I Swim the Purple Fields

“Start the big swims around midnight. I like getting down to the beach and have it all for my own. Take a minute to think things out, check out my gear. Strip off my clothes under a full moon, and be feeling so good I want to howl. Sometimes I do. I rub tobacco juice in my mask so she don’t fog up. Go over the plan one last time and then I get right on it. Grease up and go. When you top off with a layer of Vick’s VapoRub, you get to feeling tingly all over. Right dandy, doncha know? Just like a big ol’ sunflower is gonna come popping straight outcha ass.”

— From “Fields of Purple Forever” by Thom Jones

Ross Island, Antarctica

I never met Thom Jones, but he sent me an email some months before he died. The message didn’t come unprompted. Joyce Carol Oates wrote him on my behalf. I wanted to get him to come out to New York and teach a craft class to the NYU Veterans Writing Workshop. JCO and I had bonded (ever so slightly) over our shared affection for his work. Well, bonded is probably overstated. We bonded about as much as any hack might develop a literary bond with the likes of JCO. Anyway, I was prepared to pay his ticket, get him a hotel room, and an honorarium from the department for a few hours in front of some fellow veterans. Hell, I was ready to set him up in my apartment. Make room by having the Polak and me sleep on the couch. He could have had the bedroom. I had it all worked out. We’d take him to dinner, wine and dine him. Then I’d pick him up from his hotel next day and introduce him to the workshop. Take him to lunch, strap his ass into a plane outa LaGuardia, and launch him back across the rambling Midwest to the magical misty coast from whence he seemingly emerged. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.

Ross Island, Antarctica

His reply highlighted medical concerns and I accepted that. How could I not? I was disappointed at the time, and then deeply saddened at the news of his death. Never got to meet the man. I felt like a recon Marine who never got to see “real” combat outside a boxing ring. Maybe someday I’ll write him a letter I’ll never send or write him into a story that’ll never see the light of print: one of those too fucked up ditties I write alone and for nobody but me.

I’m headed south to Antarctica again. It has been melting, sitting, waiting for my inglorious return for about half a decade now. A colleague of mine, a better leader and better worker, has been going down for nearly a decade. More probably. I don’t know her well enough to cite her Ice-time. She wanted a season off and I wanted a return. A nostos is the narrative of a hero’s return journey via the sea. Think Odysseus. At this point in what is potentially my last adventure into the world, I’m uncertain at which end of that journey I’m at. Is it a return home or am I at the outset? What the fuck is home? The concept has always been a moving target for me. Military brat. In the last ten years, it’s meant the Polak. It does. Still and always. But what about the Ice and this current feeling? It can’t be the Ice or the Polka. It’s not (or shouldn’t be) a binary. When I’m away, the idea of her and the actuality of her are the locus of my comfort and my notion of continuity, a constant star, Hero’s light at the horizon, by which to navigate wherever. But again, she might be anywhere. It’s just dumb cosmic luck she’s waiting for me back in New York. Same dumb cosmic luck that put her in my path or me on all these flights south. But why do I also feel like I’m headed home now? Who or what is the Hero to my Leander? Need and want. It’s all so fucking disconcerting.

I’m in Christchurch right now. We’ve had a flight delay. The supervisor I am covering for sent me a very welcome heads-up/checking-in/pep-talk email to make certain I was in the right frame of mind. Yeah, there are some good people with the program. Yesterday was all PowerPoint presentations and ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) gear issue. It’s pissing me off I need to wear, much less take, Big Red on the flight down there. For the uninitiated, Big Red is the bulky goose down (obviously red) parka you’ll see on people in contemporary pictures of Antarctica. Some of the folks love it. Big pockets, I guess. Companies sell the civilian version back in the world. Those Canada Goose parkas on the subway always make me chuckle inside. Headed out to the Dry Valleys there, Professor Beaker?

Mending a glove

Anyway, I can’t stand the things: Big Red. Reminds me too much of growing up on Camp Lejeune and Quantico. Uniforms: cammies or Charlies or whateverthefuck for work, then USMC t-shirts for play (or slacks, t-shirt, and a polo). Yeah, yeah, I get it. You’re part of something. You’re special. The t-shirts pissed me off the most. Uniforms were required, but nobody made you buy that Devildog sweatshirt at the PX (or get that EGA tattoo or meat tag in Okinawa). That tomfoolery was all you, jarhead. (By the way, I’ll probably buy some USAP specific outfit this season, hypocrite that I am.)

David Rovics, a protest singer whose music I quite like, and whose politics mostly mirror mine, made a comment I disagreed with last Memorial Day. He wrote that military families celebrating fallen kith and kin on Memorial Day were like turkeys celebrating Thanksgiving. I took issue with his use of “celebrate” and with the implication that military members or military families aren’t as complex as any and have no agency. I identify as a veteran and as one who was raised in a military family (a dependent). Association was not my fault until it was. And I admit it was my fault when it happened, whatever my motives. We have agency and are culpable. Some of us are not fools, just assholes.

More importantly, some of us do not celebrate, but lament. I told the friend who pointed out Rovics’s remark that some of us did not rocket out of our mother’s wombs onto the right side of history. And none of us had a choice where we impacted. It took a lot of years and a lot of learning, reading, changing, to get where I am today. I’m not even close to finishing that journey, and that’s after the fault of enlistment, after all those things I have and continue to witness, and after the hard reckoning of my own involvement. Speaking of mothers, I’m digressing here like mine telling a story (I love you, Mom).

Small gear Junk-on-the-bunk

Anyway, I hate Big Red. Past seasons, I’ve avoided her entirely. They used to issue a Carhartt alternate, which I would also not wear, but might in a pinch. I snuck on a flight in just my Carhartt coat one season. I have a whole system (base-layer, non-USMC or non-USAP t-shirt, mid-layer fleece, my hunting hoodie, plaid flannel shirt, Carhartt coat shell-layer). Works like gangbusters. I know, I know, it’s just a fuckin parka, man. Stop obsessing. Get over it. Aside: “used to” is an expression I have great fondness for. Is that weird? Oh, and sometimes I deliberately write passive sentences and may even end them with a preposition. Agency. Culpability.

My other concern this season is that I once again packed too much. The thing is, I’ll never wear Big Red on the Ice; I’ll wear the Carhartt bibs rarely; and those big-ass boots they gave me will sit in the corner of my room for most or all of the season. It’s so much ballast and takes up my weight allowance. I know what works for me and I know what I’m doing. Agency. Culpability. This ain’t my first rodeo, sportsfan. Yeah, this blog, and likely this trip, has its share of egoism. Shit’s all my fault. Meh. What the hell was I talking about? Oh, yeah. A-list writers and type alpha personalities.

As a writer, all I’ll ever be is B-list. Overstating again. I’m C-list, wannaB-list. Is there a C+ list? Just above average. On the Ice, I’m a straight B-list operator (but not a beta type). Just like back in the world, I’ll always be a Gamma type personality (look it up). Hey, baby, I’m okay with all that. The shock of reality is sufficiently interesting for me. It ain’t like your shit don’t stink. And embellishment gets you nowhere, sometimes in trouble. My mild ambitions are usually tempered by both my disdain for guile and for all this contemporary, pervasive, and ubiquitous false positivity. Aside: Did I mention that if one really examined my prose, one might note a certain affinity for tautology? Agency. Culpability. Meh, again.

Although I love the water, I’ll never be the swimmer Thom Jones limns Ondine to be. Been in enough fights to know I ain’t no Jack Johnson or Sonny Liston or Theogenes. And I’ve written enough stories to know I’m no Thom Jones or JCO. If all this prose sounds like pastiche, or my claims ring of false humility, or even that abhorred and aforementioned pretense, please, back off, motherfucker, and reframe it as self-awareness and homage. Or don’t. Frankly, I don’t give a shit.

Ross Island, Antarctica

As much of an asshole as I might be, a goodhearted villain, whatever, I like who I’ve become. I’m comfortable in my own ECW, and in my mind and my body.

A colleague once told me I was a curator. It’s true. But it takes a lot of self-awareness to be a curator, to know there are better writers, better operators, better teachers, better swimmers, better fighters, better people, and to honor them and value their contribution without envy or any sense of competition. Hell, it don’t mean I ain’t gonna grease up and go. I’ll still aspire to the endurance of Theogenes of Thasos and the cunning of Diomedes (of Iliad fame), even the fucking absurdity of Leander. Swim til I sink, get lost, or hit the opposite shore, whichever comes first. Stand up, dripping and exhausted, on some distant strand and feel the power of my life pumping through my fragile veins, that certainty of my place in this beautiful and wicked entropy, and feel just a little like I got a sunflower stickin straight out my ass.