1. Georgetown, Great Exuma
Two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in the Chat and Chill Bar on Stocking Island. KB, the Bahamian who owns the place, is looking for an argument and can’t find one. Mandela versus Boutelayzee, Army versus Navy, chanterelles versus portabellas. Even Mushroom John, who brought his wife, Sandy, down here from their tuber farm in Pennsylvania for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, says the rule is to each their own. Down the beach Junior is making the best conch salad on the island, conch so fresh it is still wiggling when he puts it down in front of us. I drink two Bombays on ice to Albert’s five Kalik beers, and after some critical mass of mosquito bites we tumble outside to hit the blue, blue water. I told Albert there was no blue like Exuma blue before we came, and now he says, “It’s so pretty, it’s corny.”
Every Sunday at the Chat and Chill, KB roasts a pig, we can smell it where we’re floating, you can smell it all over the island when the wind is onshore. A jellyfish floats across the beige sand below our floating bodies, and a little school of sergeant majors mistake the yellow in my bathing suit for one of their own. The floating is so effortless, the sun so soft and warm, I’m almost asleep when Junior hollers that the conch fritters are ready, and we swim to shore and eat them, roll them around in the red sauce that has just the right amount of kick to it, get in one more swim before it’s time to eat the pig.
2. Davis, California
Early morning on what they call the ‘greenbelt’. Walking with Lucy, while Audrey leaps between furrowed, fallow fields. Everyone we know calls Lucy Audrey and Audrey Lucy, which is strange since Lucy is a thirty-five-year-old woman, and Audrey is a German shorthaired pointer, but when you see the way they look at each other, you begin to understand. Lucy has her sister’s name—Emily—tattooed across her bicep. Last month, Emily tried to kill herself, succeeded, temporarily, was gone, in almost every way that counts, for more than two whole days. Then she came back from the dead.
Last night I heard a nightingale imitating a car alarm in a jacaranda tree. This morning, a heron teases Audrey with a touch-and-go pattern along the creek. I remember the day last fall when Murray and Melinda and I walked on Limantour Beach after the storm and watched the pelicans. The storm had brought out all the animals, tule elk, fallow deer, and three coyotes who ran and leapt and did the kinds of things coyotes do in terrible lovely velvet paintings, while we watched, open-mouthed, from the side of the road. We were each locked inside our individual sorrows, didn’t know each other well enough to share, but we agreed, out loud, that just like moose, pelicans were surely put on earth to act as suicide preventers, agreed we’d never kill ourselves in sight of one.
3. Ozona, Texas
Nine o’clock on a Thursday night, the bar full of Halliburton guys in their red suits, roughnecks from the oilfields for preseason football, hunting stories, and beer. It is just dumb luck that I’ve worn my camo miniskirt, and I take the best seat in the house for watching the Pats beat up the Redskins, until the bartender comes over and tells us we’ve entered a private club. Albert rises to leave. He recognizes enemy territory, knows that sculptors and Halliburton guys shouldn’t drink together, especially not in Texas. “In that case,” I say, “I’ll take two memberships and two double shots of Patron Silver, and a Coke.”
We can mark this down as my last fearless moment. After a few hours—and dozens of silent, accusatory stares—Albert says, “You might be the first woman to ever drink in this bar,” and I say, “You might be the first sculptor.” Later, in the parking lot of the Best Western, I pick up both of our heavy suitcases and make a beeline for the stairs. Albert says, “No! Pam, no!” which makes me lift the bags higher and run for it, and when I get to the top I laugh so hard I pee.
4. Juneau, Alaska
They said we wouldn’t see any orcas. They said the humpbacks were in and when the humpbacks were in you didn’t see the orcas, because the orcas were predators and the humpbacks are prey. It’s been a long day. We’ve been all the way up Tracy Arm to the glaciers, and everyone but the captain and I are sleeping when a report comes over the radio: orcas in Shearwater Cove.
By the time we get there, there’s nothing stirring. A couple of humpbacks out in the main channel a sure sign the orcas are gone. The captain is worried about the hour, worried about the fuel he’s got left, worried about his daughter, who’s got magenta hair and a T-shirt that says THIS is what a feminist looks like, who is back from somewhere like Berkeley working on his boat this summer, selling sodas to the tourists through a permanent scowl. There is a flash of fin on the other side of the channel, distant, but unmistakable. Orca. Male.
The captain says, “That’s four miles across this channel, minimum.” I show him the silver charm around my neck, remind him that it’s my last day in Alaska, promise to swim for shore if we run out of gas.
“Don’t lose that fin,” he says, turning the bow into the sunset, but I couldn’t lose it if I tried, the water of Stephen’s Passage backlit, a million diamonds rushing toward me in the sun, and one black fin, impossibly tall, absurdly geometric, the accompanying blast of whale breath above it, superimposed onto the patterns of light.
Spotting whales at sea is not so different than spotting deer in the woods. For hours you see nothing, and then you see one, and suddenly you realize you are surrounded. This pod has twenty-five, by my best counting, the one male, who keeps his distance, and twenty-four females, all of them running steadily west. We get out in front, and the captain shuts down the engines. Every time the big male’s fin turns itself up and over and back down under the surface of the water, I can’t help myself, I gasp.
5. Laramie, Wyoming
In the summer, the trains come through town more than once an hour, and Albert and I, locked all night in the bookstore like a fantasy left over from clumsy childhood, pulling books off whatever shelves we want to and reading to each other—poems first, and then settling into stories—on the old purple couch. We’d come down that day from Walden, Moose Capital of Colorado. I was sure we would find some marker on the fence where Matthew Shepard had been tied.
Later, when we had turned out all the lights in the bookstore and thrown the mattress on the floor in the back room, the cow-boy band across the street tried to play “Free Bird” as an encore, and I watched his face above me change color with the flashing light. He took my hand and made me feel the place we came together.
“Holy,” he said, not believing in God.
6. Tampa, Florida
Eight o’clock on a Friday night, and downtown is rolled up tight. Half a block from the old Tampa Theater, lights, voices, and the slow roll of reggae spilling out into the street. Albert and I have been having a hard time finding fun in Tampa, and the Jamaicans at the Jerk Hut seem to be having some. It has the feel of a private party, and no one else there is white, but the bouncer says five bucks a person cover, twelve for a bucket of Dos Equis, you can get yourself some food in the back.
We fill a plate with jerk chicken and fried bananas, open two beers, and settle in on the perimeter. The band is talented, everyone in the place knows the words and sings along, and even though Albert keeps trying to bend the lyrics political, all the lines I catch are about love and sex and girls. Albert is not a dancer, but the beat is irresistible, so I compromise, as others do, by swaying in my chair. When we are not ignored entirely, we are looked at with pleasant curiosity.
Earlier that day, I was trying to buy some grouper somewhere other than a supermarket, and the woman at the Born Again Produce stand sent me to the Fresh Fish Market in the projects. “It’s crazy,” she said. “Water, water everywhere, but that’s the only one there is.”
The Fresh Fish Market is in a strip mall. Next door at the Joyful Noise Karate Institute, teenage boys in white and purple robes are grunting in unison; the effect is an odd mixture of eerie and calming. There was only one grouper left in the case, and the woman behind me in line wanted to arm-wrestle me for it, before she broke into a smile so wide it showered the dingy market walls with light.
Back at the Jerk Hut, the band is on break, and Albert says, “We might be the only white people to ever drink in this bar.” And I say, “And you might be the only sculptor.”
I’m finally beginning to understand, that when we want to kill ourselves, it is not because we are lonely, but because we are trying to break up with the world before the world breaks up with us.
When the band comes back, a waitress named Shaila with beaded dreadlocks and bright green pumps takes both my hands and pulls me to the dance floor. She says, “We are going to get everybody dancing tonight.” Two songs later she says, “I’m going back to get Mister,” and I know Albert won’t be able to resist her invitation. She brings him to me on the dance floor, and two songs later, Shaila gets her wish. Every single person—even the bouncer, even the kitchen ladies—are dancing, joyful, to the beat.
Notes From the Fire 
