As some of you may have noticed this blog has been sedentary for a few months, such is the nature of my freelance career. I feel like one who climbs a high mountain only to fall off once I reach the peak, but I do not despair there are other paths in life to take, paths far less treacherous. Just a few days ago I accepted a job as a reporter for the San Juan Journal in western Washington.
But I do not leave behind the war, I carry it with me, just in much smaller bags these days. Before I depart this blog, I want to leave an essay I wrote during my time in Iraq. Another essay left unpublished, another corpse without a grave to call home.
The Land of Dust
The wind hit my face. I reared back, surprised by the force capable of knocking my skull around in my Kevlar helmet. I wanted to lean out of the UH-60 Blackhawk’s open window overlooking the sand, the palm trees, the beige colored square building and the tiny figures playing soccer. I wanted to leap out and walk alongside the river snaking into the distance.
For two months I lived in Balad, Iraq working as a journalist with close to 100 soldiers from a Medevac unit based out of Salem, Oregon. We spend our days waiting for missions called in on heavy black radios strapped to our belts. Some days we sit and talk, tired from walking to the chow hall with heavy boots in heat reaching 115 degrees. Other days go by with the constant roar of the rotor blades spinning as pilots fly on and off the landing zone. Their skin smelling like hot earth and sweat trickling down their backs like a broken faucet is attached to their necks. There are days when an Iraqi mother wails because her daughter body is ravaged by burns. There are days when the medics see broken and limbless bodies. There are days when all we want is to forget. Then there are the days when the dust storms come in, the aircrafts can’t fly and the dirty fog stings your eyes and burns your throat. I have learned to stop smiling because the dust covers my teeth and gums like spackling paste.
We have an Olympic size pool here, large dining facilities and gyms, but we live behind great concrete barriers. There are no weekend trips to the freezing and wild coast. There are no old growth forests, no dark organic soil to dig your feet into, no clear lakes to bury your head and listen to silence. I don’t complain out loud. I’ve grown familiar with the diesel fumes, the pits of burning plastic from the other side of the post and the aroma of feces as the port-a-potties are cleaned, but sometimes I want to get out. I want my old life of climbing trips to Smith Rock State Park near Bend, Oregon and nights camping in the grasslands.
At night I race my creaking bike around the airfield. Gagged by the dust and nearly losing balance I wipe particles off my glasses and wheeze. I wish that I could go uphill or downhill, but its flat, flat, flat. Inside one of the trailers near the airfield, soldiers are watching A River Runs Through It. I sit down for a moment watching the images flash across the large screen. I’m captivated by the river, the water running over rocks like tongues running over smooth teeth, the high grass in the wind and the mountains rising in the distance remind me that out there are some things humans cannot cover in concrete.
So I walk home watching the armored vehicles roll by like dinosaurs, their steps vibrating in my spine. In my trailer the wind throws gravel against my door and window. I have the strangest dreams of howling artic wolves outside the greenhouse door where tomato vines wrap around my legs. When I awake I wish I could have dreamed about rain, instead I close my eyes in the shower pretending I’m in Oregon in spring. If I step outside my wet hair dries within minutes, powdered with a fine dust.
I hang a worn map of Oregon in my room and stand facing it, running my fingers over those great green areas with only one road leading to the lakes. I feel like a child running my hands over my father’s face after he returned home from months of working on the oil fields far away from home. I was three. I knew him, but I had forgotten what he looked like. I had to feel his face back into my memory.
The best scenery here is untouchable, it is the colors in the sky. Strapped into my seat on the Blackhawk I crane my neck to watch the sunset settling against the pilot’s shadowy helmet. If you look straight up you can see midnight blue, then a bit lower there is deep ocean blue bleeding into shallow sea blue then gray-blue and a bit of pink and orange. As the lights fade we fly further into the darkness. These are colors we cannot replace with computer or television screen images. Colors that fade so quickly that we can still say, “Wasn’t that beautiful?"
