Poor Your Soul by Mira Ptacin

Author:Mira Ptacin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2015-10-26T19:29:06+00:00

eleven

I am in California and I have just ridden a gondola into the Ice Age.

I bought the expensive cable car ticket because I wanted to catch a glimpse of the two-million-year-old lake everyone has been talking about. The lift carried me up two thousand vertical feet, over gray-green conifers, over brush fields with crunchy, thirsty-looking plants and gravel cliffs with caramel-colored soil. Steadily, I got higher and higher until suddenly, and only for about five or six seconds, I got to see the lake.

Lake Tahoe was giant, and startling, and still. The huge, blue mass came out of nowhere; it was as if the trees had briefly parted to reveal a secret brontosaurus stealing a nap. But the car kept moving up and on until we reached the nosebleed section of the mountain. The gondola stopped. I got out. And here I am.

Below me is the Squaw Valley USA ski resort. I didn’t come to Squaw Valley to ski. It’s August, and there’s no snow. The reason I am here on the West Coast—at the opposite end of the country from my home, and high up in the Sierras—is because I am participating in a summer writer’s conference. A week ago, shortly after the damning ultrasound, I left Manhattan and Andrew and Maybe for a literary retreat. I’d been planning on it, regardless. Now, it’s an escape. I have three days left before I am to leave and resume my life back on East 32nd Street, but for the remainder of today, I will be hiking around Squaw Valley’s High Camp. In doing this, I plan on appreciating nature. And by appreciating nature, I hope to make my mind clear and stable and make sense out of things, reach some sort of conclusion, some final decision. Our instructors gave us the whole afternoon off.

Squaw Valley’s red-white-and-blue-colored pamphlet tells me that Lake Tahoe is subterranean; she’s almost five hundred meters deep. Her waters are so still and unmoving that people flock from all over the planet just to bear witness to her clarity. The lake’s creation was incidental and completely natural: millions of years ago, rain, melting snow, and runoff filled the lower basin. After eruptions from a now-extinct volcano called Mount Pluto, a dam was formed on the north side, and scouring glaciers from the Ice Age shaped the rest of the lake.

As I skim through the glossy brochure’s scientific explanations, I see the words on the page as metaphors for my current situation: formed by a series of large faults, capable of large magnitude earthquakes, located within Desolation Wilderness, the youngest deformation belt. I smack the pamphlet with the backside of my hand, folding it up three times before tossing it into a nearby garbage can. “Shut up,” I tell it. Just shut up.

I am in California and I am the only thing keeping the life inside me alive. Without me, the baby is powerless.

Once, I called her a parasite. “This thing is a fucking parasite,” is what I said.

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