Stina's Trip » Austin

North Carolina and her girlish charms

admin — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:10:21 +0000

(WAYNESVILLE, NC) — The longer I stay in Western North Carolina, the more its beauty tries to seduce me. Its small, country roads bat their eyelashes at me, and those pristine, babbling streams give me a come-hither look. On my ride to work, I see pastures and cornfields and lush mountainsides licked with fog. Constantly, I am lulled into a major sense of awe and a minor feeling of security.

It’s almost enough to make me forget that I’m pissed.

Of course, this isn’t a constant feeling. My anger hides in the back of my mind and waits until I see a Confederate flag or the newest lineup of terrible, popular movies at the local theater to spring into action. Then, the floodgates open. I retreat into my head. Maybe I call my dad or a friend. If I’m in the car, I turn up my music, sing along and pretend I’m somewhere else. The other day, this very feeling prompted me to buy a bumper sticker that reads “What Would Morrissey Do?” Even if I don’t say a word, in my mind I am complaining and complaining and complaining. In these moments, I do believe that I am an asshole.

I tell you all this because I’m trying to change it. People here are friendly and warm, and they deserve better. I can say my discontent is due to my low pay or my lack of understanding of the genteel South that surrounds me. But that might just be crap. I think I’m still simply having a hard time settling into normal life. I miss my trip. I miss being outside of everyday culture and being able to leave a town whenever I want. I know this sounds like complaining, and I sincerely invite anyone who wants to slap some sense into me to do just that. But my goal here is not to complain. I swear. It’s to ask a question.

How am I going to make my life work? How does anybody?

I want to commit to whatever that answer is. If it means staying here a long while, settling into the down-home atmosphere and writing stuff for the paper I can be proud of, OK. If it means going back to California and waiting tables until I figure out who I want to be, bring it on. If I let go of my fear and worry, I can actually get excited for a moment. Something is going to change soon. It has to. And it has to be new and invigorating enough to get my attention.

For now, here are some pictures of Austin, ones I took months ago. Maybe it seems random, but for some reason the segue works in my head. This is my favorite street in the city, a wooded, residential lane that runs parallel to South Congress Avenue. Even on the days I was terrible at my job, the beauty of this little area always woke me up. This street somehow made me feel like an artist.

OK, time once again to remind myself of the possibility in the world.

You are a part of me

admin — Sun, 02 May 2010 18:18:35 +0000

(AUSTIN, Texas) — Hello again, and thank you for reading. I just got off the phone with my father, and he stated in a way that rang a little too true that I am in a morass. Part of me hates those words because they sound so final, and part of me nods my head at their appropriateness. Here is what I know: I am lightly settled into Austin. I am a waitress and host at a restaurant here, as well as a freelance writer and photographer, just getting started. And I don’t want to complain. And I don’t want to be angry and pine for what isn’t. But I do want a dream. The absence of one not only makes me feel lame but a little crazy.

In many ways, I’m glad to be here. I like having a slight understanding of a city and the time to actually make some friends, see some movies and bake things. There are opulent movie theater brewpubs here, for God’s sake. I mean, that’s amazing. In Austin, the food is great, the cost of living is reasonable, and the video store I frequent is far hipper than I could have ever hoped for. But still, every time I see a large map of the US (as I did recently at the visitor’s center in nearby Wimberley), I get downright hungry and antsy, and I yearn to travel. When I look at the colored blocks of Utah and New Mexico and imagine those wide-open spaces, I have to fight to stay present in my Texas world. I don’t want my traveling to become a neurosis, something I can’t control, but God, it only takes one whiff of drama in this town to make me want to hit the road. I have my job, and I have my younger brother staying indefinitely with me (he’s recently out of college and is looking for something as I am — but this is another story). Both these experiences are absolutely amazing and rare and feel like huge opportunities. They also, at times, make me want to hitch up my trailer and drive west. Alone.

So, in lieu of having some great bit of philosophy for you or a beautiful game plan to share, I’m going to focus this posting on something beyond what’s going on with me right now. This happened a few months in the past, but for whatever reason I couldn’t bring myself to write about it until now. It’s the story of my grandmother’s funeral.

It’s really not a sad tale, I promise. It’s more about discovery than anything else.

I didn’t know her that well, but I have this sense that she affected me more than I understand and will continue to do so. Her name was Vi Klasseen, and she was 88, and she was a world traveler who had lived in Redding, Calif. for decades. Everyone expected her to live much longer, for her death to be a drawn-out and gradual process, as it had been with her mother, who died at nearly 100. But she surprised us. She fell and broke her hip and sometime during her convalescence, she just went. She had already requested not to be put onto one of those breathing machines, and so she wasn’t, and she died before my grandfather or any of her five kids could see her one last time. This happened a few months ago, and I didn’t write a bit of it down then but instead seared certain moments into memory as best I could. I can’t decide whether this story is complex or simple. While I was visiting California, I kind of felt like I understood things a bit, but maybe that was just wishful thinking. Or maybe I was in that comfortable place I often am where I know just enough to know that there is so much I won’t ever understand.

Yeah, let’s go with that.

Here is some of what I do know. My grandmother was an impressive lady. From what I’ve heard, she was at least six feet tall in her heyday and had feet that were size 12 or more. She had degrees from UCLA and Northwestern. When she was my age, she bicycled around post-war Europe and fell in love with France, to which she would return many times. Not long after Europe, she met my grandfather at an intentional farm begun in part by conscientious objectors to World War II (Grandpa Ted had a been a soldier during the war, but I think the two of them became pacifists). They were engaged in a matter of weeks. When Grandma died, they had been married 62 years. Before Grandma’s death, I honestly did not know that much about her, just a bit more than was obvious. She traveled; she had taught kindergarten; she was active in the Methodist Church. She lived in a dirt house that she and Grandpa had built themselves. She was generally an out-there person, and yet we never got too close. That’s the beginning of the part of her I don’t understand. There was always some barrier between us, and it makes me sad. She used to send me money along with letters that were sprawling and personal but never really warm. I should have written back more than I did. In my guilt, I had actually knitted her a hat recently. I had been meaning to send it but hadn’t yet. As soon as I heard she had died, that’s the first thing I thought about. That did and does make me sick to my heart. As my mom told me about Grandma Vi over the phone, the only words running through my head were “I’m such an asshole.”

I think that’s one of the big reasons I went to the funeral, to make up for something I wish I could have given her when she was alive. I didn’t have the money or time, and I was the only one in the family traveling from outside the state. I had already seen all these folks at my grandparents’ wedding anniversary a few months before, and both my parents were telling me that I didn’t have to come back again. But my uncle spotted me the plane ticket, and my work granted me the days, and I did feel that strong sense of duty or guilt or whatever you want to call it. So about a week after Grandma Vi passed, I boarded a plane to San Francisco.

It was a tiny catharsis toward the middle of the flight that let me know I was doing exactly what I should be. A few hundred miles out of Austin, I woke up and looked out my window onto a brown, barren, snow-dusted world. It was covered with ripples of mountains and canyons and completely free of houses or roads. It didn’t look familiar at all, but it seemed friendly to me, and I instantly felt protective over it. I had feeling it was Utah, and so I asked the flight attendant, and she confirmed this. I don’t know how long I sat there looking at my old home, my smiling and sleepy face pressed up against the glass. It was one of those pauses in time when everything felt connected.

An hour later, I was walking out of the terminal at SFO when I heard a woman calling my name. I looked to my right and saw Jen Sadoff, a friend of mine from Moab. She had just arrived in California to pick up her father who was moving back to Utah with her. I was dumbstruck. I hadn’t seen her in nearly a year, and she looked exactly the same — a bright, friendly burst of Utah sticking out against my old life of California. We talked a bit and made tentative plans to get together while we were both in town. This never materialized, but that’s fine. Seeing her was enough to make the beginning of this trip feel like magic.

Not long after, I was in the back of my family’s old Toyota camper, and we were driving north. My mom was at the wheel, and my father and I were sitting at the dinette set and drinking beer as we watched videos of Centennial, a 1970s mini-series based on an old James A. Michener book. These movies were an integral part of my growing up, and something about seeing Lynn Redgrave and Timothy Dalton in their prime always makes me optimistic. Anyway, the five-hour drive was goofy and near perfect — except for the absence of my brother, who was still motorcycling around Mexico by himself then. At the funeral the next day, no one would seem miffed about this, however. In fact, the general consensus would be that he was respecting Vi’s memory by being on the road. People would leave it at that.

••••••••••

Everything felt new and strange in Redding. The grandparents’ dirt house and their intricate maze of gardens perched on their hillside were quiet or lacking in vibrancy or something. Without my grandmother as the rudder, the family seemed scattered. For years, Grandma Vi hadn’t been very physically active and had been losing her hearing. She was not, to say the least, the spryest person, but she was someone around which we all revolved. Now, there was no one filling that role. I hung out with Grandpa and aunts and uncles, and everything felt so final. When would so many people from this family get together again? I couldn’t imagine then, but I can now, and I don’t want to think about it.

In contrast to this solemnity, the funeral was amazing. Every pew was packed, and all kinds of people were there, from former teachers to former farmers to Redding police chiefs, past and present. In front of me was proof of how much this woman had affected this town, and I was crying before the minister even started. When he did, his presentation was fair and sweet, a mixture of adoring and real. He did a little prayer in French, and I strained to follow along. Led by my aunts, there was singing, a lot of it, as would have been my grandmother’s want. At one point, the women joked that they had originally wanted to make the entire funeral a series of hymns, and I believe it. Strong singing is something the Klasseens hold dear.

Then there were the remembrances. A microphone was passed around and my aunts talked, their words a mixture of grief, pride and humor. Aunt Joanna did a pitch-perfect impersonation of Grandma chiding Grandpa, and crowd’s laughter was seasoned with personal experience. Then some other people spoke, people I didn’t know. And then, instinctually, I knew it was my turn. I hadn’t really planned on it and didn’t know what to say, but I stood up and grabbed the mic and looked out over the very full church. Soon, a hand belonging to an elderly lady I barely knew was touching my arm tenderly. This was because I wasn’t talking. I was just standing there, silently sobbing, unable to utter anything.

This pause was somewhere between 30 seconds and a year, depending upon your perspective. Eventually, something changed, though I don’t know what, and I was able to talk again. My words came out in fits first and quickly became smoother. I didn’t touch heavily on how much I regretted or how desperately I wished my relationship with my grandmother had been deeper. Instead, as I collected myself, I told the group how incredibly supportive she had been to me, her first grandchild. As this was all rolling out, I realized how true it really was. She had always been there for me, in her way.

“I ended up working for newspapers in the middle of nowhere,” I told the crowd. “And instead of asking ‘Why are you doing that?’ — she would subscribe.”

That got a kind laugh. In my relief, I decided to only talk for another 30 seconds. In the wake of this, my father got on his feet and started crying as well. He praised the job my grandparents had done raising their kids and said through sobs that from the moment he met my mother, he knew he could trust her. I had no idea how all this was received by everyone at the time, but later, as the audience dined on finger foods together, I heard that people thought my father and I had brought a lot of heart to the ceremony. Strangers kept coming up to me and thanking me for my words. I felt like someone I hadn’t ever really felt like before, like my grandmother’s granddaughter. I have always felt a bit disconnected from my mother’s family, but there I was, one of them. And I was proud of it.

••••••••••

So now it’s a few months later, and I want that feeling back. I know that’s part of why I’m writing this. As I my trailer sits, settling into the soil of this friendly, out-the-way RV park, I worry that my sense of wonder and adventure is ebbing away, dissipating into all the traffic and people and cool neon signs of Austin. I can’t quite explain it, but something about being in California, in the presence of my family and my grandmother’s memory, was a reminder that it doesn’t have to be this way. Looking back, I feel this collective force giving me permission to take risks. It’s permission to be different, to not settle down, to make art. It’s permission get the hell out of Austin if I want. What’s surprising is how easily I forget these things sometimes.

OK, I’m awake. Now all I need is a dream.

I am here

admin — Sat, 01 May 2010 19:09:08 +0000

(AUSTIN, Texas) — I can’t run away from that part of me that needs to create. Why do I want to?

I don’t know. This is what I’m contemplating as I sit alone in my trailer, my door open, the day outside getting warmer and sunnier by the minute. I shouldn’t even be here right now, hanging out, but there was a water leak at my restaurant, and instead of staying around with the crew and trying to fit in, I came home. Now, the water is fixed, and I’m out a day’s wages, and I’m wondering why it takes an act of God for me to allow myself some time to write. It has been months, and I’m so sorry for the delay. Part of me, I think, wanted to jump whole-heartedly into the restaurant world with no distractions. Part of me was still just embarrassed that I had to stop traveling so abruptly. Anyway, it feels like it should be easier than this, this writing thing. It feels like I should have more drive and discipline and ability to escape into words whenever I need. But maybe that’s what makes my writing matter so much to me in the first place — it’s so damn hard for me to do it.

I could explain, but even I don’t understand it. The threat of writing or not sits on my chest constantly, making me feel like an asshole or a rock star depending upon my recent level of production. I am a writer. I am, and it’s pretty much all I want to be. Perhaps that’s why it feels so heavy whenever I press my fingers into these keys.

Anyway, thank you for waiting this out and reading this. It means the world to me. I will write at least one more posting today, hopefully even put up some pictures. But I’ll leave this little flag out first. This is a promise of more to come.

God, even writing that little bit felt like medicine. I really am out of practice. Talk to you folks again in a few hours.

— Stina.

What can I get y’all?

admin — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:50:48 +0000

(AUSTIN, Texas) — Turkey Reuben. Voodoo Blue Cheese Burger. Primadora Omelet. This is what has been on my mind during the month I haven’t been writing you.

I apologize for the long absence. It’s lame, I know, and I hope you haven’t lost patience with me. My world has simply been an exhausting series of surprises recently. I feel like creating monologues and short stories about my entry back into real, honest-to-God ordinary life, but I find I’m so deeply vested in it that I often forget I can. Right now I am a friendly host and a new and shaky waitress at a cool restaurant in south Austin. This has been my entire world for weeks, and I don’t mind. A large part of me wants to capture every nuance of my experiences right now — from the young, Berkeley-like atmosphere of South Congress Avenue to the intimidating and invigorating experience of working amongst so many young folks — and save it for later reflection. I am in a world of neon-lit signs and music and more boys with long sideburns and snappy cowboy shirts than I can shake a stick at. Austin may be a city of 800,000, but if feels more like a hyper-cool and congested big town. It is, at once, creative, ordinary, edgy and very Americana. Innovations like movie theater brew pubs and Airstreams that offer everything from Humane Society pets to tacos are the norm, but so are annoyances like poor wages and apocalyptic traffic. I don’t really know this city, but I respect it, and I feel this is a special time for me. A pause between the notes, I think. I have this hope that in my future I’ll look back on my Austin life and get nostalgic. First though, I know I have to be here and try to live it well.

And that seems like the hard part.

I’m reminded of an article I wrote a couple of years ago for a newspaper in Colorado. It was about a girl with severe cerebral palsy who was so disabled that she couldn’t talk or run and could hardly read. But she could paint and draw, and every moment she was in an art class I observed, she looked delighted. As I spoke with her teacher, a kindly woman, the instructor kept bringing up the same point, using similar words over and over:

Being successful at something is wonderful.

How basic, how true. Perhaps it seems like a cheap shot to compare my desire to go through a day at my restaurant without spilling water on myself with the plight of a special needs girl who simply wants to express her creativity, but maybe not. We’re all just human, just doing the best we can. Doing well feels good and doing poorly feels bad, and there’s no amount of philosophizing that can change that. For years, I have been a newspaper writer and photographer, and I have been good at what I do. That sense of accomplishment and confidence about my skills has been a huge part of my personality. That just ain’t so in the restaurant world. Tomorrow, I’m going to do a five-hour shift of waiting tables (my third such shift), and if I do well, my job will be safe and my mood will be light, and the world will feel possible. If I’m terrible, I just don’t know what will happen. Things are still quite probationary with me and this job, and the need to prove myself hangs in the air as thick as Crisco in that place. Or maybe that’s just my take on it.

Ah, but if things aren’t sometimes uncertain, and you never feel crazy and and question everything about your world and feel as though failure is imminent, is anything really worth it? Does the good stuff even matter?

I must keep those kinds of questions in mind as I fumble through learning to be a waitress again. I dearly want to succeed. It’s strange, I’m thinking now, that if I took my customers one by one and interviewed them and snapped their photos and wrote little profile pieces on their lives, that I would succeed at telling some of the truth of their existences probably more often than not. But as their waitress, when all I need to do is get their eggs to them on time, the odds aren’t so much in my favor.

Yes, Friday shall be interesting.

A place called Apalach

admin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:00:12 +0000

(AUSTIN, Texas) — I don’t know what I want.

I can write that and know I’m in no way embellishing my feelings or being overly simplistic. Up until this point, all my choices have felt fairly straight-forward to me, even if they didn’t look that way to the outside world. Go to college, graduate. Move to Portland, move away. Live in New Mexico, live in Colorado. Move to Utah and love it. Travel across the country alone in a trailer. And now, and now…Austin? I just don’t know. I kind of hate it here, and I kind of love it, and I’m far too intrigued to leave. Right now, I’m sitting in a hip, dimly-lit café/bar/cool kid hangout somewhere in the city, and 25-ish folks are laughing and drinking and sitting in front of their laptops all around me. The music in here continually shifts from obscure indie rock to old school country and more, and the menu ranges from vegan cake to meaty Frito pie. I am intrigued, and I am repelled, and I can’t help but want more. This town is like a cut on my gums — it kind of hurts, and it kind of feels good, and no matter what, I can’t stop touching it.

A million things have changed since I last wrote, and I am now gainfully employed, thank God. I’m a hostess at Magnolia Café South, a hip Austin institution on South Congress Avenue. I feel luckier than I can say, though the work is hard and fast and definitely not my strong suit. A little Austin existence is shaping up around me, and I even have a couple of friends, I think. I’m shocked and pleased. The world feels wide open.

In honor of all this and of my trip (which I do not consider over yet), I’m beginning a series of photo essays of places I’ve been to recently but for some reason didn’t get around to posting about. I don’t know where I’m going right now, but I know where I have been, and hopefully showing some of these images will bring some clarity about all of this. Even if it doesn’t, the photographer part of me is still itching to show off some of my stuff.

This first set is of Apalachicola, Florida, a little town I visited not so long ago. The reason I wanted to start with it is that I seriously considered moving there. I envisioned doing there exactly what I’m doing here (getting a job and a place to stay, etc.), though I understand now how dramatically impractical that would have been. Sure, it was a nice town, a fine town, with wide streets and old buildings and a river and a bay nearby. But there was no way to make a living there, not for me. I would have been out of my element so completely that disaster would have pretty much been my only option. It scares me now how willing I was to overlook that.

But I was romanced by the town, and I have little barrier against this specific kind of seduction. I am so susceptible to quirky, friendly, scrappy communities that it’s not even funny. I’m always looking for the next cute, strange place to take me in. This town had those qualities in spades. Within a matter of hours of my arrival, I had met a large handful of friendly, cool people, from my host, Emily, to Tamara, the boisterous and welcoming Latin lady of a certain age who owns a coffee shop in town. It all felt right in some strange way. My second day, I went out to look for a potential job and met more folks — store owners, mostly, all of whom seemed open and happy to help however they could. Yet no one had a job for me. It didn’t matter, though, because for some reason I was determined, locked-in on the idea that this was going to work, as though the shear power of me arbitrarily deciding to move somewhere would spin the universe in my favor.

I guess, in a way it did, but not in the fashion I wanted at the time.

Downtown Apalach, as I heard it called.

I’m not sure when the shift happened exactly, but when it did, it was dramatic. It could have been that drunken party I attended on someone’s boat that did it, but I don’t know. Apalachicola, a water-surrounded town of a 3,000 and change, seemed so sweet and warm for two or so days, and then, suddenly, it was stifling. It’s not that anyone in it had changed. Emily, a waitress and artist about my age, was still low-key and friendly and casual in that specific way that people in the restaurant culture can be. Tamara was still fiery and motherly and happy to have me park my trailer outside her home. But I just couldn’t anymore. A veil had been lifted, and I suddenly found myself relieved to be moving on into the unknown. Before I left, I stopped by a yarn/book shop downtown and chatted with its owner, an earthy and soft-spoken woman a couple of decades older than I. I bought some variegated, pink yarn and told Dale my thought process and conclusion. She smiled and sighed and nodded in a way that let me know she understood. So many people, she told me, come to this town and have a great first weekend. They meet cool residents and have cool experiences and then up and buy a home here. It’s only after they move in that they realize what they had experienced during that first visit was as good as it gets.

Run-down old buildings like this are the kind of images I love — yet felt a need to escape after some time Apalachicola.

Now, I know that’s not always the case, and as does Dale. I’m not knocking this Florida hamlet, and neither was she. I just think, in that moment, we both understood that this was not the place for me. It was so lovely to have someone echo that feeling. As I drove off from Apalach, there was a cinematic amount of rain pouring down, and perhaps it would have been safer to wait it out. But I couldn’t. I had to get out of there. I don’t know when it has ever felt so good to hit the road. I don’t even remember the specifics of the scenery, just that it was very green and very wet, and I was one of the only vehicles around. I took Highway 98 an hour west to military-infused Panama City and while that town wasn’t much to write home about, it was a great relief. I knew I wasn’t going to move there, and that was enough to make my stay a joy.

I can’t believe that was less than two months ago. As I look back on this recent history, I’ll admit I’m a little jealous. What a joy it would be to still be mobile, to drive away whenever anything got rough. But that’s not how it is these days. Staying in one spot is all about accountability. Holding down jobs, keeping friends, knowing neighbors. When my Austin world is good, all of these weighty responsibilities seem appropriate and enjoyable. When my life here feels a little dark, those needs and relationships seem surprisingly difficult, and I yearn for the simplicity of the road.

No matter my mood, however, I try not to lose sight of something: I am damn lucky to be here. Austin may be easy to mock and congested as can be. It may be big and impersonal at times. Its idea of itself occasionally drives me crazy. But it is alive here. Events and art and opportunity are everywhere, and it still shocks me that I get to be so close to all this live music, good cinema and plentiful improv. No, this is not what I’m used to. It doesn’t have the comfort and warmth of the small towns I have loved, but it has other qualities are perhaps just as important. This is not a place to write off. Anyway, I feel I have to be malleable and able to exist in cities that are fast and competitive. I have to be able to be in a spot where I’m not considered special and important just for choosing it. Here, I am anonymous. And I kind of like that.

A shout out to my Moab friends. I saw this on the streets of Apalach.

The hope is that if I do return to the small town thing that I do so with a degree of power. I can’t simply retreat to the small-town world because I couldn’t hack it in the city. I want to move back because small towns feel right to me, and I think I understand them. I want to move back because I like the idea of an intimate, rural place being my destination. My future family, my possible chickens and my theoretical piece of land somewhere in the desert float through my mind just often enough to remind me of that.

Ah, I feel I’m just escaping into my head now, coming up with cerebral ideas of the future. I don’t really know what I want or where I’m going, and that isn’t going to be changed by a bunch of statements. So enough.

How about some pictures instead? Here are some more images of Apalachicola, the town that nearly had me. I wish everyone I met there the best, from afar.

Tamara in her coffee shop/gift store/gallery. It was nice and warm and colorful in there.

Emily, right before I left town.

LaVerne, a local store owner. She loved to talk and gave me all kinds of advice and anecdotes and directions. No job, though. In the end, it was most definitely better that way, however.

Sisters Lydia and Adelaide Perr. I met them at Tamara's as they rested for a day in the midst of an ambitious, cross-country bicycle trip. The original plan was to cycle from Charleston, S.C. to California then to Alaska, all the while raising money for the literacy charity Room to Read. In the weeks since this picture, they have actually gotten side-tracked in Colorado (thanks to intense weather, mostly). But their accomplishment of biking more than 1,000 miles is still amazing. You can read about their travels at their blog, http://nokeysrequired.com.

Looking through the I Ching, about which Tamara is passionate.

One of Tamara's many friends, hanging out at her shop.

Dad and daughter in Apalachicola.