He had nearly died on the summit of that mountain the night before. A fierce blizzard had set in after he and mountain guide Jerome Fay reached it. A blinding deluge of snow obscured their route back, making a descent impossible.

They survived by lying on their backs, just below the summit, on a bank of “fumaroles,” fissures of hot gases escaping from the depths of the volcanic mountain.

As Muir later described it, the two men suffered “the pains of a Scandinavian hell, at once frozen and burned.”

But they survived, and by 4:00 the next afternoon had returned to the hotel and tavern operated by Justin Hinckley Sisson at the base of the mountain, near the present-day town of Mount Shasta.

Muir probably didn’t waste much time before collapsing in his bed. It was Sisson’s daughters who welcomed him back the next morning by spreading wildflowers on it.

I call this mountain region my home and enjoy exploring its trails—and its history of fascinating characters like Muir and Sisson, and stories of courage, near-death, and resourcefulness under extreme conditions. It is like reading one long adventure novel with a thin plot.

Justin Sisson himself was a notable figure, a native of Connecticut, a college-educated schoolteacher who reinvented himself when he came out West, becoming a proficient hunter, fisherman, and mountain guide—and successful innkeeper. “He knew more of the secrets of Mount Shasta than any living man,” said the San Francisco Chronicle in his 1893 obituary.

Sisson’s hotel is long gone, but you can follow the route Muir and Fay took up the mountain to the place, still known as Horse Camp, where they dismounted from their horses and continued on foot toward the summit. If you keep going to the top, you can see those fumaroles, but be aware that the weather up there can change drastically from one hour to the next. You don’t want to spend the night on them.

Recently, I did a walk on another historic trail, the one used by the horse-drawn freight wagons that supplied Sisson with the wines, liquors, and other items from San Francisco that kept his tourist mecca stocked and well-lubricated. (As many as 70 guests at a time could be accommodated in his dining hall.)

The route we followed is still known as the Sisson-Callahan Trail. Back in the freight-hauling days, it was a spur of the main wagon route that ran from the Bay Area to Oregon. The 55-mile spur started at a tiny outpost, a hotel and store, run by a rancher named M.B. Callahan.

I hiked the Sisson end of the trail, the last 10 miles, with a friend from Redding, Todd Holbrook, a search-and-rescue guy who has spent the last couple of decades finding lost hunters and hikers in the wilderness. As it turned out, we needed his skills to get us through a few places where the trail disappeared in the tall grasses of lush meadows.

For the most part Sisson’s trail goes through the canyon carved by the North Fork of the Sacramento River. Much of the trail runs high above the streambed, but there are also some stretches where it drops down right alongside the stream. Use your imagination, and you can picture thirsty horses straining at their reins, slurping a welcome drink after the long pull from Callahan.

Trails like this one, and the route up to the summit, offer us a fourth dimension, that of time and past human experience, whether it’s Muir’s near-death on the Mount Shasta summit or the more prosaic tradition of hauling goods along what is now a scenic hiking trail.

Muir’s account of his night on Mount Shasta, published in 1877 by Harper’s New Monthly magazine, is more than a great adventure story. By enriching his tale with the graceful touches of a poet and philosopher, Muir made it an adventure story for all time, embedded forever in the fourth dimension of our mountain region.

Those stories take us to the very beginnings of recreational tourism, still a vital engine for California’s remote regions, including ours. If you were to do more time-traveling and planted yourself in front of Sisson’s Hotel in 1870 to watch the decades pass, you would see the rough narrow road in front of you become a stagecoach route, with passengers dropped off right at the front door. A few decades later they’d be getting off at a nearby railroad station.

Today the original site of the old hotel is sandwiched between a two-lane frontage road known as “South Old Stage” and Interstate 5. Tourists nowadays flock to the half-dozen motels and many Airbnbs on the other side of the freeway, some of them grabbing ice picks and following the path of John Muir and Jerome Fey toward the summit.

On that night atop Mount Shasta, lying on a bed of hissing gases, Muir calmly drew out his magnifying glass and examined the “exquisitely perfect” rays of the snowflakes on his sleeve.

His thoughts soared beyond the pain and suffering of a “Scandinavian hell” and out into celestial regions that distracted and comforted him with their dazzling beauty. Despite the swirling snow above him, he had a good view of the night sky and marveled that “the mysterious star clouds of the Milky Way arched over with marvelous distinctness.”

“Every planet glowed with long lance rays like lilies within reach,” he noted.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Hiking the Mountain That Almost Killed John Muir appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s March 2020. I’m teaching at the “Club WISE” program for older adults. I’m greeted warmly by a group of six women who, I’d guess, are mostly over 65. I’m told the group may be a little smaller than who registered, “The virus is keeping some people home.”

We set out to co-create a dance to Ravel’s “Boléro.” One woman excitedly pulls the album out of her purse. We listen to it and make a dance about surrender. Afterward, I want to hug everybody—but we know it’s best not to touch. I get back in my car. It’s drizzling a little bit—that typical Southern California March “rain”—as I head to a Santa Monica dance studio to teach 12- and 13-year-olds. 

I’m busy—maybe too busy. But this is life as a dancer; it is a treadmill without an off switch. But I love the treadmill. Dancing was my lifeline growing up in an unsafe alcoholic home where I did not feel heard. Putting on “shows” in my parents’ backyard to the Grease soundtrack with my sister kept me alive. I need to dance—so I keep on dancing. 

Still, the continuous hustle weighs on me. That week, I ended up teaching 12 classes all over Los Angeles County, I danced with folx ranging from professional dancers to elementary school kids to elders in their 90s in a dance studio, memory loss facility, senior center, and the lunchroom at a facility for unhoused people. To top it off, I turned in my fifth grant submission of the year, in addition to 15 hours of rehearsal, Pilates clients, and prep for the premiere of a new performance.

Then came the lockdown. Grants, gigs, rehearsals—all of it disappeared. My show was postponed temporarily, and then, indefinitely. Those grants—what would I do without them? Nothing probably, because I couldn’t even buy toilet paper. The hustle had disappeared, except for one thing: Dance for Veterans.

In 2010, I was invited to co-create a dance program for veterans in mental health programs. My first thought was: Me? Us? Dance? Some of the veteran groups shared my initial skepticism. I’m often asked, “When are the ‘girls’ coming?” My reply is usually something like, “Well, I’m the girl, and we are all going to dance together.”

Our classes intertwine breathing, meditation, yoga, games, somatic exercises, group check-ins, and sometimes, writing and drawing. I pull from my training as a modern/contemporary dancer along with various social dances like salsa, bachata, disco, and waltzes. We improvise, play with coordination, and most importantly, collaboratively make dances inspired by a moment of joy, what we see in the room, our names and birthplaces. We perform these dances for ourselves. Emphasizing process over product became a departure for me as a choreographer who is often measured by what I get onstage.

Cut to lockdown…

“You need to unmute yourself,” I reminded the class.

So far today’s session was going pretty smoothly. I had only frozen once, my music didn’t glitch at all, and my cats stayed under the bed. Now we’ve reached my favorite point—making a dance together. Before class, one of the vets talked about all the couches she’d been seeing out for trash pickup; she guessed people were buying new couches since they were home all the time and wanted to be more comfortable. “I think we should make a dance about that today,” she suggests for our prompt. “What gives us comfort?” One veteran, while telling us about her new grandchild, pretends to rock the baby in her arms. We all do her movement back to her. The 10 students make a 10-movement comfort dance to Earth Wind & Fire’s “September.”

When we first transitioned to virtual class after a few months on hold, I was eager to reconnect but also dubious: Can I really reach seniors and superseniors—some of whom were born before the advent of television—on the internet? Many didn’t even have computers or smartphones. The online teaching I had done before the pandemic had been sterile and tedious. But despite my concerns, veterans showed up every week, men and women, ranging in ages and backgrounds.

In many ways it’s been more intimate than our in-person classes. On camera, we have seen each other’s pets, children, and grandchildren. We have made dances inspired by the precious objects spotted in our kitchens and living rooms. We’ve shared birthdays and holidays together. The week before Christmas, we made a dance about what we were moving toward in the new year. One vet jumped across his frame shouting “freedom of expression” with his arms out wide. Another stood up, walked slowly to his monitor, and bowed, saying, “I’m moving toward healing.”

My definition of the art form has always been broad and inclusive. But now I know that the transformative power of dancing and creating together can happen among people who have never met, over a glitchy telehealth system. It feels like a revelation: We can dance when we are angry, sad, happy, lonely, and tired. Our dances can be from our chairs and couches with our kids and pets. We can dance without touching, without being close and breathing the same air. And yet we create, we are vulnerable and we thrive.

I have been moved by the micro-communities that have taken hold in my virtual classes. We have collectively built resilience and found moments of celebration and social closeness. We have embodied elements of resistance—resisting what a “dancer” looks like, what a dance “should” look like. And perhaps most importantly, we have resisted the isolation and fear of this pandemic.

Just before I got my second COVID vaccine, I prompted a class by asking “what we want to let go of.” Worry, pain, and judgment were a few of the things we wanted to release in the dance.

Now, as we gingerly re-enter “public” life here in Los Angeles, I’m asking myself what is my life going to look like, and I realize I want to let go of so much: I do not want my life to go back to what it is was. I do not want to go back to the relentless hustle to barely make a living. And I don’t want to go back to the tiny, airless container that dance is often put in.

This corporeal defiance, I believe, brings about social change. If dance is this powerful—how can we now each reimagine and advance the form? What could the dancer/dance-maker/dance educator be? Can we continue to reframe the process over the product? And boldly dance for ourselves?

My colleague and friend Kai Hazelwood recently wrote an article about why she was “breaking up with dance,” which has so deeply resonated with me in this moment. In it, she writes “that transformation is the way to liberation.”

A thousand times yes to that. I don’t have the answers yet to these larger questions myself and others have been asking around dance. But I think to have questions in this moment is much more important.

One thing has become increasingly clear: I know I want my life and the lives of others to be different—to evolve. I also have an unshakeable faith that dancing and creating with others will get us there.

The post Dance Has Reached a Turning Point appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“I think I might have gotten a spider bite while sleeping,” I told the dermatologist.

He took one look and shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

It was July 15, 2020. That same day, 971 people in the U.S. reportedly died of COVID-19, which, for the moment, put my ear nuisance in perspective. But what at first appeared to be an insect bite, and then an easily cured case of skin cancer, would rapidly progress to critical stage 4 metastatic cancer.

Developing stage 4 cancer is bad; getting that diagnosis during a pandemic is even worse.

California had gone into lockdown the previous March, making even a simple trip to the dermatologist an adventure in pandemic protocols.

Even a recognized killer like cancer had to make way for COVID. The first two deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the U.S. came in early February 2020; by year end, COVID was listed as being responsible for claiming 345,323 American lives. That put COVID in third place for the year as a cause of death behind cancer, in second place, which killed 598,932 in 2020. (Heart disease remains the number one killer.)

As I waged my cancer battle in the shadow of COVID, I was reminded of the title of the Gabriel García Márquez novel Love in the Time of Cholera, and one quote in particular: “Be calm. God awaits you at the door.”

The Diagnosis: Part I

When repeated applications of Neosporin didn’t seem to help the spot on my ear, I called my internist. It would take weeks to get an office appointment, and in-person visits were discouraged because of COVID. The office aide offered a much sooner video consultation with my doctor, which she assured me would work fine for my issue.

On June 16, my internist appeared as a grainy, jumpy image on my computer screen. I turned to show him my ear, but he couldn’t see much. “You should have come in,” he said. He advised me to bring the matter up with a dermatologist.

As it happened, I had a dermatologist appointment for a routine skin examination in about a month. Actually it was a rebooked appointment, which I had gotten only after agreeing to see a new doctor. The first appointment, scheduled two months earlier, had been canceled by COVID. Perhaps if I had kept that first routine appointment, a minor abnormality might have been spotted on my ear and treated, and I would have avoided everything that followed.

When I finally arrived at the dermatologist’s office, I was met by an assistant posted outside the front door who took my temperature and asked if I had any COVID symptoms or a positive COVID test. This would be the standard procedure for doctor visits for the coming year. Once inside, the doctor gave my ear the disapproving look and then took a chunk out of it for a biopsy. It came back positive for squamous cell carcinoma.

The diagnosis was bad, but apparently not too bad. It was worse than basal cell carcinoma, one of the easiest cancers to cure, but not as bad as melanoma, the most dreaded diagnosis. If caught and treated early, squamous cell carcinoma has a 95 percent cure rate. The key was early detection and action. I had already lost several months.

The Treatment: Part I

The cure was Mohs surgery, which involves cutting out the skin cancer and some surrounding tissue to establish “clear margins” with no cancer. “Don’t worry, you’re not going to die,” the surgeon told me at our first meeting. I had never considered death as a possibility, and her reassurance had the opposite effect.

I arrived for my surgery on July 27. My wife, Susan, waited in the car in the parking lot with Bowie, our 11-pound fluffy poodle mix. The surgeon sliced some skin off my ear, put a patch over the incision, and had me wait in the car for my results. The lot was full of cars with wounded people waiting for similar call backs.

The first cut didn’t do the trick, so I had to go back inside a second time, and then a third. The parking lot slowly emptied until we were the last car left. But finally, after the third cut, the surgeon declared, “You’re cancer-free.”

I diligently followed the care instructions for the cavernous cut on my ear, but it seemed slow to heal. It had turned milky in color. Susan didn’t like the way it looked. I called the doctor, who said it was normal. About a week later, I began to feel discomfort on the right side of my neck just below my wounded ear. It got worse overnight, turning into a searing and stabbing pain with neck swelling.

The Diagnosis: Part II

When I reached the surgeon by phone, she diagnosed it as an infection at the surgery site that drained down into my neck. This sometimes happens, she explained. She prescribed an oral antibiotic and an ointment for my ear. Sure enough, I began to feel a little better and the swelling subsided somewhat. As a precaution, she referred me to an ear, nose and throat (ENT) specialist and surgeon for another opinion.

I saw him two weeks later. My neck still ached and some swelling remained. He said there was a very slight chance that the cancer had spread to the saliva gland in my neck, called the parotid gland, but this was extremely rare. He put me on another round of antibiotics.

The infection diagnosis was statistically reasonable. A cancer like mine spreads to another organ—metastasizes—in just 1-5 percent of cases.

Days passed. My ear wound refused to heal. My neck discomfort and swelling remained. “I don’t like the way this looks,” Susan kept saying.

Outside, COVID raged. We holed up at home, getting groceries and meals delivered and fearfully wiping all the surfaces with disinfectant. Inside my neck, my cancer was quietly creeping unchecked from the parotid gland to my lymph nodes.

One day, Susan developed a minor irritation in her nose, so she made an appointment with my ENT. They not only took her right away; they also let me join her in the examination room that day after we explained that I was also a patient. Up to this point, Susan had attended my appointments and diagnoses only via FaceTime.

This apparent lapse in pandemic protocol may have saved my life.

Susan’s issue was straightforward, and so the doctor turned to me to see how I was doing. Things were not getting better, I said. He took yet another look, reexplained the rare possibility that the cancer had spread, and suggested another week or so on antibiotics. Then, if my symptoms persisted, he would do a needle biopsy of the swollen area of my neck.

I was ready to accept that.

Not Susan. She had seen enough.

“Why don’t we do the biopsy now?” she said. While Susan watched, he jabbed me in the neck with a long needle and extracted several fluid samples. About a week later, we got the call: the cancer was in my neck.

What I had was a very fast-moving skin cancer that was intent on colonizing other parts of my body. If not for Susan, I might have lost several more precious weeks—and, I would learn, my life.

The Treatment: Part II

The new diagnosis changed everything. I needed major surgery, and it had to happen now—a stunning contrast to the wait-and-see attitude and in-office procedures of the previous few months. Within the hour of getting the biopsy results we had the name of a doctor at Stanford Health Care: Dr. Davud Sirjani, a highly regarded specialist in head and neck cancer surgery with particular expertise in the parotid gland.

Less than two weeks later, I was in Sirjani’s office in Palo Alto, 100 miles from our home in Monterey County.

Sirjani and two assistants crowded into the rather cramped patient room, with Susan patched in via FaceTime while she and Bowie sat in the car.

My cancer was exceptionally aggressive, he said. Initial tests indicated evidence that it had travelled beyond the parotid gland to the lymph nodes.

“We have one chance to get ahead of it,” Sirjani said. If it—stage 4 metastatic cancer—got to my lungs, he said, “There is nothing I can do.”

Sirjani bumped me to the head of the surgery line. He advised me that he would take off more than a third of the top of my ear and remove both my parotid gland and the lymph nodes on that side of my neck. The surgery would take about five hours and was fraught with possible complications. Nerves and muscles could be compromised; loss of feeling and movement were possible. I might have difficulty speaking and swallowing. And there was a chance that the surgery would not successfully remove all the cancer.

But all I could think to ask was, “I wear glasses. Will I still be able to wear them?” Sirjani said he would leave me a notch or flap of ear skin and tissue big enough to support glasses.

The day before surgery, we drove up to Stanford on Highway 101. The sparse pandemic traffic felt like a trip back in time. The pandemic lockdown was so strict that you weren’t supposed to travel outside your home county except for essential business. We checked into a nearby hotel; the lobby was eerily empty.

Before dawn on November 2, Susan dropped me at the hospital and went back to the hotel to wait with two friends who had come to support her. I probably should have been filled with trepidation. Instead, I was exceedingly calm and confident as I was sedated and wheeled into the operating room. The surgery lasted five hours.

I woke that afternoon in a hospital room bed, sutured on my ear and neck but unbandaged, and with a small drainage tube protruding from a hole in my neck to a little plastic bulb pinned to my hospital gown. Periodically emptying this bulb of pink fluid would be Susan’s unfortunate task over the coming days. The surgery had gone well, and after one night in the hospital, I was declared well enough to leave. My first night out, I slept half sitting up in bed, afraid of pulling the tube out of my neck.

Over the next week, I slept a lot and stumbled around the house with that drainage tube sticking out of my neck. At my follow-up a week later, Sirjani removed the tube from my neck and said the initial results of the surgery were very good.

He had cut off half my ear and removed about three pounds of tissue from my neck. He half-joked that he had pulled the skin on my neck so tight while putting me back together that I had gotten half a facelift. But one lymph node was not fully intact when he removed it, indicating the cancer could have escaped into nearby tissue. My anticipated radiation regimen would become more intensive as a result.

My five-days-a-week, six-week radiation course began a month later with the creation of my “mask,” a white plastic mesh covering formed to my head, neck, and shoulders. The radiologist drew target areas on my mask so technicians could aim the beams accurately. For treatment, I would don the mask and lie back on the radiation table, clamped in place. Then a technician, working from a secure booth, would line up the giant radiation wheel suspended on a mechanical arm above me and set in motion a program that had the device zap me in precise locations with precise doses.

In early December, Susan, Bowie, and I started our new routine. We would drive up to Palo Alto on Monday morning, stay in a hotel through Thursday night, and drive home Friday after my treatment. Radiation appointments were always completely booked, and I was repeatedly admonished not to be late to keep everyone else on schedule. COVID had the power to empty highways of traffic, but it could not slow down the cancer treatment assembly line.

My daily visits to a medical facility used by hundreds of workers and patients made the possibility of contracting COVID a constant concern. I masked religiously, washed my hands regularly, gave others a wide berth. In the radiation waiting room, seats were suitably distanced, but I eyed other patients warily, and they did the same. Anyone who coughed got a distressed glance.

Courtesy of the author.

But even as California became the epicenter of the post-holiday COVID surge, I stayed healthy through my last radiation treatment on January 15. I lost weight, and the radiation left me with what looked like a terrible sunburn on the right side of my neck and jaw, but that went away. Susan hung my radiation mask on the wall, adorned with several decorative lapel pins. It has the look of an odd piece of modern art, but one with special significance for us.

I spent the next months eating healthy, exercising, and trying to regain lost weight. On April 29, I had a follow-up MRI. The results were exactly what we had hoped for: no evidence of active cancer.

Returning to Normal

As radiation was eradicating the last remaining vestiges of cancer from my neck, scientists were completing their race to cure COVID. On December 11, the FDA approved the Pfizer vaccine. A week later, Moderna’s vaccine got the nod.

Susan and I got our first jabs on February 5 and the second on March 5. Businesses began reopening, and we ventured out to restaurants for the first time in nearly a year. We went to a dinner party for 10 at a friend’s house in May where all the guests had been vaccinated.

A curious pattern began to emerge in conversations. Questions about how I was doing invariably were followed by stories about someone else who had cancer. Suddenly, cancer seemed to be everywhere, or perhaps it always had been, but I had never really noticed before.

Susan ran into a friend on the street whom she hadn’t seen in a long time. The friend blurted out that she had been battling stage 4 cancer.

A friend related that both her parents died of cancer during the past year while COVID raged. So did her dog.

Another friend said she was glad to hear how well I was doing, and by the way, her mother had stage 4 cancer.

A work colleague’s wife had a setback in her battle with breast cancer.

A friend’s mother had ovarian cancer and was taking shark cartilage as an alternative treatment.

A close friend caught COVID while undergoing chemotherapy. She had to fight both metastatic breast cancer and COVID. She eventually died of cancer. At her request, I wrote her obit.

Before my diagnosis, Susan’s brother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that ultimately killed him. She was unable to travel across the country to be with him because of the pandemic.

I noticed that the mention of cancer triggers a similar reaction in nearly everyone: a reverential tone tinged with a sort of background fear. The universal message is that cancer can strike anyone and it is not a disease to trifle with.

What has been curious to me about COVID is that it didn’t garner the same level of universal respect. Almost from the start, some people questioned its ferocity and whether all the precautions were necessary—or worth the economic cost. Even free vaccines promising to cut the risk of infection rates by 90 percent have met resistance; according to polling, 1 in 5 Americans say they won’t get vaccinated. I wonder if some people would also resist a cancer vaccine. Having had a taste of the disease, I know I would be first in line.

Of course, a universal vaccine for cancer remains well out of scientific reach. There are more than 100 different types of cancer. I intend to keep a wary eye on COVID while striving to avoid another cancer encounter in the future. My new cancer strategy includes several lifestyle changes based on various recommendations: a plant-based diet, avoidance of sugar and dairy, more exercise, and mindfulness activities (I started qigong).

Pandemics come and go. Cancer abides.

The post Fighting Cancer During COVID Taught Me About Our Strange Relationship With Disease appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I am the first-born daughter, the middle child, who was called Sweet Pea, Mama-Daddy, and Peanie. Naming is very important in the Black community. The act of naming is a great power, reminding each of us how to find one’s voice and how to define, and redefine oneself. Children’s nicknames suggest characteristics that relatives have observed, or into which they believe young people will grow; these can serve as the foundation of your identity.

Sweet Pea is my father’s endearing recognition of the energy and life-giving traits of the legume and the preciousness of the flower. My most important name, my official birth-given name, is Olga. It means “Holy One of God” in Russian, and when spelled backward, it is “A Glo.” I like to amuse myself by thinking my identity is somewhere between God’s holiness and the quality of illuminating others, but I know the real foundation is that I am my father’s daughter.

By association and genetics, that also means I am my paternal grandfather’s granddaughter. His name was Jason, and everyone, family included, addressed him as his professional name, Dr. Sneed. I never had the chance to meet him, but, hearing so much about him, I held him in awe. I grew interested in whatever connections he and I may have had. Many Black families are searching to know the history of their ancestors. And, for the past 26 years, I’ve been searching—as a scholar and as our family’s unofficial cultural historian—for my grandfather.

Born in 1877, Dr. Sneed attended the first medical school for aspiring Blacks in the medical profession in the South, Meharry Medical School in Nashville, Tennessee, at the turn of the 20th century. To date, my grandfather and I are the sole ancestral linkages to degree-granting achievement in the professional rank of doctor. His, a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.). Mine, a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.).

For years, I had wondered what this other doctor was like, and why family members and relatives eluded my questions about him. As a child, I was told, “Don’t ever ask your father about your grandfather.” Being the precocious child I was, that was the very question I wanted to ask.

While completing my doctoral degree in human communication from the University of Nebraska in 1994, I had to decide on a topic for my dissertation research. I pondered for a long time, and was considering the study of the emancipatory persona of Black female slave narratives. In the course of my indecision, I mentioned my dilemma to my father, who finally gave me my opening. “Why don’t you write about Tulsa?” he asked. “There’s a lot of history there, and history about our family that you don’t know about.”

Cautiously, I approached the topic with which I was most unfamiliar. Still, I proceeded. “Um, Daddy, what was Grandfather like?”

He was silent, then responded. “Your grandfather was a fine man, dapper, one of the first Black physicians in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and a social activist. He spoke out against Jim Crow segregation and organized people when he was supposed to be silent. He was taken away to prison, and we lost him to lynching.”

He then paused for what seemed like a lifetime before he said, “You know, I’m 70 years old, and I still miss my father.”

Somewhere between the pain of that statement and the unheard tears of my father as he quickly hung up under the guise of a “bad phone connection,” I knew I had to locate Tulsa within me.

Over the next few years, I would spend research time in Tulsa and in Oklahoma City, mostly during summers, reading files, microfiche records, and turn-of-the-century newspapers at historical societies and libraries, and interviewing men and women who would have been my grandfather’s contemporaries.

I learned that, after graduating from medical school, my grandfather relocated to Tulsa and established his medical practice. He was part of a larger migration in the early decades of the 20th century of forward-thinking, progressive Black business owners. Buoyed by the booming American oil industry, they established a presence in African Creek towns, such as Muskogee, and newly established Black towns, such as Boley, Langston, and Rentiesville, and began building community, establishing education for their young people, and growing their businesses. Those early settlers dreamed of a Black economic blueprint that would serve as a model for other Black towns and communities across the country. My grandfather, and other men and women like him who represented Black excellence in education, entrepreneurship, and business acumen, wanted to redefine the pathway of opportunity, success, and citizenship for Black people.

One result was the thriving North Tulsa business community known as “Greenwood” or “Negro Wall Street.” My grandfather’s medical practice—at the corner of Greenwood and Pine Streets—was just one of the businesses that filled approximately 40 blocks. There were shops, hotels, dental offices, a hospital, a library, theaters, barber and beauty salons, grocery and millinery establishments, and more. But with this newfound prosperity came hostility, fear, and jealousy by whites, leading to the Tulsa Race Riot/Massacre of 1921.

The search for identity is an ongoing search for myself within the shadows of a people who have struggled, resisted, and survived the racial, economic, and social intolerance of Black life in America. My research has guided me–not as a canine sniffs out a bone, but as a motherless child searches for an unknown parent, or as a veteran returning from war looks for that which will make them whole—toward the inclusivity of community. It’s that very inclusivity that the Tulsa Race Massacre sought to destroy during three days of pillaging, aerial bombing, and destruction by white mobs of the community my grandfather helped build. The reported death toll was 300, but many more lost their lives, homes, and livelihoods, while a host of Black bodies unaccounted for were dumped in unmarked graves.

When the Tulsa Race Massacre is mentioned now, it is spoken as something of the past, an event to be memorialized, as it has been this past week. But not everyone agrees on how to do so, or why. Until recently, even the name of the event failed to narrate it accurately: the Tulsa Race Riot, now known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. The term riot, in America, is often imagined as being linked to the idea of a violent Black presence, of Black bodies perpetually defined and affected by violence. In the context of Tulsa, however, riot reveals an enactment of white bodies representing the violent embrace of white racial domination. Here, the violence was solely perpetrated on Black Tulsan landowners, families, and businesses by whites. The term riot fails to capture the essence of brutality and attempted obliteration of those two days. The term massacre suggests the attempt at genocide, of wiping away the Black community of Tulsa and sending a message that a Black economic infrastructure in the U.S. would not be tolerated.

In February 2001, a Tulsan complained in the local newspaper, Tulsa World, “The Tulsa race riot is history you read about it, you learn from it, then move on.” But, what does it mean to move on? What about the stories of survivors, and how they overcame the haunting memories of burning homes, bombed businesses, and charred corpses lying in the streets of the once-booming Black business community? What about their descendants, grappling with generational trauma, like my father and me?

The account of my grandfather’s experience of living through the Tulsa Race Massacre has been told by my aunt, the late Willie Mae Thompson, respectfully known in the community as “Aunt T” and mother of Morning Star Baptist Church. Her most prominent memory was of my grandfather being “tagged” so as not to be killed but rather identified as one who could pass the restrictions of the local white militia. They allowed my grandfather, as a medical professional, a physician, to comb the streets of Greenwood to identify the dead Black bodies from the living ones. Imagine what he must have undergone, surrounded by charred remains and smoldering embers. Imagine the horrifying reality of identifying neighbors, former patients, church members, and young children he may have delivered in birth.

After those days of violence, the Black community was relegated to tents constructed by the Red Cross. They held on to their faith—a faith in God and in community that would create a spirit of endurance, a strength within that gave way to organizing, regrouping, and still attempting to rebuild—in spirit, in community, in memory. Resilience is a term often characterized by the ability to bounce back, to not give up, to refuse defeat. That was the character of these powerful, disciplined, courageous, and defiant people of North Tulsa and of the Greenwood business district.

Dr. Sneed’s death took place in the aftermath of the Massacre. I don’t know much more than what my father told me all those years ago, including exactly when he died. My research is a continual unfoldment of the story of my grandfather’s life, leading me on a path of deeper exploration and inquiry into reconciliation, reparative justice, and accountability.

The survivors of the Race Massacre are often thought of as a group—a sorrowful, pitiful group, dead, buried, and forgotten. Yet their accounts, told by some who are still living (a number that can be counted on one hand today), are narrative discourses—stories—that reveal lives of courage and love, struggle and resistance, pain and despair, and transcendence and hope for future generations of the Tulsa community and of African American communities at-large. The late Mrs. Mabel B. Little, a Race Massacre survivor at the time of my interview in 1996, was a successful business woman who owned a beauty salon in the Greenwood district. She offered this reflection in an oral history published in 2002, which captured the essence of the brilliance of Greenwood and the challenge of its remembrance:

We have lost our memory as a people, so that we have no clear vision of our future. We have lost our sense of direction, if not our sense of purpose. We’re going to have to return to the past to see where we have been so we can know where we are going; not to get bogged down in the past, but to use the past as a springboard to a new and as yet unimagined future. We must take the best of the past and leave the rest alone.

Acknowledging Mrs. Little’s admonition, I will keep snooping, digging, and finding myself in the Tulsa narratives of Black bodies’ lived experience while I continue the search for my grandfather, and to illuminate public memory of the continuum of struggle and resistance of African American life in the United States.

What I have learned is to be vigilant, and to embrace a culture of resilience established by the Black Tulsans in Greenwood in the telling of the story so that none will ever again forget nor fail to be taught and told.

The post Searching for My Grandfather and the Tulsa in Me appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Originally from Alabama, a state with no shortage of divides, I have lived all over the world—four continents and counting. But I have never experienced a society so divided over the very nature of reality. As a country, Ukraine has seen three revolutions in the last quarter century, which has left an indelible emotional stamp on the inhabitants that manifests itself in unpredictable and creative ways on a daily basis. Spending much of my time here, I always feel like I am teetering between overbearing collectivism and out-of-control individualism, between the past and the present, and between Ukraine and a Russia that constantly meddles in internal politics.

With this uneasy reality as a backdrop, Ukraine struggles with COVID. After three quarantines and lockdowns and one of the highest infection rates in Europe, Kyiv is split between those who will wear their masks and think of their fellow citizens, and those who behave as if they are immune from the ravages of the virus, and call mask requirements an infringement of their rights. People here openly say that COVID is nothing more than a mass government attempt to control our minds.
 
Such attitudes, combined with Russian disinformation campaigns, have plunged public support for vaccinations here to record lows. Politicians have gained attention by playing on these public fears that vaccinations are unsafe; some fear is rational. Fake COVID tests have become commonplace, and many people see the haves vaccinating themselves, while the have-nots struggle to survive. At the current vaccination rate, Ukraine’s population of 43 million won’t be immune until 2030!
 
As an American living here, people assume two things about me: that I have money, and that I have some magical power to secure visas to the U.S., which became increasingly difficult to get during the Trump Presidency. My daily routine, when I am on the streets, involves explaining just how powerless we Americans really are in navigating the bureaucracy.
 
I have mostly avoided crowds during the quarantine. Rather than take mass transit, when I need to get around, my preference is to walk. A beautiful city on the surface, Kyiv’s infrastructure is a fragile and deteriorating holdover from the Soviet era. Gig companies like Uber prosper because you cannot count on the metro or the buses. I find it is easier—and often faster—to cover Kyiv on foot, given its terrible traffic jams.
 

Each morning, I walk to my favorite breakfast place, while watching the social structure of this city that was a Soviet Union gem until 1994 play out on the dilapidated streets of the city. One can’t help but notice the unusual number of Bentleys and high-end Mercedes Benzes speeding by, driving as if no laws can constrain them, next to the 30-year-old Russian-made Ladas that meander slowly, carrying their occupants to their jobs in the concrete jungle of Soviet-era office buildings. Likely, 75 percent of the cars I will see on my morning walk are from the U.S., totaled for insurance purposes with no chance of a life on the streets of most American cities. But given the horrendously low salaries of even Kyiv’s best and brightest, this is the only way to afford a dependable and respectable car in the country, since new cars are simply financially out of reach.

No matter the driver or quality of the car, one must watch carefully crossing the street, since the green man signaling that it is safe to walk bears no semblance to reality. Cars here are notorious for ignoring traffic lights, and in a city where parking on sidewalks is the norm, pedestrians are simply viewed as the equivalent of a cockroach that must be crushed when they get in the way.

The Sikorsky Family home, Kyiv. Photo by M. Dane Waters.

I won’t disclose the name of where I eat my breakfast since, like many establishments in the city, it has put paper in the windows so as not to be seen as open for business during quarantine. I see the same papering-over when I go by the gym, try to get a haircut, or stop by a local store or mall.

This quasi-openness, especially of the restaurants for their regular customers, is possible because the local police reportedly receive a bribe to look the other way—most of the time just from the restaurant owner, but occasionally some overzealous officers target the patrons as well. In some cases, the show of law enforcement at a restaurant is not because of violations of the quarantine, but simply a continuation of the culinary war in the city between the restaurants backed by either a Russian or Ukrainian oligarch. But regardless of who the owner is, it must be noted that the quality of the food in Kyiv is some of the best in Europe. That fact alone warrants a trip to Kyiv and the occasional intrusion of a mafia-related culinary conflict.

The Russian and Ukrainian mafias here operate collaboratively—though when at odds, they have no problem showing their unhappiness with the people being the sacrificial pawns in the conflict. Wealthy oligarchs fund both legal and illegal enterprises, and toy with Ukraine’s future prospects, sometimes aligning with Europe to the West, and sometimes with Russia to the East, depending on what is best for their political and financial interests.
 
Prior to the pandemic, tourism to Kyiv was on the rise due to its close proximity to Chernobyl—the site of one of the worst nuclear power plant disasters the world has seen. Day trips to Chernobyl were easy from Kyiv, and the numbers were increasing daily given the success of the HBO series by the same name. The Chernobyl disaster, only 60 miles from Kyiv, could have wiped out this city of millions if the wind had simply been blowing in a different direction the week of the explosion. Chernobyl continues to be a gift from Russia that keeps giving: It has not only cost the country and the world billions of dollars to contain, but Ukrainians west of Chernobyl continue to experience cancer-related deaths at a higher rate than anywhere else in the country to this day because of the deadly radiation cloud from the disaster.
 
But Ukrainians are strong in will and spirit. They are some of the most adaptable to challenges that I have seen, having continued to be put through trials that show their resilience and desire to survive—from Stalin starving 10 million Ukrainians to death in the Terror-Famine of 1932 to the Revolution of Dignity, which took place in Maidan in the heart of Kyiv in 2014. This revolution pitted everyday Ukrainians—men, women, and children—against Putin-supported President Viktor Yanukovych. Before it was over, a hundred civilians in the city had been killed by Russian-trained snipers. But many argue that this revolution was what finally set the country on a path toward full Europe integration.
 
Since the revolution, Maiden has become the true heart of this sprawling capital city. It has been the major place for the citizens to hang out during the three COVID quarantines the city has imposed during the pandemic. It is a great place to find strength to weather the growing economic and emotional challenges caused by the seemingly never-ending pandemic.

While I want to believe COVID is in its waning days here, belief is no more a protection against COVID’s spread than hanging pieces of paper in your restaurant’s windows is. Eating my breakfast of eggs, potatoes, and the occasional vatrushka behind a thin piece of brown paper, I can temporarily forget the reality of the situation, but it’s reawakened when I hear another ambulance siren that is likely carrying a COVID patient to the hospital.

It’s a stark reminder of our obligation to the health and safety of each other. The best way to rid Kyiv—and the rest of Ukraine—from this deadly virus is to recognize the importance of keeping our fellow Kyiv residents safe by respecting the quarantines, the basics of wearing masks, social distancing, and washing our hands. But is it possible to get a place so divided culturally and politically that we no longer have shared realities to agree on this? Let’s hope!

The post A Letter From Kyiv, Where Reality Is Being Papered Over appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As a popular retelling of the myth goes, Persephone is picking flowers with her friends near a lake when suddenly the earth splits open and Hades, in his golden chariot, emerges and snatches her away, ferrying her down to the underworld, where she becomes his unwilling queen. Sensing something amiss, Persephone’s mother, Demeter, calls her daughter’s name, but to no avail. She only finds scattered petals floating on the lake’s surface. Raging across the Earth in her search of her daughter, the goddess brings the first winter to mankind as punishment for Persephone’s disappearance. Zeus, ultimately realizing that the world will perish if Demeter doesn’t get her daughter back, eventually returns Persephone to her mother. But because Persephone mistakenly ate four pomegranate seeds while she was in the underworld, she must return to Hades for a third of every year, forever.

The story of Persephone is used to explain the cycle of the seasons. Fall and winter each year is understood to be the time when Persephone descends into the underworld, and the emergence of spring and summer signals her return to her mother and the world of the living. But the story is also about motherhood and the necessary pain of letting a child go so that she can fully become herself. You could argue this process begins the second a child is born, as being born is the first real separation from the mother, the first rupture that informs the many ruptures and subsequent repairs in the mother-child relationship.

A wise friend reminded me of this soon after I gave birth to my daughter, Lucia. We need to prepare ourselves to let them go, she said, so they can leave and forge their own paths. This, my friend argued, is the true work of motherhood. Our children are only guests in our houses. “It’s like holding a baby bird,” she told me. “Too tight and you crush her. Not close enough and she flies away too soon, unprotected. Hold her with the knowledge of future flight.”

I thought about her words as I soaked up listless afternoons singing to my baby, pacing the bedroom and rocking her in my arms while I stared out at the palm trees and the flat blue line of ocean, the amniotic feeling of oneness coursing between us, as if we were still intertwined by blood and fluid, multiplying cells and placental tissue. It seemed impossible that Lucia would grow up and separate from me, leading a life that didn’t necessarily include me, the Persephone to my Demeter. But who knew, she might even shun everything that I had taught her.

Having Lucia made me more aware of how the myth of Demeter and Persephone had informed my relationship with my own mother. My parents divorced when I was 7, and afterward, I ping-ponged back and forth between their houses. On Sunday nights, I would pack up my duffle to be reunited with my mother after a week apart, or to leave her again. The persistent cycle of rupture and reunification put me on familiar terms with the pain of maternal separation. I was always highly aware of my own distress over my living arrangements. Now a mother myself, I could more fully imagine my own mother’s heartache as she became Demeter, the grieving mother, who had to let her daughter go every week, forever.

But my mother’s devotion to herself, and to her own professional and spiritual path, also primed me to not abandon my own years of study and work. When Lucia was born, I was in the middle of my graduate studies, with coursework, a looming dissertation, and an unfinished novel hanging in the balance. My mother had always told me to finish my Ph.D., no matter what. But six weeks after giving birth, I didn’t know if I would ever write again; I remember telling my academic advisor that I feared motherhood had swallowed me whole. You will write again, she told me calmly, just give it time.

It took about four more months for me to come around, and realize that I wanted—and needed—to return to my studies. I found a babysitter to watch my daughter. The woman smelled of starch and talked too much, and Lucia wailed the minute she picked her up, but eventually calmed. I got into my car that first morning with still-wet hair, determined to drive to work, determined to leave behind those yawning days of closeness, with all of their intensity and boredom, just for a handful of hours. I repeated under my breath: The baby is a guest in my house; she’s a guest in my house.

I gripped the steering wheel, for a time unable to actually drive away, unable to move, so overcome with guilt and longing for my daughter, overcome by the separation that was occurring then, and by all the future separations we would endure to fully become ourselves. But I did it. I drove away—that day, and the day after, and the day after that, until the pain dulled and became routine, until it became part of me. The sight of my daughter happy, clean, and well-fed greeted me upon my return at the end of each day, and I held her again, inhaled her milky soapy scent, my heart contracting, knowing no greater relief than this.

I poured all the pain, guilt and fear tangled up in our daily partings into a novel—the tale of a mother separated from her daughter by war, who rages, grieves, and searches for her daughter amid the ruins of postwar France. I heard my mother’s voice, telling me to keep writing, to keep going, that separating from the all-encompassing demands of domesticity was imperative to creating art.

Lucia is 10 now, and I also have a son who is eight. My book is completed and published. But I will never forget the pain of that initial separation, and all the subsequent ones that followed. Our family has been pushed together again these last 14 months, trapped in the enforced closeness of COVID-19, with its lack of normal boundaries and separations. This time together has been a joyful gift, but it’s also been a strange suffocation. It has been infantilizing for my children to be tucked so tightly under my wing again, as I anxiously monitor their every move, from school Zoom meetings to walks around the block. It is time, again, to step away.

Recently, just after her 10th birthday, Lucia put her arms around me and announced that she was really going to miss me. She said this with a knowing sadness, as though her leaving was inevitable and imminent. “When I’m a teenager, which is just a few years away, I’m moving into my own apartment,” she said, a glimmer of mischief and delight in her eye. We joked about it, and I held her tight. I envisioned her tearing down the Pacific Coast Highway on a Harley, desperate to cross the border into adulthood while I raced after her on my own motorcycle, determined to stay in her rearview mirror, wherever she went.

Sometimes I fantasize that I will keep Lucia close, like the mother in the children’s book Runaway Bunny, who vows to follow her baby bunny no matter how far afield the baby bunny tries to go. But I also hope that I will release her into the world with the same confidence and trust my own mother offered to me. Of course Lucia is dreaming of escape. We all are. This past year was stolen from her, and from all our children. Her world became as small as a pomegranate seed; its seasons, disrupted. The winter when Persephone separates from her mother, descending into the underworld where she discovers her own autonomy, evaporated into a seemingly eternal quarantine summer of togetherness without reprieve.

After 13 months sequestered at home, my children finally returned to in-person school last week. Because the virus is still a threat and classrooms can’t be full, it’s a hybrid setup. We separate for three hours each morning and then come back together again.

It felt strange that first morning to drop them off and watch them disappear into their classrooms, echoing that morning long ago when I first left Lucia in the care of someone else, crying in my car, white-knuckling the steering wheel. But as I stood on the empty school lawn, I realized that we’ve always been doing this, like Demeter and Persephone, and we will continue to do this: letting each other go so we can come back together again.

The post The Story of Demeter and Persephone Taught Me the True Work of Motherhood appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There is no one to call, really, so I post my note to Facebook:

Please pray for me. I’m in more pain than I can handle. I don’t know if I’m gonna make it.

Making mental health confessions online is a risk, especially when you’re a woman, and brown. I expect nothing, but the responses come in fast. I wonder why all of these people with spouses and children and careers and weekend plans are on Facebook on a Friday at 10 p.m.

You’ve got this.
I’ve been there.
Sending love. Three pink hearts.

Thoughts and prayers are abundant tonight, and I turn away from my laptop before someone can tell me, This too shall pass.

It takes several calls from a police officer friend, a bear-sized swimmer with a wife and young daughter, who refuses my No, I don’t want to bother you and just shows up at my door for an intervention and a ride to the emergency room.

At 4 a.m., anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds in hand, he and I return from the hospital to Brighton Beach. We head straight to the boardwalk overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

The wind whips at our faces. I am freezing, and spent. There is no hope.

But there is the sea.

Several summers before, I began swimming with the Coney Island Brighton Beach Open Water Swimmers, a ragtag group of elites and amateurs in various stages of midlife crisis and recovery. But it took until that wretched winter of waiting out my misery for me to finally join them in the cold season. As the sun set too early and rose too late, I let the frigid water shake me out of my suffering, beyond misery and inertia, beyond me.

It requires a certain kind of madness to strip out of winter clothing into a bikini and bare feet on the cold sand. There are no wetsuits here, and no lifeguards. To confront the chill, I wear suits in neon colors, like Sunkist orange and key lime green. Two crimson red silicone caps stretch over my scalp, forehead, and ears, which are plugged with wax, making me look like a skull-sucking sea creature. Cold water neutralizes age and gender. I have body dysmorphia, like most American women, and it normally takes me a while to get comfortable baring my belly. But vanity serves no purpose here. As the winter grinds on and the water temperature drops below 45 degrees, I add a neoprene cap, gloves, and synthetic booties to the mix—the latter at the urging of my 59-year-old friend who explains they will protect my feet when they’re too numb to feel shells cutting into them.

There is little organization among the five or ten of us who show up on weekends, bundled in snow gear. The city prohibits ocean swimming once beaches are officially closed for Labor Day. Each of us is out for herself, though we keep eyes on the bright caps in the water, just in case someone needs to call an ambulance.

It helps that my compatriots, like me, are a bunch of compassionate lunatics, oddballs, and survivors: Sil beat prostate cancer. Capri just had her guts re-sected. Bob was an alcoholic, though he hardly ever talks about it. Sharon converted to Judaism in her forties. Jane’s daughter, Leonora, was killed by a drunk driver. Everyone’s got something to face down, to reckon with, to confess or cry to the water.

Photo courtesy of Hsi-Ling Chang.

On this Sunday, while most New Yorkers are still under blankets in bed, I walk past Russian families looking on in disbelief, dodging broken bottles and mustering toward the waves like a naked fighter: shoulders back, chest open, wide steps. You don’t face the elements with your head down unless you want to lose. The first step is nothing; 42-degree water feels like relief when it’s 20 degrees outside and the wind is whipping against you. But with another step, the skin around my ankles protests.

What no one tells you about swimming in the ocean during this bleak season is that the cold burns. It is made of blades. It stings, and cuts. The air bites like a hungry wolf, and on windy days like this one, sand roars from sea to shore, whips into the skin, lashes at eyes and fills goggles. I’ve never been more thankful for the few extra pounds around my midriff and thighs: Skinny doesn’t survive long here. The core is the only thing that remains warm in the water, and even then, not for very long.

But there is a place beyond the burn. I have to want to get there so badly that I keep going. The muscles and fat on my thighs take to the cold better than my bony heels. But the soft space between my legs cringes as I walk forward, my belly sharply contracts, and my collarbones leap upward trying to keep my breasts, lungs and heart from being submerged. I gasp but try not to scream because it will only remind me of how much I hurt. Instead I lean into the surging sea the way a soldier compels her body toward bullets, until my chest and collarbones are underwater and the only thing left above the surface is my head.

If there is really a me, that thing which suffers more than I can bear, it is this stubborn organ inside my skull, with its endless thoughts and feelings. I try to short-circuit its activity with each shallow breath I take. Too often, my brain has let me down. Failed neurotransmitters. Dysfunctional serotonin. Frazzled nerves. Fighting, fleeing, and freezing on over drive.

When I attempt to pull my face below the surface of the ocean, my brain rebels once more. No, not a chance in hell. Get me out of here.

Frustrated, I try again, gently, to override it. My face is all pins and needles, ice picks stabbing my cheeks and forehead and chin. I have never been so conscious of my body and all of its exposed pieces. Each responds. Each cries out for attention. Each is alive, or acts as though it wants to be.

I know I must move in order to generate enough heat to survive the cold. Straining my neck and upper back, I breast stroke with my head above water. My chest is trying to shrink. My toes and fingers are wailing for blood. My body wants to shut down.

Let it throw its tantrum. I command myself to breathe. Deeply, slowly, I do.

Finally, I plunge my face in the water, and I reach, elbow high, stroking, one, two, three, west toward empty rollercoasters, the Wonder Wheel, and hot dog stands that will remain closed for many months to come. I turn my face to the right for a breath, and see a stretch of old buildings and the expanse of sky over my body.

I place my face back in the burning sea, and exhale with force. I reach. I stroke. I breathe left. A wave passes over my head, chilling my skull. I reach. I stroke. I breathe right. I am cold, and burning, and warm, and tingling. I am scared. I breathe left. I am afraid to die. I am brave. I don’t fear dying. I breathe right. I feel everything. I am alive.

Being fearless is not an option. Testing my limits and ego, one January swim I stay in one minute more, and then another. When my feet step on sand again, they feel like they are on fire. It’s not pins-and-needles as much as full-on arson.

My friend Hsi-Ling, the resident kung fu expert, silently watches me exit the sea and approach my towel. My speech comes out slurred, as if the words have congealed.

After a few tries, I say, “My feet are on fi-re.”

I must look terrified. Hsi-Ling says, calmly, “Put your socks on.”

Over the next several weeks, as the ocean temperature descends toward freezing, my post-swim routine becomes crucial. Every few seconds of wasted energy means the loss of vital body heat, and a rapid, imperceptible slide toward hypothermia.

As it turns out, I do not want to die.

I trip toward land, dripping salt water and shedding my gear as I go, clutching caps and goggles in my hand extra hard, so I do not lose them as I shiver. To avoid falling over, I sit down on my towel and start from the bottom; thick socks matter most, followed by long underwear (panties are unnecessary for survival), then another layer of pants. Nothing with buttons, or zippers, if I can help it. Boots that slip on.

It’s not graceful. It’s a mess of trying to stay still while gripping fabric in the nubs of my hands, punching fists and kicking soles where I think there are sleeves and pantlegs. All of my limbs are vibrating. Sand sticks to exposed areas and forms a thick, itchy layer between my skin and my clothing. With my lower half concealed from the wind, I tug at the knot and remove my wet bikini top with a flourish, exposing my breasts without caring who sees. Water drips down my spine. I don as many shirts and sweatshirts as can fit beneath my jacket, force my numb stumps after several tries into mittens, and cover my icy wet head in a hat and hood. A thermos of hot ginger tea tastes like manna, but it is never enough. The ocean has worked her way down to my bones, and my body needs to fast-track warmth.

Hsi-Ling has taught me to high kick like a communist soldier in parade formation—which, because I am no Rockette, takes almost as much energy as burning through the water. When I tire of doing them, I jog where the water meets the sand. My lungs feel as though they are being stepped on by a steel plate. But my knees, still numb, relish the movement without pain. I run around a group of shivering swimmers, and can’t help giggling, knowing I look like a crazed Pillsbury Doughboy in all of my layers, barely able to shuffle my arms up and down. When the cold persists, I drop to the sand for push-ups. When that is not enough, I attempt burpees.

It takes an hour of this calisthenic circus for the iciness to thaw from my core and limbs, though the freeze stays in my toes, my belly, my nipples, for several hours.

When I finally take the subway back home, huddled and dozing in a corner of the train, I am blissful. Serene.

I encounter my cranky old father as I dump my sandy backpack on the floor of my apartment. He wants to ask me why I do such crazy things.

He expects me to protest but my gentle smile disarms his lecture, and he attempts one as well.

A hot shower feels too luxurious. I keep it lukewarm, and short.

I fall asleep hard with sand still in my hair, without dreams, or nightmares.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> The Biting Cold of Open-Water Swimming appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was born and raised here, in this peninsula of unceded Ohlone land developed into a golden imperial city—the redwood empire—that now holds brightly colored homes and skyscrapers amidst its dramatic hillsides.

Mount Davidson is the first place I would visit anytime I moved back from elsewhere—Washington, Malmö, Lahore. And it’s where I go when a million things are happening: pandemics, wars, labor strikes, racism, planetary disasters, homophobia, heartbreaks. Mount Davidson is where I come to try to make sense of the world and orient myself.

The trailhead is located just south of the geographic heart of the city. It lies behind the bus stop—a small, worn down shelter with graffiti scrawled on the thick glass enclosing its backside. The stop services the 36 bus line, which is the one I rode home from my high school across town in the avenues, the third and final transfer before finally winding uphill into my residential neighborhood.

Courtesy of Talib Jabbar.

These days, I ignore the signs near the entrance, having read them hundreds of times: coyote warnings, a brief history of the park’s land transfer, and a list of rules for you and your dogs posted by the San Francisco Recreation and Parks. The signs act as markers of a threshold, a portion of the park being privately owned land for public use, infringing upon common notions of ownership—what’s mine is yours is ours.

The trail itself is a designated dirt path bounded mostly by blue gum eucalyptus trees, their unmistakable smell lingering like dried tea leaves. By the time I’ve gotten ten feet onto the trail, I leave the city—its bus routes, its paved schema.

The initial climb is in the midst of that wooded patch that wraps around the majority of the hill. It’s a steep incline but I’m used to it. I ignore the burn in my calves and instead focus on the foliage of tiny blue wildflowers, poppies, hog fennel, and those wild red berries my childhood friend told me were poisonous, so my sisters and I never dared eat them. I wonder if it was a childish deceit, but I still don’t dare eat them.

As I continue on, I hear the singsong of birds, the whisking of the wind through the tops of trees, a dog in the distance; all accompaniments to the fusing of urban and wooded. When I near the top of the first incline, I’m met with the first view of the city’s skyline, and it thrills me to see the built world from that hilltop set within a forest. In that way the space feels like a paradox, something liminal between reason and spirit.

The houses that line the roads leading upward appear stacked on top of one another, a palimpsest of architectural modes that defined entire epochs—as Dickens might say, it was the best of styles, the worst of styles.

I advance further and make it to the clearing. The large fallen tree is still there with its roots exposed on the northern side of the slope. Its thick branches are smoothed over now like giant antelope horns. Behind it is the most visible of landmarks, Sutro Tower. A still functioning radio tower—big, American-red-white-and-blue—it blinks like a north star for city-goers from the North, East, and South. Adolph Sutro, who is survived by several eponymous landmarks, recruited laborers and schoolchildren as arborists to plant eucalyptus and pine all along the western sides of this urban mountain.

Courtesy of Talib Jabbar.

From the clearing I can see all three bodies of water spilling into one another around the peninsula. The San Francisco Bay, dotted with cargo ships, extends southernly around the San Bruno mountains while the Golden Gate strait pokes out from behind the Twin Peaks that block the view of the famed suspension bridge. Westward, you can make out the edge of the sea, a roaring, watery border that is the geographic and temporal end of the contiguous United States. It looks calm from up here.

I can see the foam riding atop crested waves and imagine them washing soundlessly onto the shore of Ocean Beach, where I once had bonfires with my friends in middle school. It’s also the beach where I cut class for the first time in high school to ride the bus down Geary Street and jump into the numbingly cold Pacific. Wet clothes didn’t bother me back then; I felt alive in my skin.

I climb further up the rocky steps which are cut from radiolarite sediment, traces of microscopic sea life hardened into skeletal deposits that make way for hillside hikers. I pass the bench that sits facing the city with graffiti scrawled on its back, telling the world: I was here! I strain to see if I recognize the tag from a kid I once knew but figure it’s the trace of the next generation of recalcitrant youth. It was up here I indulged my own rebellious spirit imbibing in booze provided by the private school kids who rolled kegs up the hill.

In those days the fog always lingered, having rolled in during the late afternoons even on the sunniest of days. The fog would enchant the forest, a mist hanging over our indiscretions, like a scene from the neo-noir Dirty Harry, which filmed here in 1971. Nowadays, the fog seems to have burnt off more permanently, coming around only every so often.

Courtesy of Talib Jabbar.

At the second clearing, the very top, I pass the tribute to Mrs. Edmund N. “Madie” Brown, a bronze plaque installed on a rock. Her story goes something like this: She treasured the natural respite of Mount Davidson and, drawing upon her resources as president of a PTA, arranged for students and parents to flood the offices of the Board of Supervisors with wildflowers gathered from the hillside, which convinces them to preserve the area from building developers. She deserves the rock.

This rocky perch is a vantage point to feel above it all and at the precipice of something. It’s where I came the morning after the election nights of successive presidents, one a morning full of promise, the other despair. I remember that one day soon I’ll have to take the dirt path back down through the eucalyptus, tune in, distill information weighed against my ethics, deliberate, and vote again. I’ll do it based on my entire history, or at least whatever I can remember. I’ll fantasize about the days when you could swing politicians with wildflowers.

Several steps westward from Madie’s rock, it finally comes into view: the looming concrete cross, 103 feet tall. It always feels surreal, as if I’ve just happened upon it in the middle of the thicket. Like the city itself, the cross’s previous wooden iterations were burnt to the ground several times. As one of the signs reads, the City sold the land the cross stands on in accordance with the principle of separation of church and state. The Council of Armenian American Organizations of Northern California purchased it, hence the plaque that sits at the base of the cross commemorating the victims of the Armenian genocide and urging its readers to heed a lesson by remembering that magnitude of evil in the world. The cross still serves as a site for pilgrimage, especially on Easter Sunday. The story of the large concrete cross poking through the forest always feels worked out—settled through a series of compromises—at least for now.

Courtesy of Talib Jabbar.

Time up here is measured personally, communally, historically, and tectonically; all at once.

Taking in San Francisco from this vantage point, I try hard to remember the mythic city: one that celebrated diversity and dance and the arts and music and jazz and punk and sex and freedom and love and dignity and respect and values and trees and humility and courage and class and knowledge and power and beauty and performance and devotion and collectivity and always becoming and not foreclosure.

There is still surely something left of those past versions. Questions are plentiful and grandiose, answers impoverished. Up here I can at least think myself into some semblance of an answer, or at the very least, a response.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Atop San Francisco’s ‘Redwood Empire’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.