Random thoughts in war and peace
The news hit me today in the CNN newsroom like the blast of a bomb. I had fully intended to go visit her after my return to Atlanta this week. Now, I will never see her again.I will never hear her infectious laugh again. It made my husband Kevin’s bursting laugh seem demure.
I probably never would have had the journalism career I have if it had not been for Anita. My resume landed on her desk somehow, and she wanted to hire me on the national copy desk. I will be forever grateful to her for having faith in me.
Anita fought cancer for many years. Thursday night, she lost the battle. She left behind a beautiful daughter, Kc, who will now have to navigate life without the nurturing of her mother.
Tomorrow, I journey to San Francisco, to be with another strong woman in my life — my aunt, my father’s little sister. I grew up calling her Phoolpishi, which means aunt of the flowers, her bloom faded with years of physical suffering.
Like with Anita, her cancer is back with a vengeance. Like Anita, she is strong. A fighter like I could never be.
She has endured and survived and is still with hope.I did not get a chance to see Anita again. Not on this earth anyway. But I will see my Phoolpishi tomorrow. And when I do, I will hear Anita’s laugh surround me, fill me with warmth like an old English hearth on a bone-chilling day.
I have traveled to many lands but nowhere have I seen the landscape change as rapidly or as often as it did on our road trip through Wyoming.
I see the Tetons in the rear view now, white peaks contrasting against blue sky, as the highway winds downward into flatter lands formed of earth as red as Georgia clay. We drive into DuBois, a true cowboy town where the main road is dotted with a few eateries and shops and an old sign that says “Homestead.” We poke our heads into an antique shop filled with old spurs, bits and colorized photographs. We eat burgers at the Cowboy Cafe. They are big enough to fill the belly of any hungry ranch hand.
We keep driving, not knowing where we will sleep tonight. Through the Wind River Reservation, past cows and even elk, and into Lander, where a mean wind whips through a main street that feels empty. This is an old mining town. It was the westward terminus of the “Cowboy Line” of the Chicago and North Western Railway. This is “where rails end and trails begin.”
I close my eyes and try to imagine this place as it was a century ago.
There are plenty of dude ranches nearby. I am told that’s a source for tourist dollars these days.
We keep driving. Into an abyss of nothingness. Nothing we can see but sagebrush and rolling hills in the distant. There are stretches of highway where we do not see any trailers, ranches, animals. No signs of life anywhere.
It’s a strange feeling for me. I would not want to be alone here, I think.
It takes several hours to reach Rawlins. We think about staying there but keep moving. I can’t stand the melancholy of a another town past its prime hanging heavy on every corner.
We turn right onto Highway 287, which will take us back into Colorado. It is evening when we reach Fort Collins. Downtown is bustling in this college town. People are spilling out of cafes and restaurants. I hear one man discussing Jean-Paul Sartre’s brand of existentialism.
We had come from nothingness into being. Or was it the other way around?
We drive out of Yellowstone through the south gate. For a few moments, the drive seems, well, boring compared to the visual feast that was before us all day long. But then, the highway bends and offers a glimpse of the peaks that form the Grand Tetons. Jagged mountains that rise a mile high from the ground, like gothic cathedrals reaching skyward.
We check into our cabin — The Willow — at Dornan’s Spur Ranch in Moose, Wyoming. My colleague, John Branch at CNN’s National Desk, recommended we stay there. He worked there once after he fell in love with the Tetons and could not bear to leave. The cabins are rustic but modern. And the best thing is the vast wine shop that rivals any in Atlanta.
Here’s what Dornan’s says about its wine:
“We know what you’re thinking… how did a family of hardscrabble pioneer homesteaders end up operating one of the finest wine shops in the Rocky Mountains?
Like most things around here, the story starts with Granddad (JP Dornan), and his mother(Evelyn). While she was the “official” homesteader, she chose to spend much of her time in sunny California, leaving her son to “prove up” on the property. While traveling back and forth, JP befriended many of the wine families in California, who were then (1930s and 1940s) just getting their businesses started. Their families and our families have remained close over the decades, and enjoying fine wines has become a Dornan family tradition.”
I am in heaven as I buy a bottle of Malbec, get comfortable in the restaurant and watch the sun set behind the Tetons.
The next morning, we begin the day early with a hike at Taggert Lake. Half the trail is still covered in snow. There are places where snow shoes might have been useful. We see a coyote but no bears.
We have lunch at the beautiful Jenny lake Lodge, where everything is just right. Even the butter is artfully carved in the form of a moose.
Jenny Lake is perhaps the most scenic place at the Tetons. Unlike the much smaller Taggert, Jenny is not frozen. The waters shimmer under the shadows of the towering peaks.
Another hike in the afternoon and then the drive back to the lodge. We decide to stop in and see the famed Jackson Hole ski village. On the way, we spot a moose off the highway, camouflaged perfectly in a boggy forested field.
For dinner we head into Jackson for an elegant meal at the Snake River Lodge. They have things like wild boar and elk medallions on the menu. Kevin orders the buffalo pot roast. I try a pork shank cooked in duck confit. How utterly decadent.
Our wiatress, Brandy Borts, says she came to Jackson 15 years ago and never left. My friend, John, will probably understand why, I think. I think it’s beautiful here but I am too much a lover of urban jungles to make a go of it in Wyoming.
Brandy says she loves to ski, can’t get enough of the landscape. So she works hard as a waitress so that she can stay.
Alas, we cannot stay. We have to make our way back to Denver soon.
From Denver airport, we drive to Steamboat Springs — a place that is as pretty as its name sounds. The slopes are closed for the summer but plenty of people are still around. As is the snow atop the mountains. On this day, everyone is excited about the sun. It’s the first day in a while that the wet stuff has stopped, the clouds have vanished. A magnificent statue of an elk graces a public park by the river.
At Chocolate Soup, Chelsea serves us a savory scone and strawberry rhubarb waffles. I can tell this vacation will be filled with many lazy afternoons and heaping plates of delicious food. Never tasted a waffle with rhubarb before. It made me think of the pies at Yoder’s in Sarasota. Only better.
From the picturesque Colorado ski resort, we drive northeast, through more rugged country. Just before the Wyoming state line, we come across the Hoopla shop in Walden — elevation, 8,100 feet. Amy Symonds grew up here. Her father was a caretaker of a flourspar mine. That’s the stuff they make fluoride out of. And very pretty pendants.
Her store is in the middle of a broken town. Nothing but a saloon, a barber shop and a host of trailers here. The opposite of Steamboat, I think.
Tom Waits is on the CD player. Symonds is wearing a giant fur hat on her head and stands behind the counter to greet her customers, all two of us. She sells all sorts of pelts — mink, ermin, skunk. She sells hat boxes, vintage hoop skirts and handbags, jewelry, furniture and a bunch of other assorted stuff. Her shop was featured in a western magazine. She’s happy about that. She sells me an old silver ring with a heap of copper on it. Looks like someone forgot to mold it into a more shapely sight.
We meander down the road, catch sight of a moose. I’d never seen a real live one before. We stop at Woods Landing, more out of curiosity than thirst, and sit at the bar with a folks who watch Fox News and hate CNN. On weekends, the dance hall is filled here with wranglers, ranchers and pretty girls. Bartender Mary Albright serves me an ice-cold Corona and tells me to never mind all those anti-CNN sentiments. She watches Anderson Cooper every night, she says. Tapes it when she can’t watch it live. She was born in Germany, grew up in Nebraska and worked at Home Depot in Denver before she came to Woods Landing four years ago. Now, she makes a mean vodka tonic and watches people twirl on the century-plus-old floor.
After a refreshing drink, we are off on a lonely highway, through Laramie, the town that became notorious for the torture and murder of Matt Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming. Must be tough to live in a town that’s become synonymous with something that evil.
The drizzle gets heavier in Laramie. The skies are gray. It’s the end of May but feels more like mid-winter in Atlanta. We hit the highway to Cheyenne, the state capital. My colleague Matt Smith lived here once and suggested we stay at the Plains Hotel, a no-frills lodging in a beautiful old building. Matt said we ought to eat at The Albany, and so we did. The place used to be brothel, named after the Union Pacific trains from Albany, New York. They carried troops going off to fight in World War II who had some fun on their stop in Cheyenne.
There was a lot of gambling and prostitution here until the interstates shut all that down, says owner Gus Kallas. I stare at a photograph on the wall of the Thomas Heaney saloon taken in 1888. I notice one of the workers behind the bar. He is a black man.
Valerie Boyd is one of the strongest women I know. Fiercely independent, passionate in her defending her views. Certainly, an inspiration to me, ever since I met her years ago at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I admired her talent, her tremendous writing skills, her astuteness as an editor. I especially felt a bond with her at a time when there were not too many women of color working in mainstream newsrooms.
So when I went to teach my magazine writing class at UGA (a job for which Val recommended me) more than two weeks ago and found out she had been hospitalized with pneumonia, I grew worried. After I received a message from her partner, Veta, I understood how serious Valerie’s situation was. She was in the intensive care unit, sedated, intubated, on a ventilator.
For days, the update on Val’s status sounded like this: She is getting better but she is still on the ventilator.
I thought of my own mother, who had been on a ventilator for the last three weeks of her life. When she died, I saw her chest still heaving on that machine and for a moment, believed that the heart monitor was wrong. How could she be breathing still when the monitor indicated her heart had stopped? I learned later that she had been kept on the ventilator until her doctor could order it to be shut off. It was one of the most horrifying moments of my life and an image that stays with me always.
I imagined Valerie, at DeKalb Medical Center, gasping for air, on that ventilator.
It was unnatural. She was too young to die like this. She has so much more to give to the world.
The strong-willed woman that she is, Valerie fought pneumonia like a soldier in battle. She wasn’t going to succumb to something that robbed her of her independence.
She was deemed well enough to breathe without the machine a few days ago and moved into a rehab part of the hospital Monday.
When I went to see her Tuesday evening, she told me she had thought much about death. It was not in the natural order of things for her elderly father to plan her funeral. It was she who should be doing that for him.
She told me of her dreams in her frail state. How she had seen my parents as children again; that they were with me once again on this earth. And of all children of color, who fight every day for survival.
Valerie’s near-death experience has made her cherish more all of life’s beautiful things — the sunlight and the birds, a slice of fresh pineapple (yes, she was craving slushy fruit), walking her dog. How strange she had felt that someone had to help her to the commode or watch her take a bath for fear she would fall.
I suppose most everyone who skirts death has similar thoughts. But Valerie articulated them from her hospital bed with the clarity and haunting beauty of her language that is familiar to all who have read her work, especially her biography of literary giant Zora Neale Hurston. In the drabness of hospital hues and in a strained voice that sounded like a 90-year-old chain smoking man’s (we joked), she talked of her verve for life.
Yesterday, it was Valerie who was wrapped in rainbows.
I left her room at dinner time, walked back through the halls of a chaotic hospital where suffering knows no end. And yet, a calm settled on me and once again, I knew I was better for having seen my friend. And thankful that there would be many more meetings to come.
Michel Martelly, bad-boy musician, is Haiti’s next president, according to preliminary results released Monday.
He called himself an outsider to Haiti’s corrupt political machine and when I met him at his home in December (see photo), he told me about how he would do things differently than all his predecessors — dictators and leftist priests alike. Sitting in the entertainment room of his Peguyville house, I thought: Wow. How can a musician lead Haiti out of all its woes? Earthquake, cholera, poverty, corruption, more poverty, more corruption.
But he laid out a plan that began like this: “Don’t hand Haitians money. They don’t know how to handle it. I am Haitian. o don’t even hand me money. Just come and rebuild for us.”
I thought him earnest.
Out on the streets of Port-au-Prince, they were chanting “Tet Kale!” It means bald head, as in Martelly’s. We will see now if the people will still be calling his name as he takes charge in Haiti.
His win made me want to get on a plane back to Haiti. He told me, after all, that he would take me around Port-au-Prince himself, if he were elected. I might just have to hold him to that promise.
I have not posted anything in a while — I’ve been drowning at work with the Egypt story.
But today, it happened. The unthinkable, really. I never thought that sheer people power would bring own Hosni Mubarak. But he was gone, as abruptly an surprisingly as he ascended to power after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981.
And now, the world waits and watches as Egypt moves on. After euphoria, after celebration, what will happen? Mubarak is gone but has there really been a regime change? Or will the military rule now with an equally iron hand?
It is too early, I think, to say that Egyptians succeeded in their revolution, which incidentally coincided with the 32nd anniversary of the fall of the shah of Iran. I can still remember the joy in the hearts of all of my Iranian friends and fellow students at Florida State University in 1979. They did not know then that their beloved homeland would soon become a repressive state, an Islamic republic.
So, I will keep writing the main Egypt story for CNN.com and hold my breath to see whether it turns out to be as momentous as everyone said it would be today.
Evil Reporter Chick 