Four Stories by Olivia Olson '21.5

Icouldn’t help myself. They told me to, “Take only pictures, leave only footprints.” How could I only take images with me and leave just an imprint of my body behind? I laid in the grasses and drew a song from the sinuous clouds swirling above the Sawtooth Mountains. The ranch told me how small I was; at sunset, I had watched a herd of elk cross the road I was travelling. The jackrabbits sat and listened to me, the washes suggested the pulse of life through the land, and the cars on distant mountain roads flashed their headlights over the range. I watched them drive on, wishing

I could catch up with them and show them my chapped hands. Look at what I have learned! I would say. Bodies are fragile, I can’t tell north from south here, but I can understand what the goats tell me. And, I’ll show you where they brought me: mountains so high! In preparation for my day hiking with the herd, I asked the ranch owners which one the leader was. They smiled dryly, regarding me with the same distance that lies between the ranch and the purple haze they called

Arizona. “It’s usually the one with the most daughters,” was the answer. Ok… I thought to myself. Find a large goat, probably with a ‘B’ name, and become one of the daughters. Still unsure, I followed a wide-bellied mother alongside four of her sisters. Sometimes a second herd would diverge from the main herd. Of all the grazing animals, the sheep were most likely to break off and really get lost. Radio collars hung on various necks of the sheep and goats, but without food or water or a dog, a second herd would not survive long in the high desert. That’s why I never trusted the sheep. I wouldn’t call it hiking or wandering. We had a purpose, or rather, they had a purpose and I tagged along, waiting for them as they ate high in the juniper branches. They climbed up the trunks with their front hooves, stretching their spines so taut they could snap. The kids kicked and jumped, the guard dogs anticipated their path and ran ahead, found their way up saffron escarpments and watched from above what progress the herd was making. The ranchers mentioned, “They run twice the distance as the goats.” Stick with the goats. I found countless pieces of New Mexico I wanted to bring home, to hold to my heart and bear the weight of my experience. I wanted to hold those rocks, the gnarled trees, that huge sky I’d never seen so blue. As we roamed, my feet tramped down the goats’ path a little bit more. The goats moved fast enough to prevent me from sitting down, but their leisurely pace made me wish for a book. Instead, I sang the song I heard in the clouds and read in the rocks. Lining the path were curious hemispheres of sandstone, the concave faces defined with dark red. Inlaid in each of these, flush to the face, was a concentric hollow hemisphere. The goats ate, I chose a rock. The kids ran and kicked, I ran my thumb over its flat surface. The dogs laid in the shade of a piñon, I fit my fingertip in the crater. I twisted it around, trying to wipe out the dust. Many years ago, the sandstone I was holding had broken in half and had exposed a pocket of soft rock, suddenly vulnerable to the extreme elements of the high desert. A flash flood here, a storm there, winds in the Spring and bright heat the rest of the year. It fits perfectly in my palm as I enclose my fingers around it. I’ll bring it back someday. I’m bound to return. I’ll follow the matriarch of the herd and bring along this rock; I’ll place it by the path, just where I found it. Past two valleys and one ridge, where the lucky ones are led.

It feels just like any other city. A city I’m confused in. Public transportation maps overwhelm me no matter what city I’m in. I get lost on campus and still don’t entirely understand how to find a book in the library.

When other students at the university ask me what I study, I feel silly saying, “Biology... but also German and Literature.” As Europeans attend university with a job before them, I smoke, drink and eat in German. I also wear long pants and a long jacket with no backpack, so they think I’m a European. To truly be one with the citizens of Mainz, maybe I’ll even dye my hair a shade darker. Sitting at a café, perturbed, I disrupt the friend sitting opposite me, who is quietly reading her book.

“What do you think of the term, expatriate?” I demand, in the typical American way. “What, exactly, is an expatriate?” she answers, also in the typical American way. “Anyone who lives outside of their home country for a while,” I launch back with little hesitation. I’d been thinking of the word for a long time and had nailed the very vague definition to the inside of my forehead, where I could see it and no one else. “Like Hemingway and Stein and Fitzgerald, Picasso, Dali… Those guys.” “Is it like that movie, Midnight in Paris?" “Yeah,” I sighed. As I sit and write, the morning light quietly fills my room and my window gapes open. I sit and stare out at those trees, also changing color, and am instilled with a certain homesickness. To escape these thoughts, my friend and I reconvene to walk around the cathedral and along the Rhine. We find cafés and eat warm food. We speak German with the shopkeepers and they struggle along with us. When I look into their faces, I see myself staring back, with wide eyes, shoveling in every scrap of stimulus. I see an open smile and a girl inhaling the sunshine and music of Mainz, and demanding a country-sized amount of space. A country-sized amount of space. In one sense of the word, being from the country has always made me want more space. When I tell someone I’m from Maine, they smile with closed lips and slowly nod, their eyes putting my every move and word into that box that, “makes sense.” I lower my eyes and laugh along. My family has no deep roots in Maine; we moved from Iowa when I was two. My parents struggled to find their sense of place in the lobster and tourism-based economy they ended up in. My sisters do

not have the same “island charm” and scrappy outdoor attitude as I do. The older one teaches English in Japan and the younger one wears tweed suits to school and belts Broadway tunes to hundreds in an audience. Saying they are from Maine doesn’t always “make sense” to the people they meet, but in more subtle ways, they carry the landscape with them. Similar to them, saline breezes comfort us and we get homesick in the presence of large bodies of water. In this city, the closest thing I can find to the holiness of the outdoors, from the waterfront to the woods, is in the spaces of religion. When I sit in St. Martin’s Cathedral, my mind wanders up and out of the cage of my skull and bumps along the arches and up to the keystone, gathering ideas and prayers from the trusting walls. In a second sense, a country-sized amount of space refers to everything else I carry with me from America. I feel big, bold and boisterous in the city. I bolt through the streets with long, American steps, laugh loud, and am the first to dance at any party. When I meet other students, I tell them to guess where I’m from and most say Norway or Sweden. The Americans they know do not speak German and are rude and loud. They can’t hide their shock when I tell them I’m from America. They say, “But you’re nothing like them!” Again, I laugh and lower my gaze. For the past three weeks, I’ve been trying to find my balance, one foot planted on each side of the Atlantic. It’s an awkward and uncomfortable posture. The tension has manifested itself in the music and literature I consume. I crave both the glorification of European cities by avante-garde expatriates as well as the music that western cowboys whistle as they brew their morning coffee. Upon return, my thoughts collect onto the bookshelf in my dorm room, where two opposing books stand. In one of these books, essayist Henry Miller recounts his return to America to escape the second world war after spending ten years in Paris. Upon his homecoming, he embarked on a pilgrimage to rediscover the tasteless America he had once left behind. He wrote a scathing account of his journey and later published it as, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. The other book on the shelf is a copy of Desert Solitaire, by the famed defender of the wilderness, Edward Abbey. He drooled over the tough cookies he met in his summers spent in National Parks and wrote meandering narratives describing his rafting adventures on the Colorado River. His Bible was the buttes, his cathedral the canyon. Both of these men wrote to glorify their preferred landscapes—in one, capitalizing on the ruins and temples and in the other, a holy barren waste. Amused by the authors’ idealization, I write my own responses, all of which can be summarized by one question: “Is one world really better than the other?” Despite their arrogance, I keep reading. I wander the streets of Maine and listen to cathedrals. In time, the balancing act evens itself out. The space I find between columns, between trees, and between myself and my books provide radiant blotches of color that ease me into a new city. The echoes of heavy summer perfume linger into this grey autumn.

The first mate is the first to thrust his deck bucket into the still waters, cueing us to follow. With my lungs not yet clear from a deep nine-hour slumber, I draw languid breaths that gradually become purposeful as my muscles demand more oxygen. I inhale the warm scent of seaweed, heavy with salt and sun. From fifteen feet below, my own deck bucket fills with two gallons of water and I pull it straight up to my chest, careful not to spill a drop as it crosses the cap rail. Breathing easier now, I slosh the brine into the bulwarks. If we didn’t wash down the ship every day, she would dry out, crack, and take on water, thus defying the first rule of sailing: “people in the boat, water outside of the boat.” Tiptoeing barefoot over sleeping coils, I almost slip, but catch myself on the rail. It’s midsummer, and by now the daily rhythm aboard the schooner Mary Day is well-rehearsed and runs smoothly. The first mate and the two deckhands start work at 6:30, swabbing the deck, cleaning the toilets, polishing brass, switching on bilge pumps and greeting passengers as they climb up on deck from 26 22 "INTERTIDAL HARVEST" BY OLIVIA OLSON their cabins. Quiet hours continue until the 7:00 coffee is brought on deck by the messmate, by which point the sun has risen and gently caresses our skin. This work requires expansion of body and brain. Expand, swell with the tide, bloom in the dawn, build calluses to round out the skin on the hands, as tough as the hull of the ship. Draw in unnecessary gear; strengthen what remains. As my senses sharpen in the clarity of the morning, I look up from my work to see eager ripples on the water. The newly-awoken wind spins across the bay to the shore, and I smile as I flick the "The newly-awoken lanyard of my blue wind spins across the bucket, flipping it upside-down and into the ocean. Drawing it bay to the shore, and I smile..." to my chest, I clutch the spliced handle of the bucket and thrust the water down the deck, watching it stream through the scuppers and back into the ocean. I throw one more bucket

and watch it hit the water upside-down with a perfect splash. My head snaps up at the voice of some unfamiliar vessel. It is not the warm sputter of a lobster boat, so comforting to island ears, nor is it the hum of the first ferries. The intruder blurts out a grainy chug that grates my ears. It crosses our quiet bow, and I watch, hands on my hips and eyes wide open. The boat is small; it’s only just a fraction of the size of the Mary Day. On deck stands the helm house, and behind it looms a crane and a heap of equipment. In the disrupted water, it drags around green mesh bags bulging with rockweed. As the transom becomes visible, I can see that the boat is from Brunswick. A gaff hook pokes out of the helm house and prods the bags. My lungs shrink, my eyes narrow; I become smaller. The rockweed harvested here in Penobscot Bay is shipped all over the Gulf of Maine. High in nutritional value, Ascophyllum nodosum is used as fertilizer and animal feed. While the untrained eye may see homogenous heaps of seaweed all over the Maine coast, rockweed alone is targeted for harvest. Harvesters drag it from where we are anchored off of Sheep Island to processing plants hundreds of miles away. It will be piled onto conveyor belts in a plastic plant, stretched out, dried, and finally packaged into white plastic boxes destined for vegetable beds all over the world. The driver of this boat before me is one of the few hundred self-employed harvesters who sell the rockweed they collect to processing plants across the continent. Before it is bagged, the rockweed is harvested with a fifteen-prong rake that slaps a clump of seaweed and drags it to the harvester. The rockweed is hauled onto the boat and dumped into the pile. This process repeats. By the time the harvesters are finished in an area, there are no remaining fronds or stripes at surface level. In 2009, thirty-six harvesting sectors were established along the coast, each regulating harvest to a maximum of 17% of the total biomass per sector, with no regard for the area the canopy covers. The water looks empty and cold. In 1949, Aldo Leopold recognized this nutritional discrepancy in biotic systems in

"The Land Ethic." When nutrients from one community are taken to serve another, it results in an imbalance between systems that cannot be easily reconciled. Harvesters can cut the rockweed only sixteen inches from its rock, too close for comfort. The seaweed, like a child’s nails when they are cut too close to the nail bed, will "When nutrients from one community are taken grow back, but it takes time. Reproduction is slow and to serve another, it results unreliable. With the in an imbalance between seaweed gone, the systems..." water gets too hot for the crabs that take shelter under the sparse canopy and the mallard chicks that normally reside in the clumps are washed away with the tide. The seals can’t lounge on a thick bed of rockweed any longer. Scraping their bellies on the exposed bedrock and barnacles, 28 24 their blood is drawn and dissipates into the ocean. Though it floats just twenty feet away from the Mary Day’s hull, this rockweed will be shipped all over the world. The town ashore does not control where their rockweed goes, they cannot even say if it stays. Their home is altered, no matter how sustainably harvested the seaweed is. It is taken away, piece by piece. “Olo?” The first mate whispers from the quarter deck. His face asks if I’m alright. I blink and nod, drawing another breath. I turn toward the risen sun and my lungs regain their capacity. The harvester chugs away, and the rockweed follows. It’s 6:30 and we all have jobs to do.

Itraded the ocean for the mountains – how many hold me yet. Perhaps I won’t let it. Am I still too proud times have I said that? And how many times have I to accept an impressive peak over the humble hills that sighed, my chest remembering what is now absent line the coast? Even the hills I can see from a beach from me? The mountains have not lifted me yet, and five minutes away aren’t mine, either. I can only hold they may never. Eighteen years of water, wind, lulling the beach upon which I stand, the brook that meanders and laughing cannot be matched by four years of study, through my backyard woods, the ocean I have swam no matter how high the mountains may be. I floated in in and sailed upon. The ocean gives me her song, and the ocean, I cooled my head, and grabbed onto a boat it bubbles from my throat, and water flows through as she sailed by. my fingers, soaking my guitar and the page on which I As I sit in the Vermont woods, I think of my home. write.

At my feet lies a partially frozen stream. Its frozen edg- The Vermont woods are hollow in January. They es reveal dark water trickling below. are so hollow that when I skied into

At every point that the running wa- "The snow reflected camp one moon-bright night, I didn’t ter meets the ice, it freezes, causing the edges to build up in bulbous lay- enough light through the have to use a headlamp. The snow reflected enough light through the bare ers, growing opaque as the season bare trunks and branches trunks and branches that a headlamp trickles on. It’s all flowing downhill, that a headlamp just got just got in the way. Here, the leaves away from the center of this country, to the ocean. It’s hurrying home. The in the way." have fallen, a layer of snow covers every surface, and I am alone. On the ocean is hundreds of miles away, Maine coast, the spruce-fir woods are and I cannot follow the stream to find it. I can’t smell as thick in winter as they are in summer. The needles the ocean in the stream. There are no glinting waves hold on through the toughest months and the blowfor me to watch. downs from the storms fall between standing trees, The mountain I can see on the horizon doesn’t weaving a puzzle only the mice can solve.

As I wander, ducking branches and watching my footing, the snow squeaks under my boots, and I giggle. The wooded theater unfolds itself. Every so often I look up into the dense brush and challenge my eyes to see farther than normal. My eyesight is far duller than that of the creatures who occupy these woods. I cannot see far ahead, and resign myself to my immediate surroundings. A sudden note touches my ear. Above my head, a single chickadee calls and calls— inviting, protecting, exalting. Its call cuts through the frozen silence, the cold having already coaxed the larger animals to sleep. A sparrow alights in the same pine, suggests his own idea and is quickly silenced by the territorial chickadee. "It shivers out of its peeling bark, like a There stands a dead tree before the brook. Trying to idensoldier shaking off his tify it to species, I look stiff uniform..." closely at the bark and the pattern of the branches. Unfortunately, the tree is in a state of decay and is difficult to identify. Only eight inches in diameter at the base, it had grown tall and spread its branches wide. It was eventually eclipsed by great pine and now stands rotting in the pine’s shadow. It shivers out of its peeling bark, like a soldier shaking off his stiff uniform. Caked in mud and sweat, it falls to his ankles, and the skin born underneath finally is kissed by the sun but scorned by the wind. The tree will fall soon. Back to the soil it returns. I can’t remember a tree like this one in the woods back home. I sit and stare, sigh, and shake my head at its individuality. The snow sparkles in its hushed way. I can see mountains and pines on those mountains. I can sing those pines, but I cannot sing this "the skin born underlonesome tree. I cannot sing of those whom I neath finally is kissed do not know, not in the by the sun..." way I can of my home. I can bring my ocean to the listeners, and they can let the salt water run from their eyes, just as the brook runs to the sea. The brook and the tears roll back into the sea. They return, and I have repaid the earth what she gave me. She accepts the compassion, the salt, the water.