Dear Animal,
I’m thumbing through a red notebook the size of a folded bandana. It is on my seat, between my legs, as I drive. Using my teeth, I pull off the pen cap. I usually text notes to myself, but it’s crowded in the car as we drive 1500 miles, and I fear that my teenagers will find me silly saying, ‘Siri, text Kendra’, over and over again.
‘What do you want to say?’ Siri would reply.
Instead, I write without looking at the page and my notes are crooked roads of their own. Later, I will sift through, to see what might be beautiful enough to send to you.
A theatre company feeds on beauty. Of course it does.
This time, I could hand deliver it because I am on my way. I’ve waited months to buckle up and return to you and xwesam/Roberts Creek, Sunshine Coast, British Columbia, Canada, Turtle Island. If it was just my heart in a slingshot, I’d be there in a second, but we are a family of four, one warm coat each, two pairs of shoes each, camping gear, and a curious Chiweenie, so we pack the Jeep.
In the front seat, I have a cloth bag with my knitting, my journal, and my wallet. The bag was made with 40 squares of blue cotton, given to me by a lover many years ago. It has carried too much and is gently biodegrading on my arm. I will leave some things behind this trip. I packed dried wild Irises and rhubarb jam from our Lucky land in Colorado. I have a currant bush, bound for Colin’s, cut from my property in Roberts Creek that I sold. It is a sentimental currant, I say, because he hates them. He will give it a little ground.
I am fleeing the horror of impending Trumpish doom and the heat of Colorado’s high, arid desert. It is a long descent down 7000 feet to land with two feet in the sea.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, I’m rounding out the first year living in Sunshine Colorado, on the ancestral homelands of the Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute), Hinono’eino (Arapaho) Nations. The basics of our life as a family are settling into place. Schools are sorted. A few social ties. We have each made a map of places we love: farmstands, and the Humane Society, bookstores, bakeries and fishing holes. I can find a yoga class I like and a place to plug in. I know how to go about getting swimsuits for teens, and a root canal, and what to do above 10,000 feet when my beloved eats the other half of my sandwich.
Turns out above 10,000 feet sandwiches disappear into thin air (possibly down your hatch without you noticing). You too will hallucinate up that high. On the final switchback, you will lie on your back in the middle of the trail to catch your breath and huff and puff, even lying still. You will wonder then if you cannot catch your breath because it is ahead of you. You will put your feet on the ground to follow. Even the flowers walk faster than you.
Early mountaineers would carry seeds with them as they climbed, knowing if they perished on the journey they would, at least, have moved some species of flower a half-mile closer to the moon. I question whether those mountaineers really understood the challenges of high-altitude gardening, but still, I’d like to make that show. A show that happens alongside you as you climb a mountain. Above 10,000 feet it will get surreal, doubling the atmospheric effects with the theatrical ones. The triumph of reaching the top, in this case, an alpine lake, contributes to a satisfying ending. Post-show will be half sandwiches and hammocks for everyone. Scene.
But for now, we slam the back gate of the Jeep, wave goodbye to Sunshine, and begin the journey.
The first hour on the road to Canada is familiar, but then we turn on a blue byway. When we drove the moving truck to Colorado almost a year ago, we took the superhighways, but now it’s backroads. The highway signs in Wyoming are few and far-between. But one of them breaks through the trance of prairie driving: ‘PASS WITH CARE.’
It is a good reminder. I’m trepidatious. Will all the work I have done to fall in love with a new land disintegrate once I return to Canada? Will feet on home soil act like matchsticks so that the first walk I take makes me explode with the bright happiness of being back? Watch it, Kendra. Pass with care.
If there is a competition for the fewest-humans-per-square-mile in the United States, Wyoming is a contender. There is no one everywhere we go. This seems like a good place to wait out the Trump presidency, if that does befall us. Specifically in Hidden, a town of 10 people. It has a tiny white post office with a fence made of four wagon wheels. Maybe this is where the wagon fell apart. Enough with moving West, that wagon said, this is home. I admire that sticktoitness, but it is my turn to drive.
The sky is a thin blue bedsheet pulled over my head.
In the backseat the kids debate how to defend the Jeep from a zombie attack. The Chi-weenie will need armor. There will be Jeep Jousting. My husband wants a flamethrower. One kid would choose a shovel as a weapon. That is my weapon too, if we are talking about digging into a new landscape. Zombies are one thing. There is no weapon one can brandish against change.
The signs along the road introduce each gulch by name. The word ‘gulch’ carries meaning after a year in Sunshine. I have learned to love the gulch below my house, with deer leaping through the curling barbed wire; yes, some slow progress has been made on my bi-nationality. I make a mental list of other things I love in Colorado: being buzzed by hummingbirds, the combo of bristle and billow in the Thistle Poppy, a good slam of rain, the cartwheel of late afternoon wind and the way it mixes up the sky. Cloud blender.
Wyoming also has delights, like the Black Angus, necks bent, dining on the golden grass. There are some stretches of the road called Open Pasture, where you might find a herd on the road itself. We do. And they don’t hurry to turn and see who we are. Angus, 4. Jeep, 0. I turn off the engine and wait for the call of the grass to move them from the road.
I almost died when I was 19, which is a long story I won’t tell here, but after that, when my jaw was wired shut and my legs out of commission, and I was stuck in bed, I remember looking out the window and watching the green of the grass. I was, in that moment, shot through with beauty. In that moment, my ambition was met, my life meant something, me, a witness to a stand of green sword blades waving from the black earth.
Seven years later, in a field by the railway station in Vancouver, I joined Radix to make a site-specific show called strange and tender green. It was inspired by the poem Green by Marina Tsvetaeva, which reads, in part, “The green was everywhere, a strange and tender green, it split my head wide open and freed me from all thinking.” Radix was a predecessor to you, Animal, while that grass was the predecessor of this. Every blade of grass knows every other.
The Palomino ponies of Wyoming wade in the long grass.
So, I drive and collect details like these. Past missives to you have been made of these details strung together, like beads in a necklace. But something else has emerged in my relationship with the natural world over this lonely year. I have leaned into the green. I have turned to wildflowers, shrubs, and trees. Birds and beetles and the only earthworm. The moose!
The dusty brown hills of Wyoming start moving as if the earth is boiling. The castles in the rock are rising. Maybe it is the liquid past-life of geology that I see. Maybe it is the painter that stands behind the pink of the clouds. In the past, I mistook the earth as static. Without much in the way of human community, the earth has come alive to me. It reaches out and touches me, the yellow mustard squeezing in from the shoulder of the road. It drives with me for miles.
I’m grateful for that company because there is no one else on the road. No one in the rear-view mirror. The human trace is fading, the road falling apart. There are hand-hewn fence posts and cattle gates that make the tires rattle. I drive and feel the dry. The water in the creeks is gone; the grass drank the last of it. And in the riverbed now, a pour of green grass flows through the dusty banks and yellow fields. Even my teen points to it, then it’s gone. Two birds on the telephone wire. Snow fences and Curlycap Gumweed.
I must study geology next, Animal, must understand the underpinnings of the roil and boil of this earth, of the spine of the Rocky Mountains, this body I live on. The green moves and fades, the water drying up in the heat, the animals searching. The flat coyote drying on the asphalt. She looks painted on. But we know that she will wear away, these lifeforms that live in fragile temperature windows. The geology will survive, and maybe the jellyfish. Lichen: I want to know their way. I want to be better acquainted with rock and wind. These are the survivors. The dinosaurs once walked here, animal mountains on a plant-based diet, they left footprints and bones. What will I leave?
There is a traffic jam for a bison. That seems about right to me.
Later this trip I will read a novel written by an old friend, a copy inscribed with the words, ‘Canada misses you’ after we eat crepes and drink coffee and come to say goodbye. It was pre-pandemic when we last had an in-person visit. We have missed each other, and the hour set aside becomes two, but we are still just doing headlines. It is when I settle into the book that I really get the story. It is not autobiographical, but still, the book is the writer, and I hold it in my hands. What are we made of anyway? The places that have formed us, what love has carved out of us, the indignities swallowed, threads of joy and sadness stitched into pages, squeezed between covers. I feel the disappointment that sits in the book– it lifts off the page and lingers with me a little. I feel the acerbic delight. The more pages I pile to the left, the more I hurt with the story. There is something ringing in me as I read. If you put ten cellos in a room and pluck one, they all resonate. Maybe there should be therapists for novels that can get in there and heal the ever-loving tale and the writer too, from the inside out.
I’m sure, Animal, that you would have some decent advice for me in regard to these missives. Girl, you dig plants and like to hang with animals, even rocks now, but what about your own species? Might humans make the top ten?
Well, no. The human antics that I note as we travel are more goofy than beautiful: the Vacancy at Antler Inn, rodeo tickets for sale at the DQ in Cody, and the Wayfarers Chapel, which seems too small a venue for any God, given the greatness of the outdoors, like the vast reservoir where we camp, catching as many sparkles of sunlight as the night sky catches stars.
The humans that are entirely beautiful to me are the three in a 6X6-foot box bouncing along, and I love them terrifically, but even there it’s not always easy. Imagine us in a tighter space, say a 6X6-inch novel. Could we find enough spaciousness to co-exist? Better, could we entangle and thrive? What words could do that? What story could tell it? Maybe you know it, Animal, you who weaves the human and the natural world together. My attitude toward humans right now seems to grind to a halt at bemusement / despair. Living in the US doesn’t help. My therapist cautions me not to blacklist the whole species. Just choose who to trust. Which is fine for the simple story of living one’s life, but for me as an artist, I concern myself with larger stories, so I am still seeking the resolution between the good green earth and humankind as a whole.
My husband tells me about his work on collective minds. In an ant colony, many individuals with limited cognitive capacity, acting together, can exhibit intelligence, say, in foraging for food. But what about the bringing together of many intelligent beings into a collective, like Microsoft, or the justice system? Are such structures intelligent? What are they currently making? Climate change? And then we talk for a while about what makes up intelligence, and the conversation stalls out. I’ve enjoyed many collectives of artists with you, Animal, making something bigger than the sum of its parts in the realm of art. But when we bring humans together, it often goes wrong. Hooray for drama, but gimme an ending I can get behind.
Who will dramaturg this story?
We take a conversational turn to the science of plant cognition. It is solid, Rob says. If you think of cognition as signals of things like DANGER and DROUGHT. Is signaling cognition, though? Do plants have more to say, that we can’t hear?
We keep driving through a state called WY.
I’m walking the dog behind a gas station in Alcova. The detritus of the night is signaling something: underwear with a waistband that says ‘Pair of Thieves’, a crushed Redbull can and a Hyatt key card, that car pictured above, and seven ant hills. The species both at work in their own way at Creation and Destruction. Sitting at an outdoor restaurant in Boulder a few weeks ago, I watch a gang of university students search in vain for an edible they dropped. Oh well, some dog will have a good time! they say. Who said the dog wasn’t already having a good time?
Back on the road, human and animal. Rivers and railway tracks on either side. Billboards that say, ‘All the Gravy’. The hand-painted yard sign that says, ‘Trump Leadership’ (to me this signals both ‘danger’ and ‘drought’.) There is a road named Shorty. O humans being.
We hit Montana. Rob has his arm out the window, and he reaches forward and calls, ‘first one in’. I can see back 50 years to road trips of his youth, calling shotgun, playing Spit, collecting license plates, speed rounds of ‘I Spy’. Will I learn to better love the only animal who has 20 questions?
I would have said through these 11 months of letters to you, Animal, that my focus had gained some ground. Those early letters to you seem so scattered. Like a month put in a blender and then poured onto the page. But out on the road the story gets untethered again. Movement does that to a story. Stretch it out so that the points are milestones, some missing and at the end you know you have come a long way, but you might wonder what it means.
In Montana the rivers are full to the brim. Like a teacup you must bring your mouth down to. We camp at Wade Lake, lovely, lush. As we draw closer to you, Animal, we begin to see the green wave, the fecundity. I have missed the surfeit of growth. Still, the Montana landscape is low on trees, so the telephone poles are stumpy. The street signs are only five feet tall. We come into a town of 800 people and 11,000 trout. The story here is short but wide.
Later, in Montana, we will see a low-flying DC-10 with a red belly and learn that it carries a cargo of slurry to dump on a nearby fire. I don’t know the place the fire is ripping through but hear sorrow and fear when people mention it. Later, when we are in Canada, it will be Wells with a red sky. What towns are yours, and which are mine? Dealing them out like stacks of cards. Part of moving away is the challenge to take the boundaries of what is mine and stretch it wide.
Rob drives. I am working on a new season. Not for you, of course, Animal – you have your own plans – but just for me. What shows to try to make and in which country. The list is way too long, which surprises no one, and I work to winnow. What are the stories that I care most about? We pass Goose Egg Road and joke about a whole lot of nothing.
When Rob drives, I have time watching the clouds. I’ve been wanting to talk to Colin about cloud theatre. I think about those house foundations left from the fire in Sunshine. Inside, a shell of a dresser that still has a drawer. Pull it open and out comes a cloud, which floats away. Nothing can be attached in a world made of clouds. We are taken apart by the wind.
Morning at the campground before we start driving, I am walking Pinto but not fast, because he is collecting smells. I talk to him, doing both voices. This Chi-weenie with 5-inch-long-legs is not much of a hunter, I say, but he reminds me that he once caught a moose. Oh, really, I say. Really, yes, Pepper the cat caught it then gave it to me and I put it in my mouth, but the tail was hanging out. Pinto, I correct him, not a moose but a mouse.
It’s hard to teach a Chi-weenie English. He is not Chi-interested.
The last two days on the road we fall silent. We don’t listen to music or talk much. I’m knitting Pinto a turtleneck, but I don’t knit, knit, pearl, pearl. It is enough to keep moving onwards.
I think back over the year. I’m not going to become a director for big Denver theatres or write a kitchen sink drama. Well, then, why not make theatre for grasshoppers, as I mentioned to you ruefully last September? Why not for the audience of the family, as the dream last spring suggested? I have discovered that I need audiences, human audiences, strangers, because I hold hope for the transcendental at the collective level, that Humans are Nature are God, a big line of equal signs.
I make art to grow fluent in the language of life. To lean into the flora and fauna, the spine of the earth and every form of water–to try to hear what they might say. Only then will I have something of meaning to say to my own species, I think. I write to lay bandages of flowers upon the broken human heart. But, hey, I also want to crack a few jokes along the way. Strangely, I have also spent a lot of the year listening to stand up when I can’t sleep. I make the Chi-weenie do welcome speeches in the border line-up. He says, Welcome to Canada. Um. There will be smells.
I pass through the border with care.
I don’t explode upon contact, as I feared, not exactly, but I do fall apart. When the tension of being away disintegrates, there is not much left holding me together. In making shows we often talked about sticking things together with chewing gum and bits of string, just to see if they would hold. There is a point in making a show where you fear changing things, and I wanted us to always be brave. When things barely hold together, in the theatre, I like them; they are looser and closer to chaos, so the effort of the actor to hold it together is immense. That makes it beautiful. Falling apart is a process that I trust.
I’m one month shy of this trial year, but the love of a new place hasn’t fundamentally changed me. Maybe this is a failing, but anyway, it is true. This coastal rainforest is the land that my body wants. This is the land I love. My partner and I work on a five-year plan to return. In the meantime, I’ll work the high, arid Rockies as much as I can. I’ll split my focus to be in relation through art with the land where I stand. I need that too.
Here, I hope, in a few years’ time, in a new chapter, I hope to fall apart, grow old, move closer to the ground and then someday inter within the cedar-stained soil, and, with the help of fungi and worms, fall apart completely.
Yours, ever so,
Kendra