Soul Purge

I grew up in a small desert town in Arizona, on the banks of the Colorado River surrounded by purpleand gray mountains. Geographically, it was called the Colorado River Valley. To me, it was as if our littletown sat in the bottom of a bowl. Before colonization, the land was inhabited by what settlers refer toas the Mojave people, and the river nurtured a thriving agricultural community. These peoples referredto themselves as the Pipa Aha Macav, meaning people by the river. By the time that I came into being,the Pipa Aha Macav had all been displaced to the Fort Mohave Indian reservation and there was notrace of the abundant agriculture they had cultivated for thousands of years. Where food was oncegrown and villages danced, now sit strips of neon signs, parking lots, and resort casinos. Of course, thisstory was unknown to me a child. No one ever explained the segregation of our communities, and Inever thought to ask. I remember there only being two seasons, unbearable scorching heat and tolerantwarmth.Half the year, temperatures rose above one hundred degrees before noon, and it was not uncommonto have temperature reach 120-130 degrees in the afternoon. My dad would tell me that the ground gotso hot, that you could fry an egg on the cement. I remember he may have even experimented with thistheory once. You couldn't go outside without shoes, or you'd burn and blister your feet. Once, a toddlerfell on the asphalt and developed 3rd degree burns. I shudder to remember long nights spent on mybelly in front of the swamp cooler, trying to cool my sun blistered back after having spent the day at theriver. I can’t fathom why I never knew that sun block was a thing until I migrated to Cascadia. The otherhalf of the year was very similar in nature to Portland’s typical July-August climate, and you could runaround on the riverbanks without having to wear your soggy shoes, sloshing with river water. Rain onlyfell a couple times a year, and when it did it was a big deal because when desert rain comes, it is fast andhighly volatile. I remember purple lightening, shattering thunder, and the sweetly muggy smell of rain inthe air, followed by flash floods that would swallow up whole cars.

Our family always lived at the fringes of town, hanging by a thread in all ways that a group of peoplepossibly could. Socially, economically, mentally. As a child I would spend a lot of time wandering andwondering around the open, undeveloped Mojave Desert landscapes behind our house. Wholeafternoons would slip by while I crouched and scuttled over the ground, flipping rocks over in hopes offinding the 1 in 1000 amethysts gems which were scattered about the landscape. As I flipped rocks,scorpions, lizards, jackrabbits, roadrunners, packs of wild ponies, and herds of bleating goats wouldcome and go. The sun would begin its decent behind the mountains, turning the sky shades of bloodorange, scarlet red, and then fading into the pastel purple of twilight. Eventually, the aching in my legsand back would become unbearable and I would have to end my hunt for the day. Sweaty and dusty, Iwould hop on my bike and ride down to the Colorado, taking advantage of the boat docks that belongedto the McMansion vacation river homes that sat empty most of the year. I would slide my feet out of myflip flops and jump from the dock, feeling the weight of my warm body slice through the tepid water.Floating on my back and letting the river carry me a ways downstream, I would watch the moonrise andthe stars fall. Sometimes, I would think about what would happen if I just kept floating with the river;where would it take me? Anywhere had to be better than where I was. Poverty is a most unhospitablesocial location. There, floating on the river, was the only time as a child that I felt that escape waspossible. Escape from the stench of my mother’s hangover that filled the bathroom most mornings.Escape from the sound of silence broken by the sporadic burst of domestic upheaval between myparents, or the heaves of grief that the struggle for survival elicited from them. Escape from the feelingthat all my feelings of anger, hunger, fear, resentment, grief, and mistrust of this merciless world wouldburst out of my chest someday. Under the starry canopy, buoyed by the Colorado, I felt like it could alljust disappear if I just let the river drift me to another place, another time. I had no idea that all riversrun towards a confluence with the ocean. Its destination perplexed me, and I thought up all kinds ofpossibilities for where I would end up. To me, the Colorado was as alive and agile as I was, and thesource of infinite memories and mystery. The sound of the water lapping on the beach, the wavesgenerated by the jet skis and speedboats that buzzed by, the way that the carp fish swarmed the casinostrip water ferry docks, the mix of pride and anxiety I felt when my dad would swim across the banks,the way that fourth of July fireworks or the neon lights of the casinos would reflect on the surface of thewater. The time my little brother, my only sibling, accidentally knocked an elderly woman off of the boatramp and into the river, and the way that the memory came to sit with me in the days after his death.

All of these sensory memories; all lodged somewhere in my mind on a spectrum of benign, traumainducing, intoxicating.As an adult, the intimate relationships I share with the moon, the stars, the sacred sweet silence of awild place, were all formed in the moments of refuge found in the Mojave and on the Colorado. Thesearch for escape, just as profound as ever, has endured through my migration to this bioregion. Andthat nuclear family, well they all contrived their own escape and got swept out on a swell. Sometimes Iwonder if it is they who were the victims of mental illness and suicide, or me. Whatever I am in relationto my father, brother, or my mother now, a survivor just doesn’t seem to fit right. More like a drifterhere in this other time, other place that happens to be no better, and no worse. Just a different time,and a different place imbued with the feeling that all my feelings of anger, hunger, fear, resentment,grief, and mistrust of this merciless world will come bursting out of my chest someday.