Adrienne Ross
The Lady Medea
The van appeared on the side road between Aurora
Avenue and Green Lake Way, remaining through February,
March, the first weeks of April. It was white, squat
and grime-streaked from past roads, bedecked with
parking tickets, its thick tread tires immobile amid
cobble and conifer twigs, with eight-inch black
letters painted above dented front fenders: The Lady
Medea.An old story, bloodier than most Greek myths, of
an adventurer named Jason and his spurned wife Medea,
of homes lost, revenge and journeys without end now
parked under boughs of cedars and spruces amid Honda
Civics, Sport Outbacks, Saturns, Celicas, the
occasional Porsche. Dying is a wild night, wrote
Emily Dickinson, and a new road.
One day, exhausted from the rut of weeks spent in
hours, days, nights in my home office, writing grants
for children's museums, homeless shelters, modern
dance companies, and water trusts to the Gates
Foundation, the Medina Foundation, the Seattle
Foundation, the Fish America Foundation, I looked
through The Lady Medea's front window. A tiki torch
lay stretched across the dusty dashboard. On the front
seats were scattered playing cards with the Joker and
King of Diamonds face up, crushed crimson Coke cans,
blue jeans, and a brown canvass shoved into the
passenger side wheel well. In the rear compartment
was a mattress covered by a dark blanket, a wooden
apple crate, a box of Manischewitz shabbos candles, a
3-flame pagan candelabra, and white plastic bags
crammed with clothes, papers, rubbish. Jammed by the
stick shift was The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson,
more crumpled and well thumbed than my own copy.
I sympathized with dilemma of The Lady Medea's
captain. Do I take the endless road, like Medea? Or do
I stay home, like Dickinson? Both are alluring.
Neither are a panacea for all my heart's desires. Yet
two more unlikely travel companions than Medea and
Emily Dickinson would be hard to imagine, much less
find in the same cramped and dirty van.
Medea's passions crashed against the world;
Dickinson's crumbled before it. When Jason captained
the Argo to Colchis and demanded the Golden Fleece, he
soon realized that victory required love, and promised
marriage to Medea, a sorceress and the King's daughter
who had fallen in love with the adventurer. With her
spells fire-breathing bulls were cowed, armed men
fought each other, and the sleepless dragon guarding
the Golden Fleece slipped into slumber. Jason grabbed
his prize and fled with Medea.
Medea and Jason journeyed past the legendary Scylla,
Charybdis and island of the Sirens, past Crete and to
Iolcos until they and their children found refuge in
Corinth. Dickinson spent less than a year at Mount
Holyoke Female Seminary, enough to make her return
home for nearly the rest of her life. Rejected by
Jason, Medea killed his new bride and father-in-law,
and then killed her and Jason's children before
fleeing in a chariot drawn by winged dragons.
Rejected as a poet by literary critic and life-long
correspondent Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson
accepted her "BareFoot-Rank" as a poet who would never
be known in her lifetime. Medea gave up home and the
known world. Her life became murder and recurring
flight. Dickinson's home was the known world. Her
life was white dresses and reclusion. Medea grieved
for her children. Dickinson wrote on scrap paper, the
torn remains of envelopes, the backs of recipes,
whatever daily detritus was spacious enough to hold
the importance of clover, bees, and revery, publishing
some 10 poems anonymously in her lifetime and
circulating others in letters to family and friends,
and after her death leaving nearly 1,800 poems and
verse fragments, most tied into neat bundles,
abandoned to the slightest, slimmest chances that an
unknown yet kindly reader might discover and cherish
them.
Dickinson abandoned her inspiration to the cracks and
wedges of daily, ordinary life.
But by the time I looked through The Lady Medea's
windows, the daily and the ordinary had become the
same worn jeans and Rockport walking shoes, the same
2.5 mile lake trail, the same $10,000 and $20,000 and
$100,000 grants, the same calico cat crying for
kibble, the same tuna and mayonnaise and stiff hunks
of once fresh potato bread in the back of the
refrigerator, the same white cardboard buckets of
brittle Jasmine rice and tofu with black mushrooms,
and Qwest and City Light bills tacked next to photos
of long distant places and friends. I couldn't help
but wonder if my car had enough gas to hit the road
for points unknown. When all you know is all you
know, nothing more or less than that, what is there to
do but what Dickinson says: Good-bye to the Life I
used to live - / And the World I used to know - / And
kiss the Hills for me, just once - / Then - I am
ready to go!
Dickinson was arguably referring to death, but there
are less final ways of fleeing a mundane life for one
more mysterious. For there's a time for home and a
time for the road, and laboring in one too long only
births the other.
I've hit the road before, traveling endless highways
under truly unending skies, wheels turning 80 mph as I
crossed the Mississippi River in a caffeine induced
haze, or shifted gears coming out of the Eisenhower
Tunnel to plummet 100 miles per hour after traversing
the Continental Divide, or navigated the California
coastline to the Pacific Northwest's rain and fog.
Traveling alongside me were Buick Skylarks, Honda
Civics, Dodge Darts passed from grandmother to
grandchild, blue Chevy pick-up trucks, Saabs, Subarus,
Cutlass Sierras, front wheel or rear wheel or four
wheel drives churning over what used to be Indian foot
trails, Viking outposts, Conquistador tracks, wagon
train ruts. Like myself and, I believe, like The
Lady Medea's captain, most of us were searching for a
greater freedom than what could be imagined in the
same old home, the same old life. That was my first
road trip, taken a few months before my 30th birthday
and a few months after I realized I was about to spend
my life in the same state where I had been born, amid
friends who swore they knew everything about me, a
neat career path and a shark-jawed complacency looming
ahead. Another time I sojourned across the Pacific
Ocean when illness led to a rambling, bittersweet
recovery begun by wandering dusty tracks and growing
fruit in other people's gardens. And before that had
been the inner and outer peregrinations taken along
well-worn Himalayan trails.
I can't say I've traveled as much or was well as I
could have, but I remember the longing for the vision
of the better life, the better self that was to burst
before my eyes once being away from the all-too-well-known
world of home burned the cataracts off my inner sight.
But I also remember the exhaustion of trudging past
strangers down a cobblestone Paris street with 23
pounds on my back after a day and a half without
sleep. I remember, too, discovering the breath-taking
beauty of bison and antelope painted on Dordogne cave
walls by artists dead 30,000 years or longer. I
remember the studied isolation of strangers shoved
eight to a room in an Auckland hostel, all eyes blank
to mile-smelly panties being sorted on the linoleum.
I remember the warmth of friendship that lasted a
night discussing international politics in an Abel
Tasman yurt before morning separated us to American,
English, Belgium winds. I remember the wire-bound or
black sewn pocket size or full size notebooks filled
with smudged pencil or ink faded words bouncing
between thin blue lines from writing while walking,
talking, flying, sailing but mainly waiting. Whatever
wisdom there was along the roads of all those miles
would have to wait days, months, years until I was
home, and only then by writing explore it all again, my steps
less stumbling as the true destination emerged.
The Lady Medea can travel endless roads offering
endless promises of a new place, a new life, a new
hope. True journeys have an arrhythmic heartbeat.
The hero leaves, gains the prize or enlightenment, and
returns to where he began, or where she finds a new
place, a new home. Neither Medea nor Jason ever left
the road. The journey's end for Medea was endless
flight; for Jason, it was death from the Argo's
falling timbers. The Golden Fleece disappeared from
history and story. Dickinson wasted few words on the
tale: Finding is the first Act, / The second, loss /
Third, Expedition for / The "Golden Fleece" / Fourth,
no Discovery / Fifth, no Crew / Finally, no Golden
Fleece / Jason sham too.
And The Lady Medea's captain ? Perhaps he ran out of
money for gas or to repair the transmission. Perhaps
he ran out of heart, or fell in love, or meant to
return one day while The Lady Medea sat parked beside
stone road posts, unnoticed by couples roller-blading
past or grandfather's fishing for carp, the white
parking tickets eventually replaced by a bright orange
Notice of Intent to tow.
And myself? There's a middle road between Medea's
flight and Dickinson's domesticity. It leads to the
true promise of all those miles: a chosen home with an
open door. Home and the road are like a pendulum
swinging back and forth along the same journey. We
all have lives within lives within our too short life,
like the Russian dolls nestled inside each other, and
every open road, for me at least, has always lead to a
new home. I could drive, circle, backtrack all I
wanted. Sooner or later I always end up someplace in
particular, where there's this corner with its
Ponderosa pines and #358 bus stop, this coffee house
of klezmer music and unfinished novels, this apartment
where sunlight streams through Strassbourg crystals to
make rainbows on the black and white checkered floor,
this backyard where roses and strawberries grow, this
bearded lover and not another, this beautiful and
imperfect life, the only one I've got.
©2006 by Adrienne Ross
