I’ve been off Substack for just over a year now, because I’ve had bigger fish to fry. By fish, I mean essays, and it’s not so much frying as lots of stirring and mixing and baking and defrosting and baking again and baking again and slicing and dicing and simmering. One of those essays is becoming a fully fledged book, and I just arrived a few days ago at a one-week writing residency, where I’m immersing myself in working on it. I’m keeping a daily journal as a kind of warm-up practice, and I figured, why not share it? So, here are notes from day 0 (my travel day) and day 1. Days 2-3 will hit your inbox tomorrow.
DAY 0.
Nobody on my flight is masked and everybody seems to be sniffling and coughing and clearing their throats. I mouth obscenities under my N95, which I keep pasted so tight to my face that it leaves marks afterwards. I don’t even accept the flight attendants’ offerings of water, because I don’t want to risk inhaling itchy sneezy slimy virus particles when I drink. This is unfortunate, because I’m fuming hot enough to need a full-on fire hydrant blasted my direction.
It’s a good thing I’m headed to rural Tennessee, where I’m about to spend a week in a tiny little cabin on a tiny little farm, talking to nobody and writing all day long.
But then I land in rural Tennessee and realize rural Tennessee means a 20-minute wait for an Uber. 18, 17, 16, 12, 5, finally I’m in a car but I can’t tell you a single thing about what the car looks like or the driver looks like or what we say to each other, because I’m still seeing smoke. He takes me to my Airbnb, where I’ll spend the night before requesting another Uber to the writing residency the next morning.
Well. First I’ll have to request an Uber from the Airbnb — which I booked impulsively a few days ago, because it was the one with a hot tub, but it turns out to be a trek from the center of town — to the store. I have forgotten to pack some essentials, i.e. bug spray and waterproof boots, and I also want to buy fresh berries and hummus and other things I forgot to request in the Kroger order that the writing residency hosts are picking up.
Okay, I didn’t forget the essentials. I did forget to reread the instructions sent to me weeks beforehand. In my defense, my entire week leading up to this was spent zooming up and down New York City, from my apartment to a hotel on the Lower East Side to my apartment to a friend’s empty studio on the Upper East Side to my apartment to a hotel in Kips Bay to my apartment, up and down and up and down, edging into the apartment in double masks to walk the dog and deliver groceries and pick up fresh clothes and then make it back to my temporary LES/UES/Kips Bay accommodations for a meeting, and/or just a damn bathroom, and/or, if I was lucky, some lunch, because my partner had COVID. Maybe that makes the airplane fuming make more sense. I was sure I was going to get sick, despite these isolation efforts that cost literal thousands of dollars. I was sure I’d have to cancel the residency I had marked on my calendar with two exclamation points since spring. And then I didn’t get sick, and I was sure I’d have to cancel the residency because I was too exhausted and sweaty and sore from all the heavy bag lugging on assorted buses and Citibikes and Ubers, and I could hardly imagine going absolutely anywhere except splat-flat in my own bed, inches away from my pajamas in their proper drawers and my snacks in their proper pantry and my tweezers on their proper bathroom shelf.
My partner sweetly but insistently said, This is important. You’re going. And so I cobbled myself together. And now here I am, in between Ubers for the night, in this garage that some couple has renovated into a studio-style Airbnb. I’m soft from the hot tub, and I’m blasting my current favorite song for the sixth time in a row, and I’m dancing all my anger off, or at least, as much of it as I can scream-sing out of me. And then, I am going the f*ck to sleep.
DAY 1.
I pack my giant suitcase and my tote bags back up for the eleventy-millionth time this week, tuck them in the shade under the Airbnb’s awning, and call an Uber. It takes 17 minutes to arrive. My driver spends the ride steering with one hand and petting the gray French bulldog puppy next to him in the passenger’s seat with the other. She turns to whine at me with her big sad eyes, so I stretch forward to give her a scratch, and the driver says her name is Olive Oil. “My dog’s name is Tomato,” I say. “They should be friends.” He isn’t particularly impressed.
He delivers me to the REI that’s next door to the Whole Foods, where I spend way too many minutes trying to decide which organic bug spray is best. I don’t have time for this. I have to be at the writing residency by 1pm for check-in. It’s 11:25.
I pick a bug spray and I pick the boots that are on sale in, conveniently, my exact size, and then I zoom my little shopping cart around the Whole Foods. Okay. Hummus. Got it. Tortillas, where would tortillas be. Ooh, kimchi, do I want kimchi? I want kimchi. Sprouts, sprouts, sprouts…yes, sprouts. I already ordered a vegan cheese, but what about another, as a treat? Maybe I’ll do a little cheese plate every night while I write on the front porch. That’d be cute. No, no, I don’t need two vegan cheeses. Okay, eff it, I’m getting the effing cheese. Shit! I almost forgot chocolate.
I’m wise enough this time to call an Uber before I get in line to pay. But this time, the app says my car is arriving in two minutes — of course now it does — and so I’m scrambling to get all the food on the conveyor belt, practically hurling things at the register and dropping my credit card on the floor as I watch the tiny car icon jerk towards my current location.
I shove my way-too-many bags into the trunk, trying not to panic about the residency hosts judging me for arriving with so much food. In my head, I practice explanations. Sorry for cramming the fridge — I have some illness-related food needs. Or: Haha, oh god, I brought so much stuff — I had food anxiety!! Or, I’m writing about food and hunger, so I went a little bananas. Hope that’s cool.
This Uber driver keeps me graciously distracted. He keeps offering me things — air conditioning, water, music. (“I got Jamaican, I got Latino, I got…lemme see what else is on my Sirius.”) He tells me he used to work in law enforcement. He says, “By the way, ma’am, I meant to tell you I’ve been vaxxed and boosted. I shoulda told you that sooner.” He tells me he’s not from Tennessee originally, and he doesn’t plan to stay — he’d like to move near the ocean somewhere, like Florida, but then he’d be around the other “old snowbirds,” or some oceanfront city in Texas. Probably Texas. It turns out, he doesn’t like Tennessee too much. “Tennessee drivers are the rudest in the country,” he tells me. “Worst I’ve ever experienced. Probably because they’re a bunch of repressed Republicans. Sorry, is that okay to say?” I affirm, gently but enthusiastically. This dude keeps surprising me. “I’m telling you, you gotta have the tightest butthole to be a Republican these days. No wonder they drive like they’re pissed.”
He tells me he thinks he’s driven to this place before, thinks he’s picked up some other New York girl from the airport to head to some little farm to write for a week. “I don’t know,” he says. “Looked a little sketchy. I gave her my card and told her to call me if she needed me, but she never called, so I guess everything worked out alright.”
The Uber GPS gets us lost and takes us about 15 minutes in the wrong direction. He leaves the app running because, he says, it’s the best way to keep me safe, so Uber can see where I’m at, even though he won’t get more money for it and I won’t get charged more. We finally find the residency just in time for the end of the check-in period. He unloads my bags and bags and more bags, and slowly drives off. Later, I leave him a $10 tip.
I’m welcomed by the writer-in-residence, then offered an ATV ride to my private cabin. Somehow, I imagined it would be right down a short and simple path from the main house, but it turns out I’m staying up a dauntingly steep paved street and down a pebbled road into the woods. The choppy ride jostles my precious Whole Foods hot bar lunch out of its box and spills sauce all over my tote and notebook and magazine and journal. This is correct. It’s been a bumpy ride to get here. Bumpy rides are messy. Mess can be cleaned up, even if it leaves a stain. Right?
As I settle into the cabin, my nervous system buzzes. There’s no electricity up here, and the batteries for the string lights are out, and the canopy of trees above makes it dark as night inside. There’s no running water, either, and also no cell service. (There is, however, plenty of bug spray. And I don’t think I’m going to need these boots.)
I was prepped for this. I’ve lived many weeks like this, in all my organic farming escapades. I’ve slept in goat barns and in buggy tents and tiny closets cold as fridges. Sure, the outhouse is down a slippery hill (and the actual bathroom is a solid 7-minute walk away), but I’ve peed in the dirt plenty of times before. I’ve trekked many long paths to refill water jugs and lug them home. But it’s been a while, and I’ve been doing a bit too much trekking and lugging lately.
Since most of my lunch is now decimated, I walk those 7 minutes down to the house to sift through the groceries I just bought and the ones that the hosts picked up for me. Almost everything from Kroger is rotten. My vegan yogurt’s expiration date is July 27. The vegan cheese says July 3, so I guess it’s good I bought another. The basil is soggy purple with white fluffy mold, and the mushrooms are going squishy. Again, I remember that I am indeed in rural Tennessee.
I don’t want to be here right now. Should I not have come? The inner voice that just wanted to stay home in New York, was she right? I decide to run the voice off. I take myself on a jog around the neighborhood, which seems to be nothing but sharp hills, forgoing music to be sure I’ll notice any cars roaring around corners or wrathful unleashed dogs racing towards my legs. The big main road has no shoulder, so I keep diving off into the rough weeds along the side when I hear wheels coming, lifting my hand in that static sort of half-assed wave that conveys harmless congeniality.
There’s this one beat-up red car that passes me and then comes back around a minute later. HEY, someone yells, the window rolling down as the car grinds to a halt. You single? Next to them, two friends chuckle, squeezed together in the passenger’s seat. They all look like teens.
I do one solitary guffaw, slowing my jog but not stopping. No, I yell.
Shit, they say and speed off, engine sputtering.
I shower at the house. I settle myself into a corner of the big office, praying to the internet gods that the wifi will be strong enough for my writing class on Zoom. I eat a very big and luxurious dinner at 10pm — a pile of black bean spaghetti and an amalgam of oven-roasted vegetables, all green with fresh pesto I’m thankful I bought, since the basil is rotten, and sprinkled with shreds of vegan cheese I’m thankful I bought, since the other is expired. I avoid trekking back to the cabin for as long as I can, and then I tell myself to suck it up. I slip on my shoes and click on a flashlight and play that same song I was dancing to the other night the whole way home, humming along to scare off whatever bears or raccoons or who-knows-what creatures might be concealed between the shadowed trees.
If the cabin seemed dim earlier, it is now pitch dark. I climb into the twin bed. I can’t soothe myself with scrolling social media, since there’s no cell service. I can read if I position the flashlight right. But I just cry instead, wringing out all the tears I’ve been bottling for more than a week now. Nobody can hear me but the crickets, who keep on caroling outside, undisturbed. I stop sobbing when I’m done. I feel better — happy, even, or at least curious, and absolutely amused. I realize I’ve already gathered a whole collection of new things to write about, so I pick up my phone, and I start thumb-typing these notes.