One Rock at a Time

by Heather Lynn Horvat

When my husband and I moved to Arizona several years ago, he suggested we hike the Grand Canyon. I laughed. "Experience that without me," I said. I wasn't an outdoors person.

As a teen living in central Pennsylvania, I had dabbled in the outdoors, mostly as a means to escape adult eyes. Once, I hiked near a dam in the woods and black snakes slithered across the trail so the ground itself looked like black ocean waves. My boyfriend carried me on his back. I heard the squeak of a tree branch bending and opened my eyes to see a snake dangling above me. There were so many snakes that day that I still question if it was a bad dream. Nightmare or reality, the memory lingered and I stopped seeking nature.

About a year ago, the panic attacks started. Somehow I had become fearful of more than just nature. I now feared crowds, but also feared being alone. I feared my own Self, and the fear paralyzed me. I refused to admit to anyone that I needed help. The attacks worsened in severity and intensity. I stopped writing. Or, the words stopped coming.

"You need to get out of your head," my husband said. "Make new friends. Find a new hobby."

2018 began the year of new: new friends, new freelance work, new hairdresser, new workout routines. I went on a girls' weekend to Vegas barely knowing the girls but embracing the opportunity that presented itself. The freelance work I submitted earned praise and a check. My body boasted muscle definition in places I didn't know could be toned. On the outside, I looked like I had my shit together.

Since my husband is an outdoors person, I agreed to go on a short hike with him to Wave Cave. Like the name implies, there is a cave with a jutting rock in the shape of a large surf wave. A touristy destination per Google and rated at moderate difficulty, I figured it wouldn't be as bad as Camelback, the mountain that left me with three scarred gashes on my left knee two years ago.

Arizona hiking is much different than Pennsylvania hiking. Here, the desert mountains are rocky at best, boulderous with little shade and breathtaking views at high elevations. Wave Cave possessed all the qualities of desert: gravelly, gradual incline to lull you into mental safety until the final elevation gain that's steep enough to make you wonder why you agreed to this.

Finding my footing in the rocks, my thighs screamed while I thought, What the hell I am doing? My husband didn't ask if we should turn around; I'm sure he knew that I might have said yes.

Once we reached the cave and I heaved, trying to catch my breath, I looked back from where we came. The trail was obscure between the jutting rocks and boulders. The desert beyond was serene. Houses and cityscape were further away and didn't seem as claustrophobic as it sometimes feels when you live in a cookie-cutter neighborhood. For the first time in a long time I could breathe.

Ten people shared the cave space with us. I kept to myself huddled against the back wall and ate a snack. A woman about my age, but more fit, more hiker ready, posed on the wave while her partner snapped pictures with his phone. Her laugh made me want to laugh.

When it was my turn to pose on the wave, she offered to take our picture. No judgment in her eyes that I didn't belong, because at this moment, on top of this section of mountain, everyone belonged.

It could've been hunger and thirst or aching muscles, but I felt a euphoric rush.

"Will you hike again?" My husband asked.

I've completed eight hikes since Wave Cave, some of them without my husband. As soon as I finish one, whether three miles or seven miles, rocky or boulder hopping, I begin planning the next. The panic attacks haven't stopped completely, but words are coming back to me.

---

Heather Lynn Horvat is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. She currently freelances while writing her next novel. 

Student Picks: Moshfegh and Kuusisto

Terri Alexander-- Ottessa Moshfegh creates characters that make her readers uncomfortable. In the short story collection Homesick for Another World, Moshfegh’s characters are flawed, broken, even cruel. The stories are littered with illicit drug use, anonymous sex, and a gamut of bodily functions. But Moshfegh pairs low with high; she takes low characters and applies the high of her literary prowess. She’s wickedly smart, and funny too.

The dramatic tension takes place primarily in characters’ minds. Take, for example, the protagonist in “Nothing Ever Happens Here;” a handsome teen leaves his emotionally abusive mother in rural Utah to become an actor in Los Angeles. He develops a close relationship with his elderly landlord. Moshfegh writes, “After our fourth dinner together, I found myself missing her as I lay on my bed, digesting the mound of schnitzel and boxed mashed potatoes and JELL-O she’d prepared herself.” Uncomfortable yet? How about this:  “She made me feel very special. I wasn’t attracted to her the way I’d been to the girls back in Gunnison, of course.” The reader roots for the protagonist to become aware of his blind spots. 

Moshfegh tends to go to those places with her characters that most writers avoid. The result is utterly original work that is both raw and refined. 

Heather Lynn Horvath-- I first heard Stephen Kuusisto's poetic words when he read excerpts from various works at a writers conference this past February. To say I was hooked is an understatement. 

When I began reading Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening, I was once again drawn into a poetic space few books possess. A collection of essays, Eavesdropping is more than a simple memoir. Kuusisto's observations and his mastery of both poetry and prose offers the reader a glimpse of how he listens and processes sounds, so much so that I now find myself hearing deeper. He writes of certain music: "The sound has a thickness, like the fatness of certain flowers, and the sadness is redolent, you swear it has a fragrance."

Kuusisto writes of what it's like to be blind and lost in an airport, relying on the whims of generous strangers while feeling stares and hearing no-so-quiet whispers. He writes of traveling to Iceland and Venice to sight-see. The reader is given moments of rawness and vulnerability that offer ways in which to view everyday life differently. Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening is a book to savor and reread. 

Student Picks: Currie, Gray, Padian

Danielle Service-- I dated a guy back in 2011 that told me to read Everything Matters! by Ron Currie. I bought it instantly but didn’t read it until this year, when that cat texted, asking for sex. 

Junior – the protagonist in Everything Matters! – grows up in Maine with one caveat: he knows from the moment of his conception when and how the world will end (36 years and 168 days following his conception, Earth is hit by a comet). Initially, an omniscient second-person narrator tells the story; then, Currie strikes an irreverent tone by splicing in alternating limited-third-person narration in the perspectives of Junior’s brother, a teenage cocaine addict who later becomes a professional baseball player; their father, a Vietnam veteran with a meaningful secret and a New England work ethic; and their mother, a secretive alcoholic. 

There’s a plot to destroy a social security building, a deportation to a Bulgarian gulag, suicide bombers and life-saving irrigation systems involved prior to the world’s end in Currie’s thoughtful work – but most important is Junior’s alteration of his own destiny. I followed the protagonist’s lead: I texted the guy back saying I’d read the book and wished him well, but was deleting his number.

Heather Lynn Horvat-- Isadora by Amelia Gray is an enthralling, relentless portrayal of the stunning but eccentric dancer Isadora Duncan in her darkest time. The novel is a dance of its own with short segments that begin like stage directions before entering the scene, and is told from alternating viewpoints between Isadora, her lover Paris Singer (of Singer sewing machines), her sister Elizabeth, and Max, who dwells too much on the fame he doesn't have.

The story opens moments after Isadora's children drown in a car that suffered mechanical issues and drove off a cliff. Grief is ever-present, but it is how the characters deal with the grief that makes this story memorable. Isadora, over time, consumes the ashes of both of her children. Elizabeth gorges on extra butter and eggs while no one watches. Paris stares for days at a painting, studying individual faces only to find that each resembles his lover or his child. Once, Isadora writes to her former lover with a request to take the child's clothing to water's edge and dunk it, then report back the weight of the soaked clothes. 

Isadora examines grief and the mind's ability to overcome tragedy with lyrical prose.

Katie Fenton-- Recently, I took the opportunity to read Wrecked by Maria Padian. This Young Adult novel follows the lives of two college students, Haley and Richard, who find themselves having a difficult year after Haley’s roommate accuses Richard’s friend of raping her at a party. The plot continually twists and turns as the reader learns about the traumatic event alongside the characters as they piece together the puzzle of that horrible night. In true Young Adult fashion, Haley and Richard try to grow together in their own relationship. 

I was rather blown away by Wrecked. The storyline seemed like it might be simple and overdone, but in reality, it offered a unique take. Through well-placed foreshadowing, the reader is given a reliable narrator whose god-like view of the night slowly offers the answers they’re looking for. This novel’s unique style and storyline was not only something I thoroughly enjoyed reading, but as a writer, it encouraged me to look at my own work in a different way.