Wanderlust

I’ve landed in Seattle, after a week in the fierce embrace of mountains sculpted by slow dogmatic glaciers that churned out deep valleys, leaving impossibly precarious landscapes in their wake. The Native people call Glacier the backbone of the world, and its easy to see why.  I woke up early Wednesday morning and climbed Going-to-the-Sun road, which climbs out of the Macdonald Lake Valley and then up along the ridgeline, clinging to the edge of the deep bowl of the valley. As I rode the sun rose farther over the crenellated mountain tops and the waning moon dropped down onto fields of snow.  It felt in many ways like the culmination of my trip so far, the coming together of my intentions and reality.  Sitting up there on the split open solidity of stone, Altyn Limestone and Appekunnny Argillite anchored under me, the panorama of hanging gardens of wildflowers spread before me, I felt the elemental attraction that is unique to certain obscure places on earth. It was easy to see why that place is held sacred by so many people.  It felt like time moved differently, and as I pedaled up the last two miles, watching as the peaks across the valley drew even with my eyes,  I felt as if I could ride up forever, wished that my journey would never reach its end.

At the top of the mountain I found Ben again, with whom I’d parted ways in Missoula, and we coasted down the hill together, stopping as we went to take futile pictures of landscapes that will always defy being captured in small confined boxes of light.  It was the kind of landscape that I wanted to drink in, to absorb through my skin and keep with me forever.  Lining the road on all sides a riot of wildflowers exploded from the ground – brilliant fuschia and dusky purple lupines, the sharp scent of queen anne’s lace, clematis, prairie smoke, spotted saxifrage and blue beard tongue.  There was a family of mountain goats dancing across the remnants of glaciers and bighorn sheep standing proudly on top of jumbled scree, blinking at the flashbulbs.

We lazed away the afternoon splashing in the toe curling cold of Lake St. Mary and listening to This American Life and stories of summer camp. At our campground we met Clyde, who has traveled the world on his bicycle and regaled us with stories of Peruvian frostbite and filth encrusted beds.  There was another group of supported cyclists in Glacier at the same time we were, and I stopped and talked to one of them at Logan Pass. He asked me what I was doing, and when I told him he said "there are two kinds of people out here, retired people and those who haven’t started working." (I think that when I told him I was going to New York for school he thought I meant my undergraduate degree, owing to my dewy complexion and youthful exuberance).  And I thought how true that is, that so many of us spend the middle of our lives tied to jobs that give us finite weeks of vacation a year, that work and exploration are so rarely compatible.  The majority of the people out on the roads that I’ve met are in their 60’s and retired.  It seems like there are very few people who have the luxury or the inclination to go gallivanting around the country by bicycle during their younger years.

On the 5th of July I rode the last stretch of road into East Glacier for my date with the train, where I had the good fortune to encounter a lovely and unexpected traveling companion. Molly had been traveling around the country by herself as well, and was taking the same train to Seattle and then on to Vancouver, where she was from.  We sat in the observation car until the sun went down and all we could see were our reflections in the window, surreptitiously drinking beer out of purloined amtrak glasses.  We talked for hours about everything under the sun, squeezing years worth of conversation into our finite time on the tracks. I asked all the questions I’d been wondering about for weeks, like how one goes about adopting a highway, exactly, and she told me the names of all of the plants that caught my eye – fireweed and oceanspray and thimbleberry.  It was one of those relationships that can only happen on a train, I think, singular and melancholy in its brevity and its depth.  We parted ways in downtown Seattle, and I waved at the smoke dark windows of the bus she was on as it roared by me onto the interstate.

I’ve landed now at the Meridian house, where Kristin, an old friend from Berkeley, now lives.  Its a little bit of a culture shock, being in a big city again after so many weeks of sleepy small towns.  Elizabeth has rejoined the adventure, and I am delighted to have a co-conspirator again after weeks on my own. Yesterday we rode bikes to the erotic bakery and bought lewd cupcakes to eat on the bridge over Lake Union, and then rode down to Babeland, Seattle’s original sex-positive sex store.  

The first thing I noticed about Babeland was its windows – they were clear plate glass, and everything in the store was visible from the outside. Not unusual for most stores, but it was the only sex store I remember seeing anywhere that was like that.  We talked with Lamelani, who’s been with Babeland for eight years, and has a background in biology. Just like A Woman’s Touch in Madison, she tries to incorporate clinical information when it seems like the customers are open and interested in that sort of thing. I think more and more that the way to really change our culture around sexuality is to strengthen and expand the connections between reproductive health care providers and sex-positive sex stores. 

After Babeland we had dinner with Liezl and Ann from the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF), a national network of APA women who work on a range of issues from reproductive justice to human trafficking to economic justice.  Elizabeth has written a great entry about her conversation with Liezl, so I highly recommend reading it for an in-depth perspective of the anti-trafficking work NAPAWF is doing. Over deliciously spicy Indonesian food, we talked about the impact of racial and cultural identity on reproductive justice and on progressive politics in general. It seems like there are some areas, like Seattle, where there are organizations and individuals working to expand advocacy and education around social justice issues to include perspectives that have not traditionally been included, as NAPAWF does.  There are also areas of the country, like Montana, where there is a dominant cultural identity that runs the show, and people who don’t fit into that identity are ignored, or worse.  I tried to find people to talk to about positive sexuality and reproductive health care in Wyoming and Montana, but since I wasn’t in the larger university towns, my search came up empty. There was one professor at the University of Montana in Missoula who looked interesting, but she’s on sabbatical until 2008…

Tonight I’m doing a presentation at the Center for Sex-Positive Culture, and tomorrow Elizabeth and I are meeting with an amazing array of people, including Inga Muscio, the author of Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, which is the book we assigned to all of students in Female Sexuality classes at Cal. 

Now, though, we’re off to go swimming!