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The Amazon Trail: Standing On My Own Two Feet

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In this month’s Amazon Trail, Lee Lynch talks about the way that, as she’s found a balance in life, her ability to keep her balance while walking around has begun to diminish.

Since childhood, I have been looking forward to growing old enough to know pretty much which end is up in life, to reaching Social Security age in order to write full-time, and to tackle mature subjects in my work. I find it strange that just when I’ve reached something like that balance, I’ve lost my relatively reliable physical balance.  

I’ve never been with a lover this long, and now I’ve pledged a permanence, called marriage, that I’ve learned to respect. Since the age of eighteen, I’ve never lived in one home this long. My recent stability has enabled me, I believe, to write more complex stories that feature more thoroughly developed characters and, because of my years of travel along the roads of lesbian culture, especially with my sweetheart, I can offer readers more varied and detailed settings. 

But I fall over. I traverse our home like a metal pinball looking to bump every target if only to score a jackpot of bruises. I adore my sweetheart, but when I go to hug her, or dance with her, it’s only, thank goodness, my still-quick reflexes that cover mild floundering. She doesn’t need to catch me yet, though I’m not too proud to take her hand when picking my way up or down rocks, driftwood, and slick sand to and from our wild beaches. It’s my sweetheart, after all, who’d be pushing my wheelchair and cleaning house should I break a leg, a hip, or my dizzy head.

I know it’s not just me. Strolling the beach yesterday with my sweetheart and our much-loved friend, the walker, the Pacific Ocean supine in its pacific glory, its ripples tipped with sunlight, my sweetheart tried to lead us to firmer ground, for easier trekking. The walker and I, both typically unsteady on our feet, missed our cue. We trod onward, bumping shoulders as one or the other of us teetered while the other tottered.

The walker laughed and said she often bird-watched with two other women, one of whom shares our balance problems. The third goes on ahead to escape the pinball effect. 

I’ve always had problems with balance, in every sense of the word.

Plantar fasciitis was diagnosed by a salesman at a Buster Brown shoe store when I was a little kid with painful arches. The stores used wondrous X-Ray Shoe-Fitting Machines (known as fluoroscopes in doctors’ offices), which were ultimately banned because of radiation leakage. After consulting the infernal machine, the salesman stuck instruments of torture called pediatric arch supports in my new shoes. I ditched them ASAP. 

I was athletic: running, tennis, fencing. The pain would disappear for a while, then come screaming back, benching me. Today, I wear orthotics designed with new-fangled CAD/CAM software, but, due to bilateral knee replacement surgery, I’m cautioned not to run, play tennis, or fence.

Most people who grow up gay are inevitably strangers to balanced lives. You’re proud and scared. You’d better learn to run. You’re out prowling, obsessed with seduction, or you seal yourself in your closet until you can’t breathe. You might reject your true nature to live a pretend life. Some of us can’t take the opposing choices we’re faced with, and exit entirely. Love too often cancels itself out because we’re apparently terrible at choosing partners who are good for us — until we find the one who leads us to solid ground.

I once tended to walk on the least stable sand emotionally. We counted last night and so far, have come up with at least eighteen moves I made in my life’s hike. Many of them were down to breakups or new loves. One to a death, another to moving to the groovy west. Wherever I went there’d be a therapist to help me recover my equilibrium, an acupuncturist to get my qi going again. 

My sweetheart and I try to find balance in our diets, but deep down we agree that means potatoes and ice cream. She abhors vegetables, but will cook some under duress. I seldom coerce her.

I’ve had vertigo, tinnitus and a panic disorder since I was a preschooler. All three come and go, and signal asymmetry of mind or body. Psychiatric disorders, including anxiety, can cause dizziness — which I never knew until researching this piece. I’ve managed to add hallux rigidus to my physical problems, meaning I can’t flex my big toes without pain. The docs want to fuse them. Back problems send misery into my legs, but I have no interest in robots with scalpels messing with my spine.

I’ve always wanted to outgrow the travails of youth. Now I have, and it turns out that the body wears out as the mind wises up. Where is the balance in that?

Copyright Lee Lynch 2021. Photo by Elaine Lynch.

The Amazon Trail: How To Write A Book

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In this month’s Amazon Trail, Lee Lynch takes us through the 15-year process of creating her new novel, encompassing everything from a cross-country love affair to a multigenerational LGBTQ chosen family.

I’m not giving away any secrets here. Not saying it’s simple or that anyone can do it if they send $25.00 to Post Office Box 1,2,3. Nope, it’s a personal journey and every story has a story. Here’s mine, about the writing of my newly released novel, Accidental Desperados.

This goes back to about 2007. I was living on the Oregon Coast, grateful to be renting a cottage on the property of the Pianist and the Handydyke. I was, and am, part of their lesbian family. I thought about that a lot, how gay people grow families of choice whose members nurture one another in minimal to large ways. I thought, wouldn’t it be cool, maybe even important, to write a multi-volume, intergenerational, lesbian family saga.

Earlier in my life I couldn’t get enough of this type of fiction: Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna series set in Canada, The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Family Moskat, but could I take on such an epic task? My books wouldn’t appear on The New York Times Bestseller list, but they’d be bursting with lesbians.

I said it wasn’t simple. Life itself butted in, as well as other books I needed to write. I heard from a reader; we began months of frequent correspondence. She lived in Tarpon Springs, Florida. I, never having been there, had referred to that city in a book, calling it a something like a tacky little town. My correspondent pretty much challenged me to visit and see Tarpon Springs for myself.

I accepted the challenge and by the time I left, my pen pal had become my sweetheart. We next got together at a conference, then in Oregon. We burned up the skies with our passion to be together. She had a good job in Florida. My job was portable. She flew to Oregon and we drove cross-country with my, now our, dog and a number of cats. Two years, I told everyone in Oregon. We’d move back to the west coast in two years.

The recession hit and two turned to five. By that time, we were living inland, ten minutes from my sweetheart’s job, in an unincorporated area called Dover. Unexpectedly, we had five years to explore rural central Florida, urban Tampa, storied areas like Ybor City, and to wander as far south as Naples and as far east as Miami. I could buy my sweetheart a fresh-off-the-fields strawberry milkshake at a roadside stand any time of year, or boiled peanuts from a farm stand, or real Key Lime Pie. My favorite places were what I call “old Florida” in Accidental Desperados.

I was born with the genes of a New England family, though, and the subtropical sun, the humidity, the omnipresent air-conditioning, were more than this pale white Northern body and respiratory system could take. We made the move back to Oregon. Where I proceeded to wax nostalgic for the nooks and crannies of old, old Florida settlements and the exotic habitat where, a two-minute walk from our house, we hung out with Sand Hill Cranes and Roseate Spoonbills.

I’d missed the Pacific Northwest so badly I hardly gave a thought to what I left behind, but I did want to make use of those years, that chunk of rich and unanticipated material. What if I incorporated my longing to write a lesbian family saga with the years in Florida?

What if lesbian general fiction writers followed our characters well beyond first romance into old age and fifty-year anniversaries? That’s not as rare as the dominant society, which never gives up on driving us into insecure shadows, has led us to think. Main characters would anchor the books while a lifetime of friendships became deep and permanent.  What if readers, with such stories in mind, and who were so inclined, recognized such a future for themselves?

I’d been heading in this direction, with my Morton River Valley Trilogy, which collected characters from others stories and novels I’d written. Ann McMan was on this path also, but back then I didn’t know her Jericho novels. By the way, her newest, Covenant, is as polished and engaging as any book you’re likely to read.

So here I was, back in my promised land, filling hundreds of index cards with memories of Florida, and beginning to imagine the characters who would live in a hot speck-on-a-road community, on a particular dirt sandy street I passed on my daily run to the post office for my remote job. The house, their family seat, migrated in from another non-town.

The title of the quartet and first book, Rainbow Gap, had been hanging around in my head because of the plethora of rainbows we saw in Florida. I’d wanted to do a four-book series ever since devouring Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant Trilogies were another inspiration. The advent of marriage equality, though it wouldn’t appear in the first books, had more than a little to do with my thought process.

Accidental Desperados, though also a standalone novel, is the second book in the Rainbow Gap quartet. In it, I get to introduce the “next” generation and follow their paths to the original group of gay people who are not much more than ten years older. That sounded about right for a lesbian generation which is by circumstance and opportunity accelerated from a biological generation.

And that’s how I wrote a book, then another, and am about four chapters into the third. In summary: to write a book, you need to live whatever your crazy life dishes up.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2021. Photo by Meritt Thomas on Unsplash.

The Amazon Trail: Old Stuff

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In this month’s Amazon Trail, Lee Lynch celebrates the joy of collecting all kinds of random objects, regardless of whether anyone else sees them as “collector’s items.”

I spend too much time and space collecting die-cast toy vehicles, especially Matchbox, a few Dinkys and other locally hard-to-find brands. I’m no expert, am not a vehicle fanatic, I drive a seventeen-year-old Toyota, but the allure of these tiny replicas of vans, utility trucks, and homely cars, many bunged up and from garage sales, most covered with months of dust, bring me a ridiculous amount of pleasure.

I love old stuff and old places. Nostalgia informs much of my work. My favorite school of art, photorealism, often portrays abandoned Esso gas stations, weathered clapboard houses, or bright-colored luncheonettes in the Bronx. Richard Estes and Ralph Goings capture Americana minutely. Among photographers, I can peruse books by David Plowden, Bernice Abbott, and William Eggleston for hours.

Jump to buttons. I don’t have a clue why buttons fascinate me. I’m far from a seamstress. But did you ever look at buttons, really look? The designs, especially from days of yore, can be intricate, unique, even genuine art. They sport an infinity of colors and sizes, signify rank, brand, and fashion styles. I have jars full of the things, but I’m pressed for time to let them cascade from my hands into treasure piles and may give them up. Some day.

Books, of course, from first editions of Vita Sackville-West, to an assortment of lesbian pulps, to John le Carré spy stories and the newest Ellen Hart mystery. The latter, we were shocked and honored to find, is dedicated to my sweetheart and myself.

Then there are the tiny cats. The bulk of that collection is housed in an antique glass case from a long-gone physician’s office. (No, I don’t collect antiques, unless you count a smattering of tools like my wood-handled awl, cast iron I-don’t-know what-it’s-fors, rusted wire cutters.) Some of the cats are from the Made-in-Japan era. Those from the early nineteenth century U.S. are not particularly cute, sometimes fierce-looking, and I have to wonder, who would buy these for decoration?

Along the line of tools, I was attached to three items in my mother’s kitchen. One was a wood-handled ice pick, painted red, a narrow metal ledge between the wood and the pick. I had no interest in culinary activities, but I sure used that thing a lot for little kid woodworking projects and who knows what else. She also had a wood-handled potato masher with u-shaped sturdy metal half loops. That I used to mash tuna salad I’d make when she wasn’t feeling well. The third item was a paring knife with an ergonomic handle. Over time, I’ve managed to find replicas of the ice pick and the potato masher.

In my search for the paring knife, I came across an old American brand, Chicago Cutlery. The company has been bought, of course, and now produces knives with bright-colored plastic handles, but originally, they were wood. My sweetheart has kindly donated a whole drawer in her kitchen to my collection, which was much enhanced with rare pieces from a neighbor who collects and sharpens knives as a hobby.

We collect rocks on our beaches. Agates, clear, blue, butterscotch or amber colored, jaspers, splendidly patterned petrified woods. These we keep in glass jars on window sills where light shines through the agates, or in bowls around the house so we can handle them in passing.

We have a very full house; I can’t begin to describe my sweetheart’s Xena collection or the shared postcard collection that brought us together. I have tins of political buttons and a backlog of gay bumper stickers.

More recently, I’ve been amassing less bulky items. Names, for example, often garnered from obituaries, for my books and stories. One obituary alone yielded: Horace Harp, Little Lewis Morris, Lewis Jr. Morris, Ruby Towry and Fannie Towry. More: Donna Divine, Ezra Crabtree. I always need names for stories, and each of these names sounds as if it has a story all its own.

Slang only takes up an index card box. Matching slang to characters is fun. “You’re a riot,” said my New York friend. “The real deal” for a Midwesterner. The Irish women of my family used “for dear life.” Kids are loud enough “to wake the dead.”  

All the words, all the tchotchkes, give me delight. Lately, though, this materialistic gay American has reached a time of appreciating what I have rather than collecting more, though I don’t turn away from chance finds — or gifts. Last fall, a dear writer friend stumbled on a carrying case of minicars, every last one of them the real deal. Best? I haven’t finished pawing through them yet. I wouldn’t miss that for all the tea in China.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2021. Top Photo by Gena Okami on Unsplash.

The Amazon Trail: Rats Fleeing A Sinking Ship

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In this month’s installment of The Amazon Trail: as the vermin is slowly shooed from the halls of power, Lee Lynch finds her own house suddenly overrun by literal rodents.

I’ve heard the idiom “like rats fleeing a sinking ship” often lately, and while the metaphor is apt for what’s going on in the United States, at our house it’s even more befitting.

Merriam Webster notes, “Almost all the early uses of the ‘sinking ship’ analogy were in reference to political scandals.” The phrase goes back four hundred years. Originally, the rodents, thought to sense impending calamity, were said to escape from buildings. In the late 17th century, the phrase changed to sinking ships.

However we choose to describe what’s happening in D.C., the exodus is welcome. As every type of haughty, sinister, conniving, autocratic rodent changes course, here at home we have been under assault by honest vermin: rats and moles. Shudder.

We get a bit of rain on the Oregon Coast. As a matter of fact, last night we had a drenching storm that tore yet more shingles from our roof, dismantled the neighbors’ shed, and generally made a mess outside. One can hardly blame critters for taking shelter.

But not in our house. The wretched beasts.

‘Tis the season for rats, but moles? They are gradually digging bulwarks around our home, or a moat — it’s hard to tell which. Someone said to leave them alone, they aerate the soil. That would be fine on a bit of acreage, but our house takes up most of our land. One of our kind community members is somewhat of an expert at mole dispersal. He does this only for friends and we are fortunate in our friends. 

“Let’s hope it works,” he said when I thanked him. All the more so because we just put down a mini lawn for our unbelievably adorable rescue dog Betty. No moles allowed. Par for the course, little eight-pound Betty doesn’t care for the grass potty patch. I suppose we could turn it into an L-shaped putting green for my sweetheart.

Meanwhile, a demolition crew has been taking down the house two over from us. It stood empty for a while, including a few weeks with no doors. The inhabitants tended toward the small, gnawing, whiskered mammal type. The ones with long hairless tails which they neither comb over nor color. The abhorred rats.

Once the backhoe sank its teeth into that forty- or fifty-year-old home, the rats abandoned ship. Several of them found refuge under our house. At first, we weren’t sure what was making those sounds, and we already had a contract with an exterminator, of whom we’ve become quite fond. As a matter of fact, the deceased owner of the demolished house always had him in for tea and conversation during his service calls.

I have a memory from way back in my university days. There was a crash pad a few blocks from my school, owned by a slumlord whose son was a fellow student. The school intellectuals spent long nights there, drinking, doping, and discussing the urgent matters college kids everywhere worry about. One of the uninvited residents was Ralph the Rat who, it was explained, spent his time brushing his teeth behind the walls. That was the sound we were hearing beneath our subflooring.

Manufactured homes, these days, can be as permanent as politicians in Washington. We own our bit of land so the house was installed with the intention of staying put and, because of its foundation, is considered real property. Our poured concrete slab sits a few feet below ground level. From there a contractor secured the house with piers and anchoring equipment, creating a considerable crawl space. The metal supports are sheathed in blocks of wood. 

Rats like to brush their teeth — chew — on wood. From there, they might create openings into the insulation and, unstopped, gnaw through the plywood subflooring and, like Ralph, gain access to the inside of the walls. I once had a cat named Poppins, who, when I moved into a house, spent the entirety of his days chasing the rat that had gotten into the wall while the house lay vacant. Poor guy never made his capture — the rat was evicted in a less dramatic way.

It creeps me out even to write about these creatures who, with equally creepy insects, will likely inherit the earth once humans destroy it.

Finally, our exterminator was here so often over a period of about three weeks, he’d practically moved in with my sweetheart and me. It’s been three days now and no toothbrushing from the netherworld. Our pied piper will come back to remove any new little corpses, but we’re hopeful any live critters, rats or moles, will have fled. If only it were so easy and relatively quick in our capital. 

A problem remains on the home front: we still don’t know how the rats got in. We urgently need to find that cursed crevice. But now that I think of it, we even more urgently need to block the rat route into the White House. 

Copyright Lee Lynch 2020. Top Photo by Yunu Dinata on Unsplash.

The Amazon Trail: Nah, We Ain’t No Sissies

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Lee Lynch returns from a long rest with a new edition of The Amazon Trail about work, aging, and finding ways to survive the hard times we’re all faced with.

I have been resting. A strange activity for me, but I had no choice. I was so worn out, I remember promising myself that I would never hurry again as long as I lived. The first two of six weeks I mostly slept, or lay unmoving beside my sweetheart. Awake, I read thrillers, and when those books didn’t ease my mental and emotional exhaustion, in desperation I read Ann Rule, the master of true crime.

So many people are afflicted or have died from what my sweetheart coined trump flu; so many people have died or lost their homes to the fires around us; so many people are suffering under the current administration; so many people are fighting the loss of democracy in the United States; so many people are victims of blatant and insidious racism — I feel like a sissy to have needed rest.

On July 31, I sent publisher Bold Strokes Books my new novel, Accidental Desperados. Four years in the writing, the Our Happy Hours anthology with Renee Bess tucked into those same years, and, monthly, “The Amazon Trail.” I used to be this productive and work full-time, but now?

Now I’ve lived three quarters of a century. It makes a difference. When I mentioned this to dear indefatigable Arden Eversmeyer of the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project and Old Lesbians Organizing for Change,  she said she’d never thought of her age that way. She concluded, however, that she’s lived nine tenths of a century. Which made me think, nah, we ain’t no sissies.

I was not in good shape. Just the thought of sitting in my writing chair made me nauseous with anxiety. I seriously talked with my sweetheart about ending “The Amazon Trail.” I’ve been writing it for over thirty-four years. But some people have told me it’s my best writing. Others, that they’d miss it.

I rested some more. 

I’d told my publisher four years ago I was writing a quartet of books, a lesbian family saga. Accidental Desperados is only the second novel and after I complete the series, I want to write another Pacific Northwest book, like, but not like, Sweet Creek from 2006. I’m afraid I’ll run out of time. Or brain. Or, again, energy. At the stage of fatigue I landed in, my memory was shot. I tripped over objects as familiar as my own Asics. Some days I could only lie on my back and breathe. How would I even survive the current political turmoil, much less write a book?

Then the wildfires came, and the smoke — air quality indexes over 500. A friend just south of us was at level three, the highest evacuation level, also known as GO! Another recently widowed friend had moved into her new home only a few days before she got the alert to evacuate. A third, whose health is compromised, called from the city to ask about the breathability of air on the coast. It was worse here. We won’t let King the cat out on his catio for fear of damaging his young lungs. 

Like many others, I’ve pretty much been stuck inside since the advent of the trump flu and now smoke prevents me from walking my one to two miles a day. What a perfect time to write! I’ve slowly overcome my aversion to the office and writing chair by thinking of the lives lived by rural Afghans, of people of color who’ve become walking targets on the streets of America, of Native Americans slammed by the virus, of Arctic and rainforest animals displaced by profiteers. This is no time to idle.

I am privileged to be able to rest, much less write books instead of scratching a living from the land or scrambling to fill amazon.com orders ten hours a day. My long vacation has revived me. Once again I can balance on the lip of an empty canyon I’ll rush to fill with words that tell the story half-written in my mind. Six weeks ago, I might have shelved this third, standalone novel in the Rainbow Gap series. But a lot of people, with a lot more reasons to be tired, keep working. 

Heck, I’m nowhere near nine tenths of a century old.

Top Photo: Lee Lynch by Mary Deutcher

The Amazon Trail: Femmes And Their Gadgets

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In this month’s Amazon Trail, Lee Lynch tries, and mostly fails, to understand her wife’s natural facility with machines and appliances.

It’s a shame, the things they don’t teach us at Butch School. In the Femme Gadgets class, I learned the basics of eyelash brushes and powdering noses and hoop, stud, drop, climber, and jacket earrings. The femme who has been cutting my hair for about twenty years was today appropriately made up and earring-ed, her own hair mostly blue with a complementary green streak along the part. She obviously has great fun with her various girly tools.

But that’s not what she was all excited about. It was Vector, her Kickstarter miniature robot. Vector is not without its useful functions, but is mainly an adorable, irresistible gadget that has learned to say her name.

Then, lo and behold, I arrive home and the mailperson has brought my sweetheart a five-inch fan. Small enough for travel, it runs off a USB energy source or batteries. It’s the most flexible little fan I’ve ever seen. She set it up and demonstrated its features one by one, including its big clamp, its three speeds, and the fact that it was for me. I’m staring it down as it challenges me to try it a day later, after I’ve forgotten all the instructions.

My sweetheart also wears a Fitbit and figured out every one of its functions, though she reminds me that we haven’t yet checked her heart rate when kissing.

When the arthritis in my thumbs flared up, she was the one who found me a nifty gadget that twists off bottlecaps and lifts up tabs to open cat food cans. She also found me an electric jar and bottle opener which I’m still learning to use — she was an expert within five minutes. If I manage to position the clamps so they embrace a lid, I get stuck at the dismounting and the contents splatter all over the counter.

Possibly the most exciting of her gadgets, which come free, except for taxes, through a reviewing program, was the little toy drone. She’s still trying to get it to work again after hours of setting it up and experimenting. One of our male, mechanically-inclined neighbors, who owns three real drones, came over to help, but it was my sweetheart who diagnosed the problem: the battery power drains so fast the wee drone bounces off walls, kitchen appliances, lamps, mirrors, and doors. The neighbor periodically asks if we have our pilot licenses yet.

A few weeks ago, a planter arrived. It’s about five foot by three foot, and three feet high. Assembly required. Lots of it, including a water gauge thingy. My sweetheart loves doing this stuff. I was sent to the office to write. Last week, the “shed” made its appearance. (We’re real friendly with our UPS driver.) It’s basically an ultra-sturdy toy chest for garden equipment. Or for toy drones with unresolved issues. She was exhilarated: fabrication required using the electric screwdriver I gave her as a jokey birthday gift. I’ve discovered the joke is on me.

I thought I was gadget-happy, but do not get between a femme and her mechanical puzzles. Even the clunkers.

The rice cooker wasn’t really a clunker. It worked fine for many meals. Then one day my sweetheart forgot to place the bowl in the cooker before filling it with water — the electronics were soaked. It still worked, but she enthusiastically welcomed the next rice cooker she was sent to review.

I voluntarily absent myself from her industrious zone when tricky things come her way. The dash cam, for example, took some doing on her part. As have the cat towers, all three of them. I offered to assemble the most recent one, despite knowing I’d need to give up and ask for her help when I inevitably blew it, but she forestalled that eventuality by declining my offer.

I have the patience to write a novel, but not to read directions. Especially when something comes along like the OBD2 which, she had to explain to me, is an automotive onboard diagnostic tool. But the tool is useless on its own. You have to download an app called Torque to get the two to work together. Heck, I had enough trouble setting up the simple Mini Google Home and even it couldn’t answer my questions about how an OBD works.

Where no woman has gone before, my sweetheart perseveres. We don’t have a lawn, barely even a yard, but when we get another pint-sized dog, she plans to fence and grass over a patch behind the house so we can let our puppy-to-be outside in the Oregon rain. The only obstacle she came up with was buying a lawn mower. She had her eye on lightweight electric models when, voila, she received one to review. And build.

We now both have car battery chargers and automatic tire inflators. I’m not sure how I’ll make them work if I’m alone on the road in my fifteen-year-old car. Even Vector needs a femme.

Copyright 2019 Lee Lynch. Photo by cetteup on Unsplash