Deep Wild 2024 Student Contest Honorable Mention

Congratulations to Louise Stewart, PhD candidate in English-Creative Nonfiction at Ohio University, whose essay “Earth Could Quake” earned an Honorable Mention in the Deep Wild 2024 Graduate Student Prose Contest. Here it is in full:

Earth Could Quake

by Louise Stewart

For years I’ve been trying to write about the Perseid meteor showers of 2016, a confluence of storms my mind’s eye lifts and turns round and around in ever-changing light, like a mineral with more facets to study than any other speck of time I’ve lived.

I’ve heard the brain alters a memory each time it’s revisited, and I see this happening. My drafts paint the past with my feelings about it. Earlier versions were more sympathetic to Mark. I would think of the day we went whale-watching and snuck off-trail to a bed of decaying pine needles; and of the night we made love on a beach under a full moon, and I did naked cartwheels all the way down the sand; and of listening to him sing and play guitar under an umbrella on a night of pouring rain in the Rodin sculpture garden; and of seeing my mother dazzled by his intellect when they talked Camus on a family vacation, just before she pulled me into kitchen to say, “Oh, my god,” to which I replied, “I know.” 

It used to be that when I’d think of his episodes, I’d think mostly of watching him beat his own face up until it’d swollen unrecognizable, making me cry and fetch frozen peas and beg to hold him. For the first year and a half of our relationship, the only violence he committed or threatened to commit was against himself. But by the last three months, whenever our wishes diverged, he’d grab my throat with both hands and say, “I’m going to kill you.” This he shouted behind the wheel—“I’m going to kill you and me, too!”—on our way home from the mountaintop where I last hugged our friend Jillian, not knowing that hug would be our last.

Now, at a distance of more than seven years, I think of the meteor shower we watched from Goldbug Hot Springs, a backpacker’s haven on a high desert mountain in the Salmon-Challis National Forest. And what I see is three fleeting, fathomless, inter-impacting beings, bathing in life in the predawn, watching cosmic embers rain from outer space while we sit plum on our asses in waters warmed naturally to Jacuzzi temperatures by ongoing processes that have been eons in the making: friction from fault movements, radioactive decay of the Idaho Batholith lobe that formed just before the dinosaur-killer asteroid hit home with more than a billion times the energy of an atom bomb, and(!) conduction from the mantle of a planet so wondrously resilient that to this day She yet retains the primordial heat generated 4.5 billion years ago when Earth first accreted and developed Her core. Purring gratitude to the waters for easing cricks and chills out of bodies arisen from man-made cocoons on a rock, we watch Sister Sky release bruise-hues, get starlit, and streak all fiery towards our ever-moving horizon. We turn with Her into day. 

In my mind’s eye, Jillian is alive as she was then, laughing mid-lightning, thunderclap, sudden sprinkle from a lone cloud lit indigo by the sun. Her ponytail’s dripping tracks from our sunrise soak, as she leads our way to shelter, a bivouac-sized bite out of a dying-fire-toned crag. Lithely she ducks into a crevice in the ridge, swinging her pack against the wall to make a backrest and dropping herself home all in a swoop. She pulls her knees to her chest to keep her boots dry and welcomes her pit-mix, Suf(ian Stevens), to curl up by her thigh. I follow, too, slip free of my shoulder straps and fumble through the belly of an Osprey for a cooking pot. Then I dart back into the drizzle and hear the vessel’s tinny echo as I ladle it through the creek and holler at a zipped tent to ask Mark if he’d like to join us for tea and stormwatch in a cave?

He declines, and I’ve learned not to press him. The rain’s not too heavy. Maybe if it picks up, seeps through nylon, leaks into the hair he must be pulling now, maybe he’ll change his mind. Or not. I don’t know what it’s like in there. Of course, I care and will listen if he wants to emerge and share, but I didn’t come all this way just to zip myself up in synthetic walls daylit and steaming.

I return to the grotto, to Jillian’s smile and Suf’s total presence. Dust rises as I plunk my bum down and say some-nothing, likely dog-adoring, weather-regarding, self-depreciative, words spoken for no reason but a warm tone, meaning or intending to mean simply: I see you are here, where I am so glad to be with you now. I lower the soup-pot sloshing to the ground, twist the pieces of the stove together onto a gas canister, turn a knob until the burner is hissing, thumb a lighter to the waves that whoosh then into visibility, a circle of blue flame rippling clear eddies all around it, billowing heat that speeds the sweat beads crying down my shins. 

Nowhere is the cave floor flat enough to balance my kitchenware atop this palmable steel cross, so I build a cairn support system for the stove, while Jillian cheers me on. Woa-uh! oh! we reel each time I test the stability of the thing until it no longer needs my hands. 

Wilderness improv at its finest, she’s saying to me now.

I shrug. Earth could quake. Green tea or earl grey?

She’ll have whichever I don’t want, she says, but that’s not how it works when someone wants to pour you tea, I insist. Whichever she chooses, whichever we drink, I do not recall now as vividly as her thank-you. She voices feeling so sincere I think she sounds surprised.

It’s just tea, I could say. Instead I am quiet, smile gentle, returning love eye-to-eye.

Careful not to pry, she expresses care for Mark, her friend since the Intro to Creative Writing course before the 200-level workshop where I met them both. Jillian could create space without calling you into it, offer to listen without asking a thing. Compassion I appreciate. I want to unfold. But this particular silence is one I wouldn’t know how to break, even if I were sure I could in good conscience and safety, and I’m not sure about much anymore. 

Over mountains layered in the wedge of the visible distance, whole hands of lightning fingers reach out in flashes, clearing minds of self-talk. I nod past Jillian to nudge her gaze to what I’m seeing, and we hush. Now the world looks like one of those plasma balls that sends tendrils to meet even the lightest touch. I don’t want to miss a lick. No matter how many times it happens, I am astounded with every strike. How could you not be? Light is throwing itself at the ground with enough energy to kill a man in a moment, raze a house, spark a wildfire—yet, it’s beautiful. Why? 

Between thunderings, I hear the flame billow beneath my knees but not a bubble up yet from the water. Still, I know it’s quickening. Maybe I say, A watched pot never boils, as my mom would when I was a kid on the counter mashing butter around in Kraft powder, sneaking licks with orange fingers, drooling for mac and cheese before the boxed shells had even been poured in to soften. Or maybe I say nothing. Cave communion may be wordless for a while. 

All I remember with certainty about our last face-to-face conversation is that I asked Jillian whether she had a spiritual life. And I was surprised this prompted her to speak of her childhood. Ever since our first hike (when I’d asked if she had siblings), I’d perceived a boundary around her never-was-home and never-was-family and let those mysteries be. But there in the lip of a crag, while lifting and lowering the stem of a tea pouch bobbing in her enameled steel cup, Jillian summoned her past for a minute and paused, as if to weigh potential impacts on our precious time together, now being always our only chance to co-create memories, new ones to drown out the old.

In few words, she conveyed that she’d been turned off to religion by the hypocrisy of those who used the Church to cover the abuses they committed, never atoning to their victims yet considering themselves righteous if they just performed the right rituals in front of the right people. While she was still untangling spirituality from religion, she said, she did believe in community. And that’s why she’d keep returning to Oakland between Forest Service seasons for as long as she could afford to, she added, though that might not be much longer…

I nodded and might’ve said something easy, like, the cost of living in California’s insane. She nodded with me, as we held each other’s gaze, each of us knowing more and less than we could say. At that point, it’d been nine months since she told me she’d tested positive for a gene that meant ALS would slowly and brutally kill her sometime in the next ten, maybe twenty years. Or rather, it’d show its symptoms. Then she’d take off—on her own terms, backpacking to a last vista of her choice in full strength and autonomous control of a body that knew indelibly what it was to be rendered powerless, incapacitated, brutalized by an agent threatening annihilation without consent. Given notice this time, she’d refuse.

I don’t think I answered your question, Jillian said between sips of tea.

I hardly know what I meant by my question, I shrugged. And we both smiled, and I rambled on about how I think of religions as cultures and little more than that, but I do feel a sense of spiritual connection with the Whole, which I don’t anthropomorphize or pretend to understand but would say includes all living and inanimate matter and energy in the cosmos. In agreeing with her criticism of Christianity and with her belief in the value of community, I ended up talking about my hometown and inviting her to visit.

While rainclouds rolled off for thundering peaks, we made plans for her to join my family in the Blue Ridge for Thanksgiving. Then she invited me (and Mark) to visit her in Idaho City, and I said I couldn’t speak for him but I would be there as soon as her hitch schedule would allow. She was due back at her Forest Service compound the next morning for ten days of backcountry trail maintenance. Mark and I had already planned to stay at the hot springs one more night. So, once the storm passed and the sun lit puddles of sky, we crawled out of our respective caves and hugged Jillian goodbye.

I meant goodbye as in see-you-later. But the next day almost killed me. Or rather, Mark almost killed me. And this time, I fled—with eight fingertip bruises. Drove two thousand miles, moved back in with my parents. Jillian didn’t end up joining us for Thanksgiving. When she and I spoke on the phone in mid-November—each distracted, dissociated, unable to articulate what Donald Trump’s election over Hillary Clinton was doing to us daily as women and survivors of patriarchal violence—she apologized for flaking and reiterated her hope to make it next year. Her main conflict was a medical appointment; plus she needed to save money in case her doctor would recommend surgery on her hand. She told me she suspected she’d injured it early in the summer and just kept working through the pain, mistaking her stiffness for what men on her crew called “the claw,” locking in the hands from clutching tools too tightly. What she wouldn’t know definitively until three months after our last phone call was that this wasn’t a fracture or “the claw” but rather “the split-hand sign,” a symptom of ALS.

That winter—after months of blazing trails through the wilderness, hauling nearly her body weight in tools, fuel, and gear—Jillian started falling down on sidewalks. She was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis just a few weeks before her thirty-second birthday.

Most ALS patients, once diagnosed, live three to five years with rapidly decreasing autonomy, losing the ability to move, talk, eat, and eventually even breathe by themselves. We’ve yet to develop a cure. So, Jillian lit out on her own terms, defying the Fates, burning bright to the last, quick as a meteor.

Around the time Jillian was putting her affairs in order—willing to me everything she’d ever written: drafts, letters, journals—Mark called to thank me for all the times I saved his life. He told me he’d come to see even my leaving as saving him; now, whether he meant from prison, fatherhood, further regret, homicide-suicide, or what, I didn’t ask. I hadn’t yet made it to the phase of healthy rage. It’d take me years to get there. There was much I wasn’t ready to remember, to process and name. I kept taking his calls. They weren’t frequent but seemed urgent. He’d be breathless, spiraling in self-loathing unpublished-writer anxiety, asking me to talk him back into living. And I’d tell him to go outside and tell me what he saw.

And I would go outside and tell him, this is what I see:

I see a sky that changes colors more times a day than you can count. I see sunlight and leaves drinking it up, dancing so adorably it makes me want to dance with them. Some of those leaves hang on all winter; some have just sprouted, and some are on the ground now, becoming soil to nourish what grows next. I don’t know what grows next here or wherever you are.

All I know is I don’t want to miss the fireflies rising in May or lightning storms, my God. I saw the most incredible one last summer, late August. Did I tell you? I was picnicking with my parents in this big open field, and they started packing up when the sky turned gray and wind picked up and we could tell it was about to pour, but once we got in the car I asked them to please not drive away. I wanted to watch the storm from there, sitting in the trunk with the hatch open. And we did. And I cannot describe it. Okay, I’ll try: Thick drops of water raining on my shins, warm wind on all my skin, whole hands of lightning fingers reaching out in flashes across the treetops. It was lightning sideways! I mean, all the streaks together looked like roots! The world was flickering, thundering, and all along that steady rain. It was . . . worth being here for. No question. Actually, this is dorkiest thing, but I wrote a thank-you note to my parents the next day, it was that good. Just wanted to thank them for co-creating me and for being the kind of people who’ll sit quietly in awe of a thunderstorm, picnicking in the car with their grown-ass daughter who’d just moved back in with them.

What are you thinking now? 

Is life worth living even if you don’t become a famous author? You’d probably be too busy doing stuff you hate then, anyways, to get to picnic in enough lightning storms.

Who knows how many we have left?