TRAFFIC LAWS

Gordon Graham

there are two roads out of Oceanside, but only one road in. The north highway used to lead to Bay Ocean and Garibaldi, but now it leads only to the tree where the ashes of my mother’s family are scattered.

Rain falls hard on the Oregon coast, races eagerly down porous hills to rejoin the northern Pacific, and little by little the rain drags those hills down with it. For decades civil engineers would dutifully repair the road every time it washed out, but eventually they got the message: man was not meant to drive north out of Oceanside. The road was blocked and left to the care of the forest.

Five friends and I pile out of our cars near the metal gate, carrying bows, arrows, a yellow target bag, and a stuffed owl. We spread out our gear, string up the target on one of the bows and carry it on two of our shoulders. At ground level, the air is brisk and still. Just above the treetops, I watch shredded clouds race along in the wind, whining in my ears like hunting dogs. We bypass the gate, and head up the lost road.

The rain that killed the highway was not violent. It didn’t bury the asphalt beneath ten tons of coastal mud, or split it like kindling across one knee and send it spilling into the sea. Instead, the road is plastic, warped, shaped by the shifting hillside instead of the principles of sound design. Here and there broad shelves of asphalt are calved off and sliding downslope, but only at the hillside edge. The blacktop feels soft under my feet where it is piled on infirm earth. I wonder where are the people now who first surveyed this stretch of forest for the highway. How did they envision this place transformed in their own image? On the uphill side, sweet pea pools have formed, alive with water bugs and salamanders and frogs who, like fungus on a nurse log, thrive in this brief window of infrastructural decay.

Within a mile, the cold pacific waves are hammering against the coves. The sound is titanic: I feel it in the diaphragm, or at the back of the throat where salt and bitter pine collects, rumbling like a threat. Ravens give storm-cloud croaks, and the water drops collecting on the embankment make pinball machine tones. The roadway is dense with noise, packed with life, compacted like strata of deposited soil weighed down with rain.

About a mile in, we set up the target at a hairpin turn, right where the road forks. Some of us have been shooting for years, and others are trying it for the first time today. I demonstrate how to string my bow and hand it to a friend I met two days ago. A friend I’ve known since fifth grade goes over traffic laws: nobody crosses the yellow line until all the bows are on the ground. Nobody picks up their bow until he calls clear. If he sees anyone coming up the road, shooting stops immediately. We’re all here to keep one another safe.

The bowstrings chuckle. Loose arrowheads buzz as they cross the road, and the dry thwacks on target leap away through black-green foliage, bounding over spiderweb trees. Out here, the difference between a deer and a human being is slighter than ever—we’re standing on proof that we can’t tame the landscape any more than they can.

Learning archery can be frustrating for people who are already strong. It uses unusual muscles, not the biceps or the shoulders or the core, but the back, between the shoulder blades. I’ve seen big guys used to feats of strength sputter and fume at how unnatural it feels. You’ve got everything you need, though. A bow is a beautiful machine, purpose built for the human animal. It just takes a while to remember that those muscles are there.

I’m not shooting more than a flight or two today. Instead, I sit on a cracked concrete block behind the firing line, watching the road getting borne away. The woods don’t know what a road is, so the highway’s just more stone to be rolled downhill, ambitions and illusions and all. My attention keeps drifting to the sign that marks the fork, which reads simply “In Memory of Walt Gile”. That fork runs off a hundred feet through the woods and straight over a cliff that overlooks the Tillamook Bay.

Not far from here, there’s another memorial, unmarked at the end of a trail I can’t find on any map: a Sitka Spruce almost a hundred and fifty feet tall. If you stand at its base and look up, it rises before you like a broad road into the sky, until its top vanishes where it was struck by lightning. Around its base is my mother’s family: her aunt, her mother, and her brother. Within a few years of one another, they found their ways here, where rain falls heavy and life grows thick. There’s no physical trace of them at all, but they’re there because I know they are. I know that they’re together.

Twenty flights of arrows later, my friends and I are finished. We conduct a final search for missing arrows, unstring our bows, and start trekking back. Evening is falling, and it’s colder than ever, and the road ahead is far from sure. In the twilight, we’re nothing but a handful of animals skulking along a heap of rotting stone, carrying sharp sticks and shivering in the damp. We’re not worried, though. We’re social animals— and we all know the traffic laws.

Cold Water andre cruz Digital Photograph.

The Portuguese Poets Call It Saudade

Nick

Gatlin

but english isn’t so precise. it’s like[...]the way moonlight reflects on water, or how her torso arched forward when she laughed. sometimes between sleep and wake i see it again:the Great Big Quilt that sews the world together—all the clouds wear it;and the squirrels, they wear it (you wore it:like a veil over the ocean, contouring itself around your back)[...]and when we held the sky in our arms, i wore it: “look at the stars in the water,” i said; “i didn’t know there were so many stars.”

Nesting Time

Hunter Burr

My mother told me

When I was young

I’d nested under the covers

Pressing my little feet against her calf to warm

I was once four years time enough to live and grow and walk

Nested in the covers

And warming up from the cold

How time holds itself in places

Ever moving

Placing roots in memory

In the person, place, or thing it inhabits

I wish the space for time in our vessels was not so small I want to hide time like Easter eggs in my favorite places strangers may find them and I can live forever

I want to give it as a gift, a petit four

Four years

Le petit

A little

More time

To nest

CUT YOUR HAIR C.

Cooper

Been having this recurring dream where I cut off all my hair again, and in the dream I’m always running late for something but I’m not sure what it is. Haven’t gotten that far yet. And I try to look in the mirror. But it’s a blur. And for a second I know I’m dreaming. But I think I don’t really want to know that, so I forget. And I rub my eyes, and I tell myself I don’t have time to be looking in the mirror. I must be drunk, I’m going to drive drunk again. And I tell myself I’d better sober up and catch my breath because I can’t afford to crash this car, and I know it’s important that I get where I’m going, wherever it is. I always make it to the car, and I’m standing by the driver’s side door, keys in my hand, and I start running my fingers through my hair, wondering why I can’t just leave myself alone. And it’s funny because in the dream it’s my hair, but I know, really, it’s a memory of yours, the way it felt to run my fingers through your short curls the summer you let me cut your hair because I had already cut mine.