Nature Bully

On light and dark, moms, and trying to find a balance.

“Do you think nature wants to hurt you?” Mom asked on the couch the other day. I blinked at that. Since the dawn of time, mothers have always excelled at the greatest “What in the absolute fuck?” questions, but my mom really takes the cake. Hi Mom, love you.

This topic wasn’t segued from something else, had next to nothing to do with our lunchtime chat, and—quite frankly—came out of the nowhere freakin’ blue. I’d be like if we were discussing the weather and I’d get all serious and blurt: “So why do you hate cupcakes so much, anyway?”

So forgive me when I coughed and asked: “Say again?”

“Well, like… your desert piece on your blog. It started so beautiful, but as the piece went on it felt like you resented the desert, like it wanted to hurt you. What is that?”

It took me a few moments to respond. We were waiting for the potatoes in the oven to finish cooking—what happened to that subject? I tried to remember what the hell was even in my piece about Eastern Oregon. All I could recall was dunking on that absolute loser John Day.

Mom kept going: “It just feels like in all your stories you write nature as if it wants to eat you. Why?”

I could hear the subtext. I raised you better than that.

We drove parallel to the sea, separated only by a jagged line of rocks running between ocean and asphalt. Choppy gray waters crashing against the rocks in impressive displays, while a bright fog permeated the landscape as flocks of seabirds littered the white abyss like flies. Rain shouted against the windshield.

I really hate my story “Hole Wall,” followed by “Acts of Violence” as a close second. (Did you know Acts of Violence was briefly considered to be the title for Moss-Covered Claws? I’m so fucking glad that didn’t happen.) Both stories feature some gnarly action, and were written at almost the exact same time in 2017 when we were having a tough time with our living arrangement. I guess my frustration came out in the form of writing “blood” a million different ways.

In “Hole Wall,” there’s this awful scene where a woman basically bludgeons a pelican to death on the Astoria-Megler Bridge. It’s a scene most people mention to me when they’ve read my book. I guess two pages of animal cruelty and gore tends to leave a nasty impression on people.

“So I got to the pelican story…” they say. The circumstances around the vile act are not exactly mean-spirited—the character Kate is just hurriedly trying to put it out of its misery after it’s been hit with a U-Haul and then stepped on by her friend. But the way I wrote it… I wonder if the descriptions were a bit mean to the reader. It’s just a hard scene to swallow.

“I don’t know why you had to write about it shedding tears,” a friend once told me. “Now I have the image stuck in my head of a crying pelican.”

My mother is now stuck in my head while I write. Does she have a point?

I knew the birds were above, watching me, so I tried to look neither up nor down. Something about these animals unnerved me. I kept on, trying to get away from them, but there were birds above me at every turn, every rock. I tried to distract myself as I walked. I glanced at the sides of the rocks to find walls of sea life covering them. Tan barnacles, black muscles, and large swaths of green anemones clumped tightly together. I shuddered to look at those in particular. Their formless circular bodies drooped down toward the sand, waiting for the tide to come in and relieve their tentacles of gravity.

Austin and I walk through the forest that sits behind our house. It’s like a hidden world in there. All the WASP moms walk past it on the sidewalk without giving it a second thought. But if you can stomach being That Weirdo who walks straight into the greenery and away from the street, you’ll be greeted by a trail that leads down to a ravine. Signs of witchcraft adorn the trees. A dead fire pit under a cedar. Painted rocks depicting tarot cards. We trot underneath the grand maples and devil’s club.

“Do you think I write about nature like it’s dangerous?” I ask. It’s also out of the blue, not related to anything we were talking about. Like mother like son, I guess.

Austin’s quiet for a second. For a few seconds, actually. Sometimes he is like a little computer that’s processing the information I’ve given him. Nature = dangerous? Jonah = hates nature? I can see the RAM whirring in his brain, piecing together what I’ve just said.

All he can come up with at the end is: “What?”

“Mom thinks I write about nature like it’s evil,” I say.

More whirring. “I think you hold reverence for nature in your writing,” he finally says. “But I don’t think you write about it like it’s evil, or dangerous.”

[T]he sky flashed and screamed a great thunder. The rains returned, frigid this time. Darren’s hopes were dashed as they ran through the rain, their fur-lined shoes soaked through in the splashing puddles. The tintinnabulation of rain carried on, hitting the forest’s wide leaves like drums. The turned corners, tripping into bushes and helping each other up, mud fully coating them within minutes.

“What do you do when nature is invasive or is planning to harm you?” I write in my notebook. Probably the exact fucking opposite of what my mother wants me to explore, but now I’m curious. The thing I’m writing—the thing I refuse to fully talk about because then it’ll be a Thing and will take the fun out of it—delves into this question.

My mother raised me to love nature. I’d pet slugs and kiss frogs as a child, hanging out all day in the forest until the sun went down. My childhood was centered around picking blackberries and sleeping to the calls of frogs—but Himalayan blackberries happen to be the most invasive, destructive plant in the Pacific Northwest, and the bullfrogs I encountered as a kid have since multiplied in our pond and devoured the population of spring peepers that once lulled me to sleep. Nature is beautiful, all encompassing, but it can also hurt you if you’re not careful.

I can recall running through grass with my brother, blackberry cobbler in the kitchen, and catching white moths in jars. But I also remember calls in the night, shapes in the water, and a set of cold eyes. I think back on laughing, screaming, nettle stings, sweetness, and a sense of eternal summer, everlasting youth.

But maybe this points to a larger pattern in my fiction. I shared a great book with my mom a few years ago, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow. Reading like a 2006 middle school throwback, the book details the adventures of a young woman and a Mayan death god around the Yucatán Peninsula in the 1920s. It’s incredible fun, and so well written, but it also has this tinge of darkness that permeates throughout the story. Deadly ghosts, abusive men, and a bittersweet conclusion. (Sorry, spoilers? Whatever, you’ll live.)

“I loved that about it,” Mom said. This was during a different one of our lunch meetups. “I like nice stories, but it’s more realistic when there’s a bit of darkness thrown into the mix.” I reminded her of that previous meetup after she’d asked me the “Why do you hate nature?” question. It’s a mixture of light and dark, but the dark is always so much more noticeable.

I’ve said this before, but I don’t like to write things that writhe around in the muck too much. Even previous things I’ve written on here were told with a bit of humor to lighten the mood. I’ve quoted enough of myself throughout this whole thing, so let me pull someone else’s words out of the air.

“In general, though, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.”
Anne Lamott

I read that, probably in Bird by Bird, around 2014 as an undergrad, and it’s stuck with me ever since. Yes, I do write about anxiety-feeding demons and newt people who harvest humans. But I also write about a whole city coming together to love a water monster, a boy and a sea witch making amends for past mistakes, a photographer rejecting his abusive gorgon boss in order to exist with the man he loves. The good always gets overshadowed by the bad, but I would like to point out that it is in fact still there, Mom. It’s not a phase!

But like life, the good and bad is always mixed in together, and I am not one to ignore the bad. But what if… I’m starting to focus on it a little more than I’d like?

So, back to nature. I think back on Gods of Jade and Shadow. The thing I remember the most is how much fun the book was, not how dark it could be. Maybe I could focus on creating a more positive mood going forward. Mom might have a point. (You hear me, Ma??)

Here’s a little something from… the Thing I’m writing. Wish me luck.

The midday was warm, a slight breeze causing the trees to dance and sway at the back of the property. Great Douglas firs towered over a knot of moss-covered vine maples, a cluster of blackberry bushes at the base of each tree. Charlotte found her son in a bed of spring ephemerals, bleeding hearts and miner’s lettuce surrounding him. The foliage had seemingly exploded overnight; it was really unfair. Who else could burst forth from the darkness in such a short amount of time? Charlotte wished she had that resolve in her.