completely true.”

(Click the “Letters of Note” link above to read the letter – priceless.)

* * * * *

Link of the day: A list of literary agents, compiled by the publication, “Poets and Writers”

What blog posts or articles caught your attention this week?

Driving west from Tulsa to Amarillo on a bright afternoon, you can measure the passing of time by the distance the sun travels down the bus’s massive windshield. Every hour or so I pull on the string that lowers the screen that shades my eyes from the glare. By about 7:00 pm, the screen is as low as it will go, and the sun is blinding.

Huge gashes tear the land in that part of the country: deep gorges formed by the tiniest creeks, or flat expanses of bare ground turned over by a farmer. The earth is red there, when the green grass is pulled back or split. Kind of like wounds, or cuts, but not the smooth kind made by scalpels – these are rough injuries.

I think of those who lived in this part of the country long ago, the ones whose land we stole. I think of how their life spilled into the earth. The water standing in the ponds takes on the red color of the soil, looks like pools of clay-colored blood.

* * * * *

I can’t remember ever being able to see so far. The height of the sky seems the same, but out at the horizon, around the edges, the sky looks like someone has stretched it. My eyes are telescopes. I can see small specks of cattle a thousand miles away. Huge power lines rise no higher than the width of my little finger.

It’s easy to feel small out here, where you can drive miles on the highway without seeing a house. It’s easy to feel like the whole world has expanded, and your existence has shrunk. And it’s not such a bad feeling. There is so much pressure on us to feel big, to feel important, that any lessening of this is actually a relief.

* * * * *

A dirt road runs parallel with the highway, and a teenager driving an old Chevy pickup tries to keep up with the highway traffic. Dust billows out behind his bald, anxious tires like the years of my youth: tempestuous and exciting and then settling, diffusing. He surges ahead. Later on, we pass him. He has stopped at a crossroad and is deciding which way to go.

* * * * *

The sun drops below the horizon just as we enter Amarillo, and the sunless sky feels cool against my eyes. We pull into a large parking lot, a day earlier than expected. Maile pops popcorn for the kids and the smell of it fills the bus. We put in a movie. They perch on the couch, all four of them in a row like birds on a wire, cramming popcorn into their mouths.

It’s a late night in Amarillo. The old man is sleeping beneath the bus.

Friday morning, 2am, and a thunderous rain pounds on the roof of our bus. Flashes of lightning dash inside where we sleep, and, quickly following after, thunder splits my children’s dreams.

Friday morning, 2am, and Lucy wriggles her way into our bed with the two words we can never refute. “I’m scared,” she whispers, curling up under the quilt with her mother, right up against her stomach, as if wiggling her way back into the womb. Sammy isn’t far behind – he takes my place in the bed, and I am relegated to Lucy’s bunk (I actually love sleeping in those tiny bunks).

Friday morning, 2am, and I lay in the bunk, listening to the storm. Sometimes I worry about invisible things: that my writing will never reach the heights I dream for it; that I will hurt those closest to me with one bad decision; that I will reach a later age and want a redo on this choice I’ve made to live an adventurous life.

These are the thoughts that come in the middle of storms. The sentences in my brain are frantic, like the rain. The sentences in my brain are flavored by the lightning, punctuated by the thunder.

* * * * *

Friday morning, 11am, I sit in a coffee shop and write the stories about which I dream. I drink a mocha and I read the creativity of my friends and I think about how this crazy family of mine is in Tulsa, and next week we will be in Amarillo, and, the next, Pasadena.

Life is almost always good when I rest in the here. The now. The frightful days that circle in my mind during a late-night thunderstorm rarely see the light of reality. The cool mornings after storms give me hope, when the gray sky apologizes sheepishly for all the fuss it made the night before. I drink my coffee and am reminded that autumn will circle around again. Cool mornings will come after the summer, mornings that require quilts and sweaters.

The heat of summer will not last forever.

Hope will circle around again.

It’s a smaller world now. We drive 10,000 miles in four months. We devour states the way my childhood self inhaled birthday cake. We breath in the miles and exhale them before ever really catching their scent, before ever really tasting the dust. The grit of every city coats our teeth, but we clean it from our mouths with the water of movement, of speed, of change.

The road we followed north from Ft. Worth to Tulsa stretched out in front of us. I wondered about the distance – we crossed that expanse in hours. Felt like minutes. Somehow it seemed like we were cheating, skipping through such demanding terrain without a second thought. Before the land was settled, it would have taken days. Weeks.

Or perhaps a lifetime. Perhaps the distance seemed so great back then that most people never left. Most people stayed. It wasn’t only their hometown – it was their world, their galaxy, their universe. Nothing existed outside of those rolling hills, the endless miles of trees, the sky that threatened to engulf everything.

* * * * *

On Tuesday night Maile and I sat on the front porch with a good friend, talking about books and children and moving. We drank red wine. Her neighbor saw us and came over, pulled up a chair. The neighborhood kids ran through the falling dusk, playing tag in a whirling cloud around us, like moths flitting around a porch light.

Sam and Abra ran senseless through the yard – they did not understand the rules. They simply ran because everyone else ran. Sam raised his hand in defiance, shouted a barbarian shout, took a swing at passing kids with a foam sword. Abra laughed and laughed, even as her eyes swelled with allergies. Then she came over and leaned her head on my leg, and I cleaned her face gently with a wet paper towel.

Lucy, quiet Lucy, ducked her chin down towards her sternum and took six brave steps to the tree that was base. A few of the girls explained the rules in matter-of-fact tones, as if Lucy was no stranger to them. She leaned towards the tree, put her hand on it as if it was a holy icon, her deliverance.

I found Cade in the bedroom playing with marbles. He needed some coaxing, but soon he galloped through the Ft. Worth night with the other kids, shouting to his new-found friends.

And us four adults, we drank in the night – the shouting, the shadows – long after our glasses were empty.

It’s a smaller world now. A world where children from Pennsylvania can play hide-and-seek in Austin one day, then freeze tag in Dallas the next, then soccer in a Tulsa field a few days later. A world where I can give my last quarter to a man in New Orleans, then a few days later have my life changed by a Vietnam Vet struggling in a hospital bed in San Antonio.

We devour the states as we pass through them. We gorge ourselves on miles traveled. But I hope I never take these stories for granted, the stories of real life people. The woman and her child begging in the French Quarter. The voodoo man with animal bones tied around his neck. The patient I could not touch with bare skin.

We should never wash the taste of them away.