USFS 2019 — Part 2, Chapter 1
And, however much you may love the woods, you can’t claim it is full of natural wits.
Norman Maclean, “USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky”
I ultimately took Pete’s tip on the therapist/astrologer once I was out on the Peninsula. She went by Tully, and though I had initially contacted her through a personal email, I did look her up through official channels where she was listed as Maeve Tully. From that, I found out she was indeed licensed to practice psychiatric medicine in the state of Washington. What that meant in terms of out-of-pocket cost to me was an open question only because I had neglected to mention what kind of services I was interested in when she’d proposed a time for an initial meeting. She offered it up as though it was an unofficial consultation, which was fine by me, but also made me wonder how much Pete had told her about me. And Pete hadn’t mentioned how he knew her. I assumed they had mutual friends, but neglected to ask before I left the house in Challis a day sooner than Pete had.
By all appearances, she practiced out of her home. And I quickly learned that saying she was based in Port Hadlock was a broad approximation. Though it was true that Hadlock would’ve been her closest access to certain essentials, Tully, I found out, had a Nordland zip code and lived across a causeway from Hadlock, on one of two islands east of Port Townsend Bay.
To this day, I have a hard time with physical descriptions. It’s a source of maddening frustration to others when, eager for a vague picture of an unfamiliar place or object, they ask me to describe it. But I find it maddening that native English speakers are taught that a name is not a sufficient stand-in for a description. A consequence of putting such weight on describing appearances is that we often fall back on the language of commerce. We think it confers importance, but I think we usually just end up objectifying things. Once, on Pete’s recommendation, I read one of anthropologist Franz Boas’ many translations of tales from the Indigenous communities of modern BC’s north and central coast. Despite the limits of translation, I was struck by one passage that listed birds and their corresponding sounds. In the case of the bluejay, the bird and the sound it made shared the same name in one coastal culture’s language. I had to laugh. Sometimes, a thing just looks and sounds like what it is.
For the most part, a drive to a therapist/astrologer’s house on an island on the Olympic Peninsula looks and sounds like what it is.
The land has the same trees as all coastal forests up and down the North American west coast—cedar, hemlock, and fir. The dominant fauna include an ass-ton of deer (owing to an eerie dearth of predators), a bunch of seagulls, an eagle here and there, and the occasional offland splash signaling the possible presence of a whale or seal.
The primary signs of human development are vibrations from daily ferry traffic and periodic diaper stank of paper mills interspersed with the occasional whiffs of cannabis farms. The only aspect of the weather worth writing home about are persistent high winds overnight, and honestly, less fog than popular representations would have us believe. It’s true it was darker than the Intermountain West, but such is to be expected in any comparison to high desert. Besides the proximity to salt water and the sheer size of the trees, the main difference from forestland-adjacent areas I was used to was the ubiquity of moss and lichen. Inexplicably, the stuff grew on pavement and concrete on the Peninsula—an observation I’d cached as further evidence that land was still the paramount domesticator when humans played fair.
That’s all to say, the drive to Tully’s was nondescript as far as coastal forest scenery went, and I don’t remember what her damn house looked like—a fact the two coworkers I’d met just days prior would question throughout the summer. I’d question it later as well, but for different reasons.
Once inside, she had us set up in what I assumed was the same room she ordinarily saw patients and clients in. I immediately caught sight of two hand puppets. It reminded me of Elliott’s handling of Dad’s ashbag back in Challis, but also a serendipitous development wherein a Mister Rogers theme had at some point in history leached into the discourse and artifacts of the government area that was my base of operation through October. When I’d asked one of the returning seasonals what he knew of the origins of the Mister Rogers inspiration, he said matter of factly, “MacKenzie, this is the Neighborhood of Hood Canal,” and offered no further explanation.
Though I wasn’t clear on the exact terms of my initial meeting with Tully at that point, I decided to ask first about the puppets. She explained that she generally reserved those for family and child counseling. I saw that as an opportunity to get some clarity and mentioned that I hadn’t seen that listed as one of her specialties online. She explained she tried to be more nimble than most providers since there were so few in the county, and really all of this side of Hood Canal—a detail that did bear out in that same provider search that listed her specialties. At a 40-minute drive from the government area, she was the closest in-network provider to me.
“Oh, you know what?” she said. “My child and family practice is actually how I know Pete, though kind of indirectly. A lot of those patients actually come to me through Ayla.”
Ayla was a social worker by trade. She’d gotten involved in social services on the Quinault Reservation just north of Moclips in her late teens. After getting a few degrees and meeting Pete, she returned and continued working with tribal communities. Though she and Pete were based in Moclips, she, like Pete, worked all over the Peninsula. For her part, Ayla worked with state and tribal governments to manage regional compliance with the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Tully and I marveled briefly about the distance Ayla covered in her job, which brought on the question of where I was based and for how long. I explained that although the government area wasn’t near anything, I had picked up from my coworkers that we just said Quilcene was the closest town, and I was there for the summer season.
“So, you’re working with trees?” she asked.
I laughed. “If that’s the only business out here that amounts to enough work to farm out to seasonals, Washington and Idaho have that in common.”
“Pretty much,” she said. She mentioned that there were still a few paper mills around—a fact I said I gathered from the smell as I drove further north. She said there was also more and more tourism year-round and a bunch of work in senior care for the graying population who’d adopted the region as retirees. “I guess commercial fishing is still a big employer too,” she said. “That sort of goes on with a rolling cast.”
“Ha, good fishing pun.”
“What?”
I worried, at that point, that I wasn’t in good company for dad jokes. “Sorry, I grew up near the Salmon River. Flyfishing’s sort of big out there. I just take for granted that when other people hear the words roll and cast together, they don’t immediately think…”
“I was kidding, MacKenzie. I got it the first time.”
If it had been a more formal interaction and I had filled out intake forms and everything, I would’ve asked if it was ethical for her to fuck with me like that on first meeting, though not because it bothered me. Not a lot did outside of willful dishonesty and small talk. I just genuinely wondered.
In what felt like a callback to something I’d observed in Dad’s room in Challis, I noticed all the furniture in Tully’s well-windowed office room was made of wood, specifically wicker. The chairs were roomy and cushioned, so as to not be itchy. There was a collection of maritime ephemera next to the window—a model wooden boat, shells, and what I assumed were antique navigation devices. When I eventually took a good look out the windows for the first time, I could see across the bay what I guessed were Port Townsend landmarks on the opposite shore—one of the aforementioned paper mills and a line of discernable structures extending to the shore’s western terminus.
Between the setting and the furniture, I had decided that whatever this was to be, it felt like a drastic upgrade from the synthetic medical environment where I’d met with a therapist biweekly for the first several months of the year. Natural light alone was not a given in such places. And though it was true that my experience in a clinical setting had been positive, I had to concede that the chairs alone felt like a return to something more humanizing and forgiving. Recalling the space and the view outside later, I would think of Nutbeem musing in The Shipping News that the world was all flex and give before the brute force of nails and screws replaced knots and lashings.
At some point in there, I double-checked that it was alright to call her Tully before finally inquiring about the nature of that meeting. She confessed all the context she had from Pete was that I had previously been in therapy and might’ve been interested in continuing to work with somebody on the Peninsula. I asked if he had mentioned that my dad had just died. She said he hadn’t, which suggested Pete had reached out to her before then, which I appreciated. That Pete had planned on offering to connect me with Tully before any of that had happened made it feel like less of a knee-jerk reaction to Dad’s death.
“Look,” I finally said. “I’m not dead-set against traditional therapy, but I honestly don’t know if I’m going to learn anything else from therapy models largely developed by affluent white dudes. I know I’m neurodivergent. I know I’m depressed. I have diagnoses. I don’t want to be medicated. My last therapist thought I was too self-aware for my own good. Having said that, my brother is really polling for me to look into astrology, and I have no clue what that looks like as a professional service. But Pete mentioned that’s also in your wheelhouse.”
She was immediately receptive, and said that Pete hadn’t told her that I was interested in that. I told her that was alright—validating, even, because it further suggested that his outreach to Tully antedated both Dad’s suicide and any conversations we’d since had in Challis. She said that we could start that work if I wanted, free of charge for that day, after which I could decide if I wanted to schedule paid time with her. She asked about my level of familiarity with astrology, and though it was honestly next to nothing, I confessed Elliott’s repeated mentions had piqued my curiosity enough to dig out my birth certificate for the time of my birth and download one of the many apps that could generate my birth chart.
I was a little surprised when she asked a question that I had also remembered being asked when I’d started therapy: Why now?
I remarked on the parallel but didn’t press her on whether I should expect more crossover between the two. Later I’d realize that a degree of affinity between things like psychiatry and astrology were to be expected. Both, after all, were a few of many systems of thinking we could enlist to contextualize our behaviors, experiences, and suffering. In fact, I think our attraction to such things boils down to a fundamental drive to understand why we exist that disproportionately affects the more restless types among us. I still regard the question as one of the most natural. I would come to understand it as useful but ultimately immaterial, though I was weeks out from that.
“I just want to know why I exist,” I said. “I don’t particularly enjoy being alive and I’ve had the same outlook since second grade. That seems significant, you know? To pretty much feel the same way for 20 years consistently. I feel like other things about me have a lot more turnover. And I guess I don’t expect my overarching feelings toward life to change. I just think it would be different if I felt like there was a purpose for my existence. Like I said, I have diagnoses. I know I have a personality disorder. I think that helped me be more forgiving toward myself at first. But now, I think it just reinforces my long-standing suspicion that I’m unfit for society. Anyway, I said something to that effect when my brother and I were in Challis for Dad’s stuff, and he said I shouldn’t write off astrology. I’m not really sure what he meant by it and I don’t usually take recommendations for, well, anything. I kind of have issues with being told what to do. But I’m also kind of a completist and try to give everything that doesn’t reek of capitalist horseshit a fair shake.”
“Fair enough. So did you find out that I did astrology services through Pete or on your own?”
“Pete mentioned it the second time Elliott—my brother—brought it up. We were all in the kitchen and Pete was about to give me your contact information.”
“Let me ask this, then. Since I get the sense that this is kind of a transitional stage for you, is it okay if I ask you to elaborate like I would have you do if you were in here for therapy?”
“As long as that’s not breaking any laws.”
“If we end up doing astrology work, I promise you nobody gives a damn about what we talk about now or later. And if you were continuing therapy, we could still do this. I would just refer you to a different provider, which I would’ve done anyway since Pete sent you here.”
“Fair enough,” I said, deliberately reprising her response to my little ‘fuck capitalism’ diatribe. “Carry on then.”
“You said you don’t think your outlook has changed since you were in second grade. Can you say more about that?”
“Sure. That was the first time I talked about suicide. I wrote about it in my journal—we all had journals that our teacher read. She was really sweet actually—I kind of feel bad for her in hindsight. I doubt her elementary ed degree covered anything about pre-pubescent kids confiding that they want to die. Anyway, she never confronted me about it directly. But a few days, maybe a week later after she’d read all our journals, she got the school counselor to take me out of class one day and ask me about it. I don’t remember much else. I remember feeling embarrassed by the attention. Also frustrated. But mostly confused that I got put on the spot for just being honest. So, I started keeping that stuff to myself.”
Though it’s true that my relationship to suicidality hadn’t changed since then, I had theories about why the discourse around suicide was so fucked up. I thought the prolific failure of binaries was mostly to blame. Though I’d never heard anybody else put it this way, I understood suicidality as a state of mind with a spectrum. Not everybody who thought about not wanting to exist was taking active measures to kill themselves. And though I knew from the internet that the trending term for this relationship to suicide was passive suicidality, even that seemed broad and dismissive. It seemed to just perpetuate the perception that you had to be in crisis—actively suicidal—to be valid. Crisis level notwithstanding, I took serious issue with the socially accepted response to mentions of suicide, which I’d describe as histrionic at best.
Tully stood to turn on an electric kettle in the small room and asked if I wanted any tea or water. I declined both since I had brought my own water bottle in. She asked if I’d remembered anything else about the journal episode.
The truth is I hadn’t remembered much, but, possibly inspired by the ouija board I’d noticed leaned against the wall on the counter where Tully kept her electric kettle, I did recall one quirky detail about it. “I’m pretty sure I just reproduced Lydia Deetz’s suicide note from Beetlejuice. I think I saw myself in her…because, you know, I too was living in the midst of a freelance bio exorcist.”
I wouldn’t have blamed Tully for laughing at that even if it had potential to make me feel insulted on a given day. But I appreciated that she abstained from teasing, even if she had been tempted to. “A freelance bio exorcist like Beetlejuice?”
I repeated the word Beetlejuice a third time, on general principle, and then clarified that I hadn’t in fact lived with anybody resembling Beetlejuice.
Tully then asked if it was okay if she asked me some more of the same questions that I’d probably been asked before starting therapy. I obliged once she’d explained that astrology is a branch of medicine and that some basic health information was relevant across disciplines.
The tenor of most of the questions did ring a bell. She asked if I used drugs recreationally and seemed skeptical when I said I never had. I think she, like Pete, doubted it was possible that I’d gotten as self-aware as I was without the aid of psychedelics. Elliott was the only person who knew me who believed that I was leery about substances fucking with my body and brain chemistry. When she asked if I had trouble sleeping, concentrating, or breathing, I complained that I always found the wording of those questions too reductive to be useful before saying “not really.” I told her that none of the questions about harming myself or others applied, but it would be harder to guess just how many times I’d experienced suicidal ideation in the past week or month. What even counted as an instance of ideation?
Night terrors came up—a question I hadn’t remembered being asked before starting therapy. I told her that although I didn’t have those, I occasionally experienced sleep paralysis and waking dreams—the latter of which proved challenging when it came to discerning certain events later that summer.
She asked if I was comfortable talking about family history before launching into that part of the conversation. I told her to fire away. She asked about my brother first.
“You said your brother was back in Idaho, too?”
“He was, but who knows how long that will last. He’s had some addiction issues, but he says he wants to get clean and stick around. He seems to be for real about it. He went to undergrad in Vermont and moved to New York after. Until recently, he’d always been there.”
“New York City?”
“Yeah. He came to help with the house, and the rest is short-term history I guess.”
She then asked about my mother, but told me we could bypass that if it was too much. I told her it wasn’t. She had died in labor with me, and I never knew her. Tully asked if I knew much about what had happened and I gave her the basics. My brother and I had both been high-risk pregnancies because, we had been told, our mother was herself a DES baby. Tully was vaguely familiar with the term, but asked what that was to make sure she was tracking. As I understood it, DES had been marketed as a fertility drug to women like my maternal grandmother (who I knew almost nothing about) to prevent miscarriages for a few decades starting in the 40s. Doctors didn’t start putting it together until the 70s that many females who’d been exposed to DES in the womb were contracting cervical cancer as adults. For women like my mother, who were born in the 60s and 70s, the information about that side-effect was obviously decades late. My mother had a tumor removed when she was about my age and was told she had an incompetent cervix and likely couldn’t carry a child to term. Against several doctors’ advice, she did it twice anyway—had Elliott and was fine, then had me and wasn’t.
That was about where we parked it before Tully had to prepare for another patient’s visit. She correctly guessed that I harbored extreme guilt over outcomes I had little control over. Before sending me off, she did two things. First, she told me to reach out if I wanted to continue working with her. Then, she encouraged me to consider shifting my obsession with understanding why I exist to a question of how, a proposition that immediately frustrated me.
I waited to huff like a miffed horse until I was in Gertie and heading back south to the government area. Both Elliott and Tully had seemed to imply that my drive to figure out why I existed, a line of inquiry that had been my principal occupation for more than two-thirds of my life, was fundamentally misdirected. There probably wasn’t a person alive who’d respond well to the insinuation that they’d spent most of their life fixating on the wrong thing. But therein was a truth I’d be confronted with, always to my dismay, again and again: Learning often hinged on realizating a lifetime of misdirected attention.
