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“Welcome to Port Authority, New York City. Please watch your belongings as you exit the bus,” the bus driver’s cheery voice announced.

I stepped through the glass doorway of the bus terminal into the sidewalks of Times Square just two weeks after my 19th birthday. It was 12:30 on a Saturday night in late September 1975. It was warm but not stifling hot like it had been in Florida. I didn’t have much of a warning for the bombardment of people, flashing lights, and signs that hit me everywhere I turned. It looked like something right out of a TV show. I was tired from the bus ride but felt a rush of energy as life gushed all around me. Across from the Port Authority on Eighth Avenue below 42nd Street was a chorus line of girls, wearing the shortest skirts and the highest heels I had ever seen, grabbing at men as they walked by. A half a block down I saw a hotel sign hanging on a hinge over the doorway. I slung my backpack on and walked across the street to the hotel. Just as I reached for the doorknob, a girl, not much older than me, with a feather boa draped around her neck, grabbed my upper arm.

“Hey, Cutie, you goin’ in there?” She surprised me. “Yeah,” I said.

She looked puzzled. “You mean you’re going in there and you don’t need a date?”

I was getting irritated. “This is a hotel, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, sure it’s a hotel. But…” She paused. “But most people don’t go in there without a date.” She looked me up and down. My backpack was getting heavy. “You just get here or something?” She nodded her head to the bus station and asked, “From where?”

“You ever been to New York before?” I shook my head no.

“You know anybody here?” I shook my head no.

She smiled at me, not her working-girl smile, but more like the way my sister Lucy smiled at me just before she left me out on the highway in Florida. She pulled me close to her and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Listen, you take care, sweetheart.” She grabbed another man as he passed us by. “Hey, wanna date?” She disappeared into the river of people on the sidewalk.

It was dark inside the door of the hotel. A steep flight of stairs led up to a bulletproof window. The wooden steps creaked and moaned as I climbed to the top. The rail wobbled in my hand. A big guy with a big stomach and faded tattoos on his forearms came up to the window and looked down at me. He seemed surprised when I told him I wanted a room for the night.

I said for the second time in the last five minutes, “This is a hotel, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, wait, hold on a minute.” He left his booth. I could hear him talking to someone. When he came back to the window he said, “20 dollars.” I thought that was kind of expensive since the night before I’d paid $17.99 at a Motel 6 just outside of DC, and it was in much better shape than this place. I pulled out my Traveler’s Checks and started to sign my name.

“You have to watch me sign this check or else it’s no good.”

“Oh shit. We don’t take Traveler’s Checks.”

“Why not?” I asked. “It’s good. You can cash them anywhere. I thought everyone took Traveler’s Checks.”

“Let me see some ID.” I pulled my driver’s license out of my wallet and stuck it under the slot beneath the bulletproof glass. He looked at me and then the picture of me on my license. Then he examined my signature on the check. He had a washed-out tattoo of a heart with a knife going through it on his forearm. Blood dripped off the tip of the knife. He slid my license back to me underneath the thick glass window.

“You from Kansas City, kid? I was there once. On my way to LA. Stopped and got gas. Had some of the best damn barbecue I ever ate there.”

He stuck a clean white towel and a key with a room number scratched into it under the thick glass window, and then buzzed me in through a big beat-up metal door.

“Up one flight and down to the left.” He nodded with his head towards the staircase.

My room was big enough for a bed and an old, rusted, white porcelain sink. The window had bars over it and faced a brick wall about two feet away. I tried to open it but couldn’t because it was sealed shut with nails and layers of paint. My fingers turned black from the dust and soot on the windowsill. As I rinsed them off in the sink a roach shot out from underneath and ran up the wall. I pulled my transistor radio out of my pack and propped it up on the edge of the sink. I found a Top 40 station and stretched out on the bed. The sheets smelled like fresh laundry. Downy fresh. The mattress was lumpy. Every time I moved, the bedsprings groaned and pressed into me. An R&B song came on the radio that I knew from the Miami station. Guys singing 

 in high falsetto voices. I liked that song.

I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk. It was still warm out, the middle of the night, and the streets were full of people. The sky was black but it felt like daylight because of all the storefronts, streetlights, and movie marquees. 42nd Street was lined with porno shops that had pictures of nude people having sex in their front windows. Kids about my age tried to sell me drugs, but I didn’t want any. I walked down 42nd Street from Eighth Avenue to Broadway and looked at Times Square. One thing I liked about New York was that it didn’t look like other American cities. My first disappointment from hitchhiking and traveling around the country was that almost every city looked exactly the same, only the landscape was different. There were McDonald’s, IHOPs, and Denny’s in almost every suburb across America. Once you got through the miles of ranch-style homes, shopping centers, and fast food restaurants to the heart of the city, a small cluster of skyscrapers, there was nothing to do. Downtowns were dead after 6:00 pm. Anyone out on the street after dark was a sitting duck just asking to be harassed by the police. But New York wasn’t like that. It was piled on top of itself instead of spread out. You didn’t need a car to get around. From the minute I arrived I was surrounded by the feeling of 

 everywhere. It was like I had been plopped down in the middle of a giant school of fish and had to swim fast to keep up.

I woke up early in the morning ready to get out of that hotel and go look for the Empire State Building. I threw my backpack over my shoulders and headed down Eighth Avenue to 34th Street. The city didn’t look like the same place in the daylight. It was a brownish-grey, and the streets seemed almost deserted. All the flash and excitement of the night before had disappeared. I stopped and pulled a sweatshirt out of my pack because it had cooled off during the night. No more warm tropical Miami breeze. Fall was in the air.

A tall man with a camera around his neck walked up next to me and said, “You look like you’re either lost or you don’t know where you’re going.”

“I’m looking for the Empire State Building.” He laughed and said, “Look up.”

I looked straight up and realized I was standing at the base of the Empire State Building. It was so gigantic I hadn’t recognized it close-up. The man watched me as I took off my backpack and tilted my head, looking all the way up the sleek, tan building.

“If you think that’s tall, you should see the World Trade Center. It’s twice as tall.”

This was tall enough for me. Besides, the World Trade Center was new. I wanted to see this old building that I’d heard so much about since I was a kid.

“You should go to the top to see the view.” The man pointed to a revolving brass door, so I walked over and gave it a push. It was locked. A sign in the window said tours started at 10:00 am on Sunday. It wasn’t even 9:00 yet.

“You wanna go get some coffee?” I turned and looked at him. He was big with curly dark hair. He held up his camera and snapped a picture of me. “I’m a photographer. How about you?”

“What are you up to? You look like a runaway or something with that ugly-looking pack you’re carrying around.”

“I’m not a runaway. I’m just looking.”

“Oh. Well. Do you want to get some coffee with me or not? You don’t have anything to do until the building opens anyway. Come on.” He put his arm around my shoulders and tugged at me. I shrugged his arm off. He seemed nice enough. I wasn’t getting any weird vibes from him so I gave in and followed him down the street. At 34th and Fifth Avenue he pointed to a McDonald’s. People sat looking out on the street from tables on the second floor, above the entrance. I’d never seen a two-story McDonald’s before. Yellow cabs honked as the guy ran across the street in front of oncoming traffic. We went inside and got two coffees. I ordered some hash browns, too. He took the tray and led me up the stairs to a table by the window. It felt like I was in a foreign country.

“What’s your name?” “Joe. What’s yours?” “Bud.”

We shook hands. The sudden formality made me nervous so I laughed a little.

“I don’t mean to stick my nose in your business, but what exactly are you doing wandering around with that backpack?”

“Like I said, I’m just looking around. I’m on my way back home to Missouri from Miami and thought I’d stop by to see what New York was like.”

Bud stared at me. He lit up a cigarette. I looked down on the street at the people walking by. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I’m serious. Why wouldn’t I be? Haven’t you ever known anyone who’s gone traveling before?” I poured two nondairy creamers into my coffee and watched the white cream swirl around.

“Sure I have, but most of the people I know want to leave New York, not come here.” He exhaled a big cloud of smoke. “You know what? I’m not doing anything today. If you want, I can show you around. I’ll be your tour guide.”

I thought about it for a while. He asked too many questions. I liked looking around by myself, but I had no idea which way to go, really. All I knew was how to get back to the hotel and that was one place I didn’t want to go.

He said he would take me on a tour, but first he needed to go by his apartment to pick up another camera. We rode in a cab over to Ninth Avenue and West 20th Street. His apartment, on the 11th floor, was small. The entryway had framed pictures of him with Bette Midler and Carol Channing and autographed covers of programs from Broadway plays. There was barely enough room in the kitchen to walk around a table that was covered with dirty dishes and The New York Times. The other room, the living room/bedroom, was as small as the kitchen. At McDonald’s he told me he had a one-bedroom apartment, so I asked him where the bedroom was. He said I was standing in it. In the daytime it was a living room. At night the couch pulled out into a bed and it was the bedroom. From the window above the couch, I could see the Empire State Building over the roofs of the Chelsea district.

He dug around in a closet and found the camera he wanted. Then, when he was ready to go, he told me I should leave my pack there. I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

“Because that would mean I’d have to come back here later.” I figured he had ulterior motives and I wasn’t going to set myself up for another awkward situation. Men only wanted one thing.

“Okay, if you feel like carrying that thing around all day, it’s up to you. But you don’t have to.”

We took the subway down to the Staten Island Ferry and rode across for a quarter each. He paid for me and said, “My treat.” I said, “Big spender,” and he ruffled my hair. When the ferry passed the Statue of Liberty I was disappointed. I expected it to be gigantic, the size of the Empire State Building. But it was much smaller. A strong, cold wind blew across the water and into us. The skyline of Manhattan got smaller and smaller as we got closer to Staten Island. We stayed on the ferry and rode back without having to pay again. Bud knew lots of little tricks like that about the city.

After we rode on the ferry, Bud took me to Greenwich Village. We walked down Christopher Street and he explained to me the different types of homosexuals who hung out in that neighborhood. He said they preferred to be called “Gays.” “I don’t know why they chose that one,” he muttered. “There’s nothing ‘Gay’ about it, really.” This was 1975 and the Gay Liberation period was in full swing, so a lot of people were coming out of the closet and dressing flamboyantly. I saw a guy dressed as a cowboy in red leather chaps, a blue vest, and a white cowboy hat. Someone else was dressed in army fatigues, like he was a soldier. Bud pointed out a couple of men dressed head-to-toe in black leather and told me they were into “S and M.” I didn’t know what that was. He said they liked to beat each other up. He told me most guys weren’t as extreme as the ones we saw. There were lots of regular-looking guys who dressed low-key, like in blue jeans and bomber jackets. It seemed like all of them had mustaches and short hair.

Bud knew a lot of people. When he walked me through the Village, he introduced me to his friends. They were open and seemed genuinely glad to meet me. They didn’t act like it was bizarre or “wrong” for me to be traveling around by myself. No one asked me why I wasn’t in school, which was the first question I got from most of my hitchhiking rides. A few of them gave Bud a knowing wink. People were nice to me in New York. Even though I’d just arrived there, I didn’t feel weird like I did back home in Missouri. No one stared at me like on the bus in Baltimore. This city felt comfortable. Bud asked me if I wanted to go into a Gay bar. That made me uneasy. I didn’t really. He said it would be good for me to see what one was like and that it was no big deal. He walked me to one of his favorite bars called the Ninth Circle on a little side street. We stood at the bottom of the stone stairs that led up to the bar. I didn’t want to go in. I was afraid if I went in I’d turn queer and I didn’t want to be a big fag with everyone laughing at me. I didn’t want to be a lecherous old queen with a Southern drawl like that guy in Jacksonville Beach.

Bud laughed but then got serious when I told him this. He turned, facing me, putting his hands on my shoulders, and said, “Joe, what about all the guys I’ve just shown you walking around the Village? Do they look like big fags?”

He argued, “But not all of them. Right?”

I had to admit that a lot of the Gays he showed me looked fairly normal.

The beer calmed me and helped me get over my nervousness about being in a Gay bar for the first time. Now that I was inside I didn’t feel so threatened.

Inside the bar “Fly, Robin, Fly” by the Silver Convention played from the jukebox. That was another one I knew from the radio. The bar itself was long and narrow. The walls were covered with a light wood paneling. Past the bar was the jukebox and then a bench with little café tables that ran around the perimeter of the bar. There was space to stand out in the middle. Through the back door was a garden patio with people eating hamburgers at tables covered with giant umbrellas. Heads turned and guys looked us up and down as Bud and I stood in the doorway. Downstairs was a pool table. Bud said that’s where the hustlers hung out. I went down and looked around. Some guys were shooting pool and hanging out. There was nothing dangerous or sinister about them like the word “hustler” insinuated. They reminded me of my friends back in Missouri. Back upstairs, two men sat at the bar in a locked embrace, kissing. They were so engrossed they looked like they were going to tip off their stools at any moment. I tried not to stare but couldn’t help it, so I hid my face in the jukebox and read the entire list of selections. I found my song, “Sweet Sticky Thing,” and noted that it was by the Ohio Players. When I got back to Missouri I wanted to buy a copy of that record. The song that played the most was a disco tune called “Do It Any Way You Wanna.” It seemed like every other person who went up to the jukebox played it. There were no words except the title repeated over and over. The rhythm and beat of the song sank into me. I liked it. I liked the song and I liked hearing it at that bar. Bud brought me a beer in a big glass. The beer calmed me and helped me get over my nervousness about being in a Gay bar for the first time. Now that I was inside I didn’t feel so threatened. Like the song said, people were doing it whatever way they felt like. I felt a load lift off of my shoulders. Light, relieved. I started to relax.

Bud introduced me to an older guy who was dancing to the jukebox with a knit neck scarf like he was a burlesque dancer. He had a puffy face, droopy eyes, and a sweet mischievous smile. Bud told me that the guy was in some of Andy’s movies.

Bud stopped and looked at me surprised. “You really are a hick, aren’t you?”

I said, “What do you mean?” It pissed me off that all of a sudden Bud was acting superior to me. I didn’t like being called a hick. I was raised in the suburbs, not the country.

He said, “Andy. Andy Warhol. Do you know who that is?”

I got defensive. “Of course I know who that is.” Bud glanced at me sideways like he wasn’t convinced. Thinking of Andy Warhol made me think about one of my favorite meals, a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup made with milk. I wanted to have that as soon as I got home.

The man danced up to us and said in a stoned nelly voice, “Ohhhh! My Quaalude is kicking in…” He wiggled around to the music and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. I told Bud that was exactly what I did not want to turn into. Bud said I had a long way to go. There were a couple of girls sitting at a table in the corner. That was another thing. I liked girls and didn’t want to quit hanging out with them. Bud said just because he didn’t want to sleep with a woman didn’t mean that he didn’t like women. He just preferred having sex with men. That was the first that Bud referred to himself as being Gay. I tried to let that comment slip by but kept it in the back of my mind. I didn’t want him trying anything funny with me. The girls smiled at me and I went over and started talking to them. When I got close I realized that one of them was a boy with long hair and makeup. I was surprised for a little bit, but actually liked it. I thought he was brave. They seemed okay. I said hello and told them I was from Kansas City and had been out hitchhiking. They said they were from Queens, and Manhattan was as far as they’d been away from home. The guy turned to the girl and said, “Oh! You’re from Queens? I’m from normal parents!” Then they cracked up laughing. I told them they should go to Kansas City sometime, that it would do them good to get away. They asked me who I was with and I pointed out Bud to them.

The boy said, “Ooooo, better watch out. I think he likes you ‘in that way.’”

The girl winked at me. “I think your friend’s cute. I wouldn’t mind liking him in that way.”

“Are you two boyfriend and girlfriend?” I asked. They laughed even harder.

She said, “No, honey! Excuse me… What are you thinking? I’m his fag hag, not his girlfriend.”

I’d never heard the term “fag hag” before and was shocked. Why would anyone call themselves something like that? A hag? She didn’t look like a hag to me. I was slightly appalled, but figured it must have been okay because no one was calling her a hag. She was the one who said it. People told me weird stuff all the time when I was traveling. I filed this term away in that category and pretended like I didn’t hear her.

Bud and I went back to his apartment. He made spaghetti for dinner and then pulled out the couch in the living room, turning it into the bedroom. He seduced me while we watched 

 on TV. I didn’t move. I just lay as still as possible and let him give me a blow job.

I stayed there for a couple of days. The second night I loosened up. We had sex and I let him fuck me. I was on my stomach. It was kind of boring. His body was about the same size as my dad’s. Kind of big and soft, but not hairy, and his stomach wasn’t as fat as Dad’s. I enjoyed sleeping next to him with his arm and leg draped over me much more than I did having sex with him.

I wandered around the city by myself in the daytime and then met up with Bud in the evening. I ate at a Chinese-Cuban restaurant on Eighth Avenue. I went there because after Miami, the Cuban was something familiar to me. But even there I had never been to a Chinese-Cuban place where the Chinese waiters and cooks spoke Spanish to each other. That was a bizarre mix to me. English was the Chinese guys’ third language. The rhythm of the city was starting to make sense to me. No matter how out of place I felt in Missouri, I felt completely normal in New York. ♦

Joe Westmoreland is the author of the novel 

, originally published in 2001 and excerpted below. He lives with his partner, the artist Charles Atlas, in New York City.

ser-martin

First Love

Is a River Alive?

The Sexiest Thing About Celibacy

The week my daughter was born, I had my first manic episode. She was born in the morning—I’d stayed up all night laboring—and for three days afterward, I did not sleep. It’s not as though I didn’t try; when I lay down it felt as though my eyelids were spring-loaded. In the small hours when my daughter slept, I rearranged furniture, scrubbed at the bathtub grout with a toothbrush, and attempted to remove oily milk stains from onesies the baby would promptly outgrow. The doula chalked all this up to adrenaline, but to me it felt like there was something urgent I was forgetting, and I wandered the apartment at night, searching for whatever it was. I was lucid enough to realize that soon I would have to be hospitalized and sedated. Eventually I noticed that I was trapped in a pattern of reliving each minute detail of the birth. My mind was desperately running the trail of small memories, back and forth, back and forth, to forge a beaten path that I would be able to find again later. And then suddenly, the answer came: I needed to write. The thing I was forgetting—or afraid of forgetting—was my experience of childbirth. Those memories were precious, and if I continued my new life as a mother without pausing to write them down, they were liable to slip away.

That third night, I wrote for hours and hours, filling page after page. (Only later did I learn there was a word for this: hypergraphia, a pathological impulse to write.) Around 4 am, my husband found me sitting on the floor of the baby’s room, laptop glowing in the pitch dark, and I reassured him in the language of the delusional, the self-aggrandizing, and the conspiracy-minded that I had found it, the solution, and everything would be fine if he would just leave me to my work. I was right, though; when I was finished, I slept.

. The long-awaited and -feared threat to my creative life had finally arrived, and my indomitable urge to create was forced to assert itself. This part of me wished to prove that it was willing to sacrifice my safety, my sanity, even risk my survival. And the contemporary discourse around motherhood, particularly within writing circles, had conditioned me to believe all this might be necessary. Like many young female writers, I had ingested a lot of opinions, from panels and editorials, about whether motherhood could be compatible with a writing career. I’d read Rachel Cusk’s 

 and so much Ferrante—memoirs and fiction that made it seem impossible to both write and mother, even as they were themselves evidence of this possibility. I had for years repeated the mantra “book before baby.” But eventually, time went by, and the book did not sell, and I was getting older. I wondered if rejecting the good thing I 

 have the power to conjure was only self-punishment for my powerlessness to wangle that other good thing I wanted (but might never get).

So I had the baby, and a few years later I had another, even as I lived in terror that they might prove the adorable Trojan horse by which failure and unhappiness and doom would be ushered into my life. But now that I’ve crossed the divide, I feel that, for as necessary as the despairing maternal accounts are, lately there may have been an overemphasis on what a writer loses to motherhood, and little discussion at all of what might be gained.

I am far from alone in my anxiety. We’ve come of age in an era that has seen the explosion of a veritable cottage industry of harrowing tales of maternal unraveling. Not so long ago, mother-protagonists were—with some brilliant exceptions—rare. Trust me, I exercise great discipline in not dedicating the rest of this essay to Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, and Toni Morrison. But there is still something revolutionary in the unsilencing represented by more recent accounts of motherhood, which have tended to foreground deep ambivalence, rage, and often regret. It’s also true that popular portrayals of motherhood remain frustratingly white, cis, and wealthy, limiting our access to varying narratives. Though bygone conventional wisdom held that maternal rage was not interesting or “universal” enough, readers in fact have an enormous appetite for more incisive portrayals of this not-at-all marginal experience, the truths of which were for so long politely contained behind mythic saints and monsters.

notes that the mother figure is antithetical to the classic hero’s journey—she is what the young son must leave behind in pursuit of adventure. And while the novel did feature heroines early on, it was from its inception a bourgeois form intended to morally instruct young female readers. In this tradition, Samuel Richardson’s 

Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady 

(1748) made their marks; the heroines’ stories often resolved either in sexual ruin or marriage. What came after marriage remained obscured, the mother denied subjectivity. Psychoanalysis, in its turn, embedded the perception of the mother as little more than an accessory to her child’s narrative arc. “The Freudian view… was that mothering was the end of growth and achievement for a woman,” Phillips writes. “The psychoanalytic insistence on the Oedipal drama as the origin of both creativity and the self relegates the mother not only to a supportive role but to a predetermined one.”

So I had the baby, and a few years later I had another, even as I lived in terror that they might prove the adorable Trojan horse by which failure and unhappiness and doom would be ushered into my life. 

I can’t help but feel that this conceptualization of mothers was on full display in the first wave of the memoir boom of the aughts, which brought us runaway hits from the perspective of the grown daughter or son whose mother had become monstrous through her failure at this supportive role—Augusten Burroughs’s 

 is representative. Readers gobbled up the private, shameful details of the mother’s failure, eager to offer up for evaluation what Bracha Ettinger called the “ready-made mother-monster,” whose villainy could neatly account for the writer’s neurosis and perhaps also stand in as a proxy scapegoat for the reader’s own dysfunction. More contemporary memoirs of maternal experience can seem almost like a defiant response.

Phillips suggests, in her biographies of writers and artists who are mothers, that Diane di Prima thrived under the discipline that motherhood imposed upon her life, and that Doris Lessing’s strong perspective on power and politics would never have taken shape had she not been forced to observe from the periphery. In telling her subjects’ stories, Phillips reclaims the hero’s journey for them. “Their subjectivity was in their losing and finding of themselves, first in adolescence, then in maternity, then in maturity, confronting their ‘annihilation’ and regaining their power,” she writes. “It’s the story of a central figure who goes on a journey of self-discovery… Someone who descends into the underworld and comes back.” Becoming a mother is one of the most profound transformations that occur in an average life, upending one’s identity and relationship to self and world not just once but, as Phillips points out, again and again. And so it is strange and disappointing that maternity is more often the terminus of narrative than its beginning. Even feminist texts have a way of wrapping up the grand journey of self-discovery with the revelation of pregnancy or childbirth, so that the mother-to-be can exit the stage gracefully, off to occupy the irrelevant territory where she will live out her days.

Whether the mother in question is a subject or the artist herself, we too often fail to see her as a full, dynamic character. This cultural oversight owes something not only to Victorian values and Freudianism but also to second-wave feminism, which often rejected mothers for their perceived complicity in female oppression. The mother was, as Andrea Liss writes in 

, “a silent outcast for many feminists who strategically needed to distance themselves from all that was culturally coded as passive, weak, and irrational.” Liss is referring to visual artists of the late twentieth century when she writes that, in order to be successful, they often felt pressure to “avoid any imagery that would code their art, especially work that dealt with anything female—motherhood being the most debased—as ‘sentimental.’” But it would have applied as easily to writers of literary fiction and nonfiction. Recently I met some elders at an event, all of whom attested that for years they had strained, among art and literary circles, to keep their maternity a secret; this felt necessary if they wanted to be seen as “serious.”

Thankfully, the tide has turned dramatically on this point. The novels of Ferrante, Cusk, and others, as well as the work of queer writers such as Maggie Nelson, Constance Debré, Cherríe Moraga, Carole Maso, and A.K. Summers are dedicated to complicating motherhood, snatching it back from patronizing assumptions of docility, humility, conformity, inevitability.

I have often wondered if our historic squeamishness about the dark side of motherhood might owe in part to our collective determination to uphold the fantasy that we ourselves, the readers, were loved without any trace of hatred or resentment. By now the cat is out of the bag. Lately any time motherhood appears as a subject, it is to provide a stark counterpoint to the pretty picture of contented maternity, revealing instead a gothic inner landscape of anger and desperation. It’s often given the horror treatment, or at least portrayed as a descent into near-madness, in the manner of Rachel Yoder’s 

, and the films “Tully” and “Baby Ruby.” The message—

no longer comes from non-mothers in the form of ideological appeals to female liberation, but from mother-writer-ghouls in the form of dispatches from Hell.

Children undoubtedly make time, money, and deep focus scarcer, particularly for women, but assuming—big assumption, I know—that a writer isn’t too mired in caretaking to continue writing, couldn’t her motherhood also occasion new experiences, perspectives, and depths of feeling that might be conscripted as fresh, powerful material? Might there be such a thing as a “maternal gaze”? To be sure, the term is often used in child psychology, particularly when studying the impacts of a mother’s visual attention and responsiveness on the child’s development. But I am here referring to a way of seeing that is particular, or at least much more accessible, to those who have lived as a mother-figure (of any gender). Indulge me. If the male gaze sees desired objects, and the female gaze sees autonomous beings with desires of their own, the maternal gaze sees something further: those desires locked in a merciless struggle with responsibility to others. 

Whenever critics and theorists are thinking about motherhood, two themes consistently emerge. The first is ambivalence. “It is not a matter of ‘balancing motherhood and work,’” writes Liss. “It is the feminist mother’s admission that ambiguity is often the norm, an ambiguity that constantly tears and heals, between the mother self and her professional self, between the mother self and her sexual self, between the mother self and her own child self.” The mother is a figure caught between love and hatred, self and other, present and future, and often a figure very nearly rent in two by inner conflict. The desire to flee my home for several recuperative weeks alone in a cabin and the simultaneous, irreconcilable desire to wake the children I have finally managed to put to sleep, so that I can be with them a little longer—this, to me, is the essence of motherhood. For many women writers, the ability or requirement to inhabit this both/and mindset begins early, whether or not they ultimately choose to have children. If it did not, we wouldn’t spend so much time agonizing over the decision. From the time I was small, I always knew there was no answer that didn’t involve the terrible grief of thwarted desire. That fraught curiosity is reflected brilliantly in Sheila Heti’s 

a novel composed of questions that are never satisfyingly resolved.

Even leaving aside what they want for themselves, mothers engage in maddening calculations in the attempt to do what’s right for their children. Sara Ruddick notes in 

 that a child’s preservation, growth, and acceptability are “often in tension.” “If a child wants to walk to the store alone,” she writes, “do you worry about her safety or applaud her developing capacity to take care of herself?” When a mother-character is written with any intelligence whatsoever, these competing demands weigh heavily on her psyche. Meanwhile, literally everyone has opinions on how she makes these decisions, and their opinions will contribute to her self-doubt. The practice of motherhood is always aberrant in contrast with the prescribed standards of ideal motherhood, which are contradictory and impossible, and as a result, mothers are relentlessly exposed to the “gaze”—the scrutiny—of others, which makes it all the more outrageous that for so long their own perspectives were absent.

The second theme is sometimes called “intersubjectivity,” or what Julia Kristeva describes in her writing on feminine genius as “a self which cannot be separated from its various attachments to others.” Motherhood is, as Kristeva puts it, a “catastrophe of identity.” A mother often intuits her children’s inner experience and feels their joy and pain as her own, and she carries the burden of her own radical capacity for harm. A mother revisits childhood at close range, remembering her own private dramas vividly but able to make sense, this time, of what she is witnessing, to see the long shadows already being cast. A simple but ingenious application of “intersubjectivity” appears in Virginia Woolf’s 

. Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts are constantly revealing her caretaking impulses, by anticipating her son’s sensitivity, her husband’s bruised ego, her guest’s hurt feelings; Mr. Ramsay thinks primarily of his career. That distinctive, wandering point-of-view is itself reflective of the blurred lines of maternal consciousness. It has taken me a decade or so of intellectual growth, plus becoming a mother, to fully appreciate Woolf’s project—even while she was famously influenced by Freud’s ideas, she recognized, and remedied, his failure to acknowledge the mother as a subject.

Personally, I find it useful to understand the mother-character as a figure implicated not only in a web of complex intimate relations, but also, more broadly, in larger social and political communities. Certainly there are mothers who turn away from the outside world out of fear or a determination to hoard advantages for their own clan, but it’s hard to imagine a mother who, hearing of some disaster on the other side of the world, doesn’t immediately think of her own children. So to my previous definition, I’d add that a “maternal gaze” would necessarily involve a shift in the perception of world events and systems. Ours is a culture that imagines that all violence, neurosis, and antisocial behavior begin at home. “Motherhood is, in Western discourse, the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts, of what it means to be fully human,” writes Jacqueline Rose in 

. “It is the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which it becomes the task—unrealisable, of course—of mothers to repair.” The view on society, from this vantage, would seem to be rather important. No one feels the emergency of late-stage capitalism more acutely than struggling mothers, especially those who are poor, of color, undocumented, disabled, or queer. For Rose, adequate narratives don’t leave motherhood “stranded on the far shore of history,” but see it as absolutely central.

In keeping with the maternal capacity to hold two opposing truths, I want to recognize 

 the creative potential inherent to writing through motherhood. The requirement of motherhood that is often blamed for sabotaging the mother’s creative career is what has come to be known as the “mental load.” The quantity of mundane junk that fills the mind—appointments needing to be scheduled, snacks needing to be packed, special outfits required, worries about development or school performance—that might seem at odds with the kind of mental promiscuity required for art-making. Undoubtedly this can be true. But it’s also possible that this kind of attention to detail trains the mind toward a heroic capacity for observation, which does not go unappreciated when it’s time to do the work of character development and scene building.

Since having children, I’ve noticed a differing quality of attention in myself. Even more than before, when I step off a subway car, I can give an inventory of all the people on it—their outfits, their tattoos, their wounds, their moods, their peculiar cargo, their books, their conversations. This one has a large dog at home; that one is battling a heroin addiction. “I felt suddenly older,” writes Rivka Galchen in 

, “even as the puma [baby] also, in her effect on me, made me more like a very young human in one particular way, which was that all the banal (or not) objects and experiences around me were reenchanted. The world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning. Which is to say that the puma made me again more like a writer (or at least a certain kind of writer) precisely as she was making me into someone who was, enduringly, not writing.”

Certainly, I feel as though the maternal, as a theme or subject, is in its infancy—we have hardly scratched the surface of what there is to say about it. Vital as they have been, I’m eager to see what will succeed this recent crop of overwhelmingly bleak portrayals of motherhood. Joy is harder to capture. Maggie Nelson’s 

 was one example of a more textured, complex, unconventional, and even expansive account that might give a hint of what’s to come, while Miranda July’s 

a story that claims as its beginning not even childbirth but 

 (imagine!) was the hit of the year because eroticism, self-discovery, and transformation are fixtures of the maternal adventure, too, if rarely acknowledged. But I’m even more interested in the innovations of style and form that might emerge as a response to the challenge of writing the maternal. 

I think of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag” theory of fiction, which imagined a literature made not in the image of the spear, but in the image of the satchel—that other, more feminine technology, which might gather all manner of worldly items to bring home for observation. More academic writers would also include here an analysis of Hélène Cixous and a position on 

, the notion that women do or might or even ought to claim their “otherness” through a writing style that better captures their point of view, which differs substantially and challenges the “phallocentric” tradition, perhaps by becoming more fluid, non-linear, diffusive, circular, plural, simultaneous, or sensory. Fifty years of scholarship are beyond the scope of this essay; I merely wonder if writers who are mothers might imagine their work as a subcategory of 

, which can reflect the particularities of their experience through their use of language.

Already, there are writers who are imagining this literature into being. In the contemporary landscape, I think of Rivka Galchen, Ayşegül Savaş, Kate Zambreno, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Offill, and Valeria Luiselli. These writers have used clever style innovations, such as copious paragraph and section breaks, non-sequiturs, and tone that verges on the aphoristic to mimic the interruptions and disjointedness of those early years with small children. It often feels as though the writers (or their protagonists) are carving out moments of insight, surfacing briefly from domestic demands to reach for something higher, and then being subsumed again by the diurnal. Some, too, have borrowed from the odd diction of childhood, using language to productively defamiliarize all that which adults take for granted. But I want even more. 

How, I wonder, can language be recruited to the task of rendering ambivalence and intersubjectivity? In how many different ways can a sentence contain two contradictory truths at once? How can form resist the cult of self and accommodate a shared consciousness? How could pacing be made to convey the strange passage of time when in the company of an infant?

Of course, the divisions and inner conflicts are real and inevitable; I feel them even now, as I write this essay and attempt to box out my anxiety about finding childcare for the summer. But I also ask myself who is served by the notion that these things must always be divided. I’ve found surprising pride and confidence in my ability to shift between a multiplicity of identities, and under the pressure of motherhood, I’ve achieved a greater sense of clarity than ever before about what my highest needs are, as an artist and as a person. But whenever possible, I’ve also learned to appreciate the places where the edges bleed into each other—the abundant ways that mothering has made me a better friend, the effect of a lifetime of reading on my perception of childhood and memory, the clear impact on my prose of the playfulness that now fills my days. 

Perhaps it’s worth returning for a moment to the significance of the “maternal gaze” in child psychology. That shared look from mother to child and back again is believed to instruct how the infant interprets emotions, develops language and social skills, and, in short, understands the world around them. But  when my son reaches up to map my face with his tiny hands, I wonder about the reciprocal force of that gaze. I am more determined to write than ever, because the stakes are higher; I write because I have to, but now, in some way I can’t explain, I write for my children, too. To nurture their sense of what’s possible, yes, but also to capture what they are teaching me to see. To signpost the beaten path I began down on those first strange, sleepless nights. ♦

Kate Shannon Jenkins is an essayist and fiction writer. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Believer, the Atlantic, the Drift, the Nation, Gawker, and other publications.

gen-spade-wound

Toward a Maternal Gaze

5 Takeaways: Death

Why do we die, and what happens to our biologies when we do? PW’s Founding Director of Sciences Janna Levin hosted Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan to find out. He’s the author of 

Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality

, and won the Nobel with his co-laureates for determining the atomic structure of the ribosome, a molecular machine that synthesizes proteins in all living cells. Together, Ramakrishnan and Levin discuss the biological mechanisms that initiate the process of dying and the ethical questions of immortality. ♦

Why do we die, and what happens to our biologies when we do? PW’s Founding Director of Sciences Janna Levin hosted Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan to find out. He’s the author of Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality, and won the Nobel with his co-laureates for determining the atomic structure of the ribosome, a molecular machine that synthesizes proteins in all living cells. 

Why We Die with Venki Ramakrishnan

Change the frequency. Subscribe to Broadcast.

It was back in 1972 when I first announced to my family and friends that I was going to write the Greatest Cook Book Ever. I told them that when it was done, Julia Childs, Amy Vanderbilt, Graham Kerr, Betty Crocker, James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Colonel Sanders, and Fannie Farmer, just to name a few, would all fade in the minds of culinary persons throughout the world. Swamp Dogg would become the new champion of the kitchen. Heralded not only by the creditable but the sleazy as well.

The name of my book, I told anyone who'd listen, would be... no that's been done... maybe... good, but... 

... Bullshit, I need something great like the 

... only... someone beat me to those (keep on thinking)...

In 1980, I still didn't have a title. But I decided the book must have a theme... French cooking (who are you kidding?)... Italian! (your sense of humor knows no bounds)... Chinese! (please, spare me)... Korean (you've mastered one dish and that's still too greasy)... German (no!) British (no!) Spanish (hell no!)... Do your own thing Swamp Dogg style (Yes! Yes! Yes!) 

What dishes would be included? My favorites? My most excellent? The ones my friends salivate over? Or... all of the above? The latter is the key.

... Great!!... now explain it, tie it in and make it work. Well, back to the drawing board.

Several more months (years?) went by and I'm still cooking, discarding dishes, creating dishes and dissipating flour and sugar on a scale comparable only to General Mills and C&H. But as fate would have it, I did it!! My culinary genius came to the fore and I completed this masterpiece.

After that, it sat around for a while. But then my friends made a movie about me, called 

, and these people at Pioneer Works said they'd put out my cookbook.

And now it's here. With this book as your aid you can impress, dazzle, spellbind, fascinate, and mesmerize your friends and family.

I'm strongly recommending a $399.95 price to my publisher... and that's for paperback. Whatever they sell it for, I know it will rank with the Magna Carta, 

This is the book that Hemingway wanted to write, Agatha Christie couldn't, Irving Wallace needed help with, and Alex Haley didn't have enough "soul" for... I did it infallibly. Not only does it make for good cooking but good reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic (sorry, I got carried away).

Doo Wop Squash

We had squash on our plates at least once a week when I was growing up around my Aunt Kini. She would rent rooms in our house for musicians that would come into Portsmouth, during the doo-wop era. We only had two hotels in town. But they were white; niggers couldn't go in. So people stayed with Kini.

I remember one time, Fats Domino and a bunch of other people came through after a law passed saying blacks could stay in the same hotels as whites, on the same floors and stuff. Fats stayed at The Americana Hotel in Portsmouth, as it was called at that time. But the hotel's owners weren't ready for all this. Fats and everyone jumped in the pool with their head rags on and everything. "Fuck y'all," they said. "Y'all not going to swim with our water." They drained the pool while they were in it. Staying at the Americana wasn't like staying at Aunt Kini's.

You can eat a bowl of squash and not have anything else. Because you always put something in it like a sausage, and you cut up some sausage, a little ham. You need a little pork in it. Beef ain't going to do it. But squash, it's delicious—just like Kini made it. 

– 5 medium-size squashes about 1 ½ pounds total
– 4 tablespoons bacon fat
– 1 onion
– ½ tablespoon pepper
– ¼ teaspoon salt
– 3 italian hot sausages
– ⅔ cup water

– Wash squash good with a vegetable brush. Heat bacon fat in fry pan, cut squash into ¼ inch pieces. Dice onion. Add squash and onion to bacon fat, cover, and cook over a medium flame. Cook for 10 minutes. Add salt and pepper. Stir and cook 10 minutes stirring frequently. Add Italian hots and continue to cook for 15 minutes. Cut each sausage into sections of four and continue to cook for 20 minutes more. Add ⅓ cup of water and cook another 10 minutes.

Temptations Cornbread

Like millions of others, I loved The Temptations and I dedicate this recipe to them because they summarized my cornbread in their songs when they sang "It's Growing"... which was really about what happens to one's appetite after one slice... just like "Get Ready" is your attitude when you're cognizant of what's in the oven... and "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" is how you feel once you've devoured your slice or slices... and "(I Know) I'm Losing You" names your sentiment when the last existing morsel is being masticated. Of course, "Cloud Nine" is the place everyone feels they've reached as they retire from my dining table.

– 1 cup soft butter
– ⅓ cup sugar
– 1 cup flour
– 1 tbsp. baking powder
– 1 cup yellow cornmeal
– 3 eggs (beaten slightly)
– 1 ¼ cups milk (room temperature)
– ¼ cup Monterey Jack cheese diced
– 12 oz. can whole kernel corn

– Grease skillet or pan and place in oven while preparing the ingredients. Place butter in a bowl and allow to soften at room temperature for 1 hour. Cream butter and add sugar and cream until semi-smooth. Combine flour, baking powder, and cornmeal. Add to butter mixture and mix well. Add eggs and milk, beat until well blended. Add cheese and corn, beat 1 minute more. Pour into a 9-by-13-inch pan or skillet. Bake 25 minutes.

(NOTE: Bread will appear bubbly because of the Monterey Jack cheese. Nevertheless it will be done.)

Libby's Grated Sweet Potato Pudding

My Aunt Libby was more like a parent. She couldn’t have children so she bestowed all of that love on me, and as I look back to my childhood, I needed it.

1971 found me very successful and I went home to see my parents driving a new Rolls Royce accompanied by my bodyguards who were driving my two new Lincoln Continentals. Yes, I was showing off and I needed bodyguards about as much as a bull needed tits... I digress. After several days of visiting, we prepared to go back to New York. As I was walking out the door, Libby walked up to me, gave me a big hug and kiss, then slipped a twenty-dollar bill into my hand with a “take it baby, anything can happen out there.” That was love. She had seen a million motherfuckers come through town acting like Donald Trump worked for them and didn’t have funds to get through the Midtown tunnel. I took it and sent it back in presents quadrupled.

– 2 large uncooked sweet potatoes
– 1 ½ cups sugar (more if the season has not produced a good crop of sweet potatoes)
– 1 tbsp. vanilla
– 2 cans of evaporated milk
– 3 eggs beaten
– 2 tbsp. all-purpose flour
– 2 sticks of butter

– Peel and finely grate the raw sweet potatoes. Melt butter and add to potatoes. Add beaten eggs, vanilla, milk, sugar, and flour to potato mixture. Stir until well blended. Bake in a large baking dish for 55 minutes.

Born Jerry Williams Jr., in Portsmouth, Virginia, Swamp Dogg is an American country soul and R&B singer, musician, songwriter, and record producer. The following is drawn from 

, available this week from Pioneer Works Press.

Swamp Dogg: If You Can Kill It I Can Cook It

Three hemlocks stand close in the small grove. They have grown up together, about 20 feet apart, their branches touching in places, their life histories intertwined. They have been through the same storms, felt the same winds, the same heat, and the same winters. They have shared creatures. Squirrels, chipmunks, warblers, flycatchers, thrushes, spiders, and dozens of other animals have moved between them. Deer, skunk, turkey, porcupine, bobcat, fisher, hare, bear, and perhaps a moose or few have moved beneath them. Hemlocks are among the longest-lived trees on the East Coast and in the right conditions—in cool damp, absent certain pests—these conifers can live at least 500 years and reach over 100 feet.

These three are about 70 years old and 80 feet tall. Even young hemlocks have gravitas. They are stunning dark trees, their bark deeply creviced and thick. Some hemlocks have bottom branches that droop toward the ground at the tips, creating around the trunk a circular open-air room with a low roof. These three have no lower branches that are easy to grab hold of. Their green-needled limbs start 15 feet up.

15 feet can be 15 feet too high when you are learning to climb trees, as I set out to do one May weekend at Camp Hi-Rock in Mount Washington, Massachusetts. Two dozen women and I had come to participate in the Women's Tree Climbing Workshop, an organization founded by identical twin sister arborists Bear LeVangie and Melissa LeVangie Ingersoll. I was there to be in trees and to better understand them. Trees and forests are facing existential threats because of climate change, but it can be a struggle to grasp the extent of the danger or to make sense of the complex and deadly interactions playing out between heat, drought, fire, water, disease, and pests. I hoped that being in trees would allow me to better see them through the eyes of people, like the LeVangies, who care for trees and who perceive so much more about trees and forests than many of us do. Forests are always shifting; they change form and location, they are in constant motion. At Camp Hi-Rock, I climbed a hemlock descended from trees that made their way here after glaciers started to recede some 20,000 years ago. Eastern hemlock, 

, likely traveled up from various sites in what is now Georgia or North Carolina and started settling in New England about 10,000 years ago. Pollen from lake sediments show that white pine had by then replaced the spruce and jack pine that had become abundant in the area soon after the ice left. Hemlock arrived as the climate kept warming and rainfall increased as ice melted, refilling ocean basins. Beech, birch, and oak arrived too. By roughly 8,000 years ago, the forests of the region had many of the tree species common today.

Hemlock, slow-growing and shade-loving, gave rise to forests that were dark and cool, that held onto the moisture key to their survival. Hemlock forests lined creeks, streams, and rivers, keeping temperatures low and holding soil in place with their roots. In their shade, salamanders, frogs, and brook trout flourished. In their branches, ants, arboreal spiders, and dozens of birds found homes. The hemlock grew in clusters among other trees and in vast uninterrupted stands.

The hemlocks’ journey north is one of many arboreal migration stories that have helped scientists understand the climate and ecology of the postglacial period we live in. Hemlock have also helped unlock a fine-grained weather and climate record that tells us what trees have been though in the last several thousand years, what they have adapted to and survived, and how perilous and divergent their current experience is proving to be.

In the early 1970s, Edward Cook, now a researcher at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, enlisted in the Army and was stationed at West Point, New York. He spent his free time driving around looking for rock-climbing sites and old trees. He had finished college at the University of Arizona, where he had been captivated by dendrochronology—the science of reconstructing past climate by examining tree rings—and now everywhere he went, he looked closely at trees. In the Shawangunks, which form a northern ridge of the Appalachian Mountains, he saw some ancient-looking gnarled pitch pines. From a dendrochronologist’s perspective, the older the tree, the better.

When the cambium comes to life each spring, it needs to get photosynthesis going fast. To do that, the leaves need a lot of water, which is elemental to breaking down carbon dioxide to make sugars. To get water quickly from roots to canopy, the cambium initially creates big xylem cells that stack vertically, forming long pipes running up the tree. These gallon-bucket cells form the early wood. As the growing season wanes, the tree starts to pack things up after the picnic and produces compact, thick-walled xylem cells that make up the late wood. The next spring, the process begins again, and the cambium comes to life between last year's late wood and the bark. The old dead or dying weed becomes the internal foundation on which the new live wood lies.

Cook wasn't sure how many rings—each one marking a year of early wood and late wood—he would see in the pitch pines. He used an increment borer to take his first samples. These devices only pierce a tiny bit of cambium, allowing dendrochronologists to see a tree's growth without causing it significant harm. They are elegant tools; two metal tubes, one nested inside the other. The tubes are assembled into a T, with the outer tube serving as a perpendicular handle. The extremely sharp end of the smaller tube is cranked until it reaches the heartwood or pith, the innermost and oldest part of the tree. Once the dendrochronologist has reached the heartwood, they often make a half reverse twist, which breaks adhesion between the metal tube and surrounding wood. Then they carefully pull out a tray that runs inside the boring tube, on which lies a delicate dowel-like core.

In a lab, the core is sanded and burnished to bring out the details of the bands of dark and light that to the expert eye can tell of rain or drought or fire, or radioactive fallout. Although the annual cycle of early wood, late wood, and dormancy is generally similar in temperate trees, every species has its own fingerprint: a maple and a spruce growing a few feet apart may tell the same story in different colors and textures. Pitch pines, like other conifers, have regular xylem cells, called tracheids. As Valerie Trouet writes in 

Tree Story: A History of the World Written in Rings

, "In conifers, individual wood cells queue up in straight lines like Roman soldiers."

From the tidy light-dark bands of the Shawangunk pitch pines, Cook could see that they were what is called sensitive. That is, their rings varied in thickness, reflecting changing environmental conditions. Trees that are not as responsive and have consistently sized rings are termed complacent. He also learned that one of the trees was 400 years old, 200 years older than his textbook said pitch pines could be. That was the first surprise. On the Mohonk Preserve, also in the Shawangunk Mountains, Cook found another. There, on a rocky slope with virtually no soil, Cook caught sight of some hemlocks like the ones I’ve taken to climbing, with Bear and Melissa, in nearby Massachusetts.

Modern dendrochronology had emerged in the early twentieth century in the Southwest, in part because the desert simplified the yearly story trees told about the weather. There was plenty of sun. Plenty of warmth. But there was not plenty of rain. The trees of the region put on a lot of growth when the year was wet: they made bigger cells in those years. Wet and dry years were visible in the thick versus thin rings of ponderosa pine and giant sequoia that came to anchor the young field. The pine told of rainfall in northern Arizona going back 500 years, the sequoia of rainfall in the Sierra Nevada going back 3,000 years.

With a few exceptions, the field had remained largely fixed in semiarid landscapes in America. "There was this belief that dendrochronology couldn't reliably be done in the Northeast," Cook says. The concern was that the region had too many variables— rain, snow, seasonal extremes of temperature. It was too complex a place to provide a clear picture about any one aspect of climate. But when Cook saw the hemlocks growing on sere exposed rock, he realized that they might tell a story about rain. He learned that the Smiley family who owned Mohonk Preserve had been recording rainfall and temperature since 1896. Depending on the age of the hemlock, he might be able to fact-check the annual rings against the Smiley's data.

The hemlock turned out to be more than 300 years old and for the period they overlapped with the family's weather records, they matched. Eastern hemlock showed that decipherable information about rainfall, or not much rainfall, could be found outside semi-arid landscapes. They were one of the few regional tree species able to do this. "I knew that hemlock was potentially the single most important species because it was likely to be the most common old-growth community in existence, left in existence, in the forests in the Northeast," Cook says. Some hemlock had survived waves of colonial deforestation because its soft, light, easily decomposed wood made poor lumber or firewood.

In the 1800s, though, hemlock's thick bark was almost its undoing. In most trees, a corky outer layer of phloem becomes bark. In a beech or other smooth-boled tree, this cork cambium puts on little girth each year and the bark that it replaces dusts away. In rough-barked trees, the corky layer grows wildly and the trees package the growth increases and convolutions. That is why hemlock bark is a mesmerizing world of tectonic folds, of rivulets and ravines that visitors—an ant, a climber—can travel. In the case of hemlock, that profuse growth contains a high concentration of tannins, chemicals produced to stave off herbivores, but that can also render animal skins more water resistant. In the nineteenth century, the American tanning industry expanded and tanneries arose throughout the hemlock's range.

In the Catskill Mountains and on the ridges of the Shawangunks alone, an estimated 70 million hemlock were cut, their bark ripped off, their bare trunks left to decay.

Even so, pockets of inaccessible old growth persisted. Cook kept seeking out those stands and, in time, found hemlocks older than those at Mohonk. He read an article describing 500-year-old trees in the Tionesta area of Pennsylvania, so he set out with a friend to find them. The two found plenty of middle-aged hemlocks. They found a forest littered with pipelines from an era of oil exploration. They got lost. Then they happened into a hemlock grove that felt old. Old trees should not be stereotyped: they are not all massively tall, thick, moss draped. They can be small, their age revealed in bent posture and scars, in roots that run close to the surface, like the veins that rise on the backs of our hands as our skin thins with time.

Old trees should not be stereotyped: they are not all massively tall, thick, moss draped. They can be small, their age revealed in bent posture and scars, in roots that run close to the surface, like the veins that rise on the backs of our hands as our skin thins with time.

They took cores from several Tionesta hemlocks, one of which, it turned out, had started growing in 1426. The records kept by the Tionesta hemlock joined those kept by the Mohonk hemlock—and Mohonk pitch pine, white pine, and chestnut oak. Those records were, in turn, joined by those of hemlock from Nova Scotia down to the Carolinas and as far west as Michigan. Hemlock became the backbone, as Cook describes it, of the North American Drought Atlas. The atlas, first published in 2004 and expanded and deepened since, is a database of tens of thousands of tree-ring records that reveal patterns of drought in hundreds of locations and as far back, in some regions, as two millennia. Cook's invention became a reference work for understanding historical drought and it allowed novel interdisciplinary work. Fire ecologists, anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and modelers, among many others, have used the drought atlas to understand environmental history and cultural shifts as well as to fact-check climate models. Similar atlases have since been made for Europe, for South America, for Australia, for Mexico, for Asia.

Tree ring records cover a human-history timescale. The oldest living tree ring record is from a 4,800-year-old bristle-cone pine called Methuselah—a sapling during the world of Gilgamesh, of the Minoans and the Mayans, of the last mammoths. (The oldest fossil tree ring record goes back nearly 14,000 years.) Because trees are sessile for their lifetime, the information they hold is specific to a site. That specificity helps researchers know what has been true for a particular place and, when records can be combined across nearby areas, a particular region. Tree rings show that the Northeast, generally now a rain-rich place, underwent severe droughts in the 1500s and 1600s. In places where water is not in short supply but temperature changes, as in a wetland, tree rings can tell the story of temperature. They can also reveal global temperature patterns: tree rings document the "year without a summer" triggered by the explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, which spewed ash and ejected sulfur particles into the stratosphere, where they reflected the sun's warmth back to space until some washed down as acid rain.

Increasingly, tree rings are adding detail about how we are changing the climate, making clear that we are in a new era. Valerie Trouet and her colleagues can see in European tree rings that the North Atlantic jet stream—the westerly wind that determines so much about formerly familiar weather patterns, season length, and temperature across the Northern Hemisphere—has become more erratic since the 1960s. Tree rings are helping scientists document precipitously declining snowpack in the Rockies and other mountain ranges. Tree rings are ground-truthing satellite observations of changes in forest extent and productivity. Tree rings reveal that the new character of wildfires—their intensity, their frequency—has no precedent in the last 2,000 years. And drought, the tree rings show, is going rogue with its coconspirator heat.

Dendrochronological drought atlases emerged in the Northeast, extended across the country and then across the world, in some small part because several wind-pummeled strong-rooted hemlocks on a talus in the Shawangunk Mountains shared their memories of the rain that came, or did not, for every one of their more than 300 years. And because amateur naturalists kept records down through generations and shared them with a young scientist who happened to show up one day. Mohonk Preserve and its trees remain deeply special to Cook. "Hemlock always has a very soft spot in my heart because it turned out to be such a pivotal species," he says.

As far as I know, the three Hi-Rock hemlocks I’ve spent time with have never been cored. I don't know their exact age. The hemlocks must feel the seasons changing length, the winters becoming less cold, the summers longer and drier and hotter. They may feel a pull to migrate as their ancestors did and as some of their contemporaries have: in the last three decades, hemlock seeds carried by wind have been able to germinate and survive further north; hemlocks have shifted range by about eight miles over that time. It is entrancing to be in a huge hemlock and to feel its solidity and rootedness and to think about it as a traveler.

Climbing in the way that the LeVangies teach it—engendering a culture of consideration, attention, and care—can change people in surprising ways. As I learned to climb, I did things I never thought I could do. I overcame physical weakness and phobias. I found a new way to confront climate anxiety. And I came to know trees more deeply. I began to look closely, to see and to understand our profound connection to them.

Everything that flows from trees and forests—clean air, biodiversity, cooler temperatures, clean water, human health, carbon kept solid and out of atmospheric currency, rain, regional weather patterns, culture, history—is unraveling. If trees are to continue to sustain us and to help us address our apocalyptic mess, we need to pay them more attention, give them more care.

As Melissa and Bear have taught me, we need to take to the trees.

Four or so decades after his first visit to Tionesta, Edward Cook returned to western Pennsylvania to visit the hemlocks he hadn't seen since. He was with several colleagues, including Neil Pederson of Harvard University, who studies forest ecology. It was a difficult day. They spent many hours searching, passing through clear cuts. The forest was unrecognizable to Cook: there were so many dead beech trees, so much disturbance. Pederson felt saddened as well. "I am walking through a graveyard," he says. "Adelgid is on its way... the mature beech are gone."

The group made their way through thickets of beech saplings knowing that they too would be gone soon: they saw evidence of beech leaf disease in two places, following right behind the devastations of beech bark disease. "So that national landmark forest is doomed," Pederson says. Old-growth forests are not permanent, he adds, but "to me personally they feel as though they will always be there." Seeing forests change so radically during his lifetime has been devastating. And, he says, he was worried about Cook.

Pederson kept reliving in his mind a trip he had taken with his doctoral advisor, the late Gordon Jacoby, cofounder with Cook of Columbia University's dendrochronology lab. Jacoby had gone to revisit a tree in Mongolia. "It was the first old Siberian pine that he had cored that showed global warming in Mongolia, and it turned out that it was a stump and someone had cut it and it was gone," Pederson says. "I just didn't want to deal with that again. I couldn't deal with someone at the end of their career going back to see one of their favorite trees and..."

In the last hour of daylight, they found the hemlocks Cook and his friend had cored 40 years ago. "I had to run away, because I started crying and I was just like, Oh my God, he's reunited with his trees, you know," Pederson says. "They're not dead."

That the Tionesta hemlock were thriving despite woolly adelgid was a surprise. Another team of dendrochronologists had gone to a different site in the region where Cook had also found hemlock in the 1970s and those trees were gone. Cook discovered after the trip that the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has been treating the Tionesta hemlock, something that can be done with individual trees around homes and along streets, but that is extremely challenging to do in a forest. The department has been trying to save hemlock for about two decades.

The oldest living tree ring record is from a 4,800-year-old bristle-cone pine called Methuselah—a sapling during the world of Gilgamesh, of the Minoans and the Mayans, of the last mammoths. 

It is an enormous undertaking, requiring a big and consistent budget and lots of trained people, and it entails the use of pesticides, which many states opt not to use. "Pennsylvania, historically in this program, has been willing to kind of do almost whatever it takes," says Sarah Johnson of the department's Bureau of Forestry. There are "key functions of hemlock that cannot be replicated by any other species." Where hemlock forests have disappeared, waterways heat up, embankments erode, and populations of birds plummet, including the black-throated green warbler. And the blackburnian warbler. And the hermit thrush. And the Acadian flycatcher. A tree is not just a tree. A forest is not just a forest. Both contain and sustain multitudes.

Johnson says that in the long term, the bureau's goal is to use chemicals less or not at all and to manage instead with other methods, including biocontrol—breeding and releasing non-pest insects to prey on pest insects—as well as genetic selection. A biocontrol program is underway: a fly and two beetles, one from the Pacific Northwest where they feed on a native woolly adelgid, have been released in some places. Johnson says she sees a lot of the beetles in the forest. "They're reproducing really well. We can find them very easily. They're moving very well," she says. But so far, in her view, "they're not helping trees very much." The second strategy, genetic selection, is moving slowly.

Tree genetics is a universe unto itself and is not always best understood in comparison with animal genetics. Unlike other plants and animals, trees can have enormous genetic variation within a single tree, especially if they are long-lived. The meristem of one branch may develop a mutation that every subsequent cell produced by that meristem will carry. Meanwhile, on another branch, perhaps a different mutation has occurred. Researchers studying Sitka spruce found one old-growth tree with 100,000 differences: needles, trunk branches... many were genetically distinct from one another. One tree can be many trees. In the Hi-Rock hemlock, the branch I sit on might be genetically distinct from the branch my foot rests on, from the branch hosting the lichen I am entranced by, from the branch my hand holds.

Trees can also have enormous genetic diversity at the species level. Some species have genomes that are fifty times as large as any animal's. Also, unlike many animals, plants often have more than two copies of a chromosome in each cell. At one end of the spectrum—the record holder for the moment, notes Kew Gardens Ilia Leitch—is a fern with ninety-six copies of its genome in each cell; near the other end are quaking aspen, which can be triploid, carrying three copies. Plant polyploidy, as multiple sets of chromosomes are called, arises from whole genome duplication and gives plants extraordinary genetic range and nimbleness—some mutation or some combination of genomes might solve an emerging problem. Diploid aspen seem to be more drought resistant than triploid aspen, for example. Many trees show great genetic variation both within a population and between populations, variation that reflects their migratory history, where they waited out glaciers or hot house times, how connected they were to other trees across the landscape, how they reproduced, who was eating them.

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