SATURDAY

S and I crossed the river in the same spot where I always traverse it, where the current reaches one’s waist, but the riverbed bottomed out and the current hit our necks. My bag went under. When we reached the shallows I tipped it over and water poured out. Miraculously, my phone and two pairs of headphones survived. The current’s only casualty was a pack of cigarettes. I spread the sticks out on the blanket and let them dry in the sun.

An hour later, sitting in the sand smoking damp cigarettes, I told S how that week, at another swimming spot, someone who I would call established called me established. Established? Me? S said someone else recently said, apparently out of nowhere, it must be nice to be Elizabeth. S asked what they meant. Because, they said, she gets to write whatever she wants.

The things I most want to write are the things I most want to keep to myself. For weeks I have been trying to write about secrets. I lost track of the attempts and discarded drafts. They were fine, but missed something essential, something I couldn’t quite pinpoint, so I started again. And again. Each time a little closer to where I wanted to be.

It started as a short piece about the place where I like to swim. Places, plural. And how I like having something to myself—something sacred, something unshared. Like the name or names of the place or places where I swim.

So I’ll tell you about one place, because talking about one place can be akin to talking about all places—specificity as a substitution for universality. “The importance of a sense of place is commonly accepted in the world of fiction,” Robert A. Caro writes in The New Yorker, “I wish that were also true for biography and history, for nonfiction in general, in fact.” 

I won’t name the place but if you already know it—if you know where I swim—then you know me.

Here’s the thing: I am an incredibly private person with a penchant toward secrecy, an impulse which runs counter to my profession and people’s perception of me, or the perception of me I imagine they possess, which involves distilling my innermost thoughts and the texture of my days into a narrative, in digestible prose.

So there’s this place where I like to swim. By now, mid-July, the routine has turned into a ritual: on each agreeable afternoon I change into a swimsuit, fill a reusable bottle with tap water, and grab my go bag, which contains a towel, a blanket, a notebook and pen, a book, sunscreen, sunglasses, a hat, a lighter and a pack of cigarettes—a secret vice. I drive twenty-two minutes outside of Eau Claire. I park the car under the shade of some trees. I walk through the woods. I cross the river to an island. I pick the same spot in the sand, finely churned in the waterfall. I sit away from everyone else, on the point furthest downstream. From here, I can look out at where the wide yet shallow river bends and disappears and imagine I’m still alone, if only I ignore the music blaring from nearby blankets and the shouts of guys tossing a football: On a scale of one to drunkenness I am at least an eleven. Are you ready to set sail on the SS Get the Fuck Outta Here?

The crossing itself feels like a cleansing, a baptism. A leaving behind of everything on the other side. I smoke whilst situated on the sand—a semi-secret habit I previously engaged in only out at bars, and now, in the absence of bars, only on the beach in between swims. Another ritual: kombucha. I don’t actually like kombucha. But there’s a particular kind of kombucha I’ll buy one can at a time and crack open after unfurling the blanket across the hot sand. I can’t even tell you the name—not because it’s a secret but because I only know it by it’s floral label.

These small rituals feel like the only constant in a sea of unending uncertainty. The drive, the crossing, the sand, the blanket, the cigarette, the kombucha, all in that order add up to some semblance of solace, the likes of which has meant everything to me these past few months, alone in quarantine and in the midst of a civil rights movement.

I don’t buy into the notion that things were certain before. I think things were just as uncertain but the illusion of certainty prevailed because it was easier to buy into that notion, perpetuated by the few who profited off its proliferation.

But the thing about this spot where I swim is, it is anything but certain. The only constant here is change. The shoreline rearranges itself overnight. One day the current hits my waist and the next I’m nearly submerged, the contents of my carefully packed go bag drenched.

My writing does this too: one day I’ll write something that feels brilliant and the next day it’s dull. The strangest thing happens after I publish something: after hours and hours intimately entangled in a web of words, trying to tease out a meaning or form, I forget what I’ve written. It’s like I black out—a sensation I only experienced once, entirely sober and midway down a ski slope. I’ll go back and reread pieces I’ve written and not recognize them, as if they came from someone else’s hand and not my own. 

The words and sentiments don’t belong to me anymore. Once they’re out in the world, they belong to someone else—they become part of someone else’s story.

For ten months I’ve been struggling to write a book about solitude, and recently realized it isn’t just about solitude—it’s about belonging. It’s a love letter to Eau Claire, and the improbability of finding a place to call home after a lifetime of not knowing what home was: whether it was a place, a person, a collection of people, or a concept. And like all love letters, I’m terrified to write it because I’m afraid the affair will end. Once I put it out there I can’t take it back. If I write it down and send it out into the world then the subject and the sentiments no longer belong to me.

Maybe they never did. Maybe that’s my mistake—a fatal flaw, thinking these were mine all along, when nothing really belongs to me.

Hence the swimming spots and the rituals. Hence wanting to keep it to myself, to keep it secret.

Nature in literature is too neat a metaphor, and narrative itself is too neat, unable to capture the chaos of everyday life. “Chaos is the one truth that narrative must always betray,” Nicole Krauss writes in Forest Dark, “for in the creation of its delicate structure that reveal many truths about life, the portion of truth that has to do with incoherence and disorder must be obscured.” I seek the sand in search of certainty but each time I’m reminded that the water does what it wants with the shore, shifting and shaping it at whim—incoherence and disorder obscured and unseen along the riverbed. 

James Baldwin wrote, “For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” 

SUNDAY 

I stopped counting the days since I’ve been held. But someone I follow on Instagram posts a daily tally of “coupled isolation,” and I started sheltering-in-place one day before them, so I know it’s been a hundred and eighteen days and counting since any meaningful human contact. The last time my friend S hugged me, I blurted, it’s been seventy-five days since anyone has hugged me. 

Yet the river wraps itself around me, engulfs me fully and faithfully. 

Lately my constant companion is Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, which is best read by a body of water. At nineteen, I lived in a house in the Marin Headlands, just a few miles north of Ocean Beach, where William Finnegan surfed in the 1980s. There was no cell service, I didn’t own a car, and the nearest town was five miles by bicycle. I could see the tumultuous surf at Rodeo Beach from my bedroom. Each day I walked the trails down to the shore, but I never swam because I feared the current and the great white sharks that circled the Farallon Islands twenty-seven miles offshore. I possess an irrational fear of tsunamis, and often laid awake wondering how quickly I could sprint up the hill behind my house and if it was even high enough to evade a rogue wave. Though I had roommates, I felt incredibly isolated all summer, shrouded in a layer of fog both literal and metaphorical. Drunk on the porch one night, the incessant sound of waves crashing in the distance, one roommate tried to convince me to stay. When you find good people, she said, you should stay and build a life with them. 

I knew when she said good people she meant her and our roommates and at once I knew it was their home, not mine.

William Finnegan perfectly captures the shape shifting of the sea while surfing the same spot at Ocean Beach day after day. He traveled the world in search of surf, and returned years later to find some of the landscapes altered. “Surf spots are created and destroyed, both naturally and by human enterprise.” In Indonesia, an earthquake and tsunami lifted the reef at Lagundri by two feet, improving the waves. Off the coast of Portugal, a manmade walkway ruined the surf. 

“Beyond the loss or gain, I found these sudden changes to established surf spots profoundly unsettling.” 

Before moving to Eau Claire, I had never witnessed a body of water displace entire swaths of land. The first summer, the beach stretched up to the edge of the waterfall and the river split in two around it. The next year, the beach was cut in half. The water carried the sand downstream to craft a separate, smaller island, which was submerged after heavy rains. Some days I show up and find the island almost entirely underwater, except for the trees.

Barbarian Days is research for another book I’m working on. Easily distracted at home, I bring my research to the beach, where I’m disconnected from WiFi and forced to focus. Water drips on my handwritten notes and I can’t decipher them later. The pages of books curl between damp fingertips. 

When Robert A. Caro first had the opportunity to go through files as a young journalist, he wrote, “I felt at home.” He later researched Lyndon B. Johnson’s life for a series of books, research complicated by “Johnson’s obsession with secrecy.” 

About that first research opportunity, he wrote, “There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself. I loved going through those files, making them yield their secrets to me.” 

The river is a cipher. Swimming is not the real reason I escape when I can, sneaking out of Eau Claire without telling a soul. It’s a screen for what I really want, for something I didn’t think I could ever have, for something I’m afraid to write down or else risk losing because it doesn’t belong to me. 

In Barbarian Days, Finnegan describes his displeasure at how a photograph of him surfing at Ocean Beach misses the next moment, when he disappeared into a wave:“That invisible passage, not this moment of anticipation, was the heart of the ride.”

I read this while alone at another secret swim spot. It was here, a week earlier, where someone called me established. I want to look up at someone and say, listen to this. Since there is no one, I slip beneath the surface of the pond and swim laps, reciting it to myself and the frogs and the dragonflies. Arms and legs pumping, I feel as though I am indeed making some sort of invisible passage. 

I had missed the moment of anticipation. I had worked so hard to arrive that I missed my own arrival. I wouldn’t call myself “established” because I’m perpetually striving or seeking the next step—another fatal flaw. The comments surprised me because I had somehow missed the moment of my own establishment. At what point did I become established? At what point had the sands shifted from becoming to became? 

What I really want is not the water, it’s the land. The invisible passage is the heart of the ride: driving out of Eau Claire, the road curves and opens up onto a straightaway, the fields stretch out on either side, cows dot the landscape with the occasional abandoned tractor, the trees and hills rise up around me—sheltered, protected, enveloped. At what point will I know the names of those trees? At what point will becoming shift to became? At what point will I no longer be a transplant? At what point does longing become belonging? 

Smoking damp cigarettes with S, an Eau Claire native, I realized my closest friends are the ones who were born here. My living here still makes little sense to me and I can’t explain why I gravitate toward people who are from here and choose to stay, or left and chose to return. I can’t explain why, a dozen years after that night on the porch in California, I would find myself in Wisconsin and remember my roommate’s words, When you find good people, you should stay and build a life with them. 


MONDAY 

The water receded. I wade out to the island alone. Solitude has been another constant companion the past year, reaching new heights during the pandemic, and only in the presence of strangers do I realize how unusual it is to be a woman alone in the world. I have not seen another lone swimmer out here all summer. Everyone arrives with someone except me. 

With no one expecting me at home, I take the long way back, sand stuck to my skin, swimsuit still damp. I guess at what lies behind the hidden driveways and wonder if I’ll ever have a slice of it to call my own, a little place nestled in the woods in which to write and rent out as a writer’s retreat so I can leave and travel, each time choosing to return. And yet the river reminds me that I know better than to wed myself to such certainties. None of it belongs to me. The sand disappears down the shower drain and I’m left with nothing all over again.

In April, as the snow thawed, I realized I would remain confined to my home for longer than anticipated, and it began showing up everywhere: home. I’ve always found the presence of patterns both bewildering and uplifting: a sign, an omen, more than mere coincidence. Like how a Paris Review interview with author Hilton Als opens with the question, “What does home mean to your writing?”

Later in the conversation Als circles back to the question, saying, “When you asked about home and writing, I thought about James Baldwin, who said that you carry home with you—you can’t escape from it. He means it metaphorically, but it’s important for me that home is also an actual place. […] Now I think that it’s not about property, but about belonging. You belong to your home, and it belongs to you. This person, you belong to them, and they belong to you.”

In a profile of Daytona-based surfboard shaper-artist Trey Edwards, the journalist Michael Adno asks, “‘Why do you like living here?’ After a brief pause, Edwards asks in response, ‘Who said I like living here?’”

Each day I root further and further into my adopted hometown of Eau Claire, both by choice and necessity. I question whether I belong. Whether I like living here. They’re impossible inquiries to answer in such extreme circumstances. Yet I began seeing glimmers of answers, stabs of recognition in other people’s prose.

The journalist decides not to press Trey Edwards on why he likes living in Daytona. But finally, the artist offers, "It feels in-between, but it also feels like home.”

In Hanif Abdurraqib’s dispatch in The New Yorker, the poet and essayist writes,“I have lived in Columbus for most of my life, and hope to be here for whatever uncertain time I have left. Sometimes a place is a thing that happens to you, or the result of a series of happenings. […] I love Columbus, though to love any place has always seemed to me to involve a series of calculated choices, ones that must be continually weighed and measured. And, as in any other relationship, one must be prepared to reckon with the possibility of withdrawing one’s affections if the math stops adding up.”

There were moments when I considered leaving, moments where the math stopped adding up and I considered withdrawing my affections. But I ran the numbers again and chose to stay.

On the drive back, the 6:45pm sun pierces the clouds, and I remember how I once tried to explain to someone how I’d never believed in god before I moved to the Midwest, but something in the way the summer sky opened up and the light streamed through the pillowy cumulonimbus calvus made me think,  yes, there is something or someone bigger than me, some sense of order I can’t see or grasp. But the person listening did not understand what I meant. 

What I meant was this: I have never before felt connected to the land. Not even the woods where I grew up, which seemed strange and ominous and looming. At the beginning of the pandemic my mother asked if I wanted to move back to New Hampshire and work at a sculpture garden, and I said no. My father suggested I move to the airfield where he now resides in Illinois, and I said no. The pandemic forced me to cancel not one but two planned trips back east, in March and July, and only then did it dawn on me that I would be here for the foreseeable future. I have no reason to be here. A year ago I amicably ended a marriage and sold a house and my former partner moved back east and I now own very little and my work is such that I could live anywhere.

New Hampshire was never a choice. You don’t choose where you’re born. The way I felt about my hometown was summed up in a short story by Jonathan Safran Foer, where he wrote, “I was almost always at home, but I was not always at home at home.” 

In high school, the boy I liked drove to a cabin in northern Wisconsin to stay with friends for two weeks each summer. I envisioned a dock extending into a still lake, surrounded by trees. Waking up each morning and swimming, then ending each evening swimming, then drying off by a bonfire and waking up the next morning with the smell still on you, rinsing it off again in the lake.

At fifteen, summer in Wisconsin sounded so romantic. And fifteen years later, it exceeded my expectations, even as my actual romantic life faltered and fell apart. The boy I liked, the one who went to Wisconsin, eloped with me eight years after high school, in Oregon, and then we moved to Eau Claire, and then he moved back to where we were born. 

After we amicably ended our relationship he said he did not want to live in a place where people once knew him as married. For the first time, I did not want to leave. 


SATURDAY, AGAIN

In the river, I pointed out the way the 6pm sun streamed down through the clouds, and a friend said, “god light.” 

What did you say, I asked, not believing that he had expressed in two words what I had tried and failed to convey to someone years ago. 

God light, he said. 

Those invisible passages—the drive through the fields, the walk through the woods, crossing the river, slipping beneath the surface to be carried by the current, the sun piercing the clouds—became the heart of the ride. I had read but hadn’t fully understood Clarissa Pinkola-Estes’s words until I moved to Wisconsin: “It is the love of something, of having so much love for something—whether a person, a word, an image, an idea, the land, or humanity—that all that can be done with the overflow is to create. It’s not a matter of wanting to, not a singular act of will; one solely must.” 

It’s been four years since I first visited Eau Claire and at once felt at home: a foreign feeling for someone foreign to Eau Claire and foreign to the idea or practice of sitting still. It’s been three and a half since I moved, the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I left my hometown at eighteen. In February, a psychic told me I would leave Eau Claire in May. He said I would travel back to Asia and then onto Europe. Then the pandemic hit, all of my plans bottomed out without warning, and I chose to discard his prediction like a bad first draft.

A Partial List of Further Reading & Recent Obsessions:
As a reminder, none of the links in this e-mail are affiliate or sponsored links, so I don't make money or benefit from you clicking them. If you'd like to support my work, you can forward this to a friend, share it on social media, or contribute directly: https://www.paypal.me/cedecreative 

Must-haves for the beach / river / lake / pond / body of water of your choosing:

• if you're in the woods, homemade bug spray containing lemongrass and eucalyptus essential oil (verdict is still out as to whether it actually works but it smells good)
• lemon juice in a small glass spray bottle for lightening the ends of one's hair
• sunscreen, obviously
• a proper beach towel and a woven blanket, the latter of which I bought secondhand but perhaps these gorgeous throws from Minna would do the trick
• a shawl or button-down for when one's shoulders start burning
• straw hat or a vintage-y baseball cap to shade your eyes from the sun, plus sunnies 
• kombucha and water in a reusable bottle 
• snacks: preferably fresh cherries and/or these dang good rice chips (honestly almost hate how much I love them)
• notebook & pen
• if you happen to live in a place like Portland where you can partake in certain sweet treats, perchance pack yourself a pretty lil ceramic piece from Stonedware, a woman-owned company running a rad raffle right now with proceeds benefitting two nonprofits in Portland
• a good book (see below)

Mentioned in this month's missive, by order of appearance (order the books through Bookshop.org to support local indie booksellers or libro.fm if you're an audiobook person): 

• Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss 
• James Baldwin quote via Brain Pickings 
• Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
• "The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson's Archives" by Robert A. Caro, The New Yorker 
• Hilton Als, The Art of the Essay No. 3, The Paris Review 
• Michael Adno profiles Trey Edwards, The Surfer's Journal issue 29.2
• "The Vanishing Monuments of Columbus, Ohio" by Hanif Abdurraqib, The New Yorker
• Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés 

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