I have a polished shard of abalone shell I’ve carried around for almost 50 years — in my pockets, on my windowsills, and even, sometimes, in my mouth. It’s the first thing I ever received in exchange for writing a poem, and now it’s a talisman I hold close to remind myself that I can do this — I can earn a life — by being a writer.
I first met this shard — and its shaper — at a Rainbow Family encampment at Terwilliger Hot Springs near Blue River, Oregon, in the summer of 1975. I was 18, my brother Walter had killed himself that spring, and I was hitching my way through the country, trying not to shatter into splinters while I fulfilled a childhood dream of adventure. Terwilliger felt like a place where I could fall down for a while without falling apart.
The geothermal springs at Terwilliger are perched beside Cougar Reservoir in Willamette National Forest. Nowadays, the quarter-mile hike to the pools from the forest road features a fee station, signs, guardrails and wooden bridges over narrow canyons. But back then, the way was unmarked, free — and titillatingly treacherous. The single-file path had been carved into steep hillsides by millennia of clambering mammals and all manner of soak-seekers. At canyons, employing circus performer-style balance on a giant fallen fir tree was often the easiest way to get across. The forest hadn’t seen a fire in decades, and old-growth Douglas firs towered over everything, hushing the thud of each footstep on the forest floor. The only sign of institutional civilization I witnessed during my two weeks there was a fully dressed ranger yukking it up with a circle of naked hippies. There was also a social worker from Eugene who visited the encampment once a month to sign people up for food stamps.
Terwilliger felt like a place where I could fall down for a while without falling apart.
Closer to the springs, wisps of sulfur-scented steam meandered into the forest canopy. Four or five pools of water boiled by the earth’s core were dug into the hillside, one spilling into the next, so that each successive pool was slightly cooler than the one above it. When I first laid eyes on the pools, they looked like steps made of smoky mirrors. Farther down the hill, I could see the spruce-blue water of the lagoon glimmering between tree trunks and hear Rider Creek waterfall soughing into it. In a clearing just steps away from the springs, tents and lean-tos made of tarps nestled like hobbit homes on the rare swaths of flat earth.
For a few days, an abalone jeweler was camped there. Every morning, he displayed his creations on a black velvet cloth in front of his tent. Even though I’d never seen the point in wearing stones around my neck and even though I was intimidated by the jeweler’s glossy turquoise eyes, I found myself kneeling beside his display, ogling his necklaces. The polished shards, with their pearly ripples of pink, lime green and royal blue silk, made my mouth water. I had the distinct urge to pop one into my mouth.
There was one piece of abalone I kept coming back to. It was shaped like the hindwing of a butterfly, the pearly ripples its scales. A hindwing is about all I believed I had back then — not enough to fly into adulthood with, but maybe something to build up from.
I wanted to travel as light as possible, and the idea of wearing jewelry felt like running a marathon with a purse. Besides, I had no money to speak of. I couldn’t explain it to myself, but I really wanted that necklace.
I asked him how much it was.
“I don’t know. $10? Or do you have anything to trade?”
I shook my head. Why hadn’t I ever learned how to make things with my hands, things you could wear or play or use to get by on?
Then I remembered. For years, I had been using my hands — to write. I still spent most of my time stumbling around on the page, but I loved it enough to think I was a poet.
“Would you take a poem for this necklace?”
He furrowed his brows. “A poem?”
“Yeah. Custom-made, just for you.”
He took a hit from his hand-rolled cigarette and sent a smoke ring over the canyon. “I don’t know, sister. I put a lot of work into making these things. I don’t think a little poem is gonna do it for me.”
I flushed. “Wait a minute, man. It’s not just a ‘little poem.’ I put a lot of work into it, too.”
He studied me with a glimmer of suppressed laughter in his eyes, as if this was a joke I hadn’t finished telling. Then he unfolded the story of what it took to hunt for each abalone shard. How he had to climb cliffs all along the California coast, spending from dawn to dusk in the cold wind and fog, searching for anything from tiny shards to whole shells. How scratched and bruised he got, how he risked breaking bones and maybe even losing his life. And how it took hours to sand the sharp edges off each shard and shape it into something somebody could wear.
How his fingers ached and burned long before the work was done. How could a poem possibly pay him for all that danger and sacrifice?
He had me on the physical stuff, but I was beyond material logic. After all, I was a poet, wasn’t I? I told him how it was to write a poem. How it could take days to hunt for just one word. How I usually ended up crawling around in the dark for a while before I found what I was really trying to say, or before it found me. How I had to find the guts to be brutally honest, to dig around in the bruises in my mind till I discovered what was true. How every poem started out rough and needed to be sanded down, how that could take weeks or months. How even though I didn’t usually do it out in the wind or fog, it required blood, sweat and tears, just the same.
I had to find the guts to be brutally honest, to dig around in the bruises in my mind till I discovered what was true.
I fondled the necklace. “Look. It’s so cool that you make a living hunting for abalone shells. I could definitely make a poem out of that.”
He looked at me for what felt like eons, his eyebrows still furrowed. “All right, sister,” he finally said. “Your poem for that necklace.”
I was stunned. I was so fired up to fight for poetry, I didn’t want to stop. My fingers trembled when I wrote down his address. We shook hands as I promised that his poem would be in his general delivery slot by summer’s end.
For the rest of the day, I kept stroking the shard of abalone that hung just below my clavicle. Every time I touched it, I felt like an empty pouch that had just bagged its first coin.
Even now, all these years later, holding it gives me that same buzz.
Katie Daley has performed her work across North America on radio shows, riverbanks, street corners and national stages. Her chapbook, Any Closer to Home (Finishing Line Press), was released in November. Visit her online at www.katiedaley.com.
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This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Crawling around in the dark.
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