This is Entry 12 of an ongoing serialized memoir.
Start at the beginning → Superpower
I used to meditate in a graveyard. Having spent most of the previous decade living aboard sailing ships and fishing boats, I was determined to spend a whole year living on land. I chose Port Townsend, Washington for its maritime and agricultural ties. I wanted to feel the earth under my feet. To hunker down and grow roots. Sailors call it Swallowing the Anchor.
It took me nine months to cough it back up.
I shared a cramped apartment with a couple that often raged a passive silent war against each other. Being out in the open felt somehow safer…clean. In the graveyard, I could sit and be mostly unobserved.
Every morning, I’d wake up before dawn, slip on my coveralls, puffy jacket and clogs and walk the four hundred and thirteen steps to the graveyard. Careful to avoid stepping on the graves, I’d rustle down through a hillside cemetery picking my way past the newer more ornate sites to where the gravestones were simple rectangles. The marble edges softened and rounded by time. The dates and names eroded away. Tabula rasa.
With Mount Baker looming up out of the bay below, the undersides of the marine layer would catch fire long before the sun crested the horizon. Blazing orange. Deep purples. The world would appear like the inside of a furnace blast furnace until the sun got above the clouds and we were back in the Pacific Northwest grey.
An enormous madrone tree stood sentinel over that yard and it was beneath it’s opened arms that I would take my seat. On the grassy spot still matted down from where I had sat the morning before. And the morning before that.
I’d slip out of my clogs and prop my butt up on them as I took a cross legged seat. I’d feel the roots ground deep into the earth below me. The branches above pulling down the sky. I’d slow my breath and begin by counting to one.
One.
One.
One.
A bird lived in that tree. Sometimes it would skitter along a low branch, twitter at me and then fly off.
The fluttering of wings. A chip of bark falls in my lap. Natural decay in real time.
On one morning, I chanced upon a man curled up like a deer on my spot. His prone body surrounded by a layer of frost. I circled around to get a better look. Fetal position, hat pulled down over his eyes and ears and hair sticking out like straw. A pink crack of lower back peeks out from where his jacket pulled up short and untucked his shirt. I observed. Waiting for signs of life and, satisfied, circled back towards home. No sitting today.
20 minutes later, I returned to the spot carrying a small bundle An older pair of long underwear, a patched pair of Carhaarts, a flannel shirt that I still love, the only pair of wool socks I could find without holes and a construction grade garbage bag for a makeshift poncho or sleeping pad. The sleeping man had already left. On the spot of matted grass beneath the giant madrone, I stacked my bundle like a soft sided cairn, took a few steps back and bowed.
A hello?
A good bye?
Are they the same thing?
The next morning, I returned to the spot beneath the madrone tree. No man. No bundle. And so, on the spot of matted grass beneath madrone I, once again, bowed, took my seat, and began by counting to one.
Wang. Wang. Wang.
I hop down from my bunk and peer through the door as the latch releases with a “click”.
Counsel here to meet with you.
I scan the entry of the pod for the public defender and her case file of spilling pages. Instead, I see a tall white woman in a long, cream wool coat with round wooden buttons, leather briefcase in one hand and a slightly embarrassed truncation of a wave in the other.
Rae!?!
It’s my sister-in-law.
She extends her hand in mock formality before pulling me in close.
Hey! In order to get in to see you, I told them that I was your counsel. Sorry -, all you got now is me.
She’s an attorney, though not a criminal one, and she practices in upstate New York.
Brian and David are here. They’re on the schedule to see you tomorrow.
In the privacy of the meeting room, I embrace her like she’s my saving angel. The softness of her coat, the humanity of a hug - I savor the memory as I make it.
Leaning in, I share Lawrence Kline’s warning that our words may be recorded. She nods, already aware.
Once seated she takes me in with wide eyes and stifles a chuckle.
Well?
I give her the PG version of the arrest and life in PCJ dialing back the isolated terror and the hunger.
For her turn, she gives me the PG version of how they came to find me. How, after no one heard from me for a week, my brothers got worried enough to start looking. First locally and, after that turned up nothing, they widened the net.
Cell phone records revealed that my last calls were made from Wyoming and the two brothers that lived in the states planned to meet there and start scouring the highways with one person driving and the other spotting out the window for where my car might have driven off the road. A missing person report filed with my local police eventually turned me up in the corrections system database.
Chris, I know it’s weird but we were so relieved to find you here.
Shit. I’m not relieved to be here.
Yeah, we were worried that you were dead.
Today, I have a visit with my brothers, Brian and David . For the visit, I do not leave the pod. Instead, I sit in front of a fish eyed monitor behind one of the closed doors in the pod. I can make out their picture stretched, green and distorted at the edges.. We must be in the same building, but they might as well be mission control and me an astronaut marooned on the moon.
As we lean in to try to make each other out, I pull my leg up high so they can see the orange crocs and pink socks and get the full effect of my wide striped clown suit.
David , the youngest, cracks a smile.
But then it’s straight down to business.
They say we have exactly 12 minutes and the timer has started.
We cover the logistics of vetting a lawyer. They’ve already spoken to several and have come to the same conclusions that Tail told me when I first came in. The two best criminal lawyers in town are Lawrence Kline and Bruce Ellison. I tell them how Lawrence Kline has been a dead-end for me..
Okay. Then it’s Bruce Ellison. We’ll get a call in and get him on retainer. We’ve put money in your phone account, so you can make calls. There’s also money in your commissary. So, if you need to buy food to eat or for trade or whatever… you can. Do you need anything else?
How about some books?
Done.
So… mom knows you’re okay and that you’re here but doesn’t really know any of the details. How much info do you want us to give her?
Yeah, shit. I’ll call her. I should be the one to handle that piece. It’ll probably take me a few days That’s going to suck.
Hey. You’re alive. It could be worse.
I’m hardly out of the weeds but, after two weeks of near paralysis, to KNOW that there is motion on the other side is a different kind of hope. I can feel sinovial fluids innervating my joints.
Tail agrees.
Why didn’t you say you had a lawyer in your family. Regular organized crime shit. Bro, you sure that you don’t have the Big Boss as a cellie ?
Within the huge sigh of relief maybe there’s a niggle of deflation. I’ve learned to trust my family more that I trust myself. It’s part of our training.
Family first.
Bruce Ellison shows up early the next day. I get a first glance at him through our cell door after they summon me to the control desk. A middle-aged man with a touch of a belly. A silverly braided pony tail drips down his back. He’s got a grey beard as well which is fuller and covers more of his face than the Lakota can grow. It’s clear that Bruce is a known guy, as inmates arc over to shake his hand and say, “Kola”. He receives them graciously and with warmth - a far cry from the contempt most staff reserve for us.
Back in the meeting room, he gets right to it.
So, listen, let’s see about getting your bail reduced and figuring out how to get you out of here.. That will probably take a little less than a week. Your family seems to have things pretty together. Should I work with your brothers to figure out how payments will work? Do you need anything? Do you feel safe? Just keep your head down and lay low and we’ll have you out of here as soon as we can.
From his accent, it’s clear that Bruce is an East Coast. I ask him how a New York guy ends up in the middle of nowhere, South Dakota.
Well, I came out here back in the 70’s as a volunteer with the lawyer, William Kunstler to help defend Leonard Peltier. That project ended up extending over many, many year and there was a lot of need. You know that story?
Yeah, a little bit, I’ve read Peter Matthiessen’s book.
Oh, yeah, that book. I’m working on an account of my own. It’ll be a lot less boring.
Back in our cell, Tail can’t help but express his excitement.
Sheeeet, Waaang - you got old cut ‘em loose, Bruce?!? Man, your people must have some reeeeal clout. You’re in good hands boy! They’re gonna have you out of here in no time! You been hiding all quiet like a ninja in here - but now I see you. You da silent killer. Hiding in plain sight.
This has been a quiet process—writing, releasing, and not always knowing where it lands.
If something in it connects with you, I’d be grateful to know you’re out there.
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It’s free - for now.
Click there to go to the next installment —> Sovereign Nation