34. Craig Childs, writer

I am totally copying a couple of things that the writer Craig Childs has posted on FB the past couple of days. Because I want to keep them around. 

The first is from last week. He is visiting his son in Japan now, and they are traveling around. I loved this evocative passage he wrote, which yes, does capture the out-of-body-ness that travel can evoke. (The photo is his; it accompanied this post.)

There’s a point while traveling where I’ve run out of ink in a couple pens and misplaced a couple more, a point of feeling foreign enough I’m embarrassed to be walking around mispronouncing words for water or thank you like I didn’t have enough to do at home already, where my will starts feeling doughy and I’m reading signs in a language that appears to be written by people from a planet with more than one sun and many moons, not like my own language that looks like it was fashioned by kindergartners. I start feeling lost, purposeless, sucking gooey tapioca balls through a straw while sitting next to a rotating desk fan in the back of a shop that feels like an oven. This, I think, is why some people don’t travel. You forget for a moment who you were, if you were anyone to begin with, a feeling that I try to remember to savor because it, too, is why I came. Then, a sudden rain both brightens and darkens the streets at the same time. The sun sets and windows light up. I find myself walking slowly along a narrow space between buildings and it feels like I’ve stepped into a different room inside a dream where my travel companion urges me to stop and look down an alley glowing from rain and once again I’m swimming in possibilities. Standing on a bridge over a river I’ve never heard of, I feel coolness for the first time all day. A heron lands at the water’s edge and stalks just like the herons stalk at home, only its plumage is unfamiliar, as if the artist who makes the world ran out of ink in one color and started again with another.

And this from today, in response to a bit of hate-mongering by hateful Ann Coulter (her exact words: "We didn't kill enough Indians"). Thank you, Craig, for your loving heart:

We are being clouded by hate. Every one of us needs to check ourselves. I think of lines from a Joy Harjo poem:

Each stone of jealousy, each stone
Of fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light.
No one was without a stone in his or her hand.
There we were,
Right back where we had started.
We were bumping into each other
In the dark.

Words are flying these days that need to be renounced, not with hatred, but a flat out no, this is not how we go forward.

Hear, hear. 

I have only read one of Craig's many books, which I reported on here. That one was about flash floods, and deaths—nothing approaching the horrific event of this July 4 on the Guadalupe River in Texas. He conveys well the power of that water, its destructiveness. I need to read more of him.