Article and Art by Willa Schendler
On the plane home, I took a double dose of generic nighttime cold medicine. In the foggy thirty minutes before I was knocked unconscious, I overheard Clint and Jackie talking to the flight attendant. She was not the head flight attendant even though she appeared to be in her late sixties– coarse dyed platinum hair, better makeup than I know how to do, though too heavy on the blush and eyeliner. To compensate for her lack of power, she picked favorite passengers, treated them with the saccharine charm of diner waitresses who call you hon but seem to mean it.
I always go running on the same loop. I enjoy observing the changes in the conditions of the porta-potties and side-trail detritus (shooter bottles, soda cans, orphaned gloves, and once– I think– meth, exchanging hands in a small blue baggie). I have always felt that I have to be still somewhere for a long time before I arrive. Before I notice beauty, I need to loop through sameness for years. During my last run, it was so cold that the community compost pile– where people dump unwanted things, Christmas trees, raked leaves– steamed vapor into the violet southwest sky.
7/4/23
Things to look forward to:
Telling Morgan about June
Cooking dinner
Evening walks
Clint and Jackie recognized the flight attendant. Is it possible she was their flight attendant from two Thanksgivings ago, on an overnight flight from Berlin back to Dallas? Clint and Jackie, sitting in aisle seats across from each other, bonded over this unlikely reunion in the back of economy near the bathrooms with the flight attendant in between them, resting her hands on the overhead compartments, leaning forwards so I was positioned directly under her raised arm. “Do you remember us?” Yes, of course she did. Though that was a lie.
11/12/23
November Sun, before trip…so happy.
On my run this fall, I saw an upright vacuum cleaner on the side of the trail, artfully nestled between the overgrown weeds creeping onto the pavement which were wafting the licorice bite of yellow yarrow over my ankles. The vacuum cleaner appeared a thing of natural beauty, not unlike the porcupine I stumbled upon deep in the Hunter-Fryingpan Wilderness last summer. I rounded a corner of a thick pine forest, and before my adrenaline-firing brain could identify the strange animal with black, glossy eyes (a porcupine!) the thing hobbled off, unbothered, shaking its white tipped needles as it disappeared.
6/29/23
Old Mombasa City. Jahazi Coffee in the rain. Red and orange patterned tablecloths, black and white tiles, narrow alley. Coffee has cinnamon and cardamom. The rain clouds have darkened the alley, and now the cafe is glowing with the reflected yellow light off the ancient building walls.
I felt bad writing down the details of Clint and Jackie’s life. But. They are both divorced with children, alternately spending the Thanksgiving holiday with their own kids and each other. They can travel extravagantly every two years, getting out of Texas, no tether of familial obligations. They have seen, in their words, all the great places, all the things you should see. In two years they are doing a Caribbean cruise. In four years, a guided tour of Venice. I was grateful for the distraction from the strange realization of the permanence of missing people, or the impermanence of a short visit to a new place.
My favorite part of my run is along a chain link fence topped with six inches of barbed wire, protecting an endless sprawl of industrial materials from my interference. Bobcats, two-by-fours, aluminum pipes, tractors, buckets of nails, shovels, buses. Beyond the industrial graveyard, silhouetted by the spikes of the barbed wire, I can see the satellites peeking out of the top of Cheyenne Mountain North American Aerospace Defense Command.
1/26/24
I am working in a cafe, and I have by chance run into a friend and my favorite professor. A middle aged woman next to me is sipping a large glass of white wine and journaling intently. There is a kid at the table across from me drinking apple juice and reading a comic book while his dad reads next to him. Walking through a brick alley on my way home, I am struck, momentarily, by the beauty of the blue sky against the red stone and the narrowness of the alley that seems to be more a portal than a street.
The flight attendant joked with Clint and Jackie that the damn planes just keep getting smaller, so it wasn’t their fault they needed seatbelt extenders. I wondered if Clint and Jackie felt embarrassed that their request for seat belt extenders had now become public conversation on the packed flight, but they did not seem to mind, and instead the conversation leaned towards the general deterioration of American society, where things like paychecks and airplane seats are smaller and shittier than they used to be.
The flight attendant explained that she started working more exhausting overnight international flights so she could afford a pool at her house in Florida. But now that she has the pool, she’s got to work even more to pay it off, so she doesn’t have time to swim. Is the travel part of her job nice, at least? No, the flight attendant remarks. She arrives in a hotel at midnight– and they’re all the same, anywhere you go– and leaves by dawn, never seeing a place by the light.
11/19/23
Some of the mausoleums in the Recoleta Cemetery have glass windows where you can see green growth clawing against the glass, steaming, growing out of human decay.
My run goes along the train tracks, too. The train transports whole tanks and military airplane parts. Sometimes, the train passes by, hauling inky pieces of coal in railcars covered with blocky neon graffiti. Thom Hartmann calls coal “the last hours of ancient sunlight”– the photosynthesis of long dead plants and the cellular respiration of decayed animals converted, at last, to light. My dad told me this once, as he stuck a melon-size ball of coal from a mine near our town into our wood stove and we watched it burn for hours. I watch the ancient sunlight spill out of the train against the golden mountains. Sun and light and cold and steam are what matter in this pre-apocalypse, if we could call it that.