\nWhistling air
\nWhispering in my ear<\/p>\n
Boy Mercury shootin’ through every degree
\nOOO girl dancin’ down those dirty and dusty trails
\nTake it hip to hip rocket through the wilderness
\nAround the world the trip begins with a kiss<\/p>\n
Roam if you want to
\nRoam around the world
\nRoam if you want to
\nWithout wings, without wheels
\nRoam if you want to
\nWithout anything but the love we feel<\/p>\n
Skip the air-strip for the sunset
\nRide the arrow for the target—One
\nTake it hip to hip rock it through the wilderness
\nAround the world the trip begins with a kiss<\/p>\n
Fly the great big sky
\nSee the great big sea
\nKick through continents
\nBustin’ boundaries
\nTake it hip to hip rocket through the wilderness
\nAround the world the trip begins with a kiss<\/p>\n
Take it hip to hip
\nRocket through the wilderness<\/em><\/p>\n
There’s a blasted-open echoing energy in the song, meant to be joyful and transcendent. “Roam” was that for us, but there was a dark underbelly, as though we were at the bottom of a well, and we could hear it playing way way up out in the world, at some happy party we could not get to. Our response wasn’t about the lyrics (although looking at them now, in retrospect, they express perfectly our external experience). We lost ourselves in the song and in the wide vistas. That way, we didn’t have to talk to each other. I hear “Roam”‘s opening chords now, and am immediately in the front seat of our van, my eyes watering up, squinting at the fields and mountains, trying to catch my breath, trying to ignore the fact that my boyfriend and I were breaking up.<\/p>\n
Heading up, up, up, to his friends’ ranch, I did not feel up for company. This was bad time for me, the dissolution of personality, the cessation of language … I shied away from meeting new people. I would look away when I shook people’s hands, ashamed to have this new person see me. I was not well. I lost my voice. Anyone who has ever lost the ability to speak will know the paralysis. “Fake it til you make it” does not apply. I’ll put it bluntly: I should have been in a hospital, being cared for, no demands made on me. Instead, we were going to spend a couple of days with people I never met. My soul cringed back from the exposure.<\/p>\n
We rattled up the driveway in our bug-spattered van, the windswept family – Ruth the matriarch, and two grown 20-something kids – Jessica and Chris – on the front steps, waving at us, whooping and hollering a welcome. Jessica’s small son cavorted around like a tumbleweed.<\/p>\n
Their energy was so open I relaxed. I didn’t have to put on an act, or be sociable in a polite way. If socially acceptable behavior was required, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. These people were expressive and nuts, in the best most eccentric way. The kitchen overflowed with food and alcohol. The house was freezing. Ruth gave us the grand tour, barking out comments in cynical asides. She referred to her ex-husband as “Asshole” (you could hear the capital letter). “Asshole left me diddlysquat. This ranch is MINE.” She ushered us into her huge bedroom, saying, “It’s a great room even though you could hang meat in it.” Her humor was so irreverent I found myself crying with laughter within ten minutes. The tears in my eyes, a constant for a couple of days, were tears of laughter.<\/p>\n
Chris, a fire fighter, was one of the sweetest men I had ever met. A big guy, wearing a tight T-shirt, jeans, and boots … Quiet, not forthcoming … but obviously sweet and sensitive. He was very kind to me. I don’t know if he realized his friend’s girlfriend was not in a good way, but he was very nice, specifically, to me, making sure my drink was filled, cracking jokes, talking to me about actors he loved since he knew I was an actress. Thank you, Chris, wherever you are. His kindness was random, he would have been kind to any guest who traveled up the mountain to his mother’s ranch. But oh, how I needed it.<\/p>\n
Jessica was glamorous, with thick black hair, gleaming in waves, glowing skin, and huge brown eyes. Meticulous makeup, thick mascara, but tromping around in jeans, a big sweater, cowboy boots. A high-altitude mountain girl.<\/p>\n
The house was so chilly inside I could not get warm, and outside was the frigid mountain air. The atmosphere inside, though, was warm and rambunctious. These weren’t “nice” or “polite” people. They swore. They shouted at each other. They bitched about Asshole. As a repressed girl in the middle of a crack-up, living out of a van and losing language, easy anger expressed was revelatory. Anything too positive grated on my raw nerves then, reminding me of Tennessee Williams’ famous response, when asked his definition of happiness: “Insensitivity, I guess.” <\/p>\n
The ranch, its staircase with wooden railings, thick plush rugs, massive stone fireplace, drafty rooms, gargantuan kitchen, did much to protect and soothe. My boyfriend and I sat on the couch, being entertained by this lively family, still not able to speak to each other, or acknowledge that … we were done.<\/p>\n
I whispered to him at one point, “I can’t catch my breath.”<\/p>\n
“It’s just the altitude. The first couple of days are hard, but it’ll get better.”<\/p>\n
He and I had been living out of our van for months at this point. We cooked outside, did our laundry in a bucket, slept in sleeping bags, splashed down in various camp sites across the country. But here we were, in civilization again. We both took steaming-hot half-hour-long showers. When we emerged from the steaming bqthroom, we were back in the house’s teeth-chattering air, but at least we were clean to the bone. We came downstairs, and the food was out, beers, a fire going. Somewhere along in here, I forgot my neurotic shyness. I could look these people in the eye. <\/p>\n
Ruth took us on a tour around the ranch. We went to look at the horses. Jessica, an equestrian probably since birth, leapt onto her horse, galloping off across a field, shouting and whooping. The barn was shadowy, the scent of horses pungent and overwhelming. Out of the small square barn windows you could see the jagged peaks of the nearby mountains. I had never been in such a place. I kept thinking, Those are real mountains. Just like I’ve dreamt of. <\/em> The mountains looked like a backdrop. I couldn’t realize they were actually there. This devastated me. Later, when I got really nuts, and had completely dissociated from reality, I would make us leave Teton National Park abruptly because I “couldn’t see the mountains”. My boyfriend kept saying, “They’re right there. They’re right there.” “But I can’t see<\/i> them.” We left. I said, “I’m going to have to come back some other time. I can’t see them.”<\/p>\n I stood on the ranch’s front stoop as the sun went down, hearing guffaws of laughter inside, Jessica shouting at her terror of a son. I stared at the peaks, determined to see them. My eyes tearing up, my hand over my chest. I was pissed. I could see the mountains, obviously I could see them, but I couldn’t see<\/i> them. My brain had split off from the physical world. Nothing got in. It was really upsetting to me. I wanted to feel<\/i> the mountains.<\/p>\n The only thing I could really feel was that I could not breathe, and my eyes were always full of tears.<\/p>\n Ruth took us to see the big barracks-like building on the other side of the barn where the ranch hands used to stay, or maybe they still stayed there, seasonally. You could smell the musty mildewy mattresses. Bunk beds lined the walls. There was a small wood stove at one end. Everything was cold and still.<\/p>\n Ruth said, lighting up a cigarette, “This place is haunted.”<\/p>\n I thought maybe she meant haunted by the ranch-hands. I could feel their ghostly presences. Turns out, Ruth meant actual specific ghosts.<\/p>\n “The people who built this ranch back in the 30s had two little kids, a boy and a girl,” said Ruth. “And the kids apparently used to sneak out here in the middle of the night to have pillow fights. This place is haunted by those two kids. You can even hear the slapping of the pillows, and their screams as they beat the crap out of each other.”<\/p>\n My breath was high in my throat. “Have you heard them?”<\/p>\n “I camped out here one night just to see if they would visit me.” (This is why I loved Ruth. She was in her 60s, with short grey hair, blood-red lipstick, she smoked like a chimney, wore jeans and cowboy boots, called her ex-husband Asshole, and slept out in an old abandoned building hoping to be visited by child ghosts.)<\/p>\n “And did they visit?”<\/p>\n “You bet. I woke up, and I heard these tiptoeing feet. I could hear them burst into giggles. There was nobody there, sweetheart, but they were there. And then came – wap wap wap! The sound of the pillow fight. Wap wap wap!”<\/p>\n “You were right there?”<\/p>\n “Yup! Sittin’ right over there. Hearing their giggles, and the Wap Wap Wap!”<\/p>\n “Wow!”<\/p>\n “They’re friendly little ghosts, nothing to be scared about. Just two kids fuckin’ around.”<\/p>\n I squinted through the altitude-tears into the shadows, trying to see them, with a sudden yearning, yearning so deep it pushed out of my chest. I yearned. But for what? To see the mountains? To see the ghosts? Sure, I wanted to see them. But why did this make me so sad? I squashed down inappropriate yearning with a mallet. I was always doing things like this in those days. I never felt fit for company because out of nowhere I would be ambushed by intergalactic yearning and have to leave the room. Ruth was so casual about the ghosts. As we walked out of the building, she laughed to herself, and said, “Wap wap wap!”<\/p>\n Chris and Jessica took us to see a swing on the property, put up by Asshole in happier days. Behind the house, the land fell away abruptly into a deep ravine, a virtual cliff of dirt. A tree stood on the edge of the abyss, and from one of the branches hung a wooden plank swing. You could kick yourself off and swing back and forth over the abyss. Jessica leapt on the swing and pushed herself off, flying out into the empty air, laughing out loud. I felt uneasy. I didn’t want to go on the swing. I didn’t want them watching me. Jessica lay back so she was a flying horizontal girl, floating over our heads, and back out over the abyss. <\/p>\n I didn’t trust my hands to hang on. All I kept seeing, over and over and over, like a flickering newsreel, was me letting go, and falling, falling, cracking my head open on a boulder. I kept seeing it. My boyfriend jumped onto the swing, and took a running leap off into mid-air. I watched him fly up and back, up and back, I watched him stand up on the wooden plank, gyrating his body so he kept momentum going. I was in awe of him. A daredevil who deserved to be with someone who wasn’t such a fraidy-cat head case. I watched and saw: my body falling … hands grasping thin air … scream snatched out of my throat … my head smashed open … my brains on the rock … the jolt of panic as I let go … and then … nothing to hold onto … I thought of my parents. How sad they would be. I tried to physically brush the images away. chopping my hand in the air, saying to the newsreel: “Begone.” My boyfriend was laughing out loud. He deserved a girlfriend who would have fun on the swing. It was unfair. <\/p>\n At some point, Chris came over to me, putting his arm around me, squeezing. He grinned down at me with such intimacy and kind knowingness. He knew nothing about me. I have no idea what Chris saw in me, if he saw anything, but I believe he saw something. He was like a dog, sensing something unheard by the normal human ear. He just grinned down at me, never looking away. My boyfriend careened over our heads. Chris’ attention was not invasive or inappropriate. I felt seen. He said, “You go next, okay? Don’t be scared. You won’t fall.” Somehow it didn’t embarrass me he guessed.<\/p>\n My boyfriend got off the swing, and handed it to me, saying, “It’s so great – it’s like you’re flying!”<\/p>\n It wasn’t my boyfriend’s words that made me brave. It was Chris’ grin. I could do it because Chris said it would be okay. I got on the swing, Chris grabbed hold of my waist and pulled me back … I held on for dear life. Chris said, “You ready?” “I’m ready!” Chris let go, and off I went over the cliff. I didn’t look down. I held onto the rope so hard that my hands were chafed later on. There’s a picture of me on that swing. <\/p>\n \n \nThe photo is hard to look at, because all I can see is the whole circumstance around it. But I look okay. I don’t look like I’m having a bad time. I don’t look like a weird neurotic person who couldn’t speak or couldn’t see the Tetons. I remember hearing Chris shouting: “YEAH! YEAH, SHEILA!” It says a lot about my state of mind how much this moved me.<\/p>\n Not once did the newsreel of catastrophe play. The newsreel stopped the second I was airborne.<\/p>\n Chris and my boyfriend made a feast for us on the grill: burgers, chicken, steak. Jessica made frozen margaritas. Ruth and I played with Jessica’s son, who was adorable but demonic. He wreaked havoc. Jessica kept moaning, as she put ice into the blender: “I just don’t know how to control him … God. STOP WHINING. Mom … what the fuck … ” Ruth, cigarette dangling from her lips, would bark at the kid, “Time out. You’re being a pain in the ass. Go sit in the corner. Read your book.” The child would open his mouth to start to SHRIEK, but the look on Ruth’s face stopped him cold. “Kid, I love ya. But your voice is ugly when you whine. I can’t take it any more.” Strangely enough, this kind of chaotic disciplining seemed to work. They weren’t unloving, they were open honest statements of frustration. The child sat quietly in the corner, reading a book, playing with his toy train … until he was ready to join civilized society again. He’d walk back over to us, tentatively. Ruth would glance down at him. “Are you done with that whining?” He nodded solemnly. Ruth did not hold a grudge, except against Asshole. She’d say, “Okay. Let’s play with that train then.”<\/p>\n We sat around the huge table, eating and drinking. These were casual big-hearted people. My boyfriend and I had been shivering in a soul-chill – and an actual living-outside chill – for two months. Here were people with a lot of problems, yes, but they didn’t stop them from laughing. Ruth told us bluntly, at the table, with the child right there, “It sucks being 60 and single. I’m dying for sex.” She then bellowed: “DYING! But I’m 60. Nobody picks up 60 year old women. I’m losing my mind.” Jessica was abandoned by her husband (fondly referred to as Asshole Two) and she had a difficult wild child, but she kept making the margaritas, riding her horse for hours every weekend. Chris was a lonely-heart single guy (unbelievable to me. As far as I was concerned, he was the Catch of the Century). He lived out in the middle of nowhere, he didn’t like pick-up bars, he had a hard time meeting people. These people had problems, but they were loud and funny, they loved each other, and they welcomed us. We could sit there with them, and we didn’t have to pretend our problems didn’t exist.<\/p>\n Night fell. I got the sense of the enormous spaces stretching out around us. I’m from New England. You don’t get big vistas in New England, unless you go to the ocean (never farther away than a 25-minute drive). The horizon in New England is always around a hill, behind some trees. You can’t see that far in New England. Even in the ranch house, with all the lights on, a fire crackling in the fireplace, music playing, all of us dancing around barefoot on the rug, sipping beer as we danced … even with all that lively light, you could feel everything drop off immediately outside the door. You could feel the darkness pressing in, you knew the mountains were there overshadowing everything.<\/p>\n The night slowly wound down. The child was put to bed, after a shrieking fight which left Jessica in a shambles. “He’s so wild … dammit … the kid is out of control …” Ruth said, “Jessie, you gotta be firm. That kid is DYING for limits. He may not want ’em but he needs ’em, and you’re weak. Tell him to shut the fuck up and go to bed, because he’s five years old, and that’s what five-year-olds do.” We could then hear Jessica in her son’s bedroom, giving it a good shot, albeit weakly, “You have to go to bed. Okay? I love you …” <\/p>\n My boyfriend and I had been sleeping in our sleeping bags for months. It was strange to be inside. I almost didn’t like it. In a strange way, even though we were on top of each other in the van, we also could get away from each other. We weren’t domesticated. There weren’t four walls closing in. Nature was right outside the door. We fell asleep to the sound of coyotes howling. Mating elk made anguished hooting sounds 50 feet away. Being inside a house, and having to be a “couple” was not right for us. Our relationship was over, we just hadn’t admitted it yet. It was easy to deny this reality when we were out in the wild, wearing long johns and hiking boots, collecting fire wood, sipping scotch while we watched the aurora borealis … Things were going to get worse before they got better. Being inside a house only made the wrongness between us more evident. I didn’t feel this until it was time to go to bed. I wanted to be back out in the van. Would it be weird if I slept out there, even though there were plenty of bedrooms inside?<\/p>\n The family went off to their respective rooms. My boyfriend went off to the guest room. I lingered in the bathroom for a long time … brushing my teeth … washing my face …<\/p>\n Something was going on. The sad yearning expanding in my chest. My own emotions were unbearable. I wished I could fucking catch my breath. I wished the light-headed clarity would fade. I wished I would feel like myself again. I could never be her again. She was like the Tetons. I could see her, but I couldn’t see her. She was a backdrop. She had nothing to do with me.<\/p>\n I was still in my sweater and jeans. The house was settling down, the human noise ceased. The child slept, filled with visions of evil plans to thwart the orderliness of the universe. My boyfriend lay in the pristine guest room, under a huge down comforter, reading, wondering where I was, but not wondering too hard. He probably needed a break from his wild-eyed dissociated girlfriend. Maybe Chris lay on his back in his bed, staring up at the ceiling, wishing he had a girl in his arms. Maybe Jessica curled up on her side, trying to get through another night by herself, trying to hang on until tomorrow, tomorrow would be another day. Maybe Ruth lay in her king-size freezing bed, treating herself to a panoply of luscious sexual fantasies in which she was the X-rated star.<\/p>\n And what about me?<\/p>\n I tiptoed down the stairs into the dark house, feeling like a criminal. I tiptoed to the front door, and put my hand on the cold doorknob, certain that at any second I would hear my boyfriend’s voice from the top of the stairs, “Babe? What you doin’?” His voice didn’t come. Biting my lip, I turned the doorknob, willing it to be silent … my thoughts streaming into the doorknob like a command: “Quiet. Quiet.” The night air hit me like a frozen wall, a freezing blast when I stepped outside. I wasn’t wearing a coat.<\/p>\n I was alone, high up in the Rocky Mountains. It was a cold moonless night. I have never seen such bright stars. The stars are bright in remote places in Rhode Island, but they were nothing like these stars. The air was thin, my lungs struggled for oxygen, my eyes full of tears … but the stars FILLED the sky. I stepped out onto the lawn, the dry grass crunching under my feet. I stood there for I don’t know how long. Wheels of constellations circled overhead, a dizzying array, an ethereal ceiling. The tall dark mountain sentinels, with the softly glowing white peaks, would kill you if you did not respect them. We were up so high the stars seemed to go behind the mountain peaks, the mountains blocked out the Big Dipper. I didn’t recognize the constellations. The stars were different.<\/p>\n Vincent Van Gogh didn’t think his Starry Night was “impressionistic”. He saw it as realistic. That was how a starry night actually looked to him.<\/a> I never really understood this concept until that night out under the stars in Colorado. Astronomers of old saw the heavens as a ceiling circling above. The earth did not move. The stars moved. I understood this perspective that night up in the mountains. I watched the stars move, a massive cyclorama spiraling by overhead. I watched the stars go behind the mountains and emerge again. <\/p>\n I didn’t know any of those stars.<\/p>\n Then came a sensation so distinct it can only be described one way and I never had this sensation before or since. I felt like I was going to fall up off the earth. I felt as though the stars, wheeling by overhead, would sweep me up in their motion. Gravity would no longer hold me down. I would go up, “without wings, without wheels<\/em>“, into the abyss of unfamiliar Rocky Mountain constellations. I felt this imp of the perverse, as Edgar Allan Poe called it, as another newsreel, with an opposite trajectory: instead of falling into the abyss below the swing, I saw myself falling up into the air. The stars were a moving entity of one-ness with their own insistent pull. The sensation that I would fly up off the earth into the ether became so strong I sat down on the ground, grabbing chunks of dried wintry grass to hold me down.<\/p>\n Only if one was up that high, near the ceiling of the world, would it be possible to just fly up off the earth and join the stars in their heavenly circling. <\/p>\n The sensation did not last. I have no idea how long I sat huddled on the grass, trying to press myself into the earth so that the heavens couldn’t pull me up … but it must have been half an hour. This was not psychological, it was physical, an overwhelming bodily rush of vertigo, a sense of flying up, looking down, so far down, a sense that those mountains all around me would never stop my ascent. There would be nothing to grasp onto when I left the earth. In New England, I could grab onto a tree as I flew up into the air … but here? There was nothing between me and the stars, my hands grasping thin air. Thinner and thinner and thinner air. I guess I didn’t belong here. I was too much of a sea-level kind of girl.<\/p>\n I finally knew why I had come outside. Of course.<\/p>\n The vertigo settled down. I trusted myself to be able to stand up without flying up into the starry heavens. Up I got, slowly, shakily, and nothing bad happened. I was still subject to gravity. I still took up space. Like the Tetons. Maybe I wasn’t real yet, but matter is real. I was real in that sense. I could walk on the earth. I tiptoed across the lawn, glancing back at the house occasionally, wondering when my boyfriend would notice my absence. It would be soon. I didn’t have much time.<\/p>\n I hear a wind Shivering, I started to run. Suddenly I really felt the freezing air, it cut me to the bone. I ran over behind the barn. The horses were all asleep but I could still smell them.<\/p>\n I got to the barracks building where the ranch hands slept once upon a time. I said to myself, “Don’t be silly. They’re just two little kids. They will not hurt you.” But the night was pitch-black, there were shadowy darkened buildings all around me, and I was terrified. The yearning from earlier was back.<\/p>\n Blood throbbing in my veins, I opened the barracks door, my eyes straining, trying to see, terrified that the ghosts would turn out to be not so benign, due to the fact that it was me calling them up. I shrank from the possibility of their rejection. They would know I needed something from them. They would shrink away from me. I felt, then, everyone shrinking from me. Why did these high-altitude children need to be called up by a hyperventilating sea-level girl? Just let them be. <\/p>\n Convinced I was about to be murdered, I slipped inside the barracks. I didn’t move past the inner door, I didn’t have the guts. It was too dark. I stood right by the door, and waited. I could hear my breath in the silence. The blackness pressed against my eyeballs. If I held up my hand in front of my face, I wouldn’t have been able to see it. <\/p>\n Eventually, anything can become normal. Huddling in a dark empty barrack in the Rocky Mountains was normal. My fantasies about being killed by child-ghosts wielding pillows subsided. Silence rushed in. <\/p>\n Everything washed away. My whole life washed away. I was just a body. I was<\/em> my muscles, my throat, my eyes, my inner life dulled down, my impulses cut off, a survival thing because consciousness was unbearable. But in the barracks, a sense of acute aliveness rushed back in. I was<\/em> my heart pounding and my heaving breath. And the yearning, like a hot molten sword in my side. What the hell was I even yearning for<\/em>?<\/p>\n I waited. And waited. I waited for those ghost kids to show up. I invited them. I tried to cleanse myself of the yearning. Maybe they would shy away from that yearning. I waited to hear the “Wap wap wap” of the pillows, I waited to hear their mischievous giggles, tiptoeing feet, hissing whispers.<\/p>\n Of course they did not come.<\/p>\n I waited until it was obvious nothing would happen. I walked back to the house, deflated. I remember how everything was flat again. I was suddenly blind to the stars, the mountains. I felt the gravity. I was on the earth, in no danger. I crawled into the dark bed in the cold room, and quietly cried, holding it all in as best I could, the tears scalding my cold cheeks. I so wanted to meet those ghostly little kids. I thought they might have a message, and maybe it was something in me<\/em> that held them back. I was the wrong thing here. I didn’t belong.<\/p>\n Or maybe my sleeping soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend was right. All of this was just the altitude.<\/p>\n 2026 thoughts:<\/strong> I barely remember writing this but my memory of the night in the mountains is vivid, as is the horror of what it was like inside me back then. I am a little shocked I put this out there, but (I guess?) I’m glad I did. Hard as this is to believe, just two months later I flew to Chicago to start a whole new life. I break down that whole journey in another personal piece<\/a>, written during a very very difficult month during the pandemic, when the past – and M. – was on my mind, and I didn’t know why. Starting over in Chicago is all wrapped up in what came before, the months of living off grid with a man I could no longer talk to. The yearning and wordlessness vanished once I chose my own destiny, started off on my own path, coming down off the mountain to the shores of Lake Michigan. A mere three months later I attended a fund raiser for the theatre where I had been just been cast in a production of Golden Boy<\/em>, my first show in Chicago.<\/p>\n \n \nThe scared cringing girl on the swing in the mountains was just three months before this photo? That CAN’T be right! (But it is.) <\/p>\n Just three months before, I was lying on the grass, hoping I wouldn’t be sucked up into the air. The source of the yearning I felt up in those mountains, that hot unbearable sensation, wasn’t mysterious, after all. I yearned to be three months ahead on my own timeline, nails painted red, wearing a dress I bought for ten dollars at a thrift store, drinking cheap white wine. With M. in the wings, ready (almost) for his entrance on the stage.<\/p>\n What? How does someone even LIVE at that speed?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the first couple of days I couldn’t catch my breath. We were driving through the mountains, and I had never been at such high altitude before. As a matter of fact, the Rocky Mountains were the first real mountains … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/01\/3220524976_ca991c0e73_c-e1789529932919.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\nWhistling air
\nWhispering in my ear<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/wm\/paint\/auth\/gogh\/starry-night\/gogh.starry-night.jpg\")
<\/p>\n