Editor's Notes

Deep Winter poetry by Suzanne Marie Hopcroft

Upon the Snows of Kilimanjaro - nonfiction by Colin Clancy

Trickster Kudzu Crucifix - poetry by Paul David Adkins

Christine's Case - fiction by Dennis James

Three Poems - by Jed Myers

Photographs - by Scott B. Davis

Describing Darkness: The Night Photography of Scott B. Davis - by Thomas Larson

Revolvers - poetry by Jay Carson

A Lesson in Destruction - nonfiction by Erin Anderson

Adagio - poetry by Dan Simmons

Contributors' Notes

Recently, I had another opportunity to read from The Summerset Review in the wonderful DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room at The New York Public Library. Prior to getting into the content, I was asked to say a few words about our magazine, particularly anything having to do with initial start-up and the making of its first issue.

Coincidentally, I had just seen a documentary on Hugh Hefner, where he was talking about the very same thing. While I make no comparison of his magazine to Summerset, nor him to me, there was a striking similarity in the approach that was settled upon.

In 1953, Hefner's original plan called for the featuring of a well-known idol to grace his new magazine's pages. The first issue of Playboy ran with none other than Marilyn Monroe on its cover. Shortly after launch, though, the plan changed. The idea was, from then on, to feature what Hefner called, "The Girl Next Door." When he was asked why, he said, "Because beauty is everywhere."

The similarity of Hefner's idea to the mission of this magazine is simply this: We believe that a great many beautiful works of literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been written by the girl—or the boy—next door. And in these times where the lines of communication are many and varied, this "next door" could really be anywhere.

The Summerset Review is proud to say that from its inception in 2002, there has never been a slush pile of writers' work stacked up and sitting in our in-box, waiting to be given half a glance. All submissions are read enthusiastically and objectively, and no solicitations of well-known literati are ever made. Aside from the maximum length and quantity of work writers can submit, we have only one requirement, and we regret it terribly: All pieces must be written in English.

We hope that our judgment in what is put before you each quarter is appreciated and highly-regarded. And so, with that, here we give you our Winter 2012 line up, written by the girls and boys next door to us all. Enjoy.

— JL

Theme graphics this issue - "Highlight: Humility"
Copyright © The Summerset Review, Inc. 2011.

We clench and unclench our minds as we do our
hands from tromping through the frost, the skin under

our nails tinted blue like the spruce that plays
sentinel around the house it dwarfs. My words fly

in formation, wing-bones creaking aloft, but you
leave off moving with the burgundy of their

plumes: you will not concede, home toward a kinder
clime. Cold seeps into the spaces between our

bones, burrows deep where umbrage has carved a
gulf. Ready yourself for the drifts. Sudden snows will

cover over the blitheness of our looks, white-blind to
the colors that tie us, pillowing our earth in another night.

"Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going."

— Ernest Hemingway,
from "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"

I read these lines from Hemingway's short story in the white glow of my headlamp. Mount Kilimanjaro's top is nearly a vertical mile above me in the darkness. It's eight p.m. In three hours I will be getting up for our midnight summit attempt, and I can't sleep. The combination of altitude, excitement, nausea, and cold keeps me awake.

I arrived in Moshi, Tanzania at the foot of the mountain five days ago. The eight hour bus ride from Nairobi had been long and cramped. Sitting over the engine, I felt its heat through the floorboards and the soles of my shoes. The only white person aboard, I watched out the window as our driver navigated the dusty, rutted roads, gas pedal to the floor, careening toward oncoming buses only to swerve away at the last moment, and avoiding kids, cattle, and pull-cart-donkeys by inches. Whenever I travel there is always a moment, a sudden realization, that I am no longer home. This was it. I watched masses walking alongside the road; a blend of cultures where Maasai people in their traditional, colorful dress and sandals cut from old tires herded cattle on foot next to men in shirts and ties and children in Nike T-shirts.

As the other passengers slept, I gazed out the window, hoping in vain for a glimpse of the mountain. When we finally arrived in Moshi, the overcast sky blocked any view of the mountain, but I could somehow feel Kili's presence.

All the guidebooks recommended a rest day before beginning the trek, a day to decompress and sleep away the jet lag. As I spent my day wandering the streets of Moshi, though, I felt antsy, ready to get going, ready to be doing what I came to Africa to do. I sat on my hostel's rooftop bar trying to read Hemingway's Under Kilimanjaro, but I couldn't concentrate. I kept looking into the clouds. Somewhere up there was the summit, 19,341 feet above sea level, an altitude rarely achieved by the turboprops that fly out of the small airport where I live in Marquette, Michigan.

That night I met my Tanzanian guide, Ben, and the two other climbers in my group, a married couple a few years older than me from Colorado, Aaron and Susan. I'd been apprehensive when I was told this is who I'd be traveling with. I was afraid that they would be yuppie types and that I'd be intruding on their trip, some kind of a third wheel, but as we sat outside talking about skiing the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, they seemed cool.

I spent most of the evening packing and unpacking, trying to choose what gear was worth bringing, unable to decide if that third pair of underwear would be worth its weight. I finished reading Under Kilimanjaro just after midnight, knowing that the thick hardcover would be too bulky to bring along, a paperback Green Hills of Africa already stowed in my pack.

I woke early. The plan had been to leave at eight, but we sat around frustrated and eager to get moving until Ben and a few of our porters picked us up in a shuttle van at eleven. The trailhead of the Rongai Route was a three-hour drive from here on the northern slopes of the mountain near the Kenyan border. Another cramped, dusty ride, and another look into a different culture. The economy of the lower slopes of the mountain is based on coffee and bananas; the plants growing together alongside the road, the coffee in the shade of the banana trees. Again, hundreds of people walked up and down the road, many carrying bushels of bananas on their heads. It was clear that owning a wheelbarrow was a distinction of class, allowing a person to haul three bushels to market at a time instead of just one. The van slowed at a busy intersection. One of the porters handed money out the window in exchange for several bananas which he passed around.

When we arrived at the trailhead, Ben introduced us to our team of porters, most of whom had been in a different van, and I thought there must be a mistake. I couldn't imagine our small group of three climbers needing this team of twelve people, including Ben, an assistant guide, and a cook. As we watched the porters sort out the mountain of gear—tents, food, a propane tank, fold-up table and chairs, none of it the backpacker-friendly type of stuff they sell in the expensive sporting goods stores back home—I realized that the shear logistics of preparing a trip like this was what had held us up this morning.

As the porters divided the load, I looked out at the Kenyan plains below where Hemingway spent his second hunting safari in the early 1950s. His first safari, the one that had been the inspiration for "Snows" and "Green Hills" had been twenty years prior, and had also been in Kenya and what was then called Tanganyika. Not far from here was the town Loitokitok, where Ernest bought beer for the Maasai elders during his frequent shopping trips.

Hemingway, like me, came from a middle-class family, and we both spent our boyhood summers playing in the woods and lakes of Michigan. We both loved the Michigan that we grew up in, but felt the pull of places distant and foreign. Our similarities, for me, are part of his appeal. The biggest difference that I see between us is that when he was my age, twenty-six, he published In Our Time and had almost finished The Sun Also Rises. My first book, a 200-page stack of paper printed on the English Department printers at my school, sits at the bottom of a desk drawer.

With the porters lined up to weigh their loads (each is permitted to carry up to thirty-five pounds, not including his own personal gear), we began hiking with Ben. The first day's short and easy three-hour hike started on a Jeep trail through cornfields where we stepped over elephant shit. The trail narrowed to single track through jungle and forest. We walked at a slow pace, stopping to watch Aaron give chocolate to the children of farmers, to photograph monkeys, and to let the porters pass. They moved quickly, double our speed, each carrying a huge load on his head. We arrived at Simba Camp, at about 8,000 feet, in the declining light of early evening, and our tents had already been set up.

One of the porters brought us bowls of hot water to wash our hands, then lead us to a dining tent where a candle on the table illuminated a thermos of hot water and a box of tea bags. The extravagance was too much. Most of my trek had been paid by a grant for graduate students at my school. I'd charged my plane ticket to a credit card, and paid the other trip expenses with student loan money, for which my dad had to cosign. This was unnecessary luxury.

The porter brought us creamed cucumber soup, made from fresh vegetables, then yams with beef sauce, more hot water for tea, then sliced avocados and oranges for dessert. The strange feeling of being catered to and waited on is something that I talked a lot about with Aaron and Susan and is something that we didn't get used to. When I'm camping I'm perfectly content sitting on the ground eating bagels and beef jerky and just-add-water powdered whatever. Throughout the trip I had to keep telling myself that this was their livelihood. If we didn't have this table and chairs, one of the porters wouldn't have a job.

During dinner we made fart jokes, and the conversation revolved around the use of Tanzanian toilets, holes in the ground where aim didn't necessarily seem important. I knew I was in good company.

Outside the mess tent the sky had cleared. What had just been clouds was now a brilliant display of stars. For several minutes the three of us stood outside the tents looking up. The sky gave me hope for a clear day tomorrow, a day where I might be able to see the top.

The night air felt cold, far colder than I had expected on the first night, and I wondered if I had packed enough warmth. I opened my tent, the one that had been set up for me, my duffel bag placed inside. I crawled into my sleeping bag and listened to the porters clean up our dinner tent, and I felt bad about it.

My headlamp illuminated the pages of "Green Hills." I came to a passage where Hemingway talks about the African sky. "This was a better sky than Italy. The hell it was. The best sky was in Italy and Spain and Northern Michigan in the fall and in the fall in the Gulf off Cuba. You could beat this sky; but not this country." I've not yet been to Italy or Spain or Cuba, but I thought of a September midnight standing on a beach watching the stars smeared like a painted ceiling over Lake Superior; there seemed to be more light than dark. I agreed with Papa. The sky tonight was damn brilliant, but it didn't compare to Michigan.

I read about Kilimanjaro in a magazine as a kid and had wanted to climb it since, but I never had serious thoughts of a trip until a few years ago when an ex-girlfriend and I made some vague plans. The guidebook I used to plan this trip was a Christmas gift from her, and it no doubt came with a card saying that she couldn't wait to spend her life seeing the world with me. There was once the thought that Africa's highest point is where I would propose, but now I'm here, she's 8,000 miles away, and we haven't spoken in months. The idea seems stupid.

I opened my tent flap at 6:30 a.m. to clear skies and my first view of the peaks. I saw Mawenzi, Kilimanjaro's eastern peak. Even in the light of the rising sun it looked dark, jagged, and craggy jutting into the blue sky like the backdrop of some early vampire film. Mawenzi means "the dark," but Kilimanjaro's western peak, Kibo, "the bright," is where we're headed. It was Kibo that I saw next, its summit round and unbelievably high, and its snowcaps barely visible from that angle. These snowcaps are melting quickly due to global warming and deforestation at the base of the mountain. They may be gone completely within ten years.

The air felt cold, even in the morning sun, and I wore long pants and a sweatshirt while I ate porridge, eggs, sausage, and fresh fruit for breakfast outside the dining tent. As we hiked, though, it became hot, and I stripped down to shorts and a T-shirt, and could feel sweat spreading out across my back. Today's journey took us through the heath and moorland zone where trees and alpine scrub lined the trail until we reached the treeline just before lunch. During lunch break clouds rolled in, dropping the temperature, then rolled back out, raising it again. On our afternoon hike to camp at Cave Three, just under 13,000 feet above sea level, I noticed myself breathing a little heavier. I took some Tylenol, trying to keep the headache away.

Our tents stood in a rocky valley. I sat outside in my puffy coat, gloves, and knit hat watching the fog move quickly through our valley. The large gray clouds settled below us and I felt content, happy to be on an adventure; something different, something new.

Anyone who's read Hemingway's story knows its famous epigraph: "Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai 'Ngàje Ngài,' the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude." Hemingway's original manuscript of the story, though, had a second epigraph, a quote from Vivienne de Watteville's African memoir Speak to the Earth, a book that Hemingway no doubt read while on safari. The quote comes from a section of the book in which an unnamed advisor tells de Watteville about how to put together a Kilimanjaro expedition: "The difficulties, he said, were not in the actual climbing. It was a long grind, and success depended not on skill, but on one's ability to withstand the high altitude. His parting words were that I must make the attempt soon, before there was any risk of the rains setting in." For whatever reason, Hemingway opted to delete this second epigraph from his story before it was published in the August 1936 issue of Esquire.

As we departed camp our assistant guide David, with whom we had become friends smiled his wide, toothy grin and asked, "Mambo vipi?," slang meaning something like, "What's up?"

"Poa kichizi kama tango," I said, which Ben had taught us to mean, "cool as a cucumber."

David laughed and said, "hakuna matata," no worries; a phrase that would have been a whole lot more wonderful if Elton John hadn't written a Disney song about it.

We ascended the trail of loose rock, the scrub bushes of the alpine desert becoming smaller and more scarce until there was nothing but rock and an occasional plant that Ben called Everlasting Flower. I was now higher than I had ever been, even as a chairlift operator working at the top of Copper Mountain in Colorado, and I was definitely feeling the altitude, lightheadedness and headache. I felt short of breath and my heart bounded in my chest at even the slightest scramble up a small rock face.

"Poli poli," Ben kept saying; slowly slowly, urging us to keep our unhurried pace. This sluggish pace had been annoying on the first day of the trek, but now I was happy for it.

We spotted animal dung along the side of the trail that Ben identified as buffalo. Like Hemingway's leopard, we wondered what it was doing this high on the mountain, a question that could have also been asked of us.

The mind wanders while poli poli hiking, and we spent most of the day's trek in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. I began to write sentences, then whole passages, in my head with no way of converting them to paper. I pulled a pen from my pocket and scribbled some notes on my hand.

We reached the saddle between Kibo and Mawenzi peaks and got our first view of the glaciers on the south face of Kibo, but clouds quickly rolled in to cover the summit. It was still so high above us that the thought of standing on it seemed ridiculous.

There had been a few other groups on the Rongai route at the same time as us. They had spent their nights at the same camps, and we had gotten to know several of the people, talking on lunch breaks and in the evenings, but it was always quiet. Arriving at Kibo Hut, our last camp, was a shock. Most of the routes up Kilimanjaro converged here, including the most frequently travelled Marangu route, often called the Coca-Cola Route because of the sheer number of tourists that hike it. A bustling place, hundreds of people milled around Kibo Hut speaking many languages, everyone preparing for their summit attempts.

I found a rock to sit on in a quiet corner of camp and took out my notebook. I tried to make out the notes I had written on my hand a few hours prior, but they were incomprehensible. I struggled to remember the details of the day. As I wrote, the altitude caused my pen to explode, and ink flowed across my fingers. I gave up on writing and pulled my bagged lunch out of my pack, but I had no appetite.

The porters finished setting up our tents. They wouldn't be going any further up the mountain but would wait for us here during our summit attempt. As I walked toward my tent, altitude sickness hit me like a train. The nausea came on fast and strong. In the pit-latrine I sprayed vomit that looked like water. This helped a little. I felt alright lying still in my sleeping bag, but anytime I moved the nausea took over.

I didn't want to get out of the tent at dinnertime, earlier than usual, but I thought that I should try to eat. The overwhelming smell of the vegetable soup, though, forced me to leave the mess tent to vomit. I came back and ate a few spoonfuls of rice. Aaron and Susan seemed fine, but they both said they were queasy. After dinner we said goodnight. Though I felt awful, the clouds had parted, and the view from Kibo Hut was too beautiful to ignore. I sat on a rock and looked out at Mawenzi Peak rising from the clouds, glowing orange in the early evening sun. I tried not to think about the nausea or the headache or the possibility that I would be incapable of reaching the top.

We awake at eleven p.m. I've had probably an hour or so of sleep, but I feel surprisingly good, and I think that I must have vomited out whatever was in my system. I dress and crawl out of the tent. It is covered in frost, and the air is cold but pleasant. I choke down a glass of tea and a few biscuit cookies and am ready, my daypack loaded and on my back.

The waning gibbous moon is bright enough that we barely need our headlamps as we begin the ascent from camp. The trail begins gradually but is soon steep switchbacks in loose rock and scree. I imagine it would be like walking on the gravel of my elementary school playground if it were at a thirty-degree pitch.

Above us the headlamps of another group dance up and down in the darkness. I turn around to see many more below us. There is a thin cloud cover, and in the gaps between the clouds I see the lights of villages on the Tanzanian plains miles below us. The moon illuminates Mawenzi Peak towering through the clouds, its top still above our vantage point. We move in silence, Ben in the lead and David at the rear. Our pace is not fast, but is steady, and we pass the group in front of us. There are no more lamps above.

During a short break, another group meets us and we form a single file line. Their guides sing in Swahili. The tempo is slow and keeps us in rhythm. It allows me to shut off my brain. It is pleasant, and high on the mountain in the night, surreal.

The trail steepens again, and each step becomes more labored. I keep my head down and focus the beam of my lamp on Susan's pack in front of me. My own pack weighs about twenty-five pounds, but it feels more like eighty, and it begins to take every part of me, mentally and physically, just to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Someone with an altimeter watch says we've traveled 1,100 feet above camp. Aaron tries to compute how much vertical we have left and comes up with some ridiculous figure that makes no sense, fifty-something, and I know the altitude is getting to him as well. I try to take a sip of water from my camelBak, but the tube is frozen. I feel more exhausted than I've ever felt.

There is a sudden urge to vomit and I puke just off the trail. Ben continues on with Aaron and Susan while David stays behind with me. By the time I am done, their headlamps are distant dots of light. David has taken the water bottle from my pack. He unscrews the lid and hands it to me. As I drink I look around and see the first traces of the snows of Kilimanjaro; small patches that glow in the moonlight. David and I continue on.

The trail disappears into a steep field of boulders. I climb on all fours, taking great care in placing hands and feet in the correct spots. Headlamp beams bob impossibly high above us as we climb like this for far too long. They never seem to get any closer until Ben calls down to us from fifty feet above. I realize by the three stationary beams that they must be taking a break at Gillman's Point on Kibo's crater rim. Ten minutes later, though, as I finally pull myself over the last boulder onto the rim, they are gone.

We take a short break here. I sip some water, David snaps a photo of me next to the Gillman's Point sign, and then I vomit. I look at my watch; four a.m. We've been hiking for four hours. David tells me that the trail is easy from here, not steep. I ask him how much longer to the summit. Maybe two hours, he says. I take another sip of water and realize I am shivering. I have sweat through four layers, including my 700-fill down coat, and the air that had felt exhilarating a few hours before now feels frigid. We keep moving.

David is right, the trail from Gillman's is not as steep. Back home this would be a nice Sunday hike, but it doesn't seem any easier. I feel like I'm hammered drunk, stumbling home after bar close; I'm staring at the ground in front of me, and my feet just won't seem to go where my brain tells them to. Several times I almost fall, and several more times I vomit. David keeps telling me, "Poli, poli. Slow like a chameleon." And I can't imagine how I could be moving any slower.

We stop for another break at Stella Point where the Machame route meets the crater rim. We are now above 19,000 feet, and the snowfields are expansive on either side of the trail. David sits on a rock and pulls a thermos of tea from his pack. I tell him I don't want any, but he insists. I take a sip and immediately feel it coming back up. I puke off the trail onto the snow; the same snow that made such an impression on Hemingway, until there is nothing left in me, and I am dry-heaving. I look up and realize that David is standing next to me, his hand on my back. "Let's go," I say.

We pass several groups of people who look as exhausted as me. One man is leaning on trekking poles vomiting onto the middle of the trail. He doesn't even bother to project the liquid out in front of him, so it spills down the front of his coat. His guide holds onto his arm, supporting some of his weight. David and I exit the trail to pass them; no words are exchanged.

The snow becomes thicker so that we are walking on top of it. It is icy and uneven; difficult to find footing. In the first traces of pre-dawn light we meet Ben, Aaron, and Susan. They have tagged the summit and are on their way back down. "It's not far, man," Aaron says, "just over this rise." Susan looks in rough shape and says nothing. Before we part ways Ben and David exchange a few words in Swahili. I can't understand them, but I have the feeling that Ben is asking how I'm doing.

"Just over this rise" turns into several rises until I can finally see it in the distance, the top of Africa. There are a dozen people there, and I can see the wooden sign indicating the summit that I have seen in so many photographs. I feel tears on my cheeks. At 19,000 feet there is roughly half the amount of oxygen as there is at sea-level, and my brain in the thin air can't come up with any reaction other than crying. The tears freeze.

The summit doesn't seem real. It is six a.m. and the sun is just beginning to rise above the clouds behind Mawenzi Peak. I snap several photos of my surroundings; fellow climbers standing here in silent awe, clouds pillowed miles below, horizon-bound, immense glaciers rising from nothing, lit by dawn. David hands my camera to another guide who takes the obligatory shots of us in front of the Uhuru Peak sign designating this Africa's highest point and the world's highest free-standing mountain.

"You have Facebook?" David asks.

"Yes," I say, "I'll put pictures on Facebook," and I realize that I live in a different time than Hemingway.

Then we are on our way down, having spent a mere five minutes on top. I think about the ridiculous ratio of time and effort spent getting here to the time actually on the summit.

The only cure for altitude sickness is descent, and David is in a hurry to get down. I realize now that this must be what Ben told him when we last met. I am full of adrenaline, and this first part of the descent is easy. There is a steady stream of weary climbers still on their way up. I tell them the summit is not far. As the morning sun intensifies so does the landscape. Down in the crater a thousand feet below, the shadows of massive boulders stretch out in the red dirt. I stop several times to take photos, but David is in a hurry, so I don't take as many as I'd like.

By the time we reach Gillman's Point, the adrenaline is gone, and the fatigue takes over. Now it feels like it is the one hour of sleep followed by six hours of intense hiking that is wearing on me rather than just the altitude. My throat is dry. I suck on my camelBak, but the tube is still mostly frozen, and I hope that the sun will thaw it soon. As I pick my way down the steep field of boulders I look down and see camp, miniscule, so far below. I am glad that we made the climb in the dark; being able to see the sheer immensity of this obstacle as we ascended it would have been too daunting.

We are through the boulder field, and are back on the loose scree. The sun is severe and the trail, no longer frozen as it was in the night, is a mess of red dust that I can taste each time I inhale. It is chalky and dry and mixes with the taste of vomit that still lingers in my mouth. We descend the fall line in long strides, letting gravity take over. I imagine that it would be fun in different circumstances, like running down the giant sand dunes back in Michigan. But my legs feel tired and wobbly and I know that I can't trust them enough to really get going with any speed. We pass a large group hiking up the switchback in a single file line, just beginning their day-time summit attempt. I don't envy them. All I want is to get back to camp, but it still looks tiny far below, and the descent seems endless.

I stumble into camp at around 9:15 a.m. The summit was three hours ago; nine hours since we left camp. It feels like another lifetime, though. David shakes my hand and so do a few of our porters who are hanging out by their tent. I unzip my own and fall in. I lay there on top of my sleeping bag, my feet out the door. One of the porters comes and pours me a glass of pineapple juice. I chug it, then continue to lie there for a long time before gathering the strength to take off my boots and gators.

Ben wakes me at eleven a.m. The short nap has done little to cure my exhaustion, and the thought of another three-hour hike to our next camp is too much. It is not yet noon, but this already feels like the longest day of my life. The only consolation is the idea that getting a few thousand feet closer to sea level may cure my nausea.

I try to shut off my mind for the next three hours, and in large part I succeed. Though I struggle to keep up with Ben, my legs feeling like spaghetti in the afternoon heat, I am able to block out the exhaustion and trudge forward. The view behind us is amazing—Mawenzi to the east and Kibo's iconic south face to the west, its square, snow-capped top just like so many pictures I have seen. I only look for a moment, though, then I stop bothering to lift my head. The small scrub vegetation begins to appear again, then bushes, and finally trees. And then camp. Horombo Hut; a metropolis of wooden A-frames built for the trekkers of the Marangu route. Our tents are in a quiet corner of the camp, up above the huts, so that as I zip my tent door I see them silhouetted against the sun, lowering over the blanket of clouds spread out below us.

The exuberant voices and laughter of the porters wake me. Everyone is in a good mood. It's the last day of our successful trek, and for the porters, it's pay day.

My body is sore and stiff, but this is a good thing. I feel much better, and am able to eat more for breakfast than I have in the last day-and-a-half combined.

Today there will be five more hours of quick hiking down through the clouds, through the jungle and past the monkeys. We will pass summit-bound trekkers and day-hikers walking in the opposite direction. They will ask, "Did you guys make it?" They'll congratulate us and ask, "Was it hard?"

Tonight at the hotel we will drink beers and share stories. Tomorrow is Independence Day, and for the first time in my life I will miss the silly parade of fire trucks and combine tractors in my hometown, the Lions Club chicken dinner in the park, and fireworks over the lake, but it does not matter.

Right now I am on the mountain. The snows of Kilimanjaro are thousands of feet above me, the clouds thousands of feet below. After breakfast the porters sing to us. It is the same song that we heard in the middle of the night hiking up the face of the mountain, but the tempo is much different. It is no longer a dirge meant to keep us in poli poli rhythm, but is a celebration. They clap the beat and dance in circles.

In all the time Hemingway spent in this mountain's shadow, he never climbed beyond its lowest slopes. His snows of Kilimanjaro topped a distant peak, viewed from down there on the plains. My snows, though, are not too far behind me, and I felt them this morning crunching beneath my feet as I walked, albeit weakly, directly upon them.

Images appear courtesy of Colin Clancy.

How like that trickster kudzu
to wrap and slink itself
and every telephone pole it strangles
eventually into

The Agony of Christ,
His long, green arms outstretched
along the single strung power line.

His broken shoulders held and pressed against
the full fathom's length
of wooden spar behind.

The transformer hums
beneath His swell of chest,
above which hangs and sags
His Holy Head
and Crown

twisted from the weed itself
and thick glass knotted
insulator knobs.

And how in a week
the kudzu
and hint of its host-shape
will shift

into a lifting bird,
its wings outstretched, mid-flap,

or a green leap of match-stick flame
hovering above the striker's hand.

u

"Morbidly obese" was the term physicians used to describe Christine Urbino, a phrase usually found in the first sentence of their examination notes. It means obesity of such degree as to interfere with normal activities. No argument there. Christine was five-foot-two and over three-hundred pounds. She had difficulty with a lot of things we, the less rotund, take for granted, like getting through turnstiles or wearing seatbelts.

When she first came to my law office our secretary/receptionist/clerk, Orlando Gomez, said to me, "Your two o'clock is here."

My watch said 1:50pm so I said, "Tell her to have a seat, I'll be with her at two."

"There's a problem," Orlando said. "She's too big."

"What do you mean, 'too big'?"

"Let me rephrase it. Our chairs are too small."

And then I remembered. This was a weight-discrimination case, referred to me from the Lincoln Park, Michigan, office of Legal Aid, my place of employment before I was laid off five years ago. For want of any alternative, I had opened a law office in nearby, low-rent Taylor Township, sharing overhead, including Orlando, with two other laid-off lawyers. Our waiting room was furnished with bentwood, cane-bottomed armchairs from Discount Imports.

I went to my office doorway, looked at the waiting area and confirmed Orlando's assessment.

Christine stood patiently by the office entrance, her ample girth in stark contrast to the slender nudes of Matisse's La Dance on the wall beside her. I said to Orlando, "Never mind," and approached her.

"Ms. Urbino? I'm David Sedlow. Please come into my office."

Fortunately, I had purchased from the previous occupant a weathered but sturdy red leather couch, of the type once fashionable in hotel lobbies and men's smoking clubs. Christine lowered herself into it with obvious relief. She was indeed a very large person, but very neat, wearing a cream pleated skirt, blue blazer, and white blouse. Her hair was conservatively permed, tinted blond, and her chubby, pleasant face lightly made up. A small gold cross lay at her throat. She sat up straight, looked down at my knock-off Persian carpet, then up at my mounted degrees and certificates, and then straight at me, a slight furrow of concern on her forehead.

"Thank you, Mr. Sedlow, for seeing me. But could you please tell me now what this consultation is going to cost me. I'm on a tight budget since I lost my job."

"Nothing," I replied. "We'll talk about fees if and when we decide that I should take your case. So tell me why you're here. In a nutshell."

She exhaled and the furrow disappeared. "Okay," she said. "I'll try to be brief. I was employed for ten years by the Madison Health and Dinner Club in the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit. First as a file clerk, then as a membership service associate, and finally as front office receptionist. I worked very hard in that job. I greeted all the members and guests, handled all the dinner and lunch reservations, answered and directed all incoming calls, gave callers directions to the Club, lined up personal trainers, was first responder to complaints. And I loved it. I worked any hours they wanted, stayed late to discuss problem members, volunteered to conduct tours. It didn't pay that much, but it was my whole life. And do you know why, Mr. Sedlow?"

"No, Ms. Urbino, why?"

"Look at me, Mr. Sedlow. What kind of social life do you think I have? I have no family but a sister in Chicago. All I've got is my church. And bingo on Wednesday nights. That receptionist job was my life. I met all kinds of people. I made friends. I really believed that I was a valued employee and not just a fat person. For the first time in many years I felt good about myself."

Christine fished a Kleenex out of her purse and dabbed at her eye. "Darn it, I wasn't going to do this," she muttered.

"That's okay. Take your time," I said, noting the unaffected show of emotion. "Then what happened?"

"The Club, which is part of a national chain, changed managers. Mr. Stephens, the old manager, retired and they transferred the new manager, Jack Perkins, from Houston. He's mid-thirties, athletic type, deep tan. He does a lot of hearty hand-shaking with men and cheek-kissing with women, always smiling. So right away he starts talking at weekly staff meetings about 'image' and 'branding' and 'customer experience' and 'external perception.'

"Well, six weeks after he arrives he calls me into his office and he's not smiling. He tells me there have been some complaints about me. I almost fainted. There had never been complaints about me in ten years. He says several members say I have been rude to them and made them uncomfortable. I asked him, Who? When? How? He says I left them waiting on the phone and haven't followed their instructions regarding reservations for business lunch. I asked him when this happened and who said this? He says they asked their names not be mentioned as they are afraid of retaliation.

"I said, 'Retaliation? By me?' He says in terms of table assignments, reservations, forwarding calls from their offices. And finally, he tells me that I don't project the 'dynamic look' he wants to present at the Club. He has made up his mind. I'm not who he wants up front.

"At that point I start to cry so he tells me he's got another job for me in the Membership Office, at the same pay, where I won't have these kinds of problems. He says he'll bring me there tomorrow. Then he tells me to take the rest of the day off and calm down.

"Mr. Sedlow, my heart was broken. I couldn't say anything. I just nodded, stood up, left his office, got my things and went home. When I passed the reception desk there was a new employee there. He had hired her a month before as a membership recruiter."

"Ms. Urbino, I've got to ask you this..."

"I know. She was very petite. Probably a size four."

"What happened the next day?"

"He took me to this room where there was a computer, a table, a chair, a stack of phone books, a big clock on the wall, and two telephones. No windows. My job was to make cold calls to professional and business people, telling them about a one-time special discount on dues for new members. Have you ever made cold calls, Mr. Sedlow?"

"No, but I've gotten them."

"Do you like getting them?"

"No."

"Neither do I. Nobody does, especially not busy professional or business people. Eight hours of rejection every day, Mr. Sedlow. Some of it very nasty. In a ten-by-twelve office with no windows. Nobody else had been put in such a setup.

"I did it for six weeks. Finally I asked him if I could do these calls out of my home. He refused. So I stuck it out for another two months. But there was another problem, Mr. Sedlow. I developed a kidney condition. It's not serious, but it requires me to urinate more frequently than most people. He started writing me up for taking too much time away from my desk, even though I made the required number of calls by the end of the day.

"Finally, he changed my shift to afternoons because, he said, he wanted me to call people at home at dinner time. This disrupted my whole body rhythm and aggravated my condition. And Mr. Sedlow, you can imagine the reaction I got from people getting a cold solicitation call when they were sitting down to dinner."

"I know what my reaction is."

"Exactly. Some of them called to complain about getting calls and he wrote me up for that. He said I would be fired if he had to write me up again. I was afraid that if I got fired I would never get another job with that on my record. So I quit to avoid being fired. After I quit, I happened to meet one of the girls from the Club, Nina Falud. Nina said that Perkins was dating the new receptionist, Danielle, a former stewardess."

Christine went on to relate how the club successfully contested her unemployment benefits on the grounds that she quit. She figured this would prevent her from filing a wrongful discharge suit as well. A year later she went to the Legal Aid office to get some help applying for Medicaid. Tom Pace, a former Legal Aid colleague, picked up on the circumstances of her resignation, remembered that Michigan had a civil rights provision against weight discrimination, and referred her to me.

Despite vigorous job search efforts, she had been unemployed for the past year except for some baby-sitting and, with cruel irony, telephone solicitation jobs. Her savings were depleted. Remuneration in her last position with the Club was slightly under $26,000 per year, plus health care coverage.

There are a hundred ways to lose employment cases, they are expensive to bring, and there is no money coming in unless and until you win. The cases are bitterly fought by high-powered law firms who bill for their time and are paid on a monthly basis. Experienced plaintiffs' employment lawyers sign up fewer than one out of twenty potential clients they talk to. The bottom line in such decision making is the bottom line. If I win, what do I get? And the most important factor in that calculation is the client's former compensation level. For most experienced employment lawyers, Christine's salary would have been too low to justify taking time away from their other cases involving former executives and similar high-rollers.

I was not yet an experienced employment lawyer. I hadn't had twenty cases call me. There were no high rollers in my filing cabinet. Further, I was not yet encumbered with the financial burdens generated by family or a pricey lifestyle. I was "...young and easy under the apple boughs..." still able to quote poetry, and firm in my long-standing intent to use law to effect progressive social change. Christine's comparatively low wage scale would not deter me.

But could I win?

Before weighing the many technical factors involved, I leaned back in my Naugahyde swivel chair and took a good look at Christine, as a juror would. She was markedly obese. That struck one first. But she was dignified, intelligent, and straightforward. She looked back at me. She knew what I was doing. And I thought about Perkins, the smiling Texan. Yes, I would go forward with this case. I had her sign some record release forms and said I would be in touch.

Orlando and I clocked many hours of investigation and research, spread over several weeks. Christine's personnel file, reluctantly surrendered by the Club, showed no complaints or discipline prior to Jack Perkins' arrival. The typed letters of complaint Perkins had referred to curiously all had the same format and layout.

A call to Christine's former colleague, Nina Falud, yielded a powerful piece of evidence, if she would testify to it. She said she had walked by Perkins' office and observed him doing an impersonation of Christine's walk for the amusement of Danielle. No one else was present and she couldn't hear what they were saying. Then Nina said she shouldn't be talking to me as her job could be in jeopardy, and she hung up.

Legal research showed we had a decent chance on the issues of constructive discharge, causation, and weight-bias motivation to be able to withstand the employer's pre-trial motions to dismiss.

I had Christine sign a retainer agreement. I drafted the Complaint, filed it with the State Circuit Court and had it served on the employer, now known as the Defendant.

At our meeting to go over the results of the investigation and sign the retainer, I divulged to Christine, Nina's story about Perkins' mime show.

"It doesn't surprise me, Mr. Sedlow, and it doesn't faze me. I hope we can use it to our advantage. Good old Nina. She has a limp. I can imagine what he did when she wasn't around."

I busied myself signing some papers and looked up to see Christine looking out the window, one small tear making its lonely way down her pale cheek.

"For fat people it's like being a dray horse," she said. "You get used to the whip, but it still hurts."

There's a line for the jury, I thought.

Two weeks later, I got a call from Alyne Wallace, the law clerk of attorney Gale Solingen, asking for a thirty-day extension on their thirty-day deadline to answer the Complaint. Solingen and her husband Rick VanDever had just left a big silk stocking firm, ripping off almost all of that firm's corporate clients. They were a conventionally handsome couple with a tendency toward arrogance. A thirty-day extension request was not unheard of but it usually came from attorneys, not their clerks. I so advised her clerk. Two minutes later Solingen called me.

"What's going on, Sedlow?" she barked.

"Do you have some request to make, Ms. Solingen?"

"I'm merely asking for thirty days extension. I'm tied up in some important cases."

"Well, now you've got another one. But since you asked so nicely, the answer is yes. Please draft a confirming memorandum."

"A memo? You have my word."

"I'd rather have your signature. My professional liability premiums are high enough."

"Is this the way it's going to be, Sedlow?"

"Yes, Ms. Solingen. It's called civility."

She hung up.

There followed that long and tedious segment of civil litigation procedure called "discovery," which can last from six months to two years. It essentially consists of each side posing questions and each side doing its best to avoid answering. The whole process is a tooth-pulling, foot-dragging, mind-numbing ordeal hated by all participants except defense counsel, who bill their clients $400 plus per hour.

I prepared Christine for her deposition, but was still worried about how she would hold up under fire from Solingen. Depositions can get very nasty. There's no judge present to referee. Lawyers will deliberately goad the deponents to see if they get rattled or angry and contradict themselves.

I needn't have worried. Christine handled the interrogation with aplomb—waiting a couple of seconds after each question before giving her answer, not volunteering information, not rising to the bait when Solingen posed questions in a sarcastic or hostile mode, not guessing at what she didn't know, remaining dignified and courteous.

This was the opposite of Perkins' demeanor when it was my turn to depose. His friendly, relaxed drawl became a growling threat when cornered. He admitted that he encouraged patrons to file written complaints against Christine. Perkins drafted the complaints himself for the patron's signature. He delayed confronting Christine with the complaints until weeks, and hundreds of patrons, had gone by, so that it was difficult for her to remember particular incidents and contradict the allegations.

But he insisted that Christine's weight was not a factor in his decision to remove her from the receptionist job and that he had never disparaged her physical appearance.

I had included Nina Falud on our witness list despite the fact that Nina had been reluctant to talk to me since our first conversation. Solingen took Nina's deposition. Nina was very nervous. Perkins was in the room sitting next to Solingen. He looked at Nina like a gangster would look at his next victim. This exchange followed.

Q: Ms. Falud, did you consider yourself a friend of Ms. Urbino?

A: Yes, I guess so.

Q: Did you ever hear Mr. Perkins say anything derogatory about Ms. Urbino's weight or size?

A: No.

Q: Did you ever hear Mr. Perkins ever say anything about Ms. Urbino?

A: No.

Q: Did you ever hear anyone else at the Club besides Ms. Urbino say that Mr. Perkins treated Ms. Urbino unfairly?

A: No.

Solingen let a tiny smirk escape across her fashion-model face. She said, "No further questions."

So, I thought. Solingen doesn't know anything about what Nina saw and figures Nina's got nothing but hearsay complaints from Christine. Why should I wise her up by asking Nina about Perkins' charade?

"No further questions," I said.

Perkins smiled openly, stretched and said, "Let's get some lunch."

Nina's deposition was over. She left the room without looking at any of us.

Depositions of the Club members who complained about Christine revealed that they were busy, busy men who couldn't possibly remember some incident with a receptionist two years earlier but, yes, that was their signature on the letter and, yes, it must have been true then. They also couldn't remember paying their Club dues the past three years but their secretaries take care of that and they have no idea why the dues weren't paid while they continued using the facility.

We also established that Christine's windowless Siberia was originally a storeroom and, never before nor after Christine's occupancy, had been used as an employee workplace.

So on the eve of Defendant filing the inevitable Pretrial Motion to Dismiss, what we had was not bad. Our case was essentially:

1. Christine was qualified for the position and was replaced by a much thinner person.

2. Perkins' statement that she didn't have "that dynamic look" they wanted at the reception desk was code for "you're too fat."

3. The ostensible reasons for her sideways demotion, the "member complaints," were a pretext, shown by the suspicious circumstances of their issuance.

4.The history of the windowless room indicates she was put there to induce her to quit, i.e. she was "constructively discharged."

Fortunately we had drawn as our judge for this case, Morris Feldman, a retired judge, brought back part-time to help clear a crowded docket. Feldman was not a proponent of judicial activism. In this case, that meant if discovery revealed evidence that, if believed, made out at least a minimal case, he would let it go to a jury to see if they believed it. "That's what juries are for," he would say.

Accordingly, after briefs and discovery materials were presented, Feldman called in the lawyers and denied Defendant's Motion to Dismiss. "We've got some facts here which, if believed, make out a case of weight discrimination. Do I believe them? That's none of your concern or mine. That's what juries are for. Motion denied. Let's look at the calendar and pick a trial date."

It helped that Judge Feldman was five foot, six inches tall and weighed 270 pounds.

Then came the long wait.

In those days, you were given a trial date some months in advance. As the date approached you re-briefed your client, subpoenaed your witnesses, worked on your opening statement to the jury, cleared your calendar, and lined up some clean shirts. On the morning of the trial date you showed up in court with your client, your witnesses and about twenty pounds of notes, documents and transcripts, only to find that six to eight other pairs of attorneys had been given the same trial date before the same judge. You and your client then stood around for hours in the corridor, desultorily discussing settlement with defense counsel and, every now and then, being called into the judge's chamber where you, defense counsel and the judge desultorily discussed settlement.

Solingen had from the beginning indicated there would be no settlement offer other than for nuisance value of $2500. Hers was a new law firm and they wanted to show how tough they were.

So after four hours of this routine, maybe one or two cases would settle and the judge would pick one of the remaining cases to actually start trial, usually the one with the earliest filing date. The rest of us would get a new "trial date" six to nine months hence, at which time the drill would be repeated. This non-process could and did go on for three years.

Time did not stand still, even though it sometimes felt like it in the halls of justice. I gradually acquired a caseload involving several medium, if not high, rollers and actually settled a couple of cases for substantial amounts. I developed a lifestyle which disposed of my disposable income. I replaced the bentwood cane chairs and the red leather sofa with Herman Miller designs. I tired of tuna fish and bottled Ragu. I began to care less about social change than I did about social security—my own, that is.

I married. My wife Gina was a choreographer and former modern dancer. She made very little money. And she became pregnant with our first child, Zoe. This meant she made no money. So I joined the quotidian rat race and concentrated on building a practice. I served on State Bar committees, gave free lectures on points of law, went to conventions, and schmoozed with the likes of Solingen on panel discussions—all for the purpose of getting case referrals.

And so my life went, practicing law during the day and hustling cases at night and on weekends. Gina had a life too. She formed a dance company that toured throughout the Midwest. We saw little of each other and our private lives followed similar paths. I had an affair with another woman during my travels and Gina had an affair with another woman during her travels. Upon mutual disclosure, our relationship rapidly deteriorated. We divorced, sharing custody of Zoe but with the principal burden of support on me.

Amidst my personal and professional turmoil, Christine would faithfully call once a month. I would faithfully take the call and inform her that, alas, there was nothing new on the issues of trial or settlement. She would chat for a while, about her job search efforts, her church activities, her cat, her sister. Then she would thank me for my hard work, express her confidence in me, and ring off.

I did not share her confidence. The circumstances of the divorce shattered my ego like a ball-peen hammer, plus cases weren't settling, support payments were due, and I was strapped for money. After Bar Association functions, over a few drinks, friendly corporate lawyers would ask me why I was knocking my brains out as a plaintiff's lawyer when the big money was on the other side. Things went further than that. Solingen made me a job offer. She had split up with VanDever and kept most of their clients but needed some help with the trials.

She said, "Listen, David. Dump those chickenfeed cases like Urbino, bring the rest over and work for me. Make some real money. We'll have some fun." Then she gave me her portfolio smile. She was a real looker. I had to think for a minute.

"Gale," I said. "I can't do what you do. I can't represent those fuckers."

"Then you had better leave," she said, lighting up a cigarette.

"I guess I had better," I said, reaching for my pants.

I stopped taking Christine's calls, instructing Orlando to tell her there were no new developments. I didn't want to spend time chatting when I had bigger fish to fry—age discrimination class actions, flagrant sex harassment cases, heart-breaking handicapper cases.

Finally, we received a trial date in Christine's case that I believed was the real thing. We were, by far, the oldest case of the group scheduled and we weren't going to settle.

Christine came in for what I hoped was her last trial prep. She was a mess. She had put on even more weight. She wore a dirty, secondhand muumuu that looked like a tent on her. No makeup. No earrings. Her hair unpermed and askew. She smelled. She clutched a rosary in her left hand. Looking at her I could not control a slight wince. She saw it.

"I know what you're thinking, Mr. Sedlow. I can't go to court like this. And you're right, I won't. I'll look as sharp as the first day you saw me. I'm not stupid. But I wanted you to see, to know, how it is with me on an everyday basis. How I don't care anymore. How all I've got is my faith and food. I've got diabetes and kidney disease and a lot of other health problems. Even if we win, I'll probably not live to see the money. I've been disappointed that you haven't taken my calls. But you've worked hard on my case so I can't let you down. I'll give it one more try. Let's get to work."

A law professor who taught trial advocacy often referred to the "hurly-burly of trial." It's the unarmed equivalent of the "Fog of War." No matter how much one prepares, a jury trial will take off in unexpected directions only some of which remain in the memory, especially if you try the case alone, as I did.

At the defense table were three classically Western female beauties—Gale Solingen, her clerk—Alyne Wallace, and Danielle Dumont, Christine's replacement as receptionist and now Director of Public Relations for the Club. They were impeccably groomed, had tanned, taut bodies and handsome features. I realized that this was no accident. They, especially Danielle, were there to show to the jury what they couldn't come out and say: "This is how a business person's health club receptionist should look."

Christine, had, as promised, done a self-makeover. She spent precious savings on a perm and tint, a facial and a manicure. And she starved herself down twenty pounds so she could wear her freshly cleaned blazer and pleated skirt. But she hung on to the rosary.

The testimony went pretty much as expected. I had a good time cross-examining Perkins about his solicitation of complaints against Christine and his conversion of a storage room into a cell for her. By the end of his testimony he was gripping the arms of his chair like he was going to tear them off. I remember referring to him in final argument as "...a one-eyed jack and we've seen the other side of his face."

The best testimony came at the end of Defendant's case when Solingen called Nina Falud to the stand and had her acknowledge that she regarded Christine as a friend but she never heard Mr. Perkins disparage Christine for her weight.

On my cross-examination Nina stated that while she couldn't hear what he said she had seen him imitating Christine's walk for Danielle's amusement.

On redirect exam, Solingen, mousetrapped, tried to recover and asked the classic dangerous Question You Don't Know the Answer To.

Q: If you couldn't hear him, how do you know it was Ms. Urbino he was imitating?

A: Because he was wearing Christine's jacket.

The jury was out two hours. Waiting for the verdict in the empty courtroom, Christine and I sat silently at Plaintiff's table. Gale, Danielle and Alyne chatted, joked and made calls at theirs. Perkins sat in a corner, glowering.

The jury came back and we stood for the verdict. It was unanimous: $300,000 for lost past and future wages and $100,000 for emotional distress for the Plaintiff Christine Urbino. The judge thanked the jury for their services, adjourned for the day, and hurried into his chambers.

Christine was crying. I gave her a hug. Solingen was muttering angrily in a huddle with the two other women. She noticed me looking at her, forced a smile and said, "congratulations." I nodded.

The jury foreman, a retired toolmaker named Mullone, was putting on his coat. I walked up and asked him what drove the verdict. He thought for a minute, then said, "It was, like, the prom queens beating up on the fat girl." Then he smiled, shook my hand and left.

"Well," I said to Christine, "now we'll both have enough money to join the Club." And for the first and last time, I heard her laugh.

Epilogue

I wish there were no epilogue.

Solingen appealed to the Michigan Court of Appeals. This stayed payment of the verdict until the Court of Appeals ruled. Their hearing docket was running about two years with decisions coming about six months after the hearing. I told Christine to be patient a little longer, that we should win in the Court of Appeals and that interest was accruing on the judgment. However she again began to deteriorate and was in a lot of pain from her ailments. So I began to call her every week to buck her up.

During those two years, a right wing governor appointed nothing but ultra-conservative judges. They increasingly engaged in the practice of vacating jury verdicts on the hitherto rarely used ground that "no reasonable jury could have reached such a verdict on the evidence." So after a two-year wait and a perfunctory hearing before a three-judge panel, dominated by two of such appointees, the Court issued an Opinion ruling, two-to-one, to vacate Christine's verdict and returned the case for dismissal at the trial level on the grounds that "no reasonable jury, etc..."

I called Christine to tell her the bad news and to suggest I come over the next day to discuss filing a petition for rehearing en banc or continuing the appeal to the Supreme Court. She sounded almost relieved that some decision had been made.

"Yes, "she said. "Come over tomorrow. That will give me time to clean up"

The next day, in late afternoon, I pulled up in front of her Levittown style bungalow. The front yard was overgrown but one could see where flower beds had flourished and where climbing roses had bloomed on a four-foot cyclone fence.

I knocked and no one answered. I tried the door and it was unlatched. I went in. The shades were drawn and filtered sunlight bathed the tiny living room in a golden haze. The room was clean and orderly in its offering of mismatched wooden chairs, an early model La-Z-Boy recliner and the spavined red leather sofa I had given her when I refurnished my office. I called out her name and heard no response, but I smelled one. It came from the kitchen. There was Christine, spread-eagled on the floor, a tray of spilled crostini next to her, dressed in her blazer and pleated skirt, vomit on her face and in her mouth and throat, her eyes open in surprise.

I called her sister, Irene, in Chicago, the EMS and the police. Her sister flew out immediately to view and identify the body at the morgue. I suggested she bury Christine in her blazer outfit and Irene agreed. I was one of eight pallbearers.

I saw Gale Solingen outside the courthouse a few days later.

"Sorry about Christine," she said, putting her hand on my arm and leaning close. "It was so sad. But you know, she really didn't have a case. And now, at least you're free of it, except for whatever costs the court awards us, which we'll waive, of course, if you drop any further appeals on behalf of her estate. You're not going on with this, are you? I mean, really, David, it's time for you to move on, don't you think?" she said with that same perfect smile.

I was silent for a moment.

"Gale, Christine is dead. Further appeals won't do her any good. Do what you want with your award of costs."

The smile faded a little and she took her hand away from my arm.

"But tell me something," I said. "Were you ever a prom queen?"

"Why... yes. Yes, I was," she said, the smile brightening.

"I thought so."

"Well, thank you," the smile broader.

"Don't mention it," I said, as I turned to go into the courthouse.

Title graphic: "Drawn to Justice" Copyright © The Summerset Review 2011.

The house will be a quiet hollow,
but for the cloth-muffled echo,
your thoughtless call for the one

you wish well. You'll watch him go,
into the gleaming car and down
the road, under the trees. You'll know

he's elsewhere, but hear his name
in your own voice as you reach
for two cups off the upper shelf.

He'll almost answer, though
it will only be the cat on the piano,
that groan of the furnace starting up,

or the kitchen door hinge, your ears
listening on behalf of the part of you
sure he's still here. In the corner—

they call it a corner, but it's all
the moment's surround—of your eye,
that smile you know without thought,

that quiet surprise, will appear,
and disappear quick as you look,
and you will look, to see if he's here.

The pocket of chaos in my father's head,
so far, has left him unable
to walk, find words, lift food on a fork,
or know what day it is. It makes him
emotional—he weeps as I enter
the room in which he reclines for hours
a day on his hospital bed. He speaks
with a new stutter, says Help me
whenever he comes to a hole in the ground
of his memory. Yes, it was
Connie Mack Stadium, Dad—I knew
what he was getting at. I see it too,
as it was, out past Strawberry Mansion
in the summer evening light. It was leveled
decades ago, when he never wept.

One takes the position of observer.
Exclude the body. Except one's hands
and genitals at times, and the other's

body—these are observable. Eyes,
lips, etcetera. Notes are kept
in the neuronal archives—lines

and lines inked in the shadow of events
—the rise of those breasts in the shadowless
light through the shades, even the blessed

glide of one's fingertips over the lower
ledge of the other's ribs.... This,
the observer's stance, even in bed, is

permissible, valid. Though it leaves
the darkness unsaid. Another position takes
one's own body's invisible traffic

in—the heart's reckless speeding,
shots and cries up from the neighborhood
war in the abdomen, the seething

police in their secret upstairs apartment
blinds, spies from the rival cadres
sneaking block-by-block down the spine

—so much in darkness! O, the sparks
in every plexus, covert fires
in the hovels of the chest, muzzle blasts

in the broken windows of abandoned wishes
—desire's unrecordable stars,
love's flashing interior constellations.

About eight p.m. under a fading turquoise sky and clouds with watercolor-grey outlines, the night photographer Scott B. Davis angles his black Toyota truck with camper hull into a strangely beautiful but noisy promontory in San Diego's Balboa Park. It's nothing more than an empty parking lot off Golf Course Drive—where I feel commanded by the wide-armed view of the city skyline and the red-lighted Naval Medical Center and where Davis, a nocturnalist, sees something else entirely. The something he sees is not there or barely there or quickly receding from whatever thereness it had.

At thirty-nine, Davis is by day the director of the Museum of Photographic Arts exhibitions and design. By night, he grows a new fur, becoming a visual poet of abandonment, of reluctance, of the murky edge. He likes a cloudy night since he's uninterested in rendering the stars. He works against the traditional night photo: stars and skylines, the iconography of known places, street lamps highlighting the recognizable: the San Diego Padres home, PETCO Park at two a.m. "What I'm after more than anything is a sense of absence." In his photos, "there are large voids of no information." It's a redundancy but I get his point. His minimal pieces filter the cerebral through the emotional and vice versa. This "confrontation with absence," he hopes, "in meditative silence . . . becomes a kind of self-reflective act."

It's very personal—his looking for an image "that lacks a subject but has some poignancy or interest that draws me to it." Davis also photographs the desert in light and darkness, "unspectacular places," or "what I like to say: places that were overlooked in the quest for national treasures." Davis—who has razor-cut hair, à la Criss Angel, moderately untidy with dagger points around his ears—is also an ironist. But he's artist-complicated. His personality, more meditatively grave than self-obsessed, is as keenly existential as his picture-taking style.

Davis says of himself that he has "carved a reputation as a night photographer. And I'm okay with that." In terms of his subjects, he steers clear of the icons, though he did photograph the Hollywood sign, which is unlit at night. He liked the paradox of those darkened nine letters in a studio-lot milieu with its glitzy, fake, backlit scenes. He likes to fight against this need in photographers (and galleries and museums and viewers) to have shown to them what they know, what's digestible, photography like pop music. "How do you tell a story of this place [So Cal] without describing the place as everybody knows it. I'm more interested in shedding new information than in telling the story that's already known."

In 2007, Davis's first solo show in Los Angeles caught the attention of the Los Angeles Times. A reviewer wrote that his platinum print pictures "are quiet [and] careful," conveying "a sense of the fundamental mechanics of light with unusual immediacy and clarity." In 2008, a solo exhibition in New York was also trumpeted. The New Yorker said Davis's "noir twist. . . renders the deadest of dead ends . . . weirdly seductive." The Village Voice wrote of his "sharp eye for inanimate drama . . . the shadowy flip side of sunny paradise," and The New York Times noted Davis's "eye for scenes of evocative and vaguely suspenseful emptiness. . . His images are so perfectly composed and technically fine-tuned that they turn out richly picturesque." A new show of his work opened November 2011 at the San Diego Museum of Art.

At our first stop, Davis shines his truck headlamps on a scene: a "field of poppies and wild mustard grass blowing in the darkness." A locked red gate is submerged in this growth. He likes to look at this scene "and think about and wonder," hoping to "convey that weird, eerie sense of not-knowing, of mystery. Does this describe San Diego to most people? No. Not at all. Is it an integral part of San Diego? In my opinion, yes." How so? Because it's open park space, undeveloped or reserved, under the flight path, a spot for city maintenance vehicles maybe. It's very Scott-B-Davis paradoxical in that the place's non-identity is yielding an identity of absence that catches his eye, that is, at least, "less literal" than what we know but "as literal" as what's there—all of which he hopes to capture on film.

Davis's instrument is an eight-by-ten-inch view camera, commonly used in the nineteenth century, this one built in the 1950s. These cameras are part of a long tradition, from Matthew Brady through Ansel Adams, "arguably the gold standard of the 20th century" photographer. Davis places the tripod, pulls out the accordion-connected viewer, babies its rickety age with big binder clips, and companions big box camera and scene. We're strictly analog here, though he does use digital cameras and accepts digital's speed and versatility in the new world. He's shooting directly onto eight-by-ten-inch sheets of film, doing long exposures, then processing them in a platinum-printing process: the handmade blowups may reach twenty-by-twenty-four inches.

"My seeing," he says, "has developed by using this camera." Its viewfinder is the size of a small television. The lens reduces the light of the image to one-eighth of what we see with the naked eye. As he works, as the night begins to go blue-black, Davis talks out his process. The scene with its "wild" flora, he says, has "a weird sense of overgrown nothingness." He resets the tripod, gets what he wants, puts a small square cloth over his head and the back half of the camera (reminiscent of the photographers who shot our grandparents' portraits), then presses the little black rubber ball to start and stop the exposure, which may run to three minutes.

Suddenly a man with a dog on his leash emerges into and through the "scene." This little disturbance is common, Davis says. He's often had brief encounters with people at night where the default position is, If you're out here, you're probably up to no good. Encounters appear threatening. He wonders, seeing the man go back to his car and sit inside with the light on, "Now who's the bad guy: him or me?" He says, "More often than not, I'm asked to leave," especially if he's piqued a security guard's wariness who thinks Davis can't possibly have a benign purpose in contemplating the edge of a barely lit parking lot.

Talk about listening space. Three sounds intrude as he works: the roar every five minutes of a plane passing overhead, the screeching yips of coyotes in the canyon below, and the devilish flaps of a barn owl hunting along the field's periphery.

No sooner is that photo done than he sees a patch of rain-broken-and-crumbled pavement that intrigues him. By day, he says, "I would know what this is. At night, I don't," so he's taken by it. Such serendipity is what he loves. All that "is ultimately what hooked me." And being alone in the "meditative space," looking at a scene and "wondering whether there's a photograph here."

Hooded by the dark cloth, he has to let his eyes adjust; nothing's very clear: "They're just fried. What I see and what I don't see changes under here," he says, his voice muffled. "Everything is visible; everything's also upside down and backwards. It's a pretty imprecise science." Before letting me have a look, Davis says, "You'll be surprised at what you can't see."

Under the cloth I peer at the image and see the most minimal of inky shapes in an inkier tableaux of flattened space. The subject it seems is darkness or the moodiness of the dark, and in a sense, without overtly recognizable subject matter, a Scott B. Davis night shot shares an organizing theme: whatever is there is fighting with and losing to the darkness.

We stop a third time at a pair of date palms, a senior and junior side by side. Davis calls it "an iconic, anonymous scene in Southern California." These trees are Arabian imports, which, he notes, have nothing to do with California except that they're everywhere. Davis loves these "hardscrabble, rough places, with weeds all around. It's not the pretty California everybody comes to expect." Such untidiness—this dense growth of unmanaged palms lit faintly by street lamps—is "an important part of my story—sharing with people what people aren't looking at, what people choose not to look at or aren't concerned enough to look at. By pointing a camera at it and making a still photograph, I'm forcing you to look at it."

With this image, he says, "I'll make it a lot more dark and moody and mysterious than what we're experiencing right now." A pause, and "to tell a story that you're not seeing."

I like all the conundrums a night out with a night photographer poses. On one hand, Davis says he loves to wander; he doesn't know what he's looking for. But he also has his eye on those messy, moody, unshaped spots he returns to, broods over, waits for, until the time is right. Some nights he'll venture out as long as four hours and, though he thinks about merging what's evident and what's hidden behind the evident, he comes up empty. No mystery appears. (Photography is a reductive process, he says. "Here's the world, and I'm going to extract this little square or box from it." Painting is additive. The adage goes, "one makes a painting and one takes a photograph.") "Night photography," Davis continues, "is catch-as-catch-can. You can't wait for the sun to move from behind the clouds. You can't predict a kind of magic hour and it'll go golden over there with deep shadows in the storm clouds." Most scenes remain what they are (nearly impenetrable) all night long.

So what's he seeing? Again, this koan: that which he's not seeing, what intuition tells him is or may be there. Ultimately, it's an exercise in "giving up control" of the photographer's compositional craft.

All this puts me in mind of Geoff Dyer's essay about Idris Khan. Khan is a young Englishman who photographs iconic books and classic photographs, overlaying page on page or image on image, to render a whole text or a collection of images all at once. The result is a blurred mass with a fascinating texture and idea of photographic wholeness. "Working in a medium wedded to the visible," Dyer writes, "photographers, perversely and inevitably, have been preoccupied with photographing the invisible." Khan layers the visible so many times that it produces an object as opaque as it is revealing. It's there but it's not there. The question is, what's being revealed? For Dyer, it's a "visual corollary," but of what? A collection of pages or images? If all the pages of the book are being superimposed upon one another in a single photograph, then you see the whole book at once (you look down through it) but you can't make it out. Is this an invisible quality of the whole made visible? Show me what it is you can't see. Or is it just Khan's peculiar "method" of producing a new image so we'll argue about its veracity as an image of what's "not there"?

Why is this important? For me it conjures up the so-called perversity of seeking the invisible in—or through—the visible. Yes, the photograph is over-wedded to what it sees, its actuality: it takes what it sees. But this is not exactly what Davis's photos are after. I don't think that the "less" or the "barely" or the "tiny bit" seen—that which is "barely seen" in the night—renders the invisible. To be "preoccupied with photographing the invisible" is to go against the photograph's donnée: to show what has been seen. It's double-barbed: we are stuck between what is invisible and what is not normally seen because it is not normally photographed. In this sense, it is invisible ("You'll be surprised at what you can't see," Davis says) until it's seen, that is, photographed. Once it's there, voilà! We see the invisible.

This is the Area 51 I think Davis is working in.

I'm reminded of Wallace Stevens: "To behold nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." To crack open the door to Sartre and existentialism, my undergraduate philosophy teacher one day cupped his hands and asked: "What am I holding in my hands?" We were mum. "Nothing. And now I'm going to show you." He uncupped his hands and said, "See, here it is: the nothing I was holding in my hands." It may pay to render these koans over and over again.

A photograph of a night scene, with more night than anything else, reduces an image to the elemental. There's just enough light to illuminate the darkness so we see the darkness and its many shadings, much less the lighted night (a distinction in the history of photography I will draw presently). What is unseen can be seen—that's what is meant, in part, by "photographing the invisible." To photograph what isn't seen is to photograph what is implied—a tone, an emotion, a sudden deepening or darkening of texture, any of which may have escaped the viewfinder but, perhaps, not the exposure. The camera saw it; not the cameraman. Davis's night work hinges on this implication, as much an act of faith as the outcome of hard work. Indeed, an act of faith is reminiscent of the Biblical, "the evidence of things not seen." Here's the conundrum: That which is not seen possesses some evidence that it is there, otherwise all night photos would be completely black. In Davis's work, the photograph seeks to capture the slightest evidence of night. And often the image taken is one that shudders from view, is withdrawing, escaping, hiding, and, ultimately, not materializing. The truly invisible cannot be seen. But that very impossibility has lured photographers for more than a century.

Imaging and imagining the shifty zone between what is and is not there was a primary concern of photography's pioneer, Alfred Stieglitz. Case in point, his Equivalents (1922-1935), the cloud photographs. These sky views were shot for their abstract and atmospheric qualities, their equivalencies referring not to the thing itself but the emotion in the viewer. Though taken by day, Stieglitz emphasizes the darker elements. The images are dusky, penumbral, often like a night sky, highlighted or haloed by the moon. More than anything, they are abstract. Essential to these shots is the idea that clouds are not obscuring the light as much as the light is making such obscurity visible. Stieglitz seems to be describing something that emerges out of the darkness or retains its dark and dusky quality as its chief identity. Light is always indirect. We are drawn to the light because it will light that which we want to see, which is rarely the light itself. With Stieglitz we get something wholly original, elemental, and paradoxical: the cloud, illuminating the light. Cloud suffuses the light, revealing the abstraction.

Night, of course, has one natural light source, moonlight, and the two most famous (and priciest) shots in American photographic history are Edward Steichen's "The Pond—Moonlight" (1904) and Ansel Adams's "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" (1941). Both images have much in common: they are landscape portraits, lighted by rising moons and fading suns; they are evening images; they include the loss of day as much as they do the birth of night, more welcoming than disturbing; and they are romantic and pastoral, almost photos-as-paintings. The pair is popular less for the mystery, I think, than for the symmetry, plein air visions that impose daylight recognition upon the nascent nighttime scene. I especially like the Steichen photo because its technique is evident; it was a black-and-white shot, as are all of these night photos, but Steichen, like some early photographers, added "light-sensitive" gums in a multi-layered printing process to produce the "painterly" effect. That effect leeches into the print, giving it an abrasive texture and uniting the imposed image with the physical process. Ironically, what is a "real" night scene or night-coming-on scene in the Steichen looks much more constructed by hand than taken from nature.

Of objects lighted for their nighttime drama, we have O. Winston Link, a commercial photographer fascinated by trains. Link, a poser of his material, said that since he "couldn't move the sun," he staged his environments at night by using dozens of flashbulbs, firing simultaneously, and thus, burnishing the power of the locomotive, especially the last of the steam engine trains. In "Train No. 17, The Birmingham Special, Gets a Highball" (1957), we behold a stopped (still idling) train, a Hopperesque station with windowed/radiating light, a station master holding up a bright lamp—in all, an ordered, symmetrical, safe world which the dark feels a mere viewer of, and nothing more. And yet something else is communicated—the undeterred, commercial force of the railroad, as active by night as by day. The photograph celebrates the brawn of American industrial power, conquering darkness.

In "Giant Oak, Max Meadows, Virginia" (1957), we see another lighted night scene with a jarring mix of two elements: one, the parallelism of a wire fence, power lines, a locomotive rushing forward, and its steam plume streaking back, and two, the jumble of a massive oak, most of its leafless branches against the night sky, worming their way toward and out of the cropped top of the photo. The contrast is emotionally cacophonous and visually balanced. The image is precise: it both melds and distinguishes its elements. Here the night has its opacity; the distance from foreground to background is remarkably closed. This is one of Link's few night photographs in which he captures the dominance of night. The foreground of the shot may be lighted but this light withers against the big-shouldered dark, alive in the flattened tree branches and in the train's streaking distance. The thing not seen (but now seen because Link has arranged for us to see it in the photo) is a kind of impenetrability (a corollary, if you will) between the undoctored wildness (the oak) and the straight-lined efficiency of road, fence, power lines, and train (civilization). Despite the force and omnipresence of that efficiency, it cannot compare to the wild tree and the darkness as brethren.

Brassaï, the Hungarian photographer, whose reputation rests on the night images he made of Paris and its night dwellers between the World Wars, is the most famous of the dark crew. Gyula Halász, whose pseudonym is Brassaï, studied painting and sculpture, and he emphasizes the latter in his light-and-motion heavy portraits of Paris at night. Mentored by fellow Hungarian, André Kertész, Brassaï knew the city's lustful night persona. There's a robustness and an intimacy in his photos, almost like a cultural record of the artistic side of Paris, after the gas lamps came on. Henry Miller, a friend and nocturnal rogue, wrote a laudatory essay, "The Eye of Paris," for Brassaï's first book, Paris By Night.

Seeking Brassaï's viewfinder is the fog and streetlamps mingling, sentry-like, above a Roman bridge over the Seine; the coated back of a prostitute in the cold waiting to be hustled into a darkened corner; a glossily wet and S-curving cobblestone gutter snaking around two black trees; and several caped or robed men whose sculptural mass solidifies the lastingness of the French character. For all its effects, it is a world you want to inhabit, a world of buoyant desire lust, sans guilt, sans inhibition. Nothing to fear, everything to notice, to partake in, to be exposed to. A good Brassaï night photo, often of people who work at night, has an intimate corporeality. The human universe is grounded, fleshy, freed. No matter what flagstone path or rock stairway in Montparnasse, the photo is taken with just enough fog-shrouded light to illumine the way, which is toward an adventure in the dark, not toward a dark adventure. Like Link, the dark casts a dramatic backdrop in which the darkness is a co-conspirator, protector and voyeur of what we think may be illicit.

Brassaï codifies night photography—dramatically-lit landscapes, the play of dusk and textured surfaces, the invitation to peer. His vision continues because we are creatures who, once we have seen and remembered collectively, want to see what we have seen again and again. In this respect, Brassaï is the most formidable of the night photographers because he was the first to seize the moment when Paris unbuttoned in the dark, a ceremony of lust waiting for him to photograph. Virginia Woolf once wrote that she expected a poem to give her an insight she didn't expect, feelings and ideas she hadn't encountered. As opposed to what most poems offer: the regurgitation of known sentiments. Why not expect the unexpected of the night photograph as well?

In Camera Lucida, photography's aesthetic gospel, Roland Barthes compares language (his art) to photography (the art under his microscope) and reckons the latter has a status all its own. "Language is, by nature, fictional," he writes, "the attempt to render language unfictional requires an enormous apparatus of measurements: we convoke logic, or, lacking that, sworn oath; but the Photograph is indifferent to all intermediaries: it does not invent; it is authentication itself." As Barthes plays the two arts off one another, he coaxes out a big idea: that the photograph authenticates rather than represents ("exceeds the power of representation"); the photograph says this image, taken at this time and place, travels across time, possessing the past (history) and our engagement with the past (memory).

Such actuality, Barthes argues, language cannot achieve. Language is merely representative, a simulation, not the thing itself. There is, for example, a photograph of my brothers and me taken, July 19, 1955, which authenticates that day: the Adirondack bench behind my grandparents' home on which we three young children sit, in matching shirts, and the shadow of our mother, casting itself onto the lawn, who takes the photo. Any words I write cannot show this moment better. Words show only themselves; what is their nature is symbolic: a s-t-o-n-e in language is not a "stone" in nature; it is a graphic representation. We get the grapheme and fill in the rest. The photograph gives us all that, plus its reality, with no requirement that we must be convinced it is reality.

So if a photograph authenticates a time and a place (even the shadowy picture-taker) and a photographer like Scott B. Davis is moving as far away as he can from an authenticating image of a time and a place (though I concede he can't get that far away from photography in a photograph), isn't Davis pushing the photograph toward the status/condition of language, which, in Barthesian terms, is a fiction, something invented, something inauthentic?

Is darkness, whose infinite manifestations Davis is trying to describe, the ne plus ultra of photography? And if photography's meaning is to authenticate what has been and what continues to be, then how are we to look into Davis's work and find something authenticated?

I have no ready answer for these queries. With Davis, I wonder whether his desire for darkness is a desire for the least authenticable aspect of the photograph. And yet, as he tells me, that's not the road that took him to the dark. Early on, he was enchanted by the "landscape tradition" of photography in which he "came to terms with acknowledging what you see in front of the camera, a kind of truthful recording—not to romanticize things." This lead him to photograph "scenic viewpoints in the daytime and then, simply to ask, what does it look like at night?" Landscapes and the night led him to study Stieglitz, Link, Brassaï, but more to enquire how his sensibility differed from theirs. It wasn't long before he discovered his interest: to inhabit places under-photographed at night. He went east of southern California's mountains and into the desert.

There, from his camper truck, he found that the "night truth" of the day landscape goes unacknowledged once "everyone walks away when the sun goes down." He cites Harry Callahan, a mid-century urban photographer whose minimalist poetic images, mostly in stripped-down daytime evocations, Davis feels close to. "I'm working partly in [Callahan's] tradition, using a very quiet language in photography to describe what is arguably a universal message." Primarily, though, it was the West and its dark textures that captured Davis. Born in Maryland, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. The state, he says, is "known for light and, ironically, the place I really discovered darkness. There's two million people in the state," so it's largely avoided the human stamp. He loved New Mexico's night, "the many absolute voids of inky blackness. I found that quality of dark inspired me."

How to distinguish the dark of New Mexico from the dark of California? "The darkness of New Mexico," he says, "always felt to me like a vacuum, like [the night] absorbed light." By contrast, the night in the Borrego desert, east of San Diego, is "just darkness. I don't think I've ever fully reconciled those two different skies."

Speaking with Davis about the night in the night, I feel from him that he wants to commune with the dark and the photograph's relationship to the dark. I sense he wants to authenticate nature and art whether the photograph says it or not. Davis seems closer to the dark than most people. He seeks its mystery by living in it and not avoiding it. Why is this his calling? I ask, as we repair to a loud Mexican restaurant for food and further talk. He says being drawn to the dark would be more common if human evolution had not made us less dark-adaptive. Blame it on electricity and the lighting of the night.

"I think that the loss of our sensitivity to night," he says, "and to our circadian rhythms are socially induced. The light and the racket we're sitting in right now is new ... One hundred years ago this didn't exist." For centuries, he says citing one example, mariners navigated the sea by starlight and by knowing the prevailing winds. When such traits are lost, Davis notes, we replace our once-deep instincts about the dark with a "fear of darkness." With the noisy Mexican music and the daylight-bright light, designed to push the night away, "we lose our connection to darkness."

Davis finds "a joy, a great peace," being out at night, whether in a desert or a city. Even in Tijuana, just over the border from San Diego, he says the tallest buildings are unlighted after dark; for him they become mysteriously massive and photographable shapes. "There's a real cultural difference for you. Being in Tijuana at night is not an experience Americans have." Our architectural norm is to show off a beautiful building in the dark, from within and without. Spotlights on San Francisco's TransAmerica pyramid building, for example, make it as much a day as a night icon.

Last year, Davis spent a few weeks, under the auspices of the museum, teaching photography to teenagers in India. He stayed in a small rural village of just a few thousand residents. Except for an isolated generator, powering some wealthy person's home and TV, the town was lacquered in darkness. One night he and a colleague went for a walk, though they were, as Westerners, cautioned not to. "You couldn't see your feet. It was the kind of walk where you wanted to hold the one you loved. There was," he continues, "the expectation that we should be able to see more than we did." But he and his friend couldn't. Still, they adapted. Despite gingerly maneuvering around buildings, cows, pot holes, people, cars, camels, he says that "imagining darkness and imagining absence taught me to appreciate" the strange Indian night.

We are a night-avoidant culture and yet not a night-avoidant people. Davis says that thousands of years of human evolution "cannot be erased by iPhones and electricity." He notes that all these new self-nestling technologies make people wary. "I'm frequently asked, 'Aren't you afraid to be out at night? Aren't you scared of being in the desert alone?' My response is, 'Of what?' I guarantee you that within one hundred feet of where we are right now [in the city] somebody's got a gun. And somebody's going to get angry and then bad things will happen. In the desert, chances are nobody within ten miles has a gun. My point is, these little shifts we make with culture and technology, the way we communicate, and the loss of our pre-twentieth-century DNA—I don't think it's that far gone. I think this," and he does an all-around hand wave to indicate the mad luster of the Taco Shop and the insufferable Mexican salsa music, "makes us think it's far gone. But it's not. The night is still with us."

Reduced images from "nocturnes" and "land of sunshine" collections. Copyright © scott b. davis.

The reservoir we walk around
is like glass today, reflecting
our lockstep reserve.
No dancing, only a few step
on the grass, little profanity,
no kissing. The repeated squeak
of sneaker on cement, until we are startled
by the cracking burst of pistols
from the firing range below,
reminding of all those shots thousands of miles away,
our faces repeating those sad blank stares
the young, not starting, older, not finishing,
both with death and the smell of death.

Yet the buds never listen:
frozen out twice this year,
they are at it again.
And now the ducks start their
restless honking, repeating
a mirror of some lovely song
that is always a target.

Of all the masculine ways the military taught me to destroy, it was ironic that my most destructive act would be particularly feminine. I had not expected to kill anybody in the first place, not so soon after the end of the Vietnam War, but at nineteen, I did not yet know what I was capable of doing.

Joining the Army in 1979 was simply a way to earn money for college, see the world, and get the companionship I craved. And I got it. I got communal dining. I got a bunk bed in a room with sixteen women. This is where I learned I had inherited my father's tendency to talk in his sleep.

Mornings were the worst. A mass of agitated, half-conscious women, we stumbled into our uniforms and raced through our morning chores in the harsh fluorescent lights. There was always a crush of women, but all I needed was a cup of water, an empty cup for spitting, and my toothbrush. A quick comb before pinning up my hair, a scrub with a bottled astringent, and I was ready.

Next was the bed. Although I never did see a sergeant flip a quarter on a bunk, the corners of our green scratchy blankets were supposed to create a forty-five-degree angle. I decided it would be easier if I simply did not disturb my bed for the remaining ten weeks. I could accomplish this by always sleeping on top of the covers. The weight of my body would tease out the blankets and sheets every night, but in the morning, I could give a quick pull.

My attempts to fit into this new social system were soon tested. I was standing in line for weapons issue when he first approached.

"Anderson, you're a weirdo!" barked Sergeant Blake. His solid, thick frame swelled the pressed olive-drab uniform. The crown of his Smokey-the-Bear hat loomed above fierce, dark features.

I sensed no malice. And I didn't blame him for picking on me. With my hair tied up, my black military-issue glasses, my long neck, gawky height, pale skin and wrinkled green uniform, I was not a dashing example of esprit de corps.

"No, Drill Sergeant. I am not a weirdo," I answered.

And that seemed to satisfy him. He did not make me drop and give him ten pushups.

The next time Sergeant Blake yelled at me, I was standing in another line in the early-morning darkness. I gave my response, "No, Drill Sergeant. I am not a weirdo," quicker and with more confidence. He nodded and walked away.

But the next time, I yelled like a marine, "NO, DRILL SERGEANT! I AM NOT!" His eyes widened. I didn't see him very much after that, not until our whole company was sent to the live-grenade range.

This was a very special area. Even though we had been allowed to use real bullets at the M-16 range without one-on-one supervision, when it came to shrapnel exploding in all directions, the Army was a little more careful. Each soldier had to wear a flak vest and a safety helmet and stand in front of the command tower until he or she got the go-ahead. Once the command was sounded, we each ran down to a similarly attired sergeant posted in front of a cement wall over which the grenade was to be thrown. My sergeant was Sergeant Blake.

He handed me the live grenade. He looked worried. Maybe he thought I harbored hostility because he had picked on me. With genuine concern in his voice, he said, "It's okay, Private. Don't be nervous."

And I looked into his kind, dark eyes, and I said, "I'm not nervous, Drill Sergeant. I'm not afraid to die."

His dark skin paled.

"I'm just kidding!" I laughed, and then I threw the darned thing.

I did not have the best upper body strength. That was why I should have joined the Air Force. Sergeant Blake noticed this, too, because he knocked me to the ground. He joined me down there, our noses full of dirt. Fortunately, the grenade, which had made it to the top of the wall, eventually rolled over to the other side, dropped, and exploded.

Despite my lack of upper-body strength, I was not a complete failure in this military context. When using technological forms of destruction at my disposal, I excelled. The discharge from my light anti-tank weapon made a direct hit in the cab of a distant tank, and the supervising sergeant sucked in his breath. Since he was a renowned opponent of gender-integrated troops, I considered his involuntary reaction a high compliment. Then there was the "Damn!" that burst from another sergeant as the bullets from my M-16 knocked down silhouettes popping up at the 300-meter line. "I want you in my foxhole," he said. I chose to take that as a compliment and did not sue for sexual harassment. It was intentional and accurate destruction that garnered the respect of my superiors.

I eventually became confident that I was going to graduate from basic training, and there were only forty-five months to go. This thought did not cheer me as much as it should have. I started to look with envy on the other girls who had decided they'd made a mistake by enlisting and would not be victims of their success, like the girl who had refused to touch her weapon so they would have to let her out on an incompatibility discharge, or the girl who tried to swallow a bottle of aspirin. These women had not been afraid to make nuisances of themselves, and for that they were going home.

My budding depression deepened after I twisted the ligaments in my ankles on the obstacle course. My ankles were not swollen or discolored and therefore not wounded to military eyes, but I was in constant pain as I marched in my black army boots. To march at all, I dragged myself forward. I used my arms, swinging them forward in fascist salutes to propel myself. This gave Sergeant Blake an opportunity for a new epithet. Instead of calling me "weirdo," he started calling me "Hitler."

Then I started to cry. There were no sobs or hiccups. No heaving gasps for air. It was an unemotional, silent flushing of tears that started during my morning chore, and I could not stop it. No one else noticed in the rush. No one noticed in the formation outside in the dark or during the march to the mess hall. No one noticed as I stood facing a soldier's green back under the garish light waiting for my reconstituted scrambled eggs. Only when a sergeant crossed my path and glanced at my face, awash with moisture, did the bark come.

"What's wrong with you, Private?"

"I don't know, Drill Sergeant. I guess I don't feel well."

"Why didn't you go on sick call?"

"I thought it would stop."

"Get out of here!"

When I was sitting in the quiet, empty waiting room at the clinic, the fresh sheen dried. No wave replaced it. Maybe it was just the moments of peace that had calmed me. Or maybe it was the thought that I would be taken care of. The medic took my temperature, checked my ankles, wrote out a prescription allowing me to wear tennis shoes instead of boots, and sent me back to join my company. And I felt almost cheerful, having been on my own, having traversed new streets on the base. But the next morning, the tears started again. It wasn't until I got verifiably sick with a temperature of over a hundred that I was sent to the hospital. Being off my feet helped my ankles to heal, and the tears stopped.

Before graduation, I asked my platoon sergeant for an incompatibility discharge.

"No. I can't start the paperwork on that," he said. "It's too close to graduation.

About eighteen months later, helicopter bellies loomed like swollen monsters in the dark night. Weighted down with my heavy helmet, my rifle, and my shrapnel-proof vest, I lumbered up to one, its window too high for me to peer through. That summer I was twenty-one, and it was the first time I felt complete alienation. Certainly, life had not been a perfect fit, but at that base in Germany, where one of my jobs was to roam the grounds for four hours before retiring to the guards' quarters, I knew with complete certainty I did not belong.

I had gone into the Army with the assertion that I would be trained in a foreign language. I spent a year at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, learning Czech, even graduating with honors. But I had not known that once at my permanent site, listening to actual field tapes of Czech soldiers would be classified, and that the most interesting language resource I'd have would be a Teach Yourself Czech book I'd brought. I had not known that when I wasn't in the motor pool scraping rust off something and then splashing green paint onto it, my squad would hole up in the team room with the door locked, listening for approaching footfalls. Then someone would rush to turn out the lights, and we would all hold our breaths until the company sergeant had passed. With the lights back on, we'd return to what we'd been doing—eating C-ration peanut butter and jelly, gossiping about members of other squads, or puzzling through a Czech paragraph on panda bears. I had not known that in a peacetime army, my training would be wasted, that I would watch my fragile fluency dry up and blow away.

After months of losing my language facility, the moment was ripe for my big mission. A shoulder nudge woke me in the early morning. I got out of bed, put on my gear, went down the hall for my weapon, and joined my partner, a sergeant trained in Russian.

The executive officer of the company showed up in his Volvo and drove us through the dark to the helicopter pad. The sergeant and I strapped ourselves in behind the two pilots. Even through my protective headset, I could hear the helicopter blades whip the air. We lifted up and flew low above the rooftops of German villages in the lightening sky. When we landed in a meadow, it was still dark enough to see gleaming headlights. We were taken to a building, fed and given a support squad of men armed with small machine guns. Then we were taken out to a clearing on the Czechoslovakian-German border. The armed men melted into the forest, where they would wait silently, a defensive force to save Sergeant Nash and myself should an attempt be made to snatch us across the border, which consisted of a barbed-wire fence. On the other side were a green field, an empty wooden guard tower, and a masticating cow.

Sergeant Nash set up the field radio. I listened, trying to decipher the messages from the few soldiers we were able to pick up. I could distinguish their call names, but that was about all.

Beside the fact that my training had consisted of basic grammatical structures and words like "tank," "lieutenant," and "land mine," I was eventually taught Czech by a Slovak stage actress, who got high scores from her students by drilling them with sentences that later appeared on the tests. Had she trained us just well enough to get high marks, but not well enough to function properly? Was this a form of the passive resistance I would later learn the Czechs and Slovaks were so famous for, what had allowed them to maintain their cultural identity under centuries of foreign oppression?

Or was it simply that listening to this language was the least developed of my faculties? I could read complex structures, but I could not hear them. Perhaps I was too programmed by the subject-verb-object order in an English sentence. In a Slavic language, a direct object could start a sentence and a verb could end it. Whatever the cause, I could not understand the non-military language broadcasted.

We had been sent to this area because an unusually large number of trains had been seen moving toward the gap in the mountains between Czechoslovakia and Germany. Sergeant Nash surmised that those trains were not transporting military equipment as was feared, but farming equipment. Combines. We returned to the base. When Sergeant Nash told me I did not need to go to the debriefing, I thankfully returned to my bed.

Shortly after I had arrived in Germany, I met a twenty-five-year-old man from New York. He was a dark-haired, short, stocky sergeant from my platoon. His job was to run an encoded teletype machine. Our relationship was companionable, affectionate, holding hands in the TV. lounge, going to the movies on Friday nights, and meeting in his room upstairs. But we often squabbled. My feelings were easily hurt. I learned to harden myself with false nonchalance, eliciting from him a petulant, "You act like you don't care what I think!" I responded by telling him that was the way feminists were supposed to act, and tried to explain my theories of inter-gender communication in long abstract letters.

For the most part, I used spermicidal foam. But there was one time our passion got away from us. Was it an accident or a subconscious plan? Had I played Russian roulette with my womb or could I have simply been lazy? At any rate, the urine test came back positive. Pregnant, I could now get out of the Army with impunity. I told Tom about the test. He'd been married and divorced. He had no children. He said he would marry me if I wanted, but it was up to me. The day after my plane landed in Los Angeles, I visited a clinic and had an abortion.

Title graphic: "Devastation in Pink" Copyright © The Summerset Review 2011.

As the end of her life neared,
dreary persistence disguised
all she had once been, save her
grace, unmistakable
in the elegant extension
of her hand as it reached for his.

Paul David Adkins grew up in South Florida and lives in New York. His poetry has appeared once before in this magazine (Fall 2010). koenigsburg14@aol.com

Erin Anderson was among the 100-plus Peace Corps volunteers to be evacuated from Kazakhstan in November 2011. She still has plans to teach English overseas. She has appeared once before in this magazine (Spring 2005). erincamander2003@yahoo.com

Jay Carson teaches creative writing, literature, and rhetoric at Robert Morris University, where he is also faculty advisor to the student literary journal, Rune. Jay has published more than sixty poems and has just finished a poetry manuscript, entitled The Cinnamon of Desire. carson@anawatmail.com

Colin Clancy is an Adjunct English Instructor at Northern Michigan University where he also works as Assistant Editor at Passages North. His work has appeared in The Blotter Magazine, Word Riot, Kippis!, The Lounge Companion, and CellStories. tcolinclancy@gmail.com

Born in 1971, Scott B. Davis completed a BFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico in 2000. A photographer, Davis explores spaces that are quiet, complex, and generally overlooked. Working largely at night, often in unremarkable wilderness corridors, his images broaden the language of landscape photography. In 2001, he began photographing California's urban landscape at night, challenging ideas of an iconic sun-drenched landscape, and finding personal truths in a state filled with preconceptions. His prints are made from 8x10-inch negatives, contact printed in a 19th century process using metallic platinum. His website contains current exhibition and project information. www.scottbdavis.com

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft's poetry recently appeared or is forthcoming in SOFTBLOW, The Catalonian Review, White Whale Review, PANK, Spork, The Literary Bohemian, and other places. She is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Yale University and writes from New York City, where she also teaches composition at Hostos Community College. The image accompanying her poem was provided by her. suzanne.hopcroft@yale.edu

Dennis James is a retired attorney living and writing in Brooklyn, N.Y. He previously practiced employment law on behalf of employees, in Detroit, Michigan. He has had short fiction published in The Griffin, The MacGuffin, Struggle Magazine, and in the Spring, Summer and Fall, 2011 issues of Mobius Magazine. grossmanandjames@gmail.com

Thomas Larson is the author of The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative. For twelve years, he has been a staff writer with the San Diego Reader. He holds workshops on memoir writing and delivers multimedia presentations on music, the craft of writing, and the "social author" in the digital age throughout the United States. www.thomaslarson.com

Jed Myers lives, writes, and makes music in Seattle. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, Atlanta Review, JAMA, the Rose Alley Press anthology Many Trails to the Summit, and elsewhere. He is a psychiatrist with a therapy practice and teaches at the University of Washington. medjyers@hotmail.com

Danny Earl Simmons is an Oregonian and a proud graduate of Corvallis High School. He has loved living in the Mid-Willamette Valley for over thirty years. He is a friend of the Linn-Benton Community College Poetry Club and currently serves on the Board of Directors of Albany Civic Theater. simmonsd64@hotmail.com

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Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Editors' Notes

Deep Winter

Upon the Snows of Kilimanjaro

Trickster Kudzu Crucifix

Christine's Case

Three Poems

Leveled

In the Hovels of the Chest

Photographs

Describing Darkness:The Night Photography of Scott B. Davis

Revolvers

A Lesson in Destruction

Adagio

Contributors' Notes