Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Cedar Crest

Still thinking about staying longer in New Mexico...

The morning after my return to more-toxic-land, after R. made shrimp & grits for breakfast, I set out to see P., the tent-making MCS woman from S.’ footage, who rented a room in her home, up the mountain from Albuquerque. She had been seriously ill for many years, and I hoped her home might be ok for me. Prejudiced by her mention of a Section 8 voucher, I’d imagined her place rundown and uncomfortable in a bad section of town. But in fact, when I looked at the map, I saw it was up the old, touristy road on the way to Santa Fe, tucked behind the mountains, safe from the pollution of the city, where the air comes across the Plains. No agriculture, no nuclear research facilities, just mountain air. And trees. After the desert landscape around Santa Fe, I was thrilled to have the smell and shelter and oxygen of pine trees around. The forest felt protective and safe after all that open land.


It’s been ten years since S. filmed P., and she’s aged since then, gained weight. But her voice was familiar, and looking closely, so was her face, though now framed by gray. She was having a yard sale, she’d told me. This meant that she’d set out a rack of tie-dyed shirts, socks and sheets, and piled miscellaneous leftover objects in her driveway. Ratty furniture, old appliances. Looking closely, there was some intriguing camping gear – a foldout plastic picnic table I’d only seen before at Tanglewood and a good bike. A few folks stopped by, turned over some baskets, leafed through the tie-dye, grumbled quietly and drove off. One old man with a face-wrenching eye twitch and a red plaid shirt was looking for wagon wheels, for yard decoration. Not only did he ask Patrice, repeatedly, if she had any, but he asked all the other shoppers too. Including me. Nothing, we all told him, sorry. Disappointed, he twitched one eye, nodded to everyone, piled his wife into his pickup and headed down the mountain.

During a lull between customers, P. showed me around the house. It’s mostly made of wood, upstairs & downstairs, spacious, a little messy, and unlike S.’ house, not covered in foil or any other obvious signs of an MCS inhabitant. She also has no rules about showering or washing, just that we check our soap & shampoo with her for fragrance reaction.

She’s figured out the ventilation –a ceiling fan upstairs and a window fan in the bathroom sends the air across the floor and out. In the summer, she says, she gets some off-gassing from the formaldehyde wallboard and the pergo floor, but in winter, it stays cool enough. She suggested we might want to cover the floor with plastic, then rugs, just in case. I sat in the room awhile to test it, under the open window. The air up there is incredibly clean. It’s high up too, at 6500 feet, but the altitude didn’t seem to have the same dizzying effect, or maybe I was finally used to it.

She also showed me her tent sites in the yard, that she uses sometimes when the toxic load from the city just gets too much. She has layers of tarps for protection – and a frightening story about a huge branch that fell one night on her tent, when she had decided she was too tired to sleep in it and had to stay inside.

P. is an incredible example of someone who has chosen to live her life instead of hide from it. She hated being 'strange,' as she calls it, living outside the world, in tents for so long. Now she is in school studying public health and working two or three jobs –caring for senior citizens, teaching water aerobics and working as an anti-smoking advocate at UNM. She goes into the city every day, and sometimes she spends the night at a friend's house, which actually means camping in her yard and using the kitchen and bathroom.

It's hard to do justice to P. She's very kind, but very controlling. There's a connection I've noticed between MCS'ers and 12-step. Some deep psychological thing about boundaries is at work, as if people who spend their lives without boundaries literally take too much in and it somehow destroys them, forcing them declare their needs, finally, when they have no choice, when not speaking of them will cause physical symptoms. Do I fall into this category? I wonder. I am suspicious of 12-step and self-help. I can only find life lessons in literature, emotional succor in music. The words have to be strong, the feelings powerful; a set of slogans is too foreign for me.

Fearlessness

Chögyam Trungpa:

Going beyond fear begins when we examine our fear: our anxiety, nervousness, concern, and restlessness. If we look into our fear, if we look beneath its veneer, the first thing we find is sadness, beneath the nervousness. Nervousness is cranking up, vibrating, all the time. When we slow down, when we relax with our fear, we find sadness, which is calm and gentle. Sadness hits you in your heart, and your body produces a tear. Before you cry, there is a feeling in your chest and then, after that, you produce tears in your eyes. You are about to produce rain or a waterfall in your eyes and you feel sad and lonely, and perhaps romantic at the same time. That is the first tip of fearlessness, and the first sign of real warriorship.

You might think that, when you experience fearlessness, you will hear the opening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or see a great explosion in the sky, but it doesn't happen that way. In the Shambhala tradition, discovering fearlessness comes from working with the softness of the human heart.

Back to the Real World

The next day, it was time for me to leave Susan’s. I’d planned to spend the weekend with R. again before flying home for Thanksgiving. I stopped at the little local mall, wrote for a bit in the coffee shop, visited the consignment store, picked up snacks at the grocery – normal tasks, further steps outside the white-clad purity of S.’ home, on my way back to reality. Then I headed to Albuquerque. I’d found the local music station and NPR, so the hour’s drive went quickly. I was looking forward to seeing R., but I didn’t know how grateful I’d be for the company of healthy people until I arrived. Once again, I felt my head become clear and solid as I headed down in altitude.

But being back in normal-world was a shock. I had adjusted more than I thought to the chemical-free landscape. I went with R. to run some errands and felt a little besieged: Kinko's emitted a powerful stench of ink and new carpet; the BBQ place we went for lunch served fatty meat, high fructose BBQ sauce, nutrient-free white bread and pickles that glowed with an artificial green. I’d been eating what S. ate, all organic, no flour or sugar, and it agreed with me, although it left me a little hungry. The BBQ place itself was relatively chemical-free, but its noise and light and loud talking shook me up a bit. Albuquerque’s not pretty or charming – the streets are wide, the exhaust is present, the sun was too bright. I didn’t realize how much I’d quieted down out there at the edge of Santa Fe with little company and not a trace of hustle-bustle.

Their energy, just being normal healthy people, telling stories and jokes, walking into a place without mention of its smells, living without fear of encountering bad air, was a huge relief. It lifted my spirits and I, too, was able to behave like a normal person. In Santa Fe, I'd been acutely aware of the smallest "exposure," the scented candles on the Plaza, a whiff of woodsmoke, a friend's undusted home set off my chemical-antennae and I wanted to flee. Here, I was quickly back to my usual coping: ignoring small exposures, and trying to focus on conversation and being in the world. It's complicated -- how much is "masking," that is, pretending these chemicals are NOT affecting your body systems, and how much is surviving, insisting on being a person despite some symptoms.

From BBQ, we headed for Sandia Peak, one of the mountains that ring the city of Albuquerque, where we rode a cablecar up to the top, traveling 5000 feet up again. It was bone-chillingly cold up there, and the inside observatory was carpeted with something too toxic to ignore. I was happy to pick our way along a trail at the edge of the mountain face, looking down at boulders and across at pines. It was beautiful up there, and the sudden altitude change was my excuse for seeming so discombobulated. We stopped for hot chocolate in a wonderful wood-paneled old-school restaurant on top of the mountain, a ski lodge kind of place with a clock on the wall notifying us of the next cable-car down. I became fixated on the sprinkles on the cocoa, bright red & green, in the shape of Christmas trees.

It was hard not to be shocked at the kinds of things normal people put in their body. Fatty meat raised on a factory farm. Sauce that was mostly corn syrup. Sugary hot water and artificial chocolate. Red & green dyes. It didn’t take long, it looked like, to develop a worldview, where the EI life was “pure” and the real world was corrupt—metaphorically as well as literally polluted.

When I told R & P that I was going to sleep outside in their yard with the camping mat & sleeping bag I always carry, they took it completely in stride. P. even made me up a hot water bottle, which was a nice hot-steam addition before I went to sleep. They are on a busy street, and the car exhaust did make it through the fence, but I woke up refreshed in the morning, having tangled a little with their big black cats in the night. Their acceptance was ideal – that I could be ill, and quirky, but not confined to the company of only those in the same situation. Both of them knew medical crises – R. had had a stroke and P. a horrendous bout of kidney infection. Both of them now lived with chronic conditions, and P. especially, knew there were things you did to take care of it, most of all, accepting your ‘new normal.’ She was inspiring and supportive in a way I had never expected to find in a person who did not have this particular illness. We talked about the psychological legacy of having suffered an illness, or living with a chronic condition; in her case, of coming close to death, and how it makes you different, and how you just have to cope.

I wonder sometimes, not having come close to death, can I really see that? I am constantly switching back, second-guessing my ability to continue on in the normal world. Looking for a reasonable middle path.

There was a piece in the Times today about regret and resilience and how people develop psychological "complexity" in the wake of a lost future that can never materialize the way one planned.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/health/research/01mind.html?8dpc=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1199203543-WCkuO7QyVl3O9wmoJWhIiA

How much have I traveled away from regret and towards acceptance? Sometimes it feels like quite a ways; other times, I can do nothing but grieve.

Trading in the Car

This is a classic MCS problem, how chemicals in the world stand in your way. And a plea for some car rental company out there somewhere to stop spraying old cars with "new car smell", and stop hanging those fake pine air freshener trees from the mirror. Those things are filled with neurotoxins.

http://www.courier-journal.com/blogs/bruggers/2007/12/toxic-air-fresheners.html

So here I was. I'd arrived at the Albuquerque airport and rented a car from a commercial company. Although I'd actually dragged the willing parking lot attendant around with me, sniffing the cars, looking for the most bearable one, the one I'd chosen was making me ill. I'd been living clean for a few days and the prospect of driving in that machine was not appealing. In New York, I would have ridden it out and gone to bed early, but here, where I felt good, there was no point in stubbornness. I was learning something from my new MCS pals – that it always takes extra planning, resourcefulness and effort to make ordinary things work. That’s easier if your days are fully your own, and you are no longer accustomed to an ordinary work schedule.

Since out here, I didn’t have a normal schedule, except in my head, I decided to take the trade-in journey. I drove the car back to the local Santa Fe car rental branch, my head spinning so much I could barely concentrate on pumping gas. The nice lady at the office drove me to a nearby hotel, where I took a shuttle bus to the Albuquerque airport. The shuttle bus, miraculously, was not filled with plastic smells, and my head cleared immediately on the drive – as we dropped 2000 feet. Another rental car company picked me up at the airport. They had been airing a car for me for a few days, as requested, and the traces of its dangling pine tree air “freshener” were almost undetectable. I drove it happily back to Santa Fe – now, I could come & go freely again on my own.

This trip had evolved, in a way, from a visit about screening footage, to the possibility of staying here, making Santa Fe part of my winter months of exploration. I had known when I left that the visit was an excuse to jumpstart my journey, a headlong risk wrapped in a professional obligation. And it dropped me right inside an MCS community – a group of people who knew exactly what I was talking about in my near-impossible search for housing.

Despite New Mexico's cold winters, my immersion in the MCS community made finding a place to stay seem possible. People kept using flaky language, like I was meant to be there, it was opening up to me…I don’t think that way, but I’m open to the power of suggestion. Indeed, a few places were unrented and available. I just had to test them.

For a few years, on and off, my partner and I had ‘tested’ countless apartments in New York and then in Westchester, briefly in New Jersey and then again in Western Mass. Gradually, our understanding grew – this was not just a fluke problem in my apartment. In fact, there were very few places where we did feel good. Our awareness grew of the quantities of chemicals commonly used in homes –bug killers, paints, varnishes, miscellaneous toxins that traveled in from nearby dumpsites, nuclear reactors and power plants. Sprays for tree beetles, chemical fertilizers, tar for driveways, gasoline-powered leaf blowers. It was endless. The suburbs, in many ways, were worse than the city, where at least there were no lawns to care for.

We settled for awhile in a place in a wonderful town along the Hudson River. We didn’t really feel well inside except when the heat was off, but there was a large private backyard where I set up a tent. After eight months of commuting to the city every day like nothing was wrong, I fled suddenly, back to my city apartment, which after months of sleeping in the fresh air, my body was able to tolerate again. Little did I know that that my snow-covered tent would be the last home I’d have for quite a while. Within a few months, I was sick again in the city and could not gather up the energy to renew a search. That’s when I began to sleep on the fire escape, on my sister’s balcony and on a friend’s porch in Western Mass. My after-work behavior became a closely guarded secret.

But back to Santa Fe. The first recommendation for a safe place to stay was a guest house near Espanola, about twenty minutes north of Santa Fe. Its website billed it as a place for “canaries,” and there was even a singing bird sound at the site. MCS’ers are often called canaries, as in coal-mine. If we die, the miners stay safely above ground.

http://www.newmexicoecocasitas.com/

When I called L., its proprietor, a chemically sensitive photographer and teacher, she explained to me that it had been sprayed with pesticide ten years ago. Determined not to lose her home as she knew so many MCS sufferers did, she put all of her resources into cleaning it. She enlisted some EPA scientists and some chemists from nearby Los Alamos labs. Wearing hazmat suits, they exploded canisters of sodium hydrochloride (??) inside her house, then rushed out. They heated the house up and left it for 48 hours. After six months of airing out, she moved back in and says she’s been fine there ever since. It sounded thorough to me, although Dr. A. was suspicious. I set off to find it. I thought if this place worked, M. could come join me and we could explore together the possibilities -- health, sanity, community, work, love--of living in Santa Fe. It would be remarkable to have a home again we could share, no matter how temporary.

Espanola is a different kind of place than Santa Fe. Big families, in compounds, a landscape of desolation suddenly broken up by clusters of flowering trees or a charming old church. Soft hills, dried grass the color of wheat. No tourists here. In A.’s description: drugs, pickup trucks, crime, pesticides. L., the guest house owner, was proud to live in “the real New Mexico,” not in Santa Fe’s fantasy-land. She loved her neighbors, she said. Her home was clean and arty, very inviting. She collected gourds to photograph, and they lay drying around the house, long and thin and twisted, an oddly appealing decorative touch.

The room for rent was bright and sunny, simply furnished with a concrete floor and a mini-kitchen, a one-burner hotplate and a toaster oven. Most MCS folks don’t cook with gas, and if they don’t have an electric range or oven, they use mini-appliances instead. Those toaster ovens seem cramped and stingy to me, and I'd been grateful this week for S.’ electric stove-top; it felt more human and gracious to have a few pots going simultaneously, and not be forced to tightly plan life around one burner and a tiny little rack.

But as soon as I walked in and focused on my reactions, I felt something. At first just a bit of particulate, passing her musty porch. But then I felt the familiar nerve-twitch of pesticides. The edges of my mouth drooped and and I started to lose my way in conversation. I felt myself nod and smile, and pretty soon, overdrive kicked in. I can fake it, but I'm sick, symptomatic, not really present.

Then L. began to tell me pesticide stories. The lady next door, who lived in an antique adobe now on the market, sprayed her trees, the organic farmer at the end of the block had a wholesale conversion ten years ago and gave up all pesticide use, but before that...; the IPM guy persuaded her to use ant baits in the yard, and then something else against the tick infestation in the house. Well, no wonder. It’s a miracle she’s ok, but she’s made her own adjustments. I don’t know if she lives with a certain degree of nervous system malfunction, or if pesticide doesn’t affect her the way it affects me.

Determined to save her home, she is not homeless, she lives in the place she loves. She teaches school in town; she is not homebound or disabled. She does digital photography in the back room. She knows it’s not perfect, but nothing is. It was very helpful to see, again, the range of decisions people make.

For what it's worth, this place is listed on the Safer Travel Directory, and other travelers should definitely be warned. To be fair, she promises nothing on her website, but I'd cross this off any safe list right away.

My next stop was not far away, in a place called El Rancho on the road to Los Alamos. Although it was not billed as MCS friendly, it was all-natural materials and I was interested in what that meant. And it was for rent by a lovely New York film editor who I’d met before I left home. His father had recently died, and he & his wife had decided to move back to New Mexico, where he’d grown up, to be closer to his mother. They’d bought the house but could not leave New York for another six months.

The house was gorgeous – earth tone finishes, sculpted wooden beams, and an incredible solid, comforting feeling of being inside an earth-made shelter. It was perched up on a small bluff, at the top of a steep driveway impossible in snow or ice. Halfway between Los Alamos and Santa Fe, it was in the middle of nowhere, although closer to Santa Fe than Espanola. Inside, it was empty and clean. But it had an unidentifiable smell – a cross between cologne and polyurethane, sticky sweet. I wasn’t noticeably reacting to it, but it was powerfully there, as if the floors, heated by radiant heat, were giving off something. We tried to ferret it out with our noses – he climbed on chairs to sniff the ceiling; I sniffed the fireplace (nothing) and the floor. I was not ready to commit to six months, winter was coming, and I’d been warned by S. not to live too close to a power line. This was yards from a small power plant. And so I thanked him and moved on – he’s a sweet man, soft-spoken, grey-haired, just approaching middle age but with the thoughtful affect of an older man, full of love for the incredible red-gold vistas that spill out around his new home. New Mexico is one of those places where, if you grow up there, it must be very hard to live anywhere else.

A little disillusioned, but not truly surprised that healthy homes were no easier to find in the Southwest, I sought sanctuary at my favorite Santa Fe café, a vegan place called Annapurna, with a tarot room next door and curtained booths you can hide away in. It has wireless, a magnificent assortment of teas and good warm food. Why, I figured, would it be any easier here? This was too risky – a place had to be perfect come winter, or we’d end up sleeping outside in the snow. That was not the point of this jounry: we needed somewhere warm. S.’ place was an exception, renovated inch by inch with all the intensity and need of someone who needed a healthy home. After a few hours of calming email, I headed back to find S. curled up on her couch watching ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’ What a relief.

Is Shelter Necessary for Creativity?

I feel that in Pittsburgh, the space to curl up on the couch and watch the afternoon light creep all afternoon across the stone face of the church across the street. To notice the cragginess of twigs against sky. To let my mind move forward and back in time, imagining possibilities: what if I could devote some time to making over the yard organic? What if I could be here to watch the leaf-mulch sink into the earth and produce new grass seedlings? What if I could replace my mother’s plastic herb pots with solid terracotta ones and line them up neatly on the window sill? Or trim the ivy residue off the back porch? Garden planning. Adding a bookshelf. Marination. Little life-building adjustments that require time inside, not just dashing in & out in fear of symptoms. Sloppy flat words can develop into artful emotional ones. AThe world outside can be observed, sifted, brought in. All the details we can love when we are healthy. Yardwork. Yellow leaves floating in the sun. A lost broom. A found rake. It’s endless. There’s startlingly little depression here. Energy flags and reawakens. I am not always disappointed in myself, running out of steam, angry, irritable, strained. A psychological or creative wall can be hit and recovered from. Its value integrated into what's next. New questions asked, synthesized. Is the blog ready for Freud?

Two unknown women, surviving

Still in Santa Fe:

Settled in (or out), protected from the wind behind S.’ house, I keep watching footage. I’d been taking in tragic stories for days. Women, primarily, who had abandoned their homes, their families, their jobs, in search of air they could reliably breathe. Or, the lucky ones, for whom everything crumbled only temporarily, flat on their backs with brain damage and heart trouble for months, but able, with money and support, to rebuild their lives by building themselves a home. Somehow, as closely as their experiences paralleled mine, literally or emotionally, I was able to keep my critical filmmaking distance. I wasn’t moved or shaken; I didn’t cry.

Then I came to Bonnie & Julie’s story: two young Jewish women with small children and husbands, with dark hair and dark eyes and familiar accents. Bonnie had first gotten ill lying on her brand-new carpet in her super-insulated house in Maine, playing with her newborn daughter. Julie’s son had been terrifyingly ill since babyhood -- his skin burst into bleeding sores, he had raging fevers and uncontrollable tantrums, screaming for six hours nonstop. These two women found each other in Sedona, Arizona, having both left their lives on the East coast for a climate that might give them some relief.

In the footage, the two families hold a seder, outside, with their children, against a vague background of suburban desert vegetation. Bonnie’s husband, a rabbi, leads the simple service. The children fidget, dutifully holding open their prayer books. They sing a song. The scene is badly shot, the camera spedns too much time with the father, then skitters by the children. But you don't have to see it clearly to imagine what's going on. I burst into tears at everyone’s innocence. Their effort to be a normal family was so simple and yet so immense, such a gigantic leap of faith and so unbearably fragile – like a crystal goblet teetering at the edge of a vast, rocky canyon.

For one day, they had stepped outside the circle of their besiegement. Outside the fact that their neighbors, irritated at too many requests to reduce their chemical lawn care, had deliberately begun spraying pesticides every week. Away from the boy’s delicate equilibrium so easy to unbalance that a bagel or a whiff of his grandmother’s perfume would send him into feverish, screaming fits. Leaving behind the tensions plaguing a marriage where one partner is often incapacitated by ordinary things. They had created a sacred circle, literally, and it protected them, for at least this single beautiful afternoon.

Despite it all, they had a family. Bonnie called her toddler daughter, just showing the first sign of chemical sensitivities, a ‘gift from God’. She had set up her infant’s crib on the lawn with her when she was forced to sleep outside. They were doing this all wrapped in the dynamics of a family. I was overwhelmed by that-- and heartsick. I was barely capable of dealing with this sickness alone. When I was sick, I only wanted to be by myself. Although I craved support, I couldn’t ask for it and wasn’t getting it. Relationships were strained and combative. How were they able sustain loving relationships—and keep the overwhelming loneliness at bay?

Shelter

I've been back from my Santa Fe adventure for some time now, but never finished recounting it. So it continues...

S. and I had some MCS negotiating to do to figure out the best way to screen her footage. The hard drives that stored it gave off a mysterious smell that made her sick. So S. didn’t want them in her living room and as a precaution, I only wanted them in my room with the windows open and fans on. So we set up outside, squinting into the sun, with the desert dust blowing across the computer. I’d been told there are tarantulas here, outside, like grasshoppers at home, but menacing instead of musical. Fortunately, the early November days were unseasonably warm.

MCS sends you outside whenever you can, because it’s a guarantee of circulating air, a relief from whatever poisons lurk inside. When your goal is to be outside as much as humanly possible, you develop a new relationship with the weather-- among other things, a new and boundless gratitude for a warm, sunny day.

When outside is only a place to pass through on the way to other inside places, you are not really aware of the weather. Superficially, of course you are – you bring an umbrella when it’s raining or a scarf when it’s cold, but this awareness has the snapshot, one-dimensional quality of a weather report: sunny, cloudy, chance of rain. Bundling up and walking fast gets you through the coldest city streets, but if you sit and try to work outside on a day towards the end of fall, you experience all the nuances: winds that herald winter, breezes in from the south or blustery gusts blown in from the moors of 19th century novels.

On the East coast, the coolness of the evening settles in gradually, so you can sit outside well after dark before the chill comes. But in the desert, the moment the sun goes down the temperature plummets twenty degrees. Suddenly, outside is impossible and you’ve got to run in, slam the door and wrap up in a blanket.

When I know I have an inside to go to, I love the cold. I love the winter that reappears each nightfall, the way the grey branches vanish into the deepening sky and how the windows rattle as darkness blows in. I approach shelter with excitement, like an Eskimo arriving home at his igloo, or a desert nomad reaching his respite from sandstorms. What an extraordinary achievement, the building of shelters.