I live alone on the steep
slopes of southern Oregon’s Rogue River canyon, which is a place
that can’t decide whether to be California or the Pacific
Northwest. I’m here for a solo writing residency, and what that
means is that the days are mine to use or waste. My only neighbors
are the Bureau of Land Management and the bear who raids my garden,
and my home is a simple cabin tucked into Douglas firs at the edge
of a meadow that was soaking green when I arrived last April and
now has gone brown and brittle. My connections to the rest of the
world are imperfectly reliable: dirt road and party-line radio
phone.
The dirt road takes two hours to drive and is
studded with sharp rocks. Every trip out to Grants Pass, a
sunburned town that sits astride the Rogue upriver from here, is an
exercise in faith; I don’t go out very often.
That leaves
the radio phone, which looks and acts like a walkie-talkie. When a
black icon that looks like a bent arrow pops up on the faintly
orange screen, you know the line’s busy, and you have to wait until
whoever’s talking finishes his business. Even though 15 parties in
the canyon share this one line, you never have to wait long: the
system cuts off calls after 10 minutes.
The 10-minute
limit means that conversations rarely wander into casual chat. I
know this because on a party line you can listen to other people
talk by lifting the phone off its funny cradle. Doing so raises
ethical questions, certainly, but sometimes when you are alone and
you have been alone for a long time, and you have a long period of
aloneness ahead of you, it does not seem like a crime to want to
hear the sound and tempo of a human exchange.
When I
listen in, I can only hear the voice of the person who is not in
the canyon, the Outsider; the Insider’s half of the conversation
sounds like a series of high-pitched beeps. Usually, it goes
something like this:
Hello.
(beep beep beep)
Yeah.
(beep beep beep)
A lot.
(beep beep beep)
Uh huh, okay. Bye.
(beep beep beep)
Occasionally, there is something funny,
or something mysterious, or something that is both at once, like
when a male voice laughed scratchily and said: Whenever I get into
bed, she just farts and rolls over. Other times some person I’ll
never meet says something that brings me to my knees. I’m just
weary of everything, a woman said once, and the way she said it
made me think she was holding her head in her hands.
The
strangers whose voices I hear are listening to me, too, although
according to the rules of the line, they never actually hear me.
They hear my sister dispensing advice about what to do with my
oozing case of poison oak. They hear my brother, who thinks the
party line and its eavesdroppers are fabulously exotic and so
always says brightly, Hello, southern Oregon! They hear my landlord
asking whether I’ve caught a steelhead, my father reporting that
Joe Lieberman lost the Democratic primary, and my mother telling me
how to make my tomatoes grow.
When I walk along the
canyon’s lower slopes, I find old telephone wire hanging from mossy
oaks and ceramic insulators buried in red soil: remnants from days
when lonely people lived all up and down this river, seeking their
fortune in gold. They, too, had no good overland route to the
outside world; they, too, listened in on each other’s precious and
unremarkable lives. They, too, sought connection, however
imperfect.
Sometimes, when it is late and I am sitting in
the light of a buzzing propane lamp, and I have not talked to
anyone in days, I unhitch the phone and I dial someone’s number. I
want to remember that there is a world out there and that I am part
of it. I want to remember that loneliness is only a fact and it
will eventually change.
The conversation passes quickly;
at its end, I can’t remember why I had needed to talk. I turn off
the phone and watch its orange screen fade, and then I douse the
lamp, too. I settle into the sound of crickets; I watch the bats
dip and swing against a backdrop of blinking stars. I taste this
rare gift, this fleeting moment, this whole unvarnished
lonesomeness.
Emma Brown is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). She’s still in rural Oregon but will soon
return to her home in Juneau, Alaska.
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