5 Pieces I'm Proud Of: 2014

Hey all,

This is a collection of links to a few things I've written in 2014 that I'm especially proud of. I've written quite a lot this year, and it was tough to narrow down, but I felt it was important to just zero in on a handful to share. Here they are:

"The Best Team No One's Talking About": A longform piece on the Ohio State Women's Rowing Team, which previewed what would eventually be a national championship season.

http://www.landgrantholyland.com/2014/3/31/5358288/ohio-state-womens-rowing-national-championship

"The 2014 Big Ten All-Heist Team": A look at the guys with the coolest names in the Big Ten, told through the lens of an Ocean's 11-esque caper.

http://www.landgrantholyland.com/2014/9/21/6284223/the-2014-big-ten-all-heist-team

"Cardale Jones and the Last Crusade": The best damn Ohio State QB fanfiction you will read this year.

http://www.landgrantholyland.com/2014/12/5/7318501/ohio-state-football-cardale-jones-big-ten-championship-game

"A Bus Story": A short reflection on the ideas of memory, judgment, and ownership.

http://315buckeye.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-bus-story.html

"Blankmap Chronicles: Book I, Chapter 1". The first chapter of the first-draft fantasy/adventure novel I've been writing all year. This was technically written in 2013, but I've reworked it a number of times this year and I'm considerably happier with it than I was 12 months ago. You can toggle to the other chapters from this site, as well:

http://www.wattpad.com/62214454-the-blankmap-chronicles-book-i-1-bed-moving-dreams

Thanks for sticking with me all year!

Show Your Work

Writing is inherently a kind of masturbatory act, one that far more people than you would ever guess engage in, and one that you never want anyone to catch you doing. I think that's why it's so hard for fledgling writers to share their stuff, gather feedback, or even just get used to putting themselves out there, consequences be damned. I'm still working through that part. It's one I'm not sure I'll ever get past. So it goes.

Since January 1st, I've been engaged in a kind of self-challenge involving writing every single day for a year. I know that I want to write for a living some day, but I've felt that for a long time and it's only in 2014 that I've started taking an honest stab at it. There's no one in the world who claims to be a plumber despite not plying their trade on a daily basis, or who insists that they're a doctor despite never having practiced medicine. So why do so many people claim to be writers who've never actually put a word on the page? I was like that for a long, long time--full of ideas, of beautiful words and phrases, and too damn scared to put any of them down on paper to see if they stood up to the light. This year has (somewhat) changed that.

To date, I have missed 5 days of this year, not a word produced or thought jotted down. 4 of those came on my first return visit to Columbus since graduation; the 5th was the day I officially moved across Seattle--you try writing anything worthwhile behind the wheel of a '99 Civic, ferrying all your worldly possessions back and forth in a city where people can't drive worth a damn.

The point of all this rambling is to put my money where my mouth is. To put my work out there, to be read and seen and judged and ignored. That last one is the hardest to stomach, I've found (to paraphrase Kubrick, the most frightening prospect about the universe is not that it's malicious, but that it's indifferent), but all the same, I'm pretty proud of staying on track this long if nothing else. I've posted a chapter or two here and there in the last few months, but I've been avoiding doing that for awhile now thanks to that spiral of self-doubt I mentioned above. I want to change that.

So here it is, the 1st 12 chapters of a fantasy/adventure novel I've been working at off and on since August of 2013. I've worked on a number of other things in that span, but this is where I've chosen to stick my focus for the last 4 months or so, ever since I joined WattPad (where the novel is hosted). It's really, really hard not to hedge all of this with the usual protestations--"It's a first draft!" or "This is just some dumb thing I've worked at, not very hard, mind you"--neither of those things would be entirely true, and they're pointless cries for attention and reassurance. Fuck that noise, though, as the kids say. I hope you read it, and enjoy it, but my life will not be materially different if you don't.

If you are interested in giving feedback, I'd be thrilled to hear it, even if it's along the lines of this being super boring, needing more action and less description, or what have you. You're already my favorite if you've read down this far in the blog post, and any feedback is just icing on that delicious cake. WattPad also has an app, if you're really a lunatic and want a way to take my words on the go. The link is to the main story page, but you can toggle through chapters with the drop-down menu.

http://www.wattpad.com/story/20431231-the-blankmap-chronicles-book-i

Happy reading, all.

A Bus Story

Today I took, I think, the most beautiful bus ride I've been on since moving to Seattle. It was the same southbound route that I've taken a hundred times--down to the Central District on the 48 bus from the U District--and it wasn't particularly nice out this morning. The air had that sort of gray chill that probably comes to mind when people who haven't been here think about what Seattle must be like. It's a bright, sunny afternoon as I write this, but this morning was utterly unremarkable on that score.

So the bus ride wasn't beautiful for its newness, nor for the quality of day I could see out the window. The beauty lay in the people onboard with me, though they too seemed unremarkable at first glance. 

The first of these was a woman sitting in the front seats, those that are perpendicular to the rest of the seats on the bus. She had boarded before me, so she was already seated when I hopped on. I breezed past her without a second thought--that is, until she stood up to get off the bus. It was at this point that I noticed that both of her hands were formed not of four fingers and a thumb, but each had been naturally fused into a sort of hook shape (I apologize for not knowing a more correct and dignified way of describing this). 

She grasped the bus pole, smiled at and thanked the driver, and was off. I saw her standing outside the bus. She pulled a phone from her purse, opened it, and began to laugh. What was initially so captivating to me was that she seemed so genuinely happy, so carefree, despite her (I thought) obvious disability.

That thought lasted about five seconds before it was replaced by one of utter self-disgust. What does that say about me? That I was surprised that someone with a handicap could be so obviously happy? I think we expend a lot of energy and effort pitying people who we perceive to be less fortunate than us, particularly the disabled. But the more I think about it, the more unhealthy and condescending that viewpoint seems to me. I should know better from experience, too--would I really want the rest of the world to spend their time pitying my cousin, who has lived her whole life with several severe developmental disabilities? Wouldn't I expect them to see her simply as a human being, as I do? 

So the first five minutes of my bus ride were beautiful because they forced me to challenge the way I see the world and the assumptions I hold about people. 

At the stop where the smiling woman got off, a mother and her two towheaded sons got on. The mother occupied the exact same seat as the previous woman. One son was at most seven or eight years old, the other couldn't have been older than two. As two-year-olds are wont to be, he was incredibly vocal, albeit incoherent. I watched them all interact for a good long while--as a former elementary school teacher, I'm a sucker for watching kids do funny stuff; as someone that only has brothers, I'm always keen to observe the way other brothers deal with each other. 

I wasn't disappointed. The mother would hold the younger brother up and let him explore the area around him--the window, the seats, the standing bar. All the while, his older brother would explain everything to him in a manner that you could just tell was bursting with pride. Older brothers are notorious for wanting to show how much they know, and this one was no different, but you could also tell he was just happy to be able to help his little brother understand the world. 

While this was going on it struck me that there was a good chance that none of them--or at least, neither of the kids--would ever remember this very poignant moment in their young lives. It got me thinking about memory, and what a strange shape it takes. I now have a memory of a family I will likely never see again, one that they themselves might never share. Who stops to think about, and preserve, any one in particular of a lifetime of commutes on public transport? So I'm now in the odd position of maybe being the sole possessor of this memory, which doesn't belong to me at all. 

I personally have very vague recollections of anything that happened before age eight or nine. I remember feelings, colors, faces, more than I remember actual conversations or events. And why would I have anything more than that? Kids are pretty much by definition incapable of nostalgia, so it's not a surprise that they don't take the time and effort to cement memories within themselves that will withstand in full the test of time. Why would they? When people gripe that youth is wasted on the young, one of the things I think they're really saying is that young people don't do justice to their own important moments. They don't intentionally create memories. They just live. 

So my bus ride was also beautiful for the pure, unbridled interactions I got to witness between two brothers who will never know what kind of effect they had on me. 

The last thing that made my bus ride beautiful had a timeline that in places overlapped that of the brothers. At one of our stops, an Ethiopian woman got on the bus using a single crutch. She didn't look a day above forty. She sat in another perpendicular seat, across the aisle from the blonde family. In the seat across from mine was an Ethiopian man of similar age. (By the way, I know they were Ethiopian because of how they talked--I don't know a word of Amharic, but I have a ton of Ethiopian students in my classes and caseload, so I hear it spoken pretty much daily.)

They rode in silence for a good long while, though they had exchanged a polite nod when she sat down. Two or three minutes before she got off, she leaned over to her left and asked the man a question. He snapped upright and answered her, and they fell into a friendly conversation. It was like watching ice melt, the way their faces slowly softened into bigger and bigger smiles as the conversation went on. Like I said, I didn't understand a word, but I felt like I didn't have to. The emotion present was pure, unaffected. About the only thing I did catch was the woman's name, Yodit. Because the world is funny and there is no such thing as coincidence, I learned that name a week ago in the closing chapters of a phenomenal book (The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, Dinaw Mengestu). On those pages, Stephanos, the narrator and himself an Ethiopian immigrant to the U.S., muses that the name of his American love interest (Judith) is just an anglicized version of the "original" (Yodit).

The woman's stop came, and she said her goodbye with a smile. I watched the man as she exited, and his face was that of someone who is frantically deciding between two equally terrifying prospects. At the last second he dashed off the bus, too. I was captivated watching this--the woman heard him coming, and turned back with a smile. They shook hands, and he appeared to be talking a mile a minute. The way we so often do when we're putting ourselves out there emotionally, and the nerves are taking hold. The bus pulled away, and the last I saw of them was their hands, still clasped. 

So on a gray unremarkable morning, with a moderate hangover and the furthest thing from a sunny outlook, I experienced the most beautiful bus ride of my short Seattle career. 

"Faith in Humanity: Restored" is bullshit

Few things bother me more than the deluge of posts on every facet of social media that claim “faith in humanity: restored.” What a bleak outlook that must be, any way you slice it. Either you’re emotionally malleable to the point that your feelings about the world regularly swing 180 degrees, which doesn’t say a lot about the quality of those feelings, or you see so little good in the world that an online video of a stranger doing something kind (read: something we should all be doing anyway) makes you abandon your position and proclaim that all is right with humanity. Or you’re just a poor chooser of words and have gotten sucked into the clickbait word vortex and know of no other way to voice your happiness.


I’m reminded of Dickens: “Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision.” One uplifting video on the internet should not restore your faith in humanity any more than one heinous act of terrorism or violence should take it away. Humanity is an enormous, complicated sum of parts that completely defies all of our reductive pigeonholing. School shootings, discrimination, wanton violence—these things are terrible, almost namelessly so. But they are far from the sum of our collective hopes and dreams. They are far from the total of our ambitions and achievements.


I realize how callous it might seem that I presume to talk about things like this. By most standards, I have led an enormously untroubled life. And as a white, cisgender, heterosexual male, I am the farthest thing from a target demographic for the world’s hatred and persecution.


But I still feel qualified to talk about hurt, if not on a macro level. I hurt plenty, and I have hurt plenty, and I think part of being alive is that that never goes away. You do learn from it, though. You learn to compartmentalize, to self-criticize and self-critique. You learn that there is no love like first love and that you will never again be as unreservedly happy, or as sad, as you were at sixteen. You learn that scar tissue, by whichever nefarious means it has been created, is tougher than skin.


Don’t let your faith in humanity be restored by simple acts of kindness. To do so means that you have let your faith in humanity be taken away by simple acts of violence, of evil or anger or revenge. We are better than that, and worse, and we would do well to remember it. Words and phrases ring hollow when they become so overused. Try a new way of saying things—You’ll Never Believe What Happens Next.

On Boy Scouts and Gay Leaders

In 2008 I earned the rank of Eagle Scout as a member of Troop 51 in Fayetteville, New York. I have bragged about this in the past, but this is not bragging--I simply want to put my viewpoint in context.

On Monday, the Boy Scouts of America revoked the charter of a Seattle Boy Scout troop who stood behind their openly gay Scoutmaster. This was in keeping with a longstanding BSA rule refusing the leadership of "open or avowed" homosexual men. The BSA only recently acted to allow openly gay youths in Boy Scout troops, with that decree coming last May via a vote from the BSA's national council. 

I will put this as plainly as I know how: The Boy Scouts of America, by holding onto this policy, are committing a moral and social wrong. Their ban on gay leaders within the Scouts reflects the ignorance borne of an outdated understanding of what homosexuality is and who homosexuals are. 

The official policy of the BSA, as of 2004, reads as follows: "Boy Scouts of America believes that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the obligations in the Scout Oath and Scout Law to be morally straight and clean in thought, word, and deed." This revision, while still ethically disastrous, was changed from the 1993 resolution, which stated that "homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the requirement...that a Scout be morally straight and...that a Scout be clean in word and deed...homosexuals do not provide a desirable role model for Scouts."

The BSA is making the problematic choice to espouse the belief that being sexually straight is akin to being morally straight. And by doing so, they are doing an untold number of their members a great disservice. 

What are scouts who are struggling with their own sexualities, their own identities, to make of this? Boys who might love every moment they've spent with their troop, love all the new skills they've learned and the sense of community they've gained, essentially being told that when they grow up they will be unfit to lead, because of who they might love? Or boys who happen to have gay fathers, unable to understand why their dad wasn't invited on the camping trip when everyone else's was?

Look. I understand that joining the Boy Scouts, either as a boy or as an adult leader, is a choice. No one can make you, and there are those who would say that if a gay leader didn't want to be removed from his position, he never should have joined an organization that was so contrary to his own principles in the first place. But (at the risk of building a straw man here) I would be willing to bet that most people who would say that have never spent any great length of time inside a Boy Scout troop.

I refer back to my own experience as a scout, which spanned from 1998 to 2008. In Cub Scout Pack 153 and BSA Troop 51 I interacted with and served the community alongside boys and leaders from all walks of life. This included a number of scouts who were "open and avowed homosexuals" (to borrow the BSA's own troublesome phrase), as well as some who were neither open nor avowed but weren't heterosexual, either. Young boys are shitty to one another for any number of reasons, but in my memories of Troop 51 no one was outwardly shitty to anyone else strictly because of their sexual preference. In the ways that counted, we were by and large a very open, if strange and occasionally lazy, bunch. 

It is in this way that individual Boy Scout troops, and individual Boy Scouts, are a far cry from what the BSA claims to be as a whole. Troop 51 harbored its fair share of gay scouts during my time in it, as well as a number of atheists and agnostics (both of which also fall in the "unacceptable" category as far as BSA is concerned). And in a twist that will hopefully surprise no one, there were good and bad gay scouts. There were good and bad agnostic scouts. There were good and bad hetero scouts. There were good and bad rigidly Christian scouts. It was, frankly, an awful lot like real life.

One of the things Boy Scouts are required to learn is the Scout Law, which lists the twelve characteristics that all scouts must have. They are as follows: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. The idea is that these twelve points are all equally valuable and important in the life of a scout.

I suspect I, like many, struggled hardest with the law of "obedience". What I've learned as I've grown older is that obedience is only valuable when it's reflected upon--we should stay accountable and obedient to those we trust and respect, but blindly obeying orders is not exactly healthy behavior. By stripping Troop 98 of its charter, the BSA has made that most troublesome of scout laws, being obedient, more valuable than my personal favorite scout law, being loyal. These scouts, as well as the Reverend Monica Corsaro, stayed loyal to a man who they believed was a good man and a good leader. They stayed loyal to their principles at the expense of remaining obedient to a faceless superior. 

In doing so, these boys ascribed to a much higher "standard of manhood" than that passed down by the BSA's ruling council. The troop as a whole, including Rev. Corsaro, displayed their open minds and open hearts and received a national rebuke. The BSA is allowing each of them to join up with other troops, but that seems like so much wishful thinking on the council's part--who would want to continue on in such an institution? An institution that upbraids and degrades those people who don't fit the narrow, outdated ideal of what it means "to be a man"? 

I will always be proud to be an Eagle Scout, because I know what I've accomplished and I know the years of work it took to attain Scouting's highest honor. But as long as this foolish, archaic policy remains in place, I will find it impossible to be proud of the Boy Scouts of America. 

Untitled Story, Chapter 2 (excerpt)

The ship rose out of the water taller than anything Solomon could have imagined, taller even than the highest trees he had climbed on his father's land. The scope of everything in the port dazzled him, from the dock jutting into the waves like a piece of road transplanted in the ocean, to the mooring lines as wide around as his waist, to the ocean itself, impossibly vast, rolling and frothing just as he had envisioned in his daydreams. The one element he had never considered was the smell of it all. He was hypnotized by the tang of salt on the air, something he had only ever tasted on rare occasions in town when the butcher had slipped him pieces of cured meat as his father conducted business across the street. But this...this was salt as he had never imagined it. It filled his nostrils, his lungs, and his mind as he stood on the bustling path that led from the seaport market down to the docks. Dizzy with the sights and smells, he sat himself on top of a barrel out of the way and took it all in as best he could. 

For a boy who had spent the better part of his life wandering the woods alone, such a place was a shock to the senses. He saw all manner of men either rushing or lazing about, clad in strange clothes and speaking to each other in tongues he did not understand. Strange as it may seem to those who are well-read, and knowledgeable of the world, and who have spent their lives meeting all kinds of people, Solomon Hyrax had never before considered that there might be whole groups of others that didn't speak in the same language as he. This revelation and the observations that led to it were enough to keep him fixated in his seat for well over an hour. 

He gazed at the crowded tumble of stores and homes that vied for space in the town that stretched out behind him. They were ramshackle, mostly, painted in pale pinks and blues and yellows. Where the paint had chipped away old boards showed through, eroded in strange patterns by the salt wind and turned an odd green by the moisture. Solomon's eyes took all of this in, so new and different from the dry and comfortable Naweego that he had grown up in, eventually alighting on a building nothing like the others. 

It was shaped like an odd sort of cone, black and white stripes spiraling up its sides, with what appeared to be a tiny glass house at its top. This building stood far apart from the rest, perched at the end of the ancient stone seawall that led across the mouth of the town and out into the rocky shoals. Solomon never left the barrel, but his mind was working overtime processing all the rough-hewn majesty of the oceanside town. He was chewing without thought, barely cognizant of the matronly woman who had come out of a nearby shop and pushed a steaming, meat-filled pastry into his hands.

During this time, the older Hyrax was dashing about attempting to haggle for last-minute supplies and making sure all preparations had been made in advance of their arrival. In truth he was in a state of anxious panic, setting the wheels in motion for an undertaking full of possibilities both hopeful and terrible. Jacques was and always had been an exceptionally brave man, and the anxiety clawing at his chest and suffocating his breath was a new sensation to him. He was not a man readily given over to hoping for things, practical as he was, but that emotion was fighting for space within him as well. Though he never could have vocalized it, part of him hoped he was doing right for Solomon's sake as much as for his own.

He need not have worried, at least on Solomon's account. One of the things that marks children as children (and which marks them as nearing adulthood when they begin to lose it) is the unwavering belief that their parents know what to do in any situation, particularly the tough ones. Solomon was no different, and had always believed his father to be a man whose decisions were correct. This too might seem curious, given the utter lack of socialization or emotional connection developed in the Hyrax home, but Solomon's lifelong isolation must again be taken into consideration. 

After a great deal of time Jacques emerged from the cobbled street's dry goods store with another man. Two others followed them, one pushing a roughly hewn wooden cart piled high with sacks of flour and potatoes and the other rolling a veritable flotilla of barrels with skill. Though Solomon knew nothing of such matters, there was no mistaking that the man striding beside his father was a person of importance. This newcomer exuded an air of power and authority, and though he was at least a head shorter than either of the Hyraxes, it was apparent to Solomon that he ought to stay out of this man's way. 

Jacques summoned Solomon with a twitch of his head as he kept pace with this authoritative newcomer. Solomon lifted himself down from his perch, working a kink out of his saddlesore backside as he hurried to his father's side. The new man was talking away, in a manner as rough as the boards of the shop they had just left.

"...can't promise that. But my best guess is eight days out before we reach the Chasm. Can't take ya no further. My crew and I'll be banking straight north once we reach it to finish our supply run and start fishin'. If your people are where you say they'll be, we should be able to pass ya across to 'em without too much trouble."

"Thank you, Captain. Solomon..." His father paused. "We're off to sea. Can you understand?"

There seemed to be more to the question than that, but whatever it was went unasked. Solomon retrieved his trunk from where it lay behind the carriage as their walk wheeled them down towards the dock, the great ship looming larger and larger as they approached. Solomon scarcely dared believe it. After his long years of sleeping and dreaming and imagining the sea, he was about to sever the invisible ties that bound his feet to the land and set sail for the first time. The destination hardly seemed to matter; indeed, the thought of where they might be headed barely crossed his eager mind as he made his way up the gangplank onto the sturdy timbers of the vessel that lay waiting for him. 

                                      .                    .                   .                      .                .

They were at sea for three nights before Solomon was able to lie down for bed without feeling as though his insides were down below the deck, rolling around the cargo hold among the barrels of wine and smoked meat and gunpowder. Those first few days were among the most unpleasant of Solomon Hyrax's young life. All of his romantic notions of life at sea, all of his yearning to know the most intimate details of a ship's handling and operation, had seeped out of him through the planks of the Windjammer's deck as he lay curled up and immobile behind an enormous spool of rope. 

He had never felt so acutely aware of being sick; consequently, he had never felt so little care about the things going on around him. Men came and went, his father among them (though for much longer periods of time than anyone else who came to sit with him), carrying out duties and affairs that Solomon could not muster an ounce of interest in. He had spent those three days inwardly cursing himself, his stomach, and the sea. Here was the clear beginning of an adventure that he had spent a short lifetime pining for, and he was too violently ill to take any more part in his oceanic journey than a piece of driftwood takes in its own. 

Now, as all seagoing folk know, these kinds of ailments are usually temporary. Before he knew it, though long after he began silently begged for it, Solomon was feeling almost himself again. He found that he was absurdly hungry, and it dawned on him that he had not eaten a bite since the pastry he had savored from on top of the barrel at the docks of Merriport. The tingling excitement that had electrified him the moment he stepped on board had been deadened by the rolling of his stomach. Now, as his seasickness started to subside, Solomon's feelings of flighty happiness began to well up in him again. He rose from his makeshift quarters, steadying his weakened knees by propping himself up on the massive coil of rope. 

"Well, well. Finally decided to join us, lad?"

Solomon pushed a limp coil of salt-bleached orange hair out of his face and saw standing before him the same dubious-looking man that had come to his house (could it only have been four nights ago?). His weatherbeaten face was wreathed in the acrid smoke of his black pipe. Solomon nodded slowly, careful not to make any sudden movements in case his innards decided to betray him again. 

"Good to see yeh on your feet. Yer father'll be lookin' for yeh. Give your corner there a moppin', when yer feelin' up to it."

The man was gone. He had still given no explanation of who he was, or why his coming had created such a momentous frenzy in the Hyrax home, or where they were going. 

                                                  .            .              .              .           .            .            .

Despite what the strange man had said, Solomon did not hear a word from his father for another two days. He would see the older man every few hours, usually deeply engaged in the work of the ship. Jacques' sinews bulged visibly even beneath his salt-stained cloth jacket as he went about his work. Solomon had always assumed his father to be a man of prodigious strength, but to see him in action tying off the sails or carrying up whole crates of dried food from below deck was something else entirely. At fifteen years old Solomon was quite strong himself, though he did not help with any of the work taking place on board save for the mopping requested by the strange man. No one spoke to him except to bring him food, and somehow it didn't seem to be his place to ask for a job to do. 

What Solomon did do was what he had always done: climb. The rigging of the massive ship provided ample opportunity for a boy as skilled as he to pull himself up, hand over hand, into the highest places. A quick test of any line's tension told him whether or not it was already secured in place, and if it was he could make use of it. He found the climbing of ropes and  masts to be a welcome challenge, as the whole apparatus was fundamentally more unsteady than anything he had climbed all of those lifetimes ago--or was it only weeks?-- in the colorful woods of his father's land.

From his vantage point high in the rigging of the Windjammer, Solomon could see the sailors going about their business far below. As he had done on trips into town with his father, as he had done his entire life, he imagined what the people far below were like. It troubled him only a little that he was not actually getting to know them, only creating lives for them in his own head, because he had no reason to believe that they had any inclination to get to know him in return. If they even knew he existed.

He finally spoke with his father on a hot bright morning, quite by accident. Solomon had taken it upon himself to sweep out the deck in front of the captain's quarters. Having finished early, he decided to sweep the inside as well. He had yet to find a locked door on board the ship, and guessed that this would be no different. He eased his way through the well-worn door, moving quietly in his fashion, and was startled to see his father sitting at the captain's desk poring over a large and fraying map. The older man's shirt was completely unbuttoned, and in the dusty half-light filtering through the porthole he saw what looked like ink stains covering his father's sizable chest. Jacques Hyrax was sweating considerably in the stuffy cabin, but his perspiration was not making the ink run, and Solomon stood transfixed as his eyes began to focus on the strange shapes and patterns swimming across the torso of a man who had never been anything but primly dressed in front of his son. 

If the elder Hyrax was startled by his son's presence, he didn't show it. His ice-blue eyes locked on Solomon's as he buttoned his shirt all the way back up and buried the pictures on his skin once more. He reached for a cloth that lay to the side of the desk, and slowly mopped his glistening forehead. Solomon detached his eyes from his father's chest, now covered by Jacques' rough blue shirt and utterly unremarkable. 

He rarely ever spoke to his father, especially without being spoken to first, and never asked him a question without good reason. But Jacques was just sitting there, calmly and with jaw set, as though expecting one to come. Hundreds of them danced across the front of his son's mind, begging to be asked, and Solomon blurted out the one he thought might bring him the least trouble.

"Father…who is that man? The one who came to the house, I mean. I…" 

For a few more moments, agonizing to the ever-placating young man, Jacques remained quiet with his  eyes fixed directly on his son's. When he finally broke his rigid pose, his magnificent red beard was matted by the force of his sigh. 

"I'm afraid I don't know his real name. I have always known him simply as Rip Rap. He is an old sailor and now serves as the keeper of the lighthouse that you may have seen when we were in Merriport. As such he's perhaps the best-informed man on the entire coast. He brought me some news on the day that he came to the house, and Rip Rap's news is always worth something…for good or ill."

Sweat was beading on Solomon's forehead and he could see the dust motes filtering down in the strong beam of sunlight that came through the closed porthole behind his father's head. The air in the room was becoming stifling. He dared not ask what the news had been. 

"I'm glad to see that you're up and about. Ships take some getting used to. Give it another few days and you'll be moving around like you've spent your whole life on board. I'll sweep this office from now on, so you can leave it out of your list of duties. I'm sure there's plenty of dirt in the galley for you to clean up, while you're in the mood. And please tell Rip Rap I would like a word, if you come across him."

Solomon took the hint that his interview was over, and left the room with his broom in hand. As he made his exit he saw his father begin to unbutton his shirt once more. 

Marshall Islands Chronicles, Post-Script: Pissing on the Dead

The Marshallese, being a family-oriented society with little in the way of available land space, almost always bury their dead at home. Just about every house you see there has two or three dusty white headstones in the yard, high rectangular graves with rectangular markers rising from one end. My host family's home was no different--there were three gravestones on their property, the closest being maybe six feet from my bedroom window. Nothing says, "Welcome to your home for the year" quite like three dead people to share your personal space with.

Their presence at first presented me with one of my more serious ethical dilemmas--others included "Should I eat this endangered sea turtle that's been served to me?" (guilty) and "Is it morally defensible to tape two seven-year-olds together who won't stop brawling, in the spirit of teaching them a lesson about cooperation?" (doubly guilty). Anyway, the dilemma presented by the three deceased housemates was, namely, whether or not it was okay to just piss out my bedroom window at night despite my proximity to their final resting places. The alternative, mind you, was to try to make my way through the pitch dark in an unfamiliar house with a full bladder, undo a series of knots that functioned as a lock, and take care of business before negotiating the same process in reverse. While also trying not to step on the sleeping forms of my three host siblings, who used the floor as a shared bed. Mind you, Marshallese dark was not like American dark. There was no light pollution there, no headlights going by, nothing. Once it was dark you better have known where you were.

As so often (unfortunately) happens, convenience trumped my moral platitudes in this case. I decided a few weeks into my stay on Aur that I would just let fly out the window, so to speak, should a middle-of-the-night situation arise.

This system worked out just fine for me from August to February, with a few notable exceptions. These usually involved me grossly misjudging the time of night (having gone to bed at 8:45 for lack of light or social options) and thinking it was a lot later than it really was. I would assume I was in the clear and proceed with my nightly micturating, only to have someone in my host family come around the side of the house and witness a thin stream emerging from the dark conspicuous frame of my window--it being, say, 10 pm and not 2 am as I had imagined. To their credit, they never once mentioned it to me. This I took as early evidence that we were going to get on just fine.

(PSA: this longwinded story is about to go from lighthearted to soul-crushingly bleak.)

As I said, my system worked well into February--a full six months of urinary freedom. But on the morning of February 16th, a Saturday, I woke up to the sound of men shouting and shoveling right outside my window. I was pissed off at the chaos for about three minutes before getting up to see what the commotion was. I didn't pull back my window curtain; rather, I got dressed and went out the door and around the house. What I saw felt like a sucker punch to the gut, a complete reflex that occurred before I had even finished processing what I was looking at.

A group of the men had dug a shallow trench, maybe six feet long, in the earth directly under my bedroom window. Lying in the trench was a woman, and it was immediately clear that she was no longer alive. I went out of my head for about ten seconds, just not processing or hearing anything clearly. When this wave passed I sprinted over to my school's principal, standing among the men, to ask what in God's name had happened. He explained that she had been sleeping in one of the small tin outbuildings on the next door neighbors' property, and an enormous breadfruit tree had collapsed and crushed it. Breadfruit trees generally run pretty big, with sturdy and visible roots, but there had been a colossal windstorm the night before and it had come loose. Help had come to her too late, and she never woke up. She died in the little trench as the men attempted to minister to her with medicines both modern and traditional. I should selfishly mention that my cot rested against the 1/2"-thick piece of particle board which served as a wall of the house, meaning that their ministrations and her death had happened less than a foot away from where I was sleeping. I probably don't need to explain how that made and still makes me feel.

The woman in question, Kathleen (pronounced Cat-a-lane by the Marshallese) was the mother of two of my students and the aunt of about nine others. The gut-punch I got was clearly nothing compared to the one received by the entire community, who had known her for her entire life. Everyone is family on an islands like that, in both a communal and biological sense, so when someone dies everyone loses a neighbor, a friend, a grandmother, a child. It is a strange, strange feeling to be a relative outsider in the midst of such deep-seated grief. From the events that transpired following Kathleen's passing, however, I learned two very important aspects of Marshallese culture. These simultaneously made me feel like part of their communal family (because they let me into something intensely personal and emotional), and like even more of an outsider (because I could not in the least relate to how they were handling things). Allow me to explain.

The first thing I learned is that the Marshallese, despite their passionate Christian beliefs (thanks to generations of missionary influence), are afraid of nothing except ghosts.  They swim with and kill sharks, climb limbless 50-foot coconut trees, and sail vast expanses of ocean in canoes that look like they barely float, all without batting an eye. But the possibility of a ghost--a timon (bastardized from demon)--puts them right over the edge. They cannot cope. This particularly applies to the children. After Kathleen passed away in my backyard, the kids of Aur basically foreswore the whole property for weeks. It became taboo. It took more than two months for any of my host siblings to even sleep in the house again, and only then with a solar flashlight running all night. I was regarded by my students as some mixture of crazy and heroic for continuing to sleep in my room and using that side of the house at all. For my part, I mostly just felt terrible for Tammy and Darrel (Kathleen's kids, my students) that their friends had turned their mother into the village bogey-woman. Despite all their charms, kids are occasionally just as capable of being shitty to each other as adults are.

The other thing I learned was the process by which the Marshallese grieve. Funerals are just about the only time you will ever see an outer-islander exhibit any kind of sadness. Marshallese adults simply do not cry, ever, with this one exception. It's a cultural sticking point that I really can't identify with in the least. The kids, like kids anywhere, cry all the time over hurts real and imagined, but by the time they reach age fifteen or so the ability to act on that impulse is almost entirely gone. The Marshallese are also not an outwardly affectionate people in the physical sense, ever, so it was beyond bizarre for me to be at the house that day and see upwards of forty people milling around in the presence of a dead body without a single hug being issued or tear being shed. We often forget how thick the American lens through which we view the world is, and this was one of the times that my cultural bias was readily apparent. It was truly surreal. My clumsy attempts at comforting Tammy and Darrel made me feel even more out of place, like I had just stumbled into a meeting that I wasn't supposed to know was taking place. They all just sat there, looking kind of dazed.

Like I said, there was zero crying before the funeral. What we would call "calling hours", the Marshallese call the ilomeji.  That word literally breaks down to "I see dead person/people." Eat your heart out, Bruce Willis. The ilomej went on all afternoon the following day and a vigil was kept over the body all night, until the next morning's funeral service and burial. Just before the coffin was lowered into the ground I saw my first adult Marshallese tears. It was chilling. To see such reserved women absolutely lose it, all at once, was hard to watch. It wasn't so much weeping as it was screaming. Kathleen's family pounded the lid of the coffin as they mourned, clinging to it until the last possible second.

What sprang to mind as this was all happening, as I was handed a shovel to help with the burial, was a crystal-clear memory of twelfth-grade AP Latin. The year's task had been translating Virgil's Aeneid, and the entire class had struggled with the parsing of a passage describing the sacking and burning of Troy. Our teacher, the brilliant Dr. James Hunt, told us that in English the words we couldn't grasp referred to something called ululating. Dr. Hunt said that he could explain what it meant, but we probably wouldn't truly understand because we had no cultural frame of reference for it. American women display grief in all manner of ways, but generally not with the ululations, rending of clothes, or pounding of the breasts in sorrow, as these Asiatic women had done in antiquity and the Marshallese women were still doing today. It is a gesture suited to the most unspeakable sadnesses possible. Speaking of Latin, Seneca had a saying for this: "Light griefs are loquacious, the great are dumb."

It's worth noting that the whole process, from death to burial, was over in about twenty-six hours. Being on island time (as they will proudly tell you), the Marshallese typically don't put on a shirt without three days of hemming and hawing, delays, and schedule changes, so the fact that something as momentous and important as a funeral could be pulled off so quickly was a borderline miracle. Perhaps this speaks to the hard life of the Marshallese throughout history, a catalogue full of short lives and unpleasant deaths in an impossibly unforgiving setting. I was and am humbled and grateful that they deigned to give me so much of themselves throughout the year. This particularly comes to mind when reflecting on how they were all so accommodating and thoughtful in the midst of their mourning--at a time when they had every reason to be resentful of the intruder on their grief, they still insisted on feeding me before themselves, giving me a seat of honor at the funeral, and allowing me to help shovel the earth that put Kathleen in her final resting place.

From that day forward I figured it was only right that I should never again piss in the presence of their honored dead.