First appeared in Portland Magazine, Winter 2011
I never never never in all my living days have understood how he got that sound from a crummy old tinny old Stratocaster, tones in anyone else’s hands would be wheedle-thin, but that was Stevie Ray Vaughan. His signature was clear within a couple bars of one of his tunes spilling out the radio, the density of those notes pure unequivocal evidence that sometimes a conversation about bigger things occurs between musician and instrument. I had a music gig at the Laurelhurst Pub the night Stevie died. It was a duo with my husband, and I remember we were both too upset at the news of the helicopter crash that killed Stevie Ray to play our own tunes, so we just filled the place with Stevie songs, many of which I only knew the lyrics part-way through, but just let words find me and made up strings of things to sing about while Dave played the songs on his Gibson guitar, and so was born some weird hybrid hodgepodge of the memory of Stevie through his music and two young indie rockers at a bar in Portland, Oregon.
We did not sound like the stuff of legend, but if someone had told me that far into the future, some 21 years later, that night would be one stuck in my mind, resonating as some sort of validation for why we do the things we do…It was a random night, the bar fairly empty, a gig amidst many gigs Dave and I played throughout the 90s. I probably wore jeans and a t-shirt and my black boots. I had probably scrawled out the set list on the back of one of our posters while sitting in the passenger seat on the drive over. I can still see Dave plugging in the guitar, I my mic, us about to begin, looking at each other and saying, “This isn’t going to work tonight.”
Who knows what would have happened if the club had been jumping with fans or if it had been a Saturday night instead of a Monday? But with the gratitude that only hindsight delivers, I believe all the circumstances aligned to promote an evening that started out as any other and ended as a map pin in the geography of memory. We didn’t break into one of our edgy folk tunes. Dave’s fingers decided on a blues progression and for the rest of the night we riffed and wove our way through one Stevie tune after another, improvising off choruses, Dave’s solos and my singing blurring recall with in-the-moment chord and word choices.
Like Stevie Ray, Dave was largely self-taught and never learned to read music. He had struggled with severe dyslexia his whole life, and credited this brain glitch with forcing him to find his own sound in his own way. And he did. The tunes we wrote together won national songwriting awards, charted across the country, and spilled out over five records, tours, and countless shows. And both Dave and Stevie died young. That’s where the comparisons rest. Stevie Ray Vaughan’s memorial statue is in Austin. There is no statue of Dave following his sudden death at age 44, but two decades following that night at the Laurelhurst, on the morning of the lowest tide of the year, our two kids dig a hole near Proposal Rock at Neskowin beach on the Oregon Coast and overturn the box we were given after Dave’s cremation. Before covering the hole with sand they each scoop up a handful, their hands covered in ash like gloves, walk to the shoreline, bend down, and reach for the waves. After, we walk back to the rented beach house, all the cousins and aunts and uncles, Dave’s brother and mom. We make waffles, the kids run around the yard. I sit on the deck and listen. There is a particular resonance to children’s voices, their under-developed pitch. Gulls above squawk a peculiar fugue. The ocean fills every left-over soundspace. Sitting there, I remember Dave and I had to shout our vows on our wedding day to be heard over the waves as we stood on that very beach at Neskowin, giggling, “What?” Joking and cupping a hand to ear, “Eh? Can you say that again?”
But even the repetition of promises could not bind the threads of years like an unwinding spool uncoiling time spent like stitches and after twelve years together, the rings came off. I didn’t sing for seven years after the divorce–not my songs, not improvised lyrics over the melodies of other songs. I could hardly even listen to the radio. And ten years later, on the night Dave died, my children’s questions run through me not as words, not semantics, but as sounds, blurs of tones with a singular cadence, the language of hospital sounds, beeping machines and crying. The sound of Dave’s mom sucking in her breath as she gasps over and over in a pattern, a rhythm, sitting in a chair in ER next to her son. I remember the music from Shrek 4 but not what happened in the movie. When we returned home from the hospital we crawled into my bed with my laptop, my kids wanting to watch Shrek. They had planned to watch it with their papa. So all night long we curled around each other in my bed and watched that movie. I gave them bowls of cereal. I propped myself up in the middle, a child on either side.
I remember many dusks back in our music days, tired after a day of work, loading up the car with amps and cords, heading to another nosedive bar with no guarantee of even fifty bucks, wondering why we kept lugging ourselves and our gear out to play our songs over the din of clinking beer bottles and loud conversation. It took many years of accumulated age and life to realize we make experiences to make memories to call upon when needed. I couldn’t have known then that sometimes, eventually, as elusive, unpredictable and abstract as memory can be, that sometimes these glimpses backward to the past are all that remain.
Sound rings off forever. There is no reconciliation point, even when it moves past our ability to hear. It’s out there somewhere still, echoing. It’s something to believe in, to know, even though it can’t be touched or seen. Like faith. Music plays itself in how it’s felt, in how the notes reverberate through the tiny bones in our ears, yes, but also throughout all the rest of us, a secular love rooted in the infinity of belief.
I confess to moments of quiet now. My son plays his father’s guitar, dexterity in fingers that used to reach for me to pick him up. My daughter has a voice that is an anthology of divinity. I listen to them doodle around with notes while I’m making dinner or upstairs working. Without realizing, they’re borrowing memory, too…mine, and transposing a kind of music that spills like light across a table. Sometimes I hear happiness. Sometimes I move through the song of our days like we moved through that night at the Laurelhurst, improvising, listening, being, remembering.
It’s mathematics. Angles, coefficients, line integrals. Algorithms. Formulas. Infinite numbers and inversions and rotations around an axis. Like last night, when walking down the hill toward home, you swung yourself around the signpost pole and twirled. It looked something like this:

You grabbed my arm, laughing at the dizziness. The autobiography of a day is told in the grey light of dusk. You tilted your head back and fixed your eyes on the sky, walking that way for three straight blocks while I steered, pulling your arm if you veered too close to the parking strip, and warning of upcoming curbs. You said you were watching the day disappear, you didn’t want to miss a thing.
Quantifying light. Rotation around an axis. Parallel beam geometry. I have a decision to make. I have a manila folder jammed with articles, abstracts, definitions, research study data, mathematical equations, charts, graphs, print outs from the Food and Drug Administration and the National Cancer Institute. They are smathered with highlighter pen markings and notes in the margins.
I work in photography. I arrange photos in a particular order to tell stories on walls, in books. I pull together exhibitions and write about such imagery, for cover jackets, for the interior essays. In one book about war and its aftermath, there is a picture of turkeys and geese in a foot-worn yard. In front of the house on a patch of grass is a table where three women sit on milk crates, breaking off chunks of bread, dipping in tins of soup. We are somewhere in eastern Europe. In another image, broken power lines reach down to earth like arms, the poles, straight like spines facing off with the sky. Lines run over faces, and across tilled, careful rows of soil; clothes wires divide the sky like a horizon, and serpents of pipes stretch out to the picture’s edge.
So what, really, is relevant about images? In photography, there is aesthetic, and then there is just truth. Staring you straight in the eye: a burned-out building, ships moored by the circumstance of land, a spigot, a window, a door, chickenwire, clapboard, home, the inside of my son’s head viewed from every angle. I have a decision to make.
There are patterns to how we survive. To how we fight wars, to how we contain our lives. Etched in the geography of memory is gesture. And it is within these gestures, and their repetition, that the stories are told. On whatever square of earth, we stand holding together all our parts: the threads of our history, the way our bodies merge with the landscape. We are pieces. We are broken. We are composites of the parts that stay hinged, stuck, wrapped in the arms of grey light, found.
I write about holding that light and the pictures of life it carries on its rays, placed on a piece of paper, and called a photograph. Alpha particles can be stopped with a sheet of paper. Beta particles, with a strip of aluminum foil.
Clarke’s headaches are worse. His hearing is at an all-time low. There is 10% of a pearlescent orb still in his mastoid, the part they couldn’t remove two and a half years ago. In the photograph the doctor took during the surgery, the mass is nestled in red, wedged in the bones. There is aesthetic, and then there is truth.
Radiation. Sunlight. Sky. The Rocky Mountains emit 40 millirems (mrem) per year. Three Mile Island, dose at plant site during the accident on March 28, 1979: 80 mrem. CT scans: 2,500 mrem.
It all begins a long time ago. Clarke has just had his first CT scan. He is 18 months old. He reacts to the anesthesia. His torso is burning and fever spiking a degree a minute, while his extremities are ice cold and turning brownish blue. I sit in ER on top of a bed encircled by a plastic curtain while, for six hours, they try to stabilize my boy. After, they send us upstairs to the pediatric ward to stay overnight for observation. All the beds are taken by other sick children and scared parents. I curl around him on a mat on the floor. He sleeps. I listen to the children in our room breathe, I listen to the mother in the bed above me murmur to her daughter. I listen to the footsteps in the corridor.
Radiation. From sunlight.
It is 104 months past that night. Clarke’s headaches are worse. I have one ally: an internationally-recognized otolaryngologist and neurological surgeon, also a professor and Associate Dean at one of the country’s most prominent medical schools. I have fought with and dismissed over 30 doctors. He is the one willing to continue investigating. He orders another MRI, a new hearing evaluation. And another, 5th, CT scan. Then Clarke and I are to get on a plane and go see him. I cry rain because I have made a decision. I have to say no, to another doctor for another reason, again. One CT scan equals 312 X-rays. Clarke has had four CT scans, 1,248 X-rays. Clarke will have no more CT scans. And I am scared because it has been 10 years and I am rather out of doctors.
Clarke is rocking in his bed, holding his head, sobbing. It is night. And then it is morning. And it is the same.
CT stands for “computed tomography.” A tomograph rotates around the axis of the patient, scanning, capturing cross-sectional images, pictures in parts, to create a tomogram, and the pieces become the whole.
The etymology of tomography is derived from the Greek tomos, part, and graphein, to write.
I write my way backwards. A pocketwatch with a radium dial emits 6 mrem per year. Naturally-occurring radiation exposure is called “background” radiation–it comes from the earth, from water, cosmic rays from space, airborne dust and particulates in the atmosphere. The time period for equivalent dose from natural background radiation: 8 months per CT scan.
In 2008, researchers reported findings that 25,000 Japanese post-atomic bomb survivors were exposed to roughly the same amount of radiation of two CT scans.
One of those CT scan looks something like this:


An Austrian mathematician designed a mathematical basis for tomography called the Radon Transform–integral geometry, hyperplanes, equations, letters, numbers, symbols, mastoid, 10%, measure, image, logic, sky, logic, earth, pieces, logic, irrelevance.
Light.
Visible light is electromagnetic radiation. With it, I can see my son’s face. Without it, I can see his shadow on the sidewalk under the streetlamp while he swings his body in a circle around the axis of the pole. A spiral scanner rotated around his head in one continuous motion in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2007. Shooting in light, targeting X-ray sensors, in a perfect, algebraically-configured circle.
I let this happen.
At dusk, each evening of each day when you and I walk the dog up the hill and back again, the light, it is grey. It could be a photo.
Last week, one of my dearest friends moved to China. With a young son in tow and hopscotching flights, it would be an exhausting journey and a week or so before I’d hear news of her arrival. When I do, she sends a lengthy missive in list form of the happenings and findings in her first few days into a transplanted life (there is no tub, she is heading to the flea market to look for a very large pot to bathe in, the job she was promised is about 10 hours a week more than originally discussed…). But the very first point she writes is the following:
Luoyang is amazing despite the fact that flowerbeds and parks are dug up for new growth, I can’t understand a damn thing anyone’s saying and have a secret fear I never will, the layer of smog hangs in the sky and there is no sun, no stars, no other place to look to.
My friend lived in the Pacific Northwest for years, and grew up in Alaska. She’s seen a lot of sky, felt a lot of grass on the scale of Walt Whitman beneath her feet. And she notices when sky and soil are missing. Now in the world’s most populous country, geography is enveloped by the tangible needs of daily human life–buildings to sleep and work in, pollution-generating cars to transport to and from the coordinates of work and home and errands, product generation for consumption.
We are aware of the precarious state of the planet’s health. Entire polital campaigns are slanted to this angle, environmental policies debated in governments worldwide, industry and considerable funds designated toward creating and marketing “environmentally-friendly” automobiles, light bulbs, detergent. Yet, sometimes we still can’t see the sky in Los Angeles, in Luoyang, sometimes even on murky summer days in Portland. And why do we need to?
I don’t know why others hike or camp, take walks, sit outside on their lunch hour–I can only speak for myself. My son, daughter, and I often take our dog out around dusk. We are held by the light as it changes, and the darkening occurs softly, and without our noticing. And it is often at this time of day that color blooms across the arc of earth, and cobalt will singe with rose before giving in to black. It is a contest to see who can find the first star of the night, and when one of us calls out and points up, we stop walking and make a wish. It is the only time it occurs to me–in my solidly adult life of bill-paying, meal-fixing, laundry-cleaning–to stop and stand exactly where I am, to pause a thought, to wish. And it is because the sky asks.
One evening when my daughter was younger, she wondered what made the sky spill with paint, how the color arrived, and why it changed and disappeared. I use words like “electromagnetic spectrum,” and “atmosphere,” “dust particles,” “gas molecules,” “water droplets….” Violet is the shortest wavelength, red the longest. Colors are continuously radiated and absorbed, deflected, reflected. Seen. Blue scatters across the sky, at the horizon it is a lighter shade because it is farther away. At dusk because there is less light to carry the shorter-wavelength colors like blues and greens to our eyes, the longer-wavelength colors can sustain, reach further like the fingers of an outstretched hand. So we look up and wait, down on earth, for the colors of a particular day to reveal themselves.
British physicist Philip Gibbs wrote, “It may not be a coincidence that our vision is adjusted to see the sky as a pure hue. We have evolved to fit in with our environment; and the ability to separate natural colours most clearly is probably a survival advantage.” The Physics and Relativity FAQ, 1997. Web. 23 October 2010.
Yesterday my son lay stock still in the bore of an MRI machine. A mirror was positioned in the tunnel so that he could see me sitting at the foot of the flatbed. We both had to be stock-still for an hour. My view consisted of his still-chubby toes (he’d removed his socks prior, trying to eliminate everything that could possibly cause an itch) and above the machine, high on the wall near the ceiling, was a small window, about one and half feet by two. Much more difficult than his previous MRI two years ago, partly because he had a headache going into it, this time midway through they needed to inject him with contrasting fluid. He has historically thin-walled veins that collapse easily, so finding a line in was tricky, took attempts on both arms by two different people, bruised him up, and just plain hurt. He never made a noise, but while they were sticking him with needles he just lay there and the tears quietly rolled down.
I wiped them and squeezed his hand, and after they pushed him back in the bore to complete the rest of the scans, and I sat back at my post in front of his toes, I looked up at that window for the remaining 30 minutes, at the square of sky that wasn’t going anywhere, either. The blue was dense and static, the visual timbre of a resonant note, an oboe perhaps. Several tree branches extended into the frame, the remaining leaves the color of sparks. Clouds interrupted and hung. A breeze pushed around the branches, and while time and our bodies were frozen inside that room, hinged on necessary stillness, the movement outside continued on, the branches conducting the sky. I could watch all this through the small rectangle of glass, and the blue it contained, the bit of tree, the clouds, focus my thoughts away from my son’s tears, away from the new prick marks on the inside of his arm, removed from the clanging, banging sounds of the machine to what was waiting on the other side of the window. I had someplace else to look.
Much of the world is shrouded in the tediousness of smog. And in those places, eyes travel upwards and vision with the capacity to continue on and on, to absorb every shade and hue, is blocked. The call and response betwen physics and geography is unwitnessable.
The Environmental Protection Agency reported air pollution and visibility impact on the skies over our country’s national parks. In eastern parks, average visual range has decreased from 90 miles to 15-25 miles. In the West, visual range has decreased from 140 miles to 35-90 miles.
But, due to continued air pollution, we see less and less of the ground on which we stand, of the sky that dangles the earth. And in turn, there is less context, less information for orienting our complicated, human selves. Those of us here in the West have it better than most, the typical visual range is about 60 – 90 miles, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But that’s only half of what it would be without haze. In most of the rest of the U.S., the typical visual range is only 15 – 30 miles, about one-third of the visual range under natural conditions.
A University of Maryland team of researchers recently compiled data of sky visibility measurements taken from 1973 – 2007 at 3,250 meteorological stations around the world. Increased airborne pollution in the atmosphere blocks solar radiation from the earth’s surface, and has caused significant “global dimming.” Science Daily, 2009. Web. 24 October 2010.
And in this continual drought of light we keep trying to verify where we are, even if it means squinting here and there, or re-creating sky in whatever ways we’re able. One of my favorite photographs of my children was taken years ago on a rainy Portland winter day. They’re toddlers, over-sized sheets of paper are clipped to each of their little easels, empty yogurt cups filled with paint are lined up on the table. They each hold brushes, and are standing in their underwear with huge grins pasted across their faces. The paper remains white. Their bodies, however, are covered with every color of dawn, day, and dusk. They’ve painted each other’s backs, too. I remember Sophie saying, “Look, Mama! We’re painting the sky on our tummies!”
The sky is not maneuverable by statistics; and data of diminishing brightness and color informs of tangible implications of visibility impact, but it cannot explore or implicate the emotional tethers created when one’s head is thrown back and for a second or two, we just look. In those moments, a day is contained with clouds, or color, with one thing, perhaps the only thing, that remains steadily and constantly there.
