Octopus, Octopus: Survival Mothering with Jaques Cousteau
When faced with danger, my baby and I grow fins and return to the sea.
I will remember high Appalachia as the place where Serene and I danced through a landscape of natural wonders: hiking through the mists of Cascade Falls, riding an inner tube down the New River, chasing guppies along the spongy creek where the moonshiners once hid their contraband. A constellation of fireflies settles on the hillside across the road: we wave our arms and whip them up. My baby loves avocados and pumpkins and feeding the piglets on the nearby farm. When he is upset, I conjure a vintage episode of Jaques Cousteau and hold him tight to my chest, streaming on my laptop from the corner of his little bunk bed, Octopus, Octopus.
In a few years, I will remember the kindness of the elders at the farmer’s market, my bright students from all over the world, fiddle contests in the holler, the emergency funds the Unitarians gave us to cover the electric bill. The big, big thunderstorms. An old lover, an archaeologist, comes through the valley with a truck full of shards of pottery and arrowheads he’s lovingly dug from the grounds and preserved with scientific care. We play records through the night as the rain pours into the creek out back. He holds me until tomorrow.
Today, though, I am shoved onto the concrete isle of single motherhood in the Walmart parking lot with my toddler in my arms. The guys with white power decals and Don’t Tread on Me flags rev the engines of their stepside trucks to scare people they don’t like, and they don’t like us. We are in their scopes: a single mom, no wedding ring, in yoga pants: a liberal from the college, and her biracial kid with a soft, curly afro, headed to the Red Robin for a two-for-one deal.
Since the election, more locals have been outfitting themselves in paramilitary gear, rigged up with flags and patches from the surplus store. Hatred blasts from their windows at the volume of screams. They lay in wait. It is 2017 and, in just a few weeks, they will gather here on the way to Charlottesville, where they will chant and march over the grounds of the old tobacco plantations, torches in hand.
I am stranded at the dwindling university, non-tenure-track faculty, out of my depth. My temporary status means that the only classroom available to me is the one in which, a decade earlier, an undergraduate shooter began his spree. 32 people were killed; 19 wounded. On the first day of each semester, my students enter the room anxiously as shadows pass by the hazy windows to the hall. When class starts, I lock the doors from the inside: the remodelers carefully thought of this detail. The new plaster on walls cannot paper over the horror; the new windows do not make us forget the survivors who jumped from them. Dutifully, I teach my class on digital anthropology, another on the arts and social transformation.
Up the road, the office of my therapist sits atop a pain clinic. The epicenter of the American opiate epidemic is here in the ancient Roanoke Valley. A trail of pickups and rusty campers lines a path from the offramp as pills make their way from one set of hands to another. For many in Appalachia, whose prospects of meaningful work died with the coal industry generations ago, the medicine can’t keep up with the pain. I want to hold their sadness; I know that I, too, need to be held. It is not their fault. The therapist helps me visualize the physical location in which I carry my self-hatred, my self-blame: it settles into my breastbone, an ache. No matter what I do to try to make it go away, it smolders.
At night, at the threshold of my little cottage in the mountains, I move a full bookcase to barricade the door. I am afraid that the man who hurt us will follow through on his threats. He has an app that allows him to call from different numbers multiple times a day. My protective order has elapsed and I can’t afford a lawyer, and we live within a two-hour reach of his impulses. Just a mile up the road, I turn into a gravel driveway to turn around for something I forgot, and a single-wide trailer appears before me. Someone has painted the letters K.K.K. across its face, black against white.
Two of my students come to me with credible complaints of misconduct at the school; more emerge, and I stick up for them from the powerless side of an administrator’s desk. My possibilities of finding a tenure-track job for the next school year dwindle into nothing, and I’ve got 8 weeks to find a new job, a new home, a new city. I panic.
Under the gaze of the guys with the Celtic Cross tats, I push a giant contraption for football players across the gym floor, ploughing the astroturf. Over weeks, I pile more and more weight on it, until it feels like it won’t budge. I push myself so hard against the machine, digging the balls of my feet into the floor, that my shoes peel halfway off, but I move that thing every time. I get stronger. This is not any kind of a sensible gym exercise; it is a psychosomatic workout. My body needs to know that it has the power to get unstuck, to escape.
When I get home, I spin the old globe I got at the hillbilly flea market. My finger lands on a destination, anywhere but here. Take me back to the West Coast. I will leave everything I have behind yet again, everything but my son and all these books and records, in exchange for my freedom. The wind will whip my hair as I stand on the edge of the subduction zone, the tectonic seam where the earth’s crust cascades into the ocean. I will return to the sea. I will grow fins.
Find me the farthest place, and I’ll never come back.