Despair at Deep Creek
The mystery, the magic, and the parts of life that take great effort
Hello to all the new subscribers to this newsletter, Another Place Times. This feels like a good time to introduce myself and my story. You can read a little about me in my first post here, and then move on to part one of why this place matters to me, and part two of how I came to own 10.6 acres of land I call Another Place in Benzie County, Michigan.
As always, share around if you feel it. Thank you for being here.
There is an image of myself that has reconstituted itself in my head hundreds of times by now, but always contains this detail: I’m arriving at my home as someone else, and “I” watch as real me steps out of a camper, happy, to greet the guest. I don’t know why the camper, specifically, lodged itself in my mind; eventually, I’d like a house. But a camper marks a first shelter, a temporary shelter according to most township zoning codes, a step on the way to somewhere else. Over the past month, I’ve stepped into this image of myself in ways that are eerily similar to the version in my head, and in other ways that were unexpected.
I write this from my land, called Another Place, where I’ve been for the past week, hosting some friends at times and spending quiet moments with my girlfriend and by myself in others. There have been mournful moments, blissful moments, terrified moments only to realize the sound was just a country mouse. The air hangs heavy with the sudden loss of a friend’s brother, a reminder that it can all shift in a moment, and despite the beauty of this place, I’m still afflicted with random bouts of cell-deep fear that I can’t figure out how to calm. Still, the newly acquired camper provides a shelter and comfort that I’m excited to return to each night and the kitchen tent protects us from the rain, if not rural rodents. I’ve never camped in one place this long and I feel myself settling into a routine. I’m learning the sounds of the forest at night — whippoorwills like in the country songs, an owl after dusk, a million threads of crickets all chirping at different paces, intermittent mooing from a placeless cow, coyotes far away. We saw several spots cleared of leaves in the center of the forest, likely deer beds. It’s comforting to know deer choose to sleep close-by. The air is grey and humid, straddling the line between cool and warm, and carries with it ribbons of moss, dirt, sweet decomposing wood, smoke-smell from the charred logs, the lingering scent of fish from the cast iron pan.
So many things are beautiful, but what I’m writing about today are the hard parts, the parts that take great effort to see through.
Crossing the river at Deep Creek
I don’t know much about astrology, don’t know much about the French I took, but I did just learn that I emerged from my first Saturn return — when the planet Saturn finds its way back to the same position it was in the moment you were born — this past February, around the same time that I broke down in a canyon in California. I have an unwritten, loose rule that I won’t force signs and astrology upon my experiences, but when I learn something that is undeniably parallel, I’ll stop to notice it. Right now, fresh off of a beautiful weekend celebrating my friend of 20 years’ marriage and reflecting on the many pits and highs inevitable when you know someone for twenty years, returning home amidst other friends’ heartbreaks and losses, I’m thinking about the darkest times.
Toni Morrison writes in her essay The Site of Memory about the veil a writer can drop over traumatic times when attempting to connect with readers. It becomes a writer’s job to “rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate’” and reveal the difficult times, trusting that readers can manage their own reactions and still find a way to look directly at the story a writer tells. She goes on to assert:
“The exercise [of writing about personal experience] is critical for any person who is black, or who belongs to any marginalized category, for, historically, we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were its topic.”
For much of my life, I had a script to tell lovers and friends about my life. In recent years, that script’s flaws became visible to me and I tried to shake loose the rehearsed story and instead lead with feeling. That turned out to be difficult, raw, and devastating. I realized that in order to get close to someone, to be whole and real in a way that creates intimacy without any spaces or holes, I first had to feel close to my own memory. In order to rip the veil for you all, as readers, I had to remove the veil for myself about my childhood, about my queerness and its ongoing shifts, and about adolescent loss. Morrison writes that removing the veil requires certain things. It requires trusting one's own memories, and it requires imagination. So far, I haven’t experienced anything as painful as this ongoing process of recollection and imagining, which, whether out of coincidence or necessity, has coincided with my Saturn return over the past three years.
This newsletter, the story of my grandfather, my dad, my maternal grandmother, are truths and they are stories. There may be a time in the near future when we can’t distinguish between the two (see: AI), but for now they coexist on this page. I don’t want this space to skip over the details that illustrate how, and although none of you have asked, I don’t want to leave out the parts that make me and Another Place real. After all, as Morrison captures so perfectly, “if writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.”
Those parts— the mystery and magic, the parts I’m most interested in—are often also the times lived with great effort.
I started this Substack soon after I had a panic attack at 4,500 ft elevation along the Mojave River, frozen, unable to get into the mouth of Deep Creek hot springs despite the miles I’d hiked to reach it.
My girlfriend Ellen and I had spent days in the desert, me being depressed, often on the phone with government offices and otherwise doing every small movement with great effort, her doing everything she could to distract me, to love me, while knowing she had to let me ride through this depression on my own. In an attempt to shake ourselves loose, we decided to take the scion rental car to a hot spring an hour’s drive and a steep two-hour hike away. While I write this, I find it hard to remember this time. My particular state was brought on by destabilizing job loss—just three months after buying Another Place and taking on a mortgage in addition to my rent I was laid off from my nice job, in addition to playing mediator to a shift which changed my family, riding out another winter in Detroit (cause for actual sickness), experiencing stress on my relationship, reckoning with the ending of another, and accepting the unwelcome (at the time) truth that I must write. So I made a decision that day by not making one at all; instead, I let my body move forward to the scion, trusting that doing something that I did not want to do at all was exactly what I needed to do.
There are no specific driving directions to Deep Creek hot springs1. If you were to enter it into a GPS, it’d take you along a sand-dirt road past manufactured homes with big fences protecting their sparsely landscaped dirt yards that make you wonder how the kitchen sink inside spouts any water at all, each house with a giant truck in its driveway, until you reach what looks like it could be a turn and you take it. It’d lead you along an off-roading road with pits so deep they could swallow half a Scion. Eventually, you’d listen to your fear signals and decide the Scion isn’t, in fact, made for this, and you’d get out of the car to scout the road ahead. You’d see the road going on and on as far as you could see, sometimes hitting a 45 degree angle. You’d wonder how anyone lives out here. You’ll be so tired now from the depression that you can’t walk or really even talk to your girlfriend, who’s sitting in the seat next to you anxiously twisting her hair as she re-reads the forum from 2015 with crowdsourced instructions on how to reach the hot springs through a hole in the fence. You won’t remember how you get to the less bumpy road, but then you’re on it, and it twists up and up past boulders the size of a tiny house and some almost the size of Giant Rock. It will be then that you realize you only have one water bottle for the both of you and there’s a two-hour desert hike at the end of this drive. You drive further still from any human civilization. You’ll be panicking now, unable to speak coherent sentences, so you stay silent, begging yourself to calm down and be good company, shame welling up inside you as you imagine how fun and easy other people probably are, but not you. Finally, the car will reach the end of the road marked by a hand-painted fence that says a lot of words that, when put together, make your brain scramble, because that’s how signs are written in the high desert, and your girlfriend will turn right to follow them. You see an old Army tank and a compound of RVs, canopy tents, and that chlorophyll-green Florida carpet. A sign says, “STOP HERE, $5. IF I’M NOT HERE PUT IT IN THE BOX,” the unclear “I” taking up space in the seemingly empty desert. You haven’t left the passenger seat for hours, and next, a desert woman will emerge from one of the campers very differently than the entrance of your vision. She’ll walk over to the car window and lean down to get a look at you. This place will seem like an old family operation that started up to capitalize on the fact that one possible road into the hot spring happened to fall on their property, miles away from any store, their only water rainwater collection. She’ll give you very clear, thoughtful instructions on how to reach the trailhead and you’ll notice she has teeth like she used to do meth but she doesn’t anymore, and you’ll feel proud of her. She’ll be quite nice. She’ll take your entrance fee money, and it won’t be until later that you learn there was another, free way in from the West side, through a hole in the fence.
Once there, we hiked past graffiti boulders into the pinyon and juniper woodlands of the San Bernardino mountains, further and further down alongside the edge of a mountain and around the other side to a vista of San Bernardino snowpeaks in one direction and an endless valley in the other. Looking at beautiful scenes while depressed is like taking half a xanax at the beginning of a flight then trying to wake up an hour later as the flight attendant asks if you’d like anything to eat or drink. There is no way to emerge quickly enough, and just as you push out the words “No thank you,” they’ve left. I hiked my body through the landscape, taking care on the dusty loose rock cliff faces, all along envisioning an end with pools of clear, hot spring water. At one point, I screamed “ASK ME ABOUT MY WIENER” into the abyss, a dated reference to the film Acceptance from when Jonah Hill was better, still a soft, emerging nerd, an effort that almost always takes me out of myself. The plea echoed around the mountains and returned with no answers.
At the end of two hours, we heard distant voices and reached the base of the glacial river, a sandy curve where I saw a naked body walk slowly into the river and another, in a towel, starting a campfire. Further down were the hot springs. As we approached the place where Ellen remembered entering when she’d been here once before, we realized that we were entering from the other side of the river from the hot spring pools. The high water level made the hot springs inaccessible for us unless we swam through the glacial river. To a normal person on a normal day, this would not be the end. This glacial swim may even be refreshing, exciting, fun. Today, as I write this, I feel the gulf between how I would react in this moment and how I reacted then, the curse of reflection.
When I realized this detail then, I panicked. If you, reader, have ever experienced a panic attack, I’m sorry. I also learned that day that for me, a panic attack is not a bee sting, but more like a stroke, coming on slowly in the hours or even days before and peaking to cause damage.
Living in that moment, I believed I would die. If I entered the glacial river, I would dissolve from the intensity of the sensation. If I turned around and retreated, I’d die from the humiliation and also from dehydration. The experience triggered a million histories, a million details that all of a sudden existed at the same volume in my head and my body. Every time I’d been driven into danger, left alone in the car, led astray without a plan, swam in too deep of water, been left to insecurity and instability, been in a house of deafening silence or deafening yells made my body feel like ten million tiny workers in hardhats were stretching a net around me, constraining my limbs together in an attempt to keep me safe but that was actually constricting air flow to my lungs. There was no way to win and no decision to make that would relieve the fear. So in one of the most beautiful places I’d ever been, light licking the cliff rock behind me, I cried really hard.
As my nervous system settled, I concluded that if I didn’t make it to the hot springs, I’d let every trauma, every disappointment reign. My girlfriend made me a deal; she’d swim across first to show me that she could survive. After that, I knew that, in theory, I could survive. I would need to stop thinking and try to rely on reason, which felt nearly impossible, but for once, appeared as the only clear option. As she waded across, her belongings held above her head, I decided to stop thinking. Something in the panic let me abandon the net and let the tiny workers dissolve. They weren’t protecting me. All at once, I became tired of myself and decided to simulate self-love through action, even if I didn’t yet feel it. I accepted that I’d never get to that place of self-love if I let people do the hard things for me. I could receive love and care, but I had to parent myself, and in this moment, that looked like following Ellen through the river. I remembered a book about breathing, something about the Wim Hoff method, so I breathed like that and I tip-toed across the river, reaching the other side in under a minute, where the hottest pool was first.
I ended up relaxing enough to enjoy the pools, noticing details like how the hot water spills over into the river endlessly, but I didn’t feel safe again until we’d hiked the few miles back out of the mountains, driven the scion back to paved roads, passed the miles and miles of 80,000 people at King of the Hammers UTV race, and were a few miles from home, eating a burger in a booth. That day marked an exit, I now know from an actual astrological system, and an exit from the story I’d been telling myself. I recognized my nervous system’s response above all else, how over the past few years, I’d been searching for a home near The Place with such vigilance in part because I was ramping up in a slow panic. For so many years, I lived life with great effort. I resisted the fact that I didn’t have control over my own reactions until, that day at Deep Creek, I was forced to recognize the need to completely give up control, and I was witnessed in this effort. There’s grace in the flow, I see now. No one was going to carry me across the river, and no one was going to carry me back up the mountain. Neither decision felt good, or beautiful, or pleasurable; I was miserable. There is no great resolve. If loving myself reads corny, so be it. The moment was not a decision, but an inevitable outcome of the past several years, and it was not without great effort.
In a strange parallel, record floods as a result of Hurricane Hilary have washed through the Morongo Valley and the San Bernardino valley over the past week, washing the Deep Creek hot springs with flood waters. The river I mentioned is impassable today due to this flooding.
The site of scarcity
There’s a balance I’m trying to achieve of having some skill, a lot of time, and a little money. Too much money and you lose the charm, too little money and the work feels constant while the dream hovers out of reach. Two things I need are water and shelter; Another Place currently has one of these things, as of recently, in the form of a 2014 Palomino Backpack camper. I don’t have water, and to get water will cost many thousands of dollars (anywhere form $7k to $30k USD, depending on the depth of the water table, which no one can reliably predict before beginning to drill). So for now, we fill a few 5 gallon water jugs with drinking water at my friends’ / neighbors house, bathe in the lake, and that is enough.
I look ahead and everything I want will take effort.
Buying this property last October felt like a summit; with the papers signed, I stood at the peak and could clearly see my visions coming true. I could see one version of what was ahead and begin to plan for it, something that didn’t feel possible when I didn’t have a home. That feeling has again been strong this summer, but for many months, from January until I returned from my trip and began to collect a paycheck again, I tumbled—or bellyflopped—back into a valley with no clear visual of the landscape ahead. This valley, this low point, was largely created by lack of security and stability, triggering childhood loss and money trauma, convincing me that I was not going to be okay, that I would not live through this, that I would never make the art I need to make, that other people—people who are strangers and ghosts to me—do not have similar struggles, affording them a life padded in bliss that, in part, will always be foreign to me. Some of that is true, but most are spikey, sticky, dark thoughts spurred by envy, complex post-traumatic stress, and scarcity mindset. It’s been hard to push against that mindset, but that’s what I needed to do. It takes an immense amount of hope and persistence to think outside of this trap, something that I find hard to access myself but that I’ve seen modeled by people around me. Scarcity mindset is rooted in capitalism and consumerism, which, if you’ve grown up in the United States, you’ve been inundated with since the moment you were born. Capitalism tells us that there isn’t enough, so we need to fight each other, advance, grow, and act with urgency in order to secure our share.
This is all to say — there is enough. When I was staring insecurity in its multiple morphing faces this past winter, I heard every dark thought at the same volume. Every day took great effort. In my mind, I saw Another Place taken from me because I fell behind on mortgage payments. I saw myself moving back in at home and having to give away my cats. I saw myself as an absolute loser; despite it being “just a job,” being laid off brought up every personal trigger around abandonment that I could imagine. It was incredibly difficult to experience this at the same time as other personal events. Yet, there are worse things, and I’ve lived through worse, and I survived. A huge part of that is the support network and friendships I’m lucky enough to be surrounded by. This time, I was able to accept generosity with minimal shame.
After the meltdown at the Deep Creek hot springs, and with unemployment security covering my rent and mortgage, I could more easily see the space around me. It’s clear that with spaciousness, we can feel calm. After almost two months of demonic hellish communication between Michigan’s unemployment department, I finally got on UI in the state of Illinois where I lived for almost a year, and this allowed me to be able to think more clearly. I was able to write, to create music, to live very lean knowing that my rent was covered through assistance.
Eventually, I found stability again through a freelance job, and then my current full-time job researching affordable housing access, providing me the great privilege, once again, to plan.
Advisors say to stick to the topics you promised your readers. For Another Place Times, that’s property, rural land, being queer, water, myself, and you within all of it. Nothing good happens without great effort. Or maybe the good just tastes sweeter when you thought you were going to die. Since that day, there’s been more that was hard, and recently, a large swath of peace. The peace will inevitably shift eventually into something else. This is how it will always go.
My friend who does know a lot about astrology says that Saturn moved through me in that moment. The days following, I felt raw, so my girlfriend and I decided to spend a day trying to make a short film about local alien lore. I didn’t yet have the perspective I do now, but I knew something had shifted. At the very least, I wasn’t afraid of dying.
Everything burst open from there. We made the film, and someday you’ll see it. On the way home from that trip, I spent a very different layover in the Phoenix airport, this time returning to my home in Michigan to write again for the first time in nearly ten years.
Another Place updates
The corner parcel near mine will be auctioned off today, Friday August 25 in an online government auction. The site has sat vacant since the natural gas company who ravaged it went bankrupt 12 years ago. More on that next time.
I’m beginning to explore the local libraries. This time I spent a day at Glen Lake Community Library, an extremely nice and new library. On the community board was a posted event for public star gazing at a local observatory.
There are two benches made out of planks of wood and cinderblocks.
The solar lights I randomly placed throughout the property and in the woods continue to spook me when I wake in the night thinking the one way out in the woods is an alien orb finally come to take me home.
A portion of the income from this newsletter will be donated to Housing North, a 501c3 nonprofit organization working toward increasing accessible and affordable housing in rural northwest Michigan.
The springs are along the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) if you’re lucky enough to hike that