intuitive ink

I will never forget the first time we stepped out of the cool, air-conditioned airport and into that heady and muggy summer noonday: Miami, Florida. It seems like a lifetime ago. Even the lens here gets a bit thick. I'd never experienced a sauna, and it was not until later in life that I was able to grasp and wrap my mind around this most perfect analogy: stepping out of the airport and into Miami for the first time was like literally walking into a sauna. Of course, at the time, my 9-year old body had never experienced such an assault. Accustomed to the dry, desiccating heat and alpine altitudes of the rockies and Northwest, it just didn't know what to make of this sudden sea-level elevation and humidity. My body did the only thing it knew how to do: attach an extremely vivid association to the moment. When first learning that we were moving to Florida, I remember thinking that I didn't know what to think. I pictured a literal jungle: a thick, dense jungle of overgrown vin...

Third grade. By this time, my family had grown; instead of two little brothers, I now had three. Benjamin was born in the same fashion as we all had been: on the floor of a house. Again had my mother given birth with no midwives and no doctors and no pain medications. I was getting older, barely beginning to comprehend the huge responsibilities of being the big sister. In late March of that year, school had just been let out for a long Easter weekend. For some reason or another, I was never one to run straight home from school. Often did I linger, staying afterward with my good friend Angela; we'd hang out with our teachers and stack chairs on desks or bang erasers on the sidewalks, making little white and pink geometric designs on the concrete. We were almost never in a hurry to get home. Although we rarely had homework, I always wanted to bring home my science book, to have something interesting to read over the weekend. Angela and I had a lot in common; our parents were of the s...

In 1986, Hurricane, Utah was a smaller, quieter version of the community it is today. On the outer fringes of Zion National Park, it was also giving birth to what is now Chums International. My family rented a two-bedroom house on Main Street. By this time, my mother was with child again. Main Street was, of course, one of the main attractions in this dry, dusty community. Along with Main Street, attractions also included a grocery store, a drug store, the state liquor store, a hardware store, a drive-in theater, a burger joint, an elementary school, a middle and high school. Most of the allure of the city was indeed its proximity to Zion National Park, and its nearness to canyon desert trails and wild. First through third grades were spent here, and if I were to sum up my memory of this time of life, it would be in a word: "Wild." This would not be not the "wild" associated with rebellious teenagers, but the wild borne from lack of discipline early on in life. As t...

  It is either the scent of a memory, or the memory of a scent that I associate with that charred, black rubble. The December sky was always gray, and it was so odd to be standing in what used to be our cozy, dark living room underneath that gray sky. Inside outside. The outside all burned up, some of the inside left, if singed, around the edges. We poked among the snow-dusted rubble. Any salvageable item would be carefully plucked from the charred black, placed in a pile. The scent of the memory was heady, almost sticky. Every salvageable item we'd find would have this cloying scent, the scent of a fireplace, almost sweet. The most impressionable image burned into my five-year old mind: the melted gaping maw of the glass and plastic television. We moved across town, where I had to start finishing Kindergarten, attending a new school. We made new friends -- they lived in the apartment by ours, and some of the ornaments were re-done. My memories of the days and months that followed ...

A couple of years later, it was time to start going to school. I attended North Star Elementary, and from the very beginning, I loved school. Those hours of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, being read to and taught by my mother, had prepared me well. In mid-December of 1985, things were going about as well as they could for a five-year-old. After all, I was the oldest, going to school. I was a hot-shot, for a Kindergarten kid (weren't we all?). My dad was in Las Vegas, working to earn money for the holiday, but that was okay since he'd be home for Christmas in a week or so. It must have been right after Turtle magazine had arrived in the mail, because I was in the bedroom of my parents, away from my pesky siblings, to read my favorite magazine. And then I heard my mother scream my name like I'd never heard her scream. And again. I'd never heard her say my name quite like that before. So I peeked out the door, entered the hallway. In a flash, I saw the smoke and my moth...

By the early 1980's, my dad had several years of experience in construction and was about as well-respected as one can be in that business: he worked for a contractor, hanging sheetrock on a number of the now-famous Las Vegas resort hotel and casino properties. Since Las Vegas is all about building up to tear down and build again, he rarely had a shortage of work. After awhile, he was doing well enough to upgrade our yellow VW beetle to a brand new, shiny, red Toyota Corolla station wagon. Perhaps it was the new car, the wanderlust, hippie nature of my parents not wanting to raise a family in Las Vegas, or something else entirely -- I was too young to ask and will never know for sure -- but after three years, they decided it was time to move on. Where? Somewhere about as climatologically different from the hot, arid Las Vegas desert as can be imagined. In the summer of 1983, we packed our bodies and a meager amount of material belongings into the station wagon and hit the road for ...

Most people are able to look back on their life and see a particular place as "home". Some part of their existence has ingrained itself into a geographic locale. Everybody has somewhere they "go way back," and no matter what happens they can close their eyes and imagine it in their mind's eye. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is able to return home to Kansas after clicking together her ruby red slippers and wistfully saying: "There's no place like home. There's no place like home." The whirlwind may have taken her away from her familiar place, people, comforts, but it didn't destroy her idea of home; she had it in her all along. Dorothy had a pretty good idea of what she was asking for so wistfully when she clicked those heels together: Kansas was and is all she knew. Dorothy never knew how lucky she was. Growing up, I never knew that feeling of "home"; the tornado was metaphoric. My parents were hippies, of a generation that tec...