Embracing the Apocryphal

For a pretty sublime 12 days this month, I got to take up residence in a cottage on Whidbey Island. How I came to be welcome on 48 acres of erstwhile farmland on Puget Sound’s northern shores is a bit of a story. But the short version is that I volunteered a fair amount of time at the end of 2020 with an organization that runs a retreat out that way. As a show of appreciation, they generously offered a while back to put me up for a stay in June. I knew it wasn’t something I could reasonably turn down, but that didn’t stop me from having serious reservations right away.

Long before I was even going through the motions of leaving home this month, I struggled with feeling like I deserved to essentially be taken care of by other people for 12 days. I think being offered something like that is just a shock to my system that I’ll never quite get over. Sometime right before I left home, it occurred to me that I have a hard time trusting other people to take care of me in general. I’ve read enough about developmental trauma by now to have a good understanding of where that comes from. Still, it was pretty striking to realize that was a psychological barrier to entry for me even as I was about to enter a space known for its radical style of hospitality. On the more practical side, I knew I couldn’t be fully offline while there since none of my current gigs include paid leave, and I wasn’t sure how well that would mesh with the retreat experience.

Nonetheless, I committed back in April to going and went into it with two pretty broad goals. One was to try to stay offline outside of predetermined working hours. The other was merely to reestablish a healthy writing practice. Besides being pretty successful by both criteria, I feel like I also learned a hell of a lot about my needs just from letting other people take care of me for a stint.

That would’ve been a solid takeaway on its own, but while I was there, I also did a lot of what I guess I’d call latent learning — getting conscious of, or just reacquainted with things I already knew, but perhaps fail to think as exhaustively about as I’d like to on a typical day. As corny as it sounds, I think the simple act of listening had a big hand in all that learning.

In the most literal terms, listening dominated my time on Whidbey from the first night I was there. My cottage was one of a handful on the land, and while the layout and concept of each cottage is mostly uniform, their surroundings give each of them a slightly different character. One distinguishing feature of mine was its proximity to a man-made waterfall.

Though the synthetic quality of the waterfall really does stick out at first sight, the water source is the reason all hours between dusk and dawn within close range of the cottage are accompanied by what I can only describe as a nightly frog symphony. Hearing it, I noticed myself observing and inquiring about what was going on around me in that patient way most of us probably haven’t channeled much since we were kids.

I remember the first night I was lying in bed in the cottage and heard the symphony abruptly cut out. Because of a story from a different time and place, and involving a different species altogether, I thought some kind of natural disaster might be imminent, and wondered if everyone within punching distance of the Cascadia Subduction Zone was about to bite the big one with me.

For the record, as far as ways to bow out of this terrestrial life go, I wouldn’t mind a cataclysmic natural disaster and would even welcome it as something of an early relief from the responsibility of being a human in 2021. But even I admit that before anticipating relief, there would be an interval of dread where I wouldn’t know what’s going on or be immediately prepared to let go. At least that’s how I imagine myself making the psychic transit from life to death under such conditions. Anyway, I only had to straddle that mishmash of existential dread and the possibility of ultimate relief for a few minutes before a lone frog cleared their throat, which seemed to inspire the whole brood to work their way back up to a full crescendo in no time.

In terms of patient inquiry, some days passed before I understood a few things about the frogs. For one, it eventually became clear that my cottage was the exclusive domain of the frog symphony. Other folks on the land couldn’t hear it from their cottages, and at first didn’t know what I was talking about until the executive director joined us by the fire ring in the communal area one night and began asking which cottages we were all in. Some discussion of what made them all different followed.

It was during that conversation that I got the intel that the abrupt pauses in the frog symphony were their general reactions to the tiniest of disruptive or ambiguous stimuli in their environment (i.e. the approach of the farm dogs, Hilde and Benny, at close range). But that explanation made me even more curious about frog behavior. Why, for example, do they communicate with each other in what registers as nothing shy of symphonic to human ears? And can any frog start the band back up after an intermission? Or is that the responsibility of select frogs? Do frogs get banished from the community if they croak out of turn and effectively expose the group’s whereabouts to potential predators?

I confess I haven’t yet consulted anything authoritative on the social behavior of frogs. And frankly, I’m in no hurry to. I think I’m finally at an age or maybe just a place in my own evolution where I sort of love the ambiguity of not “knowing” — in the western colonial science sense — why frogs behave the way they do.

If anything, I think I’m more invested in wisdom and stories of unknown origin these days. To be clear, I’m not riding for outright lies or misinformation. What I’m talking about would probably be categorized as apocryphal, or more specifically stuff that I presume is apocryphal until stumbling into some confirmation down the road that it is absolutely based in material reality and actual events, with multiple witnesses. One such story in this tradition that I think about constantly is actually the one that crossed my mind the first time I heard the frogs cut out from my cottage.

Every time the anniversary for the 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake arrives in August, there’s a surge of folks sharing their personal or family’s memories about the earthquake. And there’s consistently a subset of folks whose stories detail all kinds of crazy sliding doors moments. I vaguely recalled one where a group who planned to stay at a campground in the Madison River Canyon that night arrived, got out of the car, and never set up camp because one person in the group insisted something was wrong and that they should find a different place down the road to stay for the night.

Because they got out of the area and stayed elsewhere, they weren’t among the 28 campers who died overnight in the slide of rock and debris that followed a magnitude-7.3 quake at 11pm MST (for whatever it’s worth, some sources unofficially put it as a magnitude-7.5 quake). After the fact, other members of that group that turned around asked the person who insisted on leaving why they thought “something was wrong.” Their response was that the birds weren’t singing.

Before I knew better, that story was why I was a bit paranoid about what an abrupt break in a frog symphony might presage.  For as long as that Hebgen Lake earthquake story has lived rent-free in my conscience, I never knew its source. But two years ago, my move across the country in August coincided with the 60th anniversary of the quake. I stopped and stayed with family in Spokane the night before the final leg of driving to the Olympic Peninsula. Once in for the night, we visited briefly and somehow got to talking about the earthquake when my aunt cited one person’s account that sounded similar to the one I remembered. She said she’d seen it in the comments of one of the many anniversary posts floating around the Facebook hellscape. Remembering that, I was inspired this past week to pull out all my millennial stops and scour comments on all the earthquake anniversary content from 2019 until I found the comment my aunt mentioned. After probably two hours of wading through with a fine-tooth comb, I turned up this gem:

I doubt anybody else could get the same satisfaction I did from excavating this nugget from the catacombs of social media. But encountering something like this delights me to no end these days for many reasons. I think the biggest one relates to a significant irony that’s been consuming me lately. It’s this idea that poor folks are the least represented in our record-keeping and histories despite having lived almost all of their lives in public — generally not by choice. And I guess I’m starting to see that phenomenon more broadly through the lens of the settler state, under which the people who get credit for “discoveries” are often just the ones who record something in a way that can be documented, indexed, or commodified by the dominant culture — and usually in a way that never challenges the dominant narrative. That model of course allows for some notable exclusions, including any wisdom and stories that reside in an oral tradition.

That fact has made me question my dependence on written records, or at least consider the depth of what can never be fully represented by them. And although I suppose I’m sort of transposing some of that extra-textual content all the time when I decide write about it, I kind of think of all this apocryphal stuff — albeit apocryphal stuff that usually catches up with me and proves itself to be true — as operating in something more akin to an oral tradition. It exists in the body of collective memory and knowledge where, although it may never enter the official record as a fact of certain origin, many people can vouch for it. Oddly, somebody I met during my time on Whidbey reminded me of somebody else in my life who’s been a font of apocryphal minutiae for as long as I can remember.

The person whose stay on Whidbey overlapped with mine is a writer and multi-hyphenate ass-kicker in more ways that I probably know, and her name is Elmaz. Very early in my interactions with Elmaz, we realized we both had ties to western Pennsylvania. I’m a generation removed from my Monongahela Valley kinfolk by way of my dad, but she grew up out that way, in a small coal mining town on the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border.

In one of our conversations, I mentioned my tradition of patronizing old bowling alleys whenever possible, and she described this theatre she frequented when she lived in Pittsburgh in the early 70s that had bowling lanes on the second floor. That stunned me, though not because I had never heard of such a thing. Quite the contrary, I’ve heard of this exact 70s era Pittsburgh phenomenon from my dad wherein bowling alleys were often on the second level of establishments like bars. However, I had always dismissed it. I think I suspected the description wouldn’t track quite so literally with the reality of how those spaces were set up. I had chalked it up to apocryphal back when that word had strictly pejorative connotations for me.

I live for weird discoveries like this — where I finally track down the backstory behind something I found compelling at first blush, but prematurely wrote off as dubious. Another way I’ve experienced these kinds of epiphanies around the apocryphal has been getting the backstories behind one-liners and idioms that have always been in my lexicon, but not necessarily in that of anybody else around me.

I can think of two offhand. The first also comes from my dad: the concept of “milling around” — which is basically steelworks-inspired Pittsburghese for lollygagging, lingering aimlessly, or otherwise shirking in lieu of being productive. It’s nothing complicated, but it was years before I learned that my dad actually got it from the grandfather of a kid I grew up with in Gardiner — another spawn of the diaspora of fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-generation yinzers like my dad who left Pittsburgh during deindustrialization of the 70s and 80s to set up shop in Yellowstone of all places.

The second one-liner that was just always in the air in my childhood was repeated by my mom. I’ll get to the exact saying, but let me set this up in the order my brain worked in to make this slow connection. I’ve been learning recently that among the different communities that found their way to Yellowstone for work with the park’s concessionaire in the 70s and 80s was a sizable contingent of Navajo folks. One of those folks that had stuck around through the years, named Irvin, was always present in my mom’s circle of coworkers and friends throughout my childhood.

Irvin is one of those people I have no memory of having to be introduced to, and yet it took me until I want to say summer of 2014 to notice he had a glass eye. By that time, we were working different seasonal gigs for the Park Service and we only crossed paths a handful of times every summer. I was surprised that I had apparently missed that detail about Irvin in years past. That just felt like something I should’ve noticed when I grew up seeing him around with greater frequency. So I asked my mom about it, and she confirmed that not only had Irvin had that glass eye for as long as she’d known him, but that he was the originator of her oft-repeated line, “It’s all fun and games until somebody gets their eye poked out.”

It’s the kind of thing my mom would say as a cautionary admonition to my sister and me when our play antics would escalate to involving pseudo-hazardous materials like sticks. In hindsight, I don’t know how I ever missed the attribution for this darkly funny talking point. Like, of course my mom filched that one from the guy with the glass eye.

What’s interesting to me about that in hindsight is that in the same way that the basic info about the frogs on Whidbey made me more curious about other mysteries of their behavior, more questions occur to me now as an adult knowing that Irvin lost an eye at some point in his life. For example, my mom seems to recall that the bordertown closest to where Irvin grew up is Farmington, New Mexico. From reading a book called Red Nation Rising recently and keeping up with some conversations the authors have had around its release (like this one), I know that Farmington can be fairly described as a bastion of casual, vigilante, and police-sanctioned violence against Native people. In fact, an April 1974 murder of three Navajo men — Benjamin Benally, John Harvey, and David Ignacio — by three white teens in Farmington is referenced multiple times in Red Nation Rising as the Chokecherry Massacre.

Just knowing that much about Farmington has made me wonder if the long tradition of bordertown violence had anything to do with why Irvin has a glass eye. Now, I don’t think it’s imperative that I know something as specific as how, when, or where somebody got their eye poked out. But I do think there is something to consulting the stories that are collective and more widely known as a way of approximating or at least empathetically imagining a person’s story in a way that we may not otherwise have access to. The result may be something we’d have to classify as apocryphal. But as I’ve learned, sometimes the apocryphal turns out to resemble or fully match what really happened.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the information available in the official written record is useless. I just think the wisdom that’s passed down, but not necessarily written down, is of equal value. And I think we need both ways of knowing to help us pool our wisdom as comrades and do our level-best to not fuck up this weird terrestrial existence the cosmic lottery has given us a shot at. That prospect certainly makes me want to listen more closely, inquire with more patience, and embrace the apocryphal in our midst.

---

For any folks interested in the Red Nation Rising book I referenced or any other books from PM Press (I promise there are tons of good ones — it’s like porn for Marxists), you can use the coupon code SOLIDARITY at checkout for 40% off your entire purchase. And if the sticker that came with my recent order can be trusted, you may be able to get an additional 25% off with coupon code STICK25. Happy reading, comrades!

This month’s feature image: Fractured Highway 287 near Hebgen Lake, 1959. Photo by Roger Burnham Colton via U.S. Geological Survey.