Synopsis:
Dove Creek is a wise, eloquent, fiercely honest fictional chronicle of a young woman’s venturesome journey from her bare-bones Kentucky background to an Indian reservation in the Pacific Northwest. She finds a new life as a much-loved healer—a blonde, female, hillbilly shaman who happens also to be a nurse for the Indian Health Service.
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Excerpt:
May 23, 2001
Eaglecap Wilderness, Oregon
The old-timey folks from down home would call this surviving a season. They’d tell me I ought to deal with this segment of my life like I would any other: by reading the Bible and praying. Going to revival meetings and speaking in tongues. Dancing in the Spirit. Letting preachers lay hands on me. Getting slain out. People who know me now tell me I ought to be careful about staying out here by myself, considering what I’ve been through. “Is anything ever going to be enough for you?” someone said. And I couldn’t rightly say what was drawing me, other than I wanted to go camping where nobody else was.
The environment overtakes me, becomes so stark I can’t help but focus on it. Mosquitoes losing spunk with sundown’s chill. Conifers bursting with the green scent of pitch thanks to a string of early hot days. The Lostine River, sparkling and frilly with quick and early snowmelt bursting against gnarly-rooted banks, her own smell a mix of earth and wet stone. I’d love to be strong enough to stand upright against the hurling blast and push of that overgrown river, wade to the other side, make a fire, sit and take a good look back at myself and this place. This ghost scene from another life. A place of grilled trout, coyote impressions, K-mart sleeping bags. A place of squeal-laced river baths and boxed wine in ceramic coffee cups. A place where Brett, maybe six, once tiptoed away at dawn with his pint-sized rod and reel and a nightcrawler, hoping to catch a perfect Dolly Varden for the family breakfast. Mark slapped high-fives and said, “Atta boy!” Zach, our three-year-old, pulled at his T-shirt neck until the threads popped, he was so impressed by the feat.
As for me, I made busy firing the campstove, holding back “my baby’s-growing-up” tears. I would also be the one years later who would cry the first time they walked the block from our house to the park alone.
In three months, that daring fisherman will hit twenty-one. Three months more and Zach will turn eighteen. But I’m not here to wallow in my empty nest. I’m ready to be done with the nightmare of single parenting. The visitations, swapping custody, child support. The constant whiplash of emotions daring me to commit either abuse or neglect. And my poor sons with more than their share of alley fights and bloody noses, damaged psyches retaliating against enemies their father and I created.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad we made it this far and at least none of us is dead or in a vegetative state. And I’m sure I will look back on this as not the end of an era but the beginning of a new normal. But as the boys leave this year to go to college (Brett’s is a late lift-off), I find myself red-faced furious at life for leading me down such a road and then abandoning me. For suckering me into conceiving them because I loved Mark’s snowy blue eyes. For baby diapers and bottles and tonsillectomies and ten days in the pediatric ICU, IV antibiotics scooting through a tube into Zach’s scalp six months after he was born. Watching the world from inside a glass-walled isolation room. Breastfeeding and rocking for ten days of naps and nights. In my line of vision an abandoned hydrocephalic three-month old, whose head circumference rose and fell like a barometer.
Oprah’s magazine recently had a quote from Ranier Maria Rilke, who said to “have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.” I carry it around and read it almost every day. Rilke thought one day you simply realize you’ve “lived your way into the answers.”
These words come to mind here on this evening of my life, staring at a mug of ice cubes, tonic water, gin with a chewed-up lime, testimony to the Swiss Army knife I failed to sharpen before I left home. I also failed to pack a bucket for dousing embers, not to mention a shovel and ax–both required by law. I seem to have equipped myself with nothing much beyond my desire to survive the sleeping part. I brought a yogurt and a raw chicken breast in the Igloo, but this fire I kindled from forest floor refuse has dwindled to a point no brighter than the very twilight I meant to fend off. So I’m forced to hike the newly-graded dirt road to look for firewood the Forest Service might have left. Workers saw windfall to get it off the roads, cut it into cordwood and kindling and leave it stacked along the ditch. Most of it is delivered to primitive campsites such as this one, so the requisition comes guilt-free–this knowledge one of the privileges of having been the sister-in-law of a forest ranger in the American West.
The American West. The other question to be raised at this point, I suppose, beyond why a forty-four-year-old woman is trying to fool herself into thinking camping alone is the answer to something, is how the woman got to be alone in the first place.
Which is to say it is hard to know where to begin. I could start with having been a child of the 1960s and ’70s, sophisticated in ways my Kentucky kinfolk never had been by television and the Vietnam War, a public education and years and stacks of library books, by bomb shelters, the Beatles, Life magazine, the hippie mindset and the glamour of their dancing devotion to the image they created of themselves. Like many of my generation, I also couldn’t see myself being intrigued by what the generations of my people had settled for–in this case hundreds of years of sequestered living in the mountains of Kentucky. I watched the women of my lineage move through life dream-like and wordless with a certain level of judgment I know I learned from watching the better lives of people on TV (how else could I have learned it?), the lines of their dresses therefore appearing listless and unimaginative, the furnishings in their homes largely without color, except for small berry-dyed string roses attached to crocheted doilies, the faded rosy shades of which I so loved. And the spots in the linoleum where the bright still showed. My daddy’s parents hung flowered wallpaper once, and it was pretty for awhile, although smoke from the potbellied stove in the front room and the wood cookstove in the kitchen soon dulled it.
But there was something else. It had to do with the deep mysteries that shrouded both sides of my family, the way my mother and her sisters and mother whispered among themselves, hushed when the men came in to wash for meals; the way when the women whispered one of them would be crying. It had to do with the way the men of my father’s family told stories aloud and the women didn’t. It had to do with Mom and Daddy having raised me “in town,” of my being the object of suspicion I did not understand. Of feeling I was not accepted by this club of women who chopped tobacco and bared their flat breasts in the kitchen to nurse their many babies and butchered chickens and churned butter and went crazy or died before the age of forty. Most of them still, in 1970, wore feed-sack dresses, grew and slaughtered and canned everything that passed to their mouths from the table. Many of them couldn’t read but embroidered entire bedspreads with bluebirds. They danced in the spirit and spoke in tongues and laid hands for healing. Mom still talks about milking the cow in the snow and how hard it was to live isolated with young children and without running water or even a well. Later, when I was nine, when they moved us up north to Louisville–plunging us kids into the chaos of city schools–they still maintained our house on Redbud Street like it was the hills. No precise, flowerbed landscaping for us, unless you count the whitewashed tire full of dirt and irises in the backyard, but plenty of wild honeysuckle and enough dead cars that now and then “The City” sent Daddy a polite letter asking him to license and insure them or haul them off.
Why the lot of my relatives still squatted in the same places they had for generations, watching old buckboards and rank-and-file storefronts silver into dust, I don’t know. Nor why nobody wanted to get free of tobacco barns and man-high mules and round-nosed pickups constantly in need of having a brake line bled or a can of tube patch picked up from town, which, of course, required traversing nearly twenty miles of slate-bottomed creek and dirt road, not to mention catching and hitching one of the mules. My fear of ending up like them created in me a skittish-ness like a deer’s. Deer stomach.
So I drove away, in 1977, with Mark and a 1964 Falcon full of dreams and belongings, in a January storm so cold and icy the Ohio River froze. My goal? To do better than the rest of my family had, to do better than raising tobacco crops by walking behind the wide, shiny rump of a mule and the angled blade of a single-tree plow. To do better than milking Grade A dairy cows by hand, selling the skimmings to the local creamery. To do better than growing sugar cane for molasses, selling eggs, reweaving worn-out sleeves and knees. To do better than end with skin dark and leathery from days in the field, standing in the doorframe whenever an automobile idled up to the house, the irises of my eyes so faded as to be visible to the driver.
Twenty-three motels pockmarked the 120-miles of asphalt between La Grande, Oregon, and Kennewick, Washington: some heavy with the exhaust of eighteen-wheelers idling in the parking lot; some nondescript, with two or more layers of door-studded cement floors and iron balcony railings. Some crumbly stucco places. Some pleasantly shingled, with family rates and meager neon lights beckoning the highway. Some fairly elegant, after the New West fashion.
We had much to occupy our talking and thinking on that June night in 1991, but my passenger, Joey Mundell–trim, athletic build, hair visceral and dark–was interested in two things only: the news I had just shared about a day in April when, while making my public health nursing rounds, I happened to find his blonde wife, Tanya, a police trainee, naked as a sheared sheep in the back of our black cherry Dodge Caravan with my graying-at-the-temples police corporal husband at a game preserve overlook outside La Grande. A place where I commonly stopped to record home visits in patient charts and where every manner of wildlife, from nesting falcons to an autocratic bull elk and a coquettish handful of cows could be observed.
That, and the new panties he’d recently given Tanya. “Frickin’ black lace underwear,” he said, “and red cowboy boots. She just had to have those red cowboy boots, and I bet you anything they’re gone. I betcha they’re not in the closet. Frickin’ black lace French underwear, and she goes and does this.” And as soon as we found their love nest, he meant to tear the place apart until he found them, to determine whether she’d “used them” with Mark.
We hit every burg and side street, and it took more than nine hours, but we finally discovered Tanya’s car outside the Days Inn in Kennewick. It was six a.m. Joey knocked on doors and shouted and we grilled the frightened desk clerk until the man threatened to call the police. Instead of making good on our promise to leave, we headed to the parking lot and crouched next to her silver Grand Am, exchanging the rhetoric of limbo and cuckolds. Daybreak was crazing the shadows, lifting the scent of sagebrush and evaporating dew. I told Joey how Mark suddenly wanted a vasectomy; explained my missing teeth, the gaps that made me conscious of my genetics, pulled the previous week to de-crowd my mouth for braces, part of a beauty and weight-loss plan designed to re-ignite my marriage. Joey wept into his hands. Said he cheated on her once, while she was in the hospital birthing their first baby, that somebody should have shot him then. That he deserved this.
Still, neither of us wanted what was taking place. But we both wished for the courage to blow the two to smithereens.
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Praise for Dove Creek:
“Paula Marie Coomer writes like a house afire, and her richly variegated novel deserves a prominent place in the literature of the modern American west.”
—Ed McClanahan, author of Famous People I Have Known, and O the Clear Moment
“Dove Creek is a beautifully wrought novel which tells a tender story of a woman who loved and learned the lessons of the heart from the men and women she nursed on the Nez Perce and Coeur d’Alene reservations of northern Idaho.”
—Mary Clearman Blew, author of All But the Waltz and Balsamroot
“The split-second decisions that alter our lives, the ancient rituals that save us—in Paula Coomer’s Dove Creek, self-destruction and dogged erserverance come together in a novel of intimacy that crosses the boundaries of culture and time. We don’t have enough female quest stories, but this is one of them— lyrical in its language, vivid in its detail, important in its observations of the chaos and confusion that come when a young woman lets go of her identity and strikes out on her own perilous journey of self-discovery.
—Kim Barnes, author of A Country Called Home
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Buy Dove Creek:
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About the Author:
Paula Coomer’s fiction, poetry, and non-fiction have appeared in many journals, anthologies, and publications, including Gargoyle, Knock, and the acclaimed Northwest Edge series from Portland’s Chiasmus Press. Ms. Coomer has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and was the 2006 writer-in-residence for Fishtrap, Oregon’s renown advocacy program for literature in the West. Her books include the short story collection Summer of Government Cheese (2007; 2011), the poetry collection Devil at the Crossroads (2006), and Road, a single-poem chapbook (2006). Her first novel, Dove Creek, was published in 2010 by Booktrope (formerly Libertary).
Visit her blog HERE.
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