“And I, I don’t think I’ve changed,
No, and I’m too scared to stay the same
So my carpets got crop circles
My carpets got crop circles these days”
-Odie Leigh
[Tacoma, Washington] MY APARTMENT WAS ON THE third floor of a building called “The Towers”; a studio for $1000 a month. Contrary to the title, it was a squat structure of red brick, though extending in height along the steeply inclined road. The hallways smelled of mildew and the elevators often substituted as a public urinal. The neighbors, mostly wonderful, were sometimes spirited with raucous exchanges—often with themselves.
I remember the symphony of sounds on summer nights. Drunk hollered shouting in the courtyard, bike brakes, car horns and ambulances wailing. Radios playing at the streetlight and wet coughs over menthols. Every once in a while a gunshot crack and silence.
I had found myself in social work after leaving a career as a marine electrician. I started volunteering and shortly after was employed at a series of homeless and domestic violence shelters. I was doing intake, security, and helping with case management. I had not spoken to my family for a long time back then. Things weren’t great and looking back I often feel that job was an attempt to give the love I didn’t have to the people I was responsible to.
It was a rewarding and lonely time.
I developed a coping mechanism to handle the nightly horrors of relapse and withdrawal, mediating fights, communicating with first responders and concerned citizens and the long nights quietly listening to traumas and circumstances of our guests lives—I began to paint. Smearing pastel and acrylic resin on bleached canvas, I would stare out at the grey skyline and sketch the scenes, studying dimensions and copying photographs. The place was draped with paint-stained drop cloths and littered with mason jars of brushes and stacks of novels. I didn’t need a family, I had art, writing and people to take care of.
Or so I thought.
Eight months and two weeks later, I was on a mental health sabbatical and broke. The lease was nearly up, and the downstairs neighbor had set their couch on fire with a cigarette… again.
It was my father who broke the silence first. In light of my situation he suggested being in need of a deckhand on his clam boat back on the east coast; he followed with a reminder of my grandmother’s failing health. Defeated and emotionally drained, I relinquished and agreed to return. Looking around my hovel, I knew that the time had come to leave this chapter of my life behind.
Moving always seems to change the value of things, metaphorically and literally. Only essential items could fit into the little hatchback. Only the most essential items would continue with me.
I had clothes, books, art supplies, and two boxes of writing. All that was left was a box of paintings. Each cut from their plywood frame and rolled into tubes of coarse canvas. My heart was beating in that box. Each canvas a devastating story, every marigold yellow splatter—a heartbreak wrung from soul and poured onto paper.
Yet, life was under threat, and on one dark morning my silver sedan set out from the city of destiny. Neko Case sang on my car radio as I wept quietly thinking I may never return. And just like that I left this part of me behind, abandoned, in order to survive.
“I like to climb up and down your vine,
and leave a little trail, just a slimy line”
-Barry Polisar
[Prophysaon coeruleum, otherwise known as the “Blue Grey Tail Dropper,” is a small to medium sized slug. Its colors range from gray to blue often with light speckling. They inhabit moist, coniferous or mixed wood forests of varying ages. They prefer moist forest floors and abundant coarse woody debris, particularly of big leaf maple. They are primarily found in southern British Columbia, Western Washington, and small regions of western Idaho.]
The highways stretched on across the horizon and there were bright pink sunsets and gas station chats with truckers heading towards Cheyenne. There were quiet nights staring at hotel ceilings. There were cheap rooms in Bozeman and Columbus, Ohio. There was wine drinking and letters written to old friends on loaned stationery. Then one morning I was sweating in muck boots and oil slicks staring at the edge of a dock. The acrid smell of rotting clams wafted near the grey herons wading in creek beds beside diesel engines churning in anticipation for the sea. I was back home, I wasn’t sure why, but I was there.
Looking up at the glimmering casino lights, tied up in the crick waiting for fuel; I began to think: “Life sometimes takes you on a circuitous route.” It is as if one needs only to return to the beginning to see where the wrong turn was taken. This turn had taken me to Atlantic City, New Jersey. After 10 years, I had come home and nothing had changed except for everyone else and me.
Seven strange months passed as a deckhand on the F/V Joey D. She was a two-hundred-foot-long, bright red, stern fixed, single-dredge clam boat captained by my father, Ed. There was first mate, Matt, who had a lot of strong opinions, a strained marriage but cooked a mean sea bass. There was the other deckhand, a Florida surfer working his way to Indonesia. As any sea tale goes, we had a great season, a few arguments, a lot of work and made a decent check. It was a tough time, and life had reached a sort of a stasis, but all the while New Jersey had begun to grow tiresome.
Driving a car down the coastline, it was apparent the land had lost its soul.
The Lene Lenape people had long vanished from its pine forests. Their villages cobbled with colonist bricks and filled with sizzling concrete. The asphalt hardened under the sun and was repaved layer upon layer until the cries of their gods and ancestors were nothing more but muted murmurs and then silence.
I camped alone in the Pine Barrens when we weren’t working. Under the moon, I would listen to the frogs’ croak and cicada hiss along the banks of the Batsto River. I was on a spiritual trip, and I craned my ears when a rushing wind swept around the camp hoping to hear these spirits and a whispered word of guidance.
Their absence told me all I needed to know.
The night I knew my stay here was ending. I was rocking in a bunk as we steamed out towards the Atlantic on a cloudy night. In a notebook I scribbled the thoughts as they bubbled to the surface. Over waves slapping the hull and the hydraulic hum of gears turning, my heart whispered a rising refrain,
“Things do not have to be this way”.
Under a thin sheet with a notebook curled in my lap; I imagined I had become—the prisoner, who in a sudden bout of curiosity gave a slight push to his prison door only to find the exit unlocked the entire time. It was a period of stagnation, just another blip between the prologue and epilogue of a single man’s story. To end the book here would be a disgrace. So just like that, I dropped the plans I thought I needed to go on and found a new one, I was heading back to Washington to start anew again.
“I learned that fear
Is just the false belief
That there is nothing
You can do”
-Katie Pruitt
[The Blue Grey Tail Dropper tends to be solitary and only few have been found. Their main threats include habitat loss, competition with other gastropods, and native predators. It’s believed they serve an essential ecological role dispersing spore of mycorrhizal fungi. This species is capable of self-amputation of its tail when threatened by predators.]
I had settled into a small shack, same one as before, tucked in a meadow, high up on a hill surrounded by Douglas Fir. I found a job and enrolled in school. I filled my space with things and got back to filling pages with words. After circling Pax Americana in a fugue state searching for self, I was beginning to nestle into a new routine, I was beginning to get acquainted with the man I wanted to be in life.
I wasn’t ready for everything to change.
I received a phone call early one morning at work.
My cousin said,
“She’s dying get ready.”
(Which is a strange thing to hear early one morning at work.) Later that afternoon, my father had called and said, “Grandma isn’t doing well; you should probably buy a ticket.”
Five hours later I was skyrocketing across two thousand miles upright in a plastic seat, looking through a porthole at the void looking back at me.
I didn’t know what happens next.
Money comes and goes, apartment leases end, favorite shoes wear out, and sometimes friends drift away. Sometimes people die. But something like a grandmother—the cornerstone of the family, the ever-loving constant, the one woman whose comforting little voice can always be counted on to be found—I had never actually considered the world didn’t need her as much as I did.
She died ten hours after I landed.
I held her hand as the machines whirred and a slick black fluid in tubes slinked out of her organs. She wheezed and smiled with glittering eyes saying to me for the very last time,
“I love you, Justin.”
I do not remember the hours and days following the soft limp and fall of her head. The words from aunts and uncles fade into a wonky din. The proclamations from the Rabbi, the sounds of Hebrew echoing around the spacious ceiling, the glimmering shine of polished shoes, and the fragrant smell of funeral flowers all ceased to exist when the casket faded into the darkness of the mausoleum wall.
“I’m lonely and I’m blue,
Yet I’ll try to go along,
Without you”
-Franki Valli
[Little is known about the slug, except that it is extremely rare, and it’s habitat is shrinking.]
Suddenly I’m back on a plane, crossing the country again, heading home to Washington. I’ve got the same number of bags, and a heart loaded with grief. I’m looking out of a porthole and below I can see the spired mountain ranges of the northwest.
The plane was descending, landing, circling, and ambling about the tarmac until finding its proper home. I disembarked, making my way with the crowd towards the carousels spinning without luggage. My suitcase tumbled down the little slide. And, so too did I imagine, that my grief had tumbled right behind it.
[A biologist friend had once asked me about endangered species in the Northwest. I had very little to offer in return being neither a biologist nor one worried about such matters. I did some research and there I stumbled onto the Blue Grey Tail Dropper. Here was this beautiful little slug, glistening blue and shrouded in mystery. Its defining feature, a perforated tail always at the ready to leave behind when in danger. Did the slug fret about the time it had with this appendage? Did it covet a nub of its existence over its greater prosperity?]
Standing under the glare of fluorescent lights, pre-recorded voices, electronic dings and alerts all around me—the bags and my grief came circling round, and just like that I picked one up and left the other behind, as a final act of self-defense, a last-ditch effort to survive. // JUSTIN PLATTER
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE BLUE-GREY TAILDROPPER SLUG through the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife at wdfw.wa.gov
