Knot

A few days ago, my friend K. returned to me a postcard I’d sent him from Australia in 1996. The caption says “Bicycle riding has become increasingly popular in Australia” and it pictures a kangaroo wearing a bike helmet and riding a bike across what must be outback territory, it’s red dirt and scrub. I sent the card from somewhere near Adelaide, I think, I did not say on the postcard and the mark is unreadable. It was cold, a change from being out in the desert, and I had fallen in love with a traveler from Austria who had gone back to Brisbane by another route. We were to meet in Brisbane and head up to the Great Barrier Reef together a week or so later. After that I would commute to Austria, learn to cross country ski and speak German, get married to that Austrian traveler, mostly give up painting for writing, take a ukulele to Antarctica, buy a house in West Seattle, battle a case of depression brought on by one of those years that is one thing after another, see elephants walking past my Serengeti campground, join a rock band, watch my father’s mind grow blurry, get soft in the middle, and move forward in time on my own accidental path as humans do.

Marine speed used to be measured by a sailor feeding rope out over the back of a moving ship. The rope was knotted at intervals, the number of knots that went through the sailor’s hands in a thirty second period determined the speed. Getting this postcard back feels a little bit like grabbing on to the line somewhere back towards the beginning. It’s like holding a knob of wet rope, salty and a little bit spiky from the fibers, a marker of a place in time.

A few years ago my brother showed me some letters I’d written to him when he was in China in the 80s. I was insanely frustrated and angry at the time, tight and sharp as razor wire. I was living in the sprawling soulless suburbs of Orange County without a car. I had recently returned from India and nothing made any sense at all, not one single thing. I was poor, not suffering, but in that scraping by kind of way of your twenties when you’re just trying to figure out how to pay your rent and take your community college classes and go for a beer when it’s your night off. I wanted very much to go visit my brother, but I could not imagine where I would find the money for a plane ticket, it seemed impossible at the time. I was — still am — credit averse, something of a hangover from my dad’s financial problems and the idea of putting one thousand dollars on a credit card was inconceivable.

And there’s the knot in my hands again. Back more years, but in those letters, the wet cold weight of bundled rope, of a place in time, written down for my brother in Beijing. I have his letters too, but I tore up the envelopes and used them in a series of lithographs I made in college. It was easier to print on metal plates, but I liked using the stones. I would stand at the sink with the water running, spinning the levigator — a special grinder just for this process — until the stone was smooth and all ghosts from the previous printer’s work had disappeared. I made good work, my brother has some of it, and some of it hangs in my mom’s home, and I may have a few of the prints too, stowed away in portfolio folders. The prints were abstract and minimalist with bright Chinese red chops on them, and the patterned edge of airmail envelopes is bonded to the surface of the soft rag paper.

I managed to squeeze a shocking amount of text onto the postcard from Australia. It is full of longing. I want to be reunited with my travel companion from Austria, I want to show this place to my friend back in Seattle, but also, I want to be back home in in my studio, making paintings about Australia. I write, nearly at the bottom edge of the card, “Camping romance landscape endless highways frustration rain — it’s all too much I might explode!” The postcard is too small to hold on to everything that is happening, but I buy a stamp with a wombat on it and send it off anyways — not before scrawling a little vertical note (foreshadowing my later writing mania) on the address panel. “Too many exclamation marks, please forgive me. You understand.”

I buy postcards at garage sales and junk stores. I have one from Hawaii postmarked July 10, 1972. It is written in Italian. There’s a note under the address in a different hand that says “Died 11-13-72”. I do not know if M. J. Fine got the postcard sent to him at the Goldenage Convalescent Hospital; this line of rope is not mine. A second one, also from Hawaii, says, “Hello Vada and Jerry. How are you enjoying NY spring. Arthur and I are here in Hawaii on the island of Hawaii it is so beautiful. We are staying here a few weeks. We are enjoying the lovely beaches, hula shows, all the lovely lazy life here. How is Jerry doing, what are you doing? Hope fine, love, Noreen.” I have another stack of postcards with no text on them, pictures of anonymous motor lodges, low rise places with big cars out in front, photographed in the 60s and early 70s, I’d guess. They look like the kinds of postcards you used to see on nightstands in the fake leather folder with the hotel stationary. There was a time when, on our journeys, we would sit down to write a letter at the awkward little writing desk provided, instead of doing what I do now, checking my email or updating my blog and complaining that I have to pay for wifi.

I am a tremendous advocate for digital media; I just love the stuff, I love that I can sit down and write these words and as soon as I hit publish, they are available to you in Hanoi and Honolulu and Houston. But these words lack the physicality of that postcard from Australia with the ridiculous helmet wearing kangaroo. I bought a little piece of picture cardboard and wrote on it in blue ball point pen. And I stuck a stamp on it and it traveled the same distances that I did to get to my friend in Seattle. He peeled off the coded label that the post office stuck on to it, I can see the remains of the sticker over the address panel; it had covered up part of my obsessively neat handwriting. A few days ago, my friend put that postcard into an envelope with a hand written note to send back to me.

“Bicycle riding has become increasingly popular in Australia,” it says, absurdly. But back in my hands, it’s doesn’t feel so frivolous. It’s a marker of time. It’s a knot in the rope.

I did a search to see if I could find the postcard image to use in this post. Serendipity. I found this post from 2007 about the postcard that sits in front of me right now.