Never Flourish, Never Die

Issue 50 • Fall 2024 • Nonfiction

IN A DRY AND THIRSTY LAND

The last man I ever tried to date hated the desert. Maybe it was his upbringing in Western Oregon, surrounded by the easy beauty of forest waterfalls and lush green canopies, in proximity to the ocean, that made him so uncomfortable. Maybe it was his Christian faith whose tradition links the desert to temptation, punishment, and the rigorous tests of separation from God.

His reasons are my conjecture. As we crested the plateau separating the heavily irrigated farmland from the barren edge of Grand Coulee, he fell silent. My favorite part of the drive north to my grandparents’ house, winding along the dynamited road on either side of the terrible, extraordinary dam before emerging into the northernmost finger of the Channeled Scablands, and he had nothing to say. When I pressed him, he admitted to being afraid, to feeling that we were “on the moon,” in a place we weren’t meant to survive. Good Lord. Grow up, I wanted to tell him. A little struggle builds character. And besides, people have been ‘surviving’ here for a long time, despite our people’s apocalyptic arrival, our industrial-scale world-remaking. I could compromise a lot, and had, but this would be our final impasse.

RAIN FROM A RAINLESS SKY

The book had a slightly off, self-published look to it—the print too large, the paper stock grainy and gray. My dear friend June had picked it up somewhere, drawn to the oddly poetic title pages that centered serifed all-caps text over middling-quality black-and-white photos of our cherished scablands. In one, dune-like hills bearing stubs of winter wheat—scenery I’d soon know as my own—receded into the dusty horizon, captioned “ALONE IN A GARDEN.”

“It’s about sagebrush,” June told me as I flipped through, skimming the other title pages.

“Huh.” I’d never been good at spreading my attention between two inputs. I remembered that we’d just been talking on my last visit about the poetics of sagebrush.

“Yeah, and gay people,” she added, startling me out of my page flipping. She smiled and said something like, “This guy thinks sagebrush is gay and evil.”

Rain from a Rainless Sky: A Work of Theological Botany was the 2006 master’s thesis of a student at New Saint Andrews College. When she first showed it to me, I knew little about New Saint Andrews, one node in a network of extremist Christian institutions known collectively as Christ Church. June knew because she lived in Pullman, Washington, just across the Idaho border from Moscow, an otherwise charming college town that was being slowly re-colonized by the church. She explained to me that they had a goal to “take over” the town—step one in a broader project of “Christian dominion” over the region. She let me take the book home with me, where it would sit in a pile waiting for my full attention for the next five years.

DEATH BENEATH THE DESERT SHRUBS

“I see it—the sagebrush. The white settlers called it wormwood (regarded as poisonous and therefore cursed)…Mark Twain praised it in one place as the ‘friendly sagebrush’ and derided it in another as ‘the fag-end of the vegetable creation.’” —Rain From A Rainless Sky

In the heat of August, I drove my haggard Subaru south to visit June in her newly rented apartment in Pullman. She’d just started grad school for photography and this development brought her back to the east side of the state, to my delight, from the dreary challenges of an underemployed life in Seattle. She’d written from there a couple of times, ambiguous lines like, “Almost every day it rains. The crows keep cawing at me—like they are telling me to go home.” Home, as in, where I am? I wondered this, but didn’t ask.

On our way to the Snake River, we talked about this landscape, our connections to different edges of this strange desert. I asked her, “What kind of plant would you want to be?” The balsamroot was long done blooming by now and there wasn’t much flora to be seen. I thought about mullein, which I’d learned to smoke last winter for my chronic lung infection.

“Sagebrush.”

“Sagebrush?” I thought about it, about how its smell in the heat of summer, mixed with the metallic notes of irrigation water, was one of my favorite smells. A smell we likely shared as a common memory.

“Yep. Because I’ll never flourish, but I’ll never die.”

Jesus. Wasn’t that the truth? It reminded me of another conversation we’d had, in which she’d complained about how annoying people could be when trying to signal their support for her early public transition. She told me about some lady telling her she was “fabulous.”

“I haven’t had a fabulous day in my life,” she’d replied.

I thought about that sentiment—“never flourish, never die”—and gazed past the broken rear view mirror, considering my own lack of flourishing. I couldn’t see myself in the mirror, but still felt reflected by it. It bounced against the side panel, held on by a thinning strand of tape. I looked over at her, wondering how I’d got here, to this strange canyon with this beloved near-stranger. “I think I’d be sagebrush, too.”

DOWN BY THE RIVER

Since Rain from A Rainless Sky was printed in 2006, New Saint Andrews College and the greater Christ Church universe, led by Pastor Douglas Wilson, has only expanded its attempted theocratic takeover. Campuses have grown, including that of their K-12 school, and the cult has actively recruited hundreds of families to move to the region.

By comparison to the current material published by Wilson’s impressive media machine, Rain from A Rainless Sky is tame. The book compares acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals in the church to sagebrush that needs to be burned or flooded to death. In Wilson’s YouTube videos, he literally wields the flamethrower.

The author of the little book invokes fire as a response to “barrenness,” but more often calls back to the Biblical flood. He writes, “…the dangerous God who overwhelms the desert lands with words of barrenness…is also the loving Master…who loves to overwhelm the desert lands with streams of water so that the wicked should be overwhelmed by the righteous.”

The flood, even for Eastern Washington’s secular population, is evidenced all around us. Technically, unless you’re a young Earth creationist, it was ancient floods, plural, that shaped my beloved landscape here. By 2020, June and I were living in a tiny town on an island of fertile loess known as the Palouse, where rolling hills of prairie-turned-wheat were spared from the scraping blasts of water that exposed the underlying basalt of so much of the rest of the state. The floods deposited giant boulders in illogical places, carved out massive potholes and ripples, and re-routed or widened the channels of the great rivers that traverse this cold desert landscape.

The Snake River is one of these re-made oases, first by the floods and then by industrial settlement’s dams and dredging. Still, on a hot day, if you don’t think too hard about it, it’s a welcoming strip of cool water tucked within miles of dry, rocky hills. Invasive blackberries spread along the roadside in some parts of this, the Snake’s final northward arc between Lewiston, Idaho and the place, miles downstream, where it pours into the Columbia.

On the first warm day of spring in 2021, a small group of us drove to Wawawai County Park for a beach picnic. It had been a long year of pandemic isolation, learning to cohabitate while navigating a dangerous viral landscape. But now, there was at least a vaccine. Hope tentatively emerged alongside the crocuses. We took a break from lounging to play catch on the steep grass hillside that sloped down to the water.

“This is fun!” someone called out stupidly. I laughed, but they were right. When was the last time I’d played catch?

“We should play baseball, for real!” Bridgette suggested in their earnest way.

“How many people do you need for baseball?” June wanted to know. We could find enough. Everyone was sick of being cooped up. Down at the river, an institution was born. By the time we held the World Series game two years later, Palouse Gay Baseball had an amplified announcer, a dedicated playlist, merch, a website, four coaches, a rotating set of “grill daddies,” handmade trophies made by fusing baseball gear with sex toys, and turnouts too big for traditional teams. Rules fluctuated, teams were randomized each week, perhaps chosen by astrological sign. You couldn’t strike out during your first game. You could choose a softball or a baseball. Over the first two years, we watched dozens of rural queers, grad students, and townies become better at the game than we’d imagined possible.

On a perfect summer Sunday, we might meet at the river hours before to sip beer in submerged camp chairs or lay around on the bank reading and playing cribbage. When city gays asked us how we survived out here in the red side of our state, so close to Idaho, we could now tell them, “There’s enough of us to play baseball.”

ROOTLESS EXILES

About a year ago, at a rest stop truly in the middle of nowhere, on that never-ending quest for a gender-neutral bathroom, June and I squatted down to examine a battered, detailed map of Washington state hung behind plastic on an informational sign.

“There’s us,” she said, pointing at our town’s tiny dot on the Idaho border.

“Yep, and here we are now,” I said, “and there’s where we’re going.”

“We’ve been there,” she said, pointing to the massive Juniper Dunes wilderness area where we tried to dirt bike camp a few summers ago. There’s something about a map depicting a place well-worn in memory. Other people know we’re here. We’re really right here, aren’t we? We traced the Columbia, Snake, and Spokane rivers back to their origins, blue lines simplifying many days and years of swimming, fishing, trying in vain to scam our way onto someone’s boat.

And now there was a house. A mortgage rooted to a single point on the map. It wasn’t something I’d ever expected for myself. We bought an old tube TV and a set of rabbit ears to put on top of our fridge. We only get a few stations this way, but one of them is the same ABC affiliate in Spokane that both sets of our grandparents, each hundreds of miles from the city, would watch, waiting for the name of the closest town to theirs to be spoken. Decades later, Kris Crocker still reads the weather. June has a crush on her. Every so often, we’ll look up from cooking if Kris says, “Watch out for those high winds in the Palouse, tonight, folks.”

“That’s us!” one of us will say.

THINGS FADING / THINGS MADE NEW

We pulled up to the Emerald of Siam, a Thai restaurant and music venue in Richland, just before sunset. In the spring of 2023, June and I had driven southwest about two and a half hours to her hometown for a punk show. It would be the first live music either of us had seen since the beginning of the pandemic. We could only hope that we wouldn’t be the oldest people there. June has long believed that I’m better at bumming cigarettes than her, so she dispatched me to wrangle one in the parking lot. I looked around hopefully and saw them: lesbians.

I did an exaggerated sidestep to the semi-circle where the couple stood talking to a lanky young man in a patched vest. Before I could open my mouth to ask, one of them pulled a cowboy-style cigarette case from the inside pocket of their leather vest and held it forth with a theatrical flourish. I nodded June over and we all got acquainted. Somewhere in the introductory statements, conversation split into two topics: rural life and trucks.

I told Leather Vest we’d come two and a half hours to be there. “Damn! We came an hour and a half and thought that was crazy!” When I asked where the two of them had come from, they named a town I had never heard of. A shocking achievement. “It’s down on the Columbia,” she told me. “We came out sight unseen from Pennsylvania because we wanted land, and this is what we could afford.”

Snatches of the second conversation bled into ours, amplified by the collective passion of two vintage Chevy owners. “You have an S-10? No way! That’s mine right over there.” Leather Vest’s partner gestured across the parking lot to a beautiful black truck. June nodded to me and said, “She has a Ranger.”

“You let her drive a Ford!?” We laughed about the intermarriage of Ford and Chevy under one roof, sounding just like a bunch of old men at the farm supply. We didn’t look too far off, either, in our camo jackets, work boots for the mosh pit, tooled leather belts. We laughed about those old men’s inability to spot us for what we were, being as country dykes can often look more like their own ranch-working wives than the blue-haired, heavily made-up queers of their imaginations. We exchanged numbers in earnest. It’s no small thing to add another gay oasis to the map in this parched landscape.

Three weeks later, the Emerald of Siam was vandalized the day before its planned Drag Brunch. Its windows were papered over with fliers that read: “THE TRANS EXPERIMENT HAS FAILED…GROOMERS NOT WELCOME IN RICHLAND.”

CAINS IN THE CITY OF GOD

The New Saint Andrews logo just went up on what once was the only art gallery in town. Christ Church won a First Amendment lawsuit against the City of Moscow concerning their anti-mask protests at the height of COVID, and this, along with the national rise of anti-queer and more broadly anti-“woke” sentiment, has cemented their place on the front lines of the culture wars. As the motto printed on New Saint Andrews merchandise says: Numquam Bella Piis, Numquam Certanima Desunt. For the faithful, wars shall never cease.

As frightful as it is to live among hundreds of people with these beliefs, they haven’t yet put a stop to our local degeneracy. The first party our queer collective threw this year was themed “Leather and Lace,” and all the freaks came out from miles away to take over the back room of the gyro shop. A leather artist from the other side of the scablands sold handmade harnesses, chokers, flagging keychains. Two trans-fem DJs created transcendent moments through the spiritual power of bass, the closest some of us get to a church. All this decadence, just around the corner from New Saint Andrews College. I saw a sticker on the paper towel dispenser in the bathroom that said, “[Pastor] Doug Wilson sucked my dick and all I got was this lousy sticker.”

When we planned this party, and those that came before, we did so with safety in mind. We had a new plan for this new venue: how we would watch the doors, how we would watch the sidewalk outside, what we would do if someone came with violence in mind in this politically charged and well-armed state. I’ve suffered weeks of nightmares before every one of these parties. There’s nothing any of us, even my therapist, can do besides shrug and say, “Well… yeah.”

THE APOCALYPSE

Small white candles in paper cups greeted me on a recent trip home, when I attended a vigil observing the death of Nex Benedict, a queer, Indigenous teenager, killed by their peers in the high school girls’ bathroom. The youngest person in attendance was around nine, and brave enough to share in front of all the gathered adults. All I remember now is their whimpered closing statement, “I worry the world is not a good place.”

I couldn’t talk to them. You don’t want to lie to a child and tell them that everything is fine when it isn’t. You don’t want to scare them by saying that the adults are scared, too. I wish I’d had the presence to tell them that we’re doing our best to make the world a good place, even in the hopeless-looking, barren terrain of this era. That people like us are magic, especially good at making a place good. Sweeter, funnier, kinder, braver, and all in better lighting.

A neighbor in town sees someone taking photos of the front of her house where a progressive Pride flag flies above a Black Lives Matter sign. A business owner was shot to death in California for flying the same flag. Anti-gay rhetoric of decades past is remixed now into the public lexicon, words like “groomer” misapplied, “protect the children” wielded to close a library. Douglas Wilson tweets, “Testing, testing, boys are not girls,” and his YouTube channel tops a hundred thousand followers. An LGBTQ travel advisory is issued for the state of Idaho.

I don’t know where the theology graduate—the one who wrote this disturbing tract I’m obsessed with—is now, or if he still believes what he wrote in his thesis. I wonder if, when he wrote it, he ever imagined a reader like me. I wish I could meet him, but only if I had a huge tattoo of a sagebrush and the words “Never Flourish, Never Die” on my hairy belly, over my inhospitable sinner’s womb, that I could flash to him and say, “Fuck you. Me and my beautiful desert friends will live forever.” At times, we appear to be flourishing. Living here though, with the residue of recent violence lingering in the ground and the sounds of war talk leaking out of other rooms, it still feels like a clock is always counting down to some inevitable disaster. But for now, like the sagebrush and the slivers of prairie between the wheat fields, we’re still here.

Issue 49 • Spring 2024

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry