Never Forget
On this September 11th, we drove to Carson Hot Springs, in Washington on the Wind River. It is a 75-degree day, and there is only the cut of blue sky, pine trees leaning, and the curve of the road as we drive along interstate 84. The Columbia River hugs the shoreline, just below us to the left. It is only an hour from Portland, but we have not been here in a long while, having spent the past year driving West, to the Oregon coast. It has been at least 15 years since I crossed the Bridge of the Gods at Cascade Locks, passing what used to be the Char Burger, a destination on a summer afternoon after a mossy hike on one of the numerous trails in the Gorge. I remember they had milkshakes made rich with Tillamook ice cream, sweet syrups mixed in and whipping cream on top. The smell of charred hamburgers and crispy French fries pulled you in with the promise of more lighthearted days.
At the bridge, I approached the toll booth, rolled down my car window and looked up at the booth’s window just slightly to my left. A woman waved at me from a second window, lower and to the right.
“I’m right here sweetie,” she says. “The other window!” I laughed and handed her two dollars in cash. I remember the day the toll changed from one dollar to two. It seemed an affront – a reminder to travelers that all things trodden on eventually need repairs, and nothing ever costs what it cost you as a younger person. I drove over the narrow bridge, my eyes avoiding snatches of water in the periphery. I clenched my hands tightly on the wheel with my ever-present fear of falling or simply turning the car sharply, and driving off the bridge, plunging into the water like a wounded seagull. On my beach walk the prior weekend I had spied three dead seagulls in a row. Lying face up, their webbed feet pointing at the sky. What brought them to that end? A shark, or a fisherman’s net. Do seagulls die of old age?
Safely on the other side we made our way North towards Carson, through the sleepy town of Stevenson with a few antique stores, a saloon, and the branch of the bank Jay worked for when we first started dating, acquired since by another bank with larger coffers and no nepotism.
“We used to come visit this branch and then golf in the afternoon at Skamania Lodge,” Jay advised, pointing out the new roundabout we were approaching which would have us turn left on the third exit for the hot springs.
I calculated in my head, when was the last time I had come to soak in the long white porcelain baths, their insides stained with minerals in hues of brown, gold and olive green? The first time I was twenty-three, twenty-four. My friend Lynette suggested we treat ourselves one weekend, as we had been running steadily together several times a week and our bodies ached like old houses settled into shifting foundations. I had not known what to expect, nor the monastic silence required. Lynette and I were often giggling together; she had bright dimples on both sides of her mouth, and they jumped around amongst her freckles when she spoke. She was often chewing gum and her snorts of laughter had to make their way around the gum, which she would expertly tuck up behind her teeth. Her teeth were even and gleaming, and her short auburn hair framed her fresh, mischievous face.
Lynette had forewarned me that Carson Hot Spring was “rustic”. Still, I was unprepared that first visit, as we descended into the culvert that was the “resort”. I first spotted directly ahead the white clapboard three story “hotel” built in the early 1900’s, where a sign directed you for checking in. To the left was a row of cabins, four or five, with no plumbing, and some missing windowpanes. I watched as a woman in a plaid, well-washed jean shorts and bare feet came out of one of the cabins, with a lit cigarette. The screen door sighed audibly behind her. She sat in a folding chair and put her feet up on the cabin’s porch railing. Her eyes were soft and sleepy. All around us I sensed a deep quiet that was part of a mutual agreement. Even the birds flew silently from tree to tree. The trees too were mute, a gentle sway to their limbs.
To the right was a long, single story bath house with a small wooden sign by two doors at the front (“women” to the left and “men” to the right) painted a dusty light green and reminiscent of army barracks. Lynette had instructed me to leave all jewelry at home and our purses in the car. We were laughing about something before we even walked into the bath house and were immediately hushed by the woman behind a small desk. The room was dim, and, in the background, I could see another room where rows of beds lined up against each wall as if at an orphanage. Bodies wrapped in white sheets lay as still as mummies, a folded wet washrag covering their eyes. In another room to the right was a grouping of long white tubs, next to each one a wooden chair, a hand towel, and a bathmat. The lights in all three rooms were in a perpetual state of the early morning light you witness peeking out of your tent camping high enough to see the tree lines. It was the kind of light that makes you believe there is a god. A benevolent god who wants you to know he sees you there, just you, basking in that short time, before the day is stark and delineated everywhere.
Lynette and I scurried in silence to the dressing room, following the woman’s instructions on where to put our things and which bath number we were assigned. Her name was Prya, or Misty, or it was Longevity. We climbed into our baths next to each other, naked. I longed for Lynette’s long legs and long neck, as I rested my strong calves against the bottom of the tub. Today, when Jay and I entered the bathhouse through our separate doors, I wore my face mask between the dressing room and my soaking tub, where each tub was surrounded by its own private curtains. I gazed up at the fans revolving meditatively on the ceiling. The minerals in the water swirled tightly around me – I could almost see them sucking at my skin, pulling out toxins, choking on them.
That first time with Lynette, the bath “guide” led us to the room with the beds where she asked if we wanted a “tight, medium or loose” hold. Knowing nothing about what to expect, I had chosen medium and then suffered thirty minutes in silence as my blood pulsed in my brain, the sweat soaking into each layer that covered me, my inability to move inside the cocoon of tightly wound sheets around me, gripped me in terror like I was trapped in the dark closet of a basement in a stranger’s house.
Today the guide called me sweetie, the same as the woman at the toll booth. I wondered not for the first time since turning forty-eight or so if I had crossed over into that category of people again who need to be handled with care. The other times in my life I remember this word being used for me was when an adult was trying to appease me or calm me down (I was three, or five) and when a boyfriend was being solicitous or loving. Or also trying to appease me or calm me down. Serenity, or Ayla, whatever her name was, suggested that many of the “ladies” liked a medium wrap with their arms out. She had led me to the bed closest to the window, which was open, and I was pleased with both her suggestion and the breeze dancing across my face as disrobed and lay down. She placed a cold wash rag over my eyes. I drifted.
After these events, Lynette and I followed the guide to separate rooms for a massage. Halfway through that first time, I finally reached a stage which felt like release. A sink unclogged. A ball of string unwound. I was a noodle, drying in the sun. I was that soft white fuzz that blows off dandelions dried up in the yard. Today, I breathed in the sunlight through the open window and placed my face down in the cradle of the massage table. I curtailed my masseuse’s attempt at initial small talk, and presently I was drifting again. I remembered when I had come here the week before Scott, and I got married. Lynette insisted it was the best thing to do the day of my bachelorette party. We came early and drank a couple of beers by noon and when I arrived at the first bar, the meeting place for my party, I felt like all my usual sharp edges had softened.
Scott and I were married on September 11th, 1993. Eight years later, when the twin towers were burning to the ground, Scott and I had separated the prior year. I picked up my two children at their day care and Montessori school and we drove to Seaside. I do not remember the driving. There was something burning inside of me, an existential fear that I needed to make it to the ocean, that I needed to hold my children as close to me as I could. On that day, the things we witnessed, (and when I write “we” I mean Americans, all of us) the terror we read about and saw in photographs and interviews from that day were unlike anything we had ever known or imagined. I felt frozen with disbelief. And everywhere we went, for weeks, months, perhaps years after, we carried this shadow with us, this need to look behind us, double-check things, like whether the oven was left on, or the gas tank was full in our cars, or airplane schedules remained unchanged, or we knew where exactly our child was biking “down the street” to, whose house, who lived there, was it safe, and how long would they be. We wondered; will it happen again? Where and how? No one, no one had ever been safe, we realized, and no one would ever be safe again.
I have made a habit of leaving town now, on 9/11. I propel forward with the need to be somewhere I am usually not. It is as if I have a premonition of disaster, should I stay in the same place, and practice my usual routine. I believe I can outrun it, trick it into thinking it can find me, but I will not be where it expects me. The disaster that I cannot know, cannot predict. The disaster which is all the terrible things I can think of happening to the people I love that haunts you from the time you realize life is so tenuous. I look at the images of 9/11 that traverse my social media, the television, the tributes, and I think to myself, if this memory grieves me in the way it does, what do those closer to the people that died that day do with their grief?
Never forget.