Nectar of the Gods
“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”
-Joan Didion, The White Album
Nestled behind a rusted wrought iron fence three miles west of Highway-99 lies one of the many vineyards in Madera, California. With the nearest gas station sitting 12-miles outside of the property and the local grocer sitting seven, a community of this independence is forced to self-sustain. Missionary House secludes itself behind the 20-acres of Western grapevines and six-miles of cracked roads; A home to Pastors and Missionary Families of Christ that doubles as a Christian summer camp (what they call the “Field of Dreams”) during the warmer seasons.
I had been planning this road trip with my best friend, Sarah, for two months at that point. We had visited the Mojave Desert in southern California a few months prior — slept in the workspace of a Joshua Tree landscape painter, met two men who we swore were our lost soulmates, wrote in our leather-bound notebooks until our black ink fountain pens ran clear — floating adrift through the estate of the West Coast had an intrinsic awareness that we had never touched before, a possessive freedom that tasted of a fascinating, dreamlike nectar to a 21-year- old woman. The chase for that freedom became our focus, it sat itself at the forefront of our minds and persisted to bang our skulls until we fed its demand.
The plan was to leave home for 16 days. Seattle, to Portland, to Sacramento, to Madera, to Mojave, to Las Vegas, to Virginia City, to Medford, all the way back to Seattle. Flowing through the veins of eight cities, two (recently unemployed due to a mixture of laziness and the ricochet from March 2020) women who had nowhere to be, and two lives strategically stuffed into one nylon-lined backpack — the only packing method that guaranteed enough space in the backseat for our various gospels of Joan Didion, typewriters, and notepads. At that time, many things felt like they were created only for us. A dismembered coyote laying idle on the side of the highway, 2-for-1 specials on Jack and Coke’s at the midnight saloon, Joan Didion’s childhood home at an unusually close proximity; We had been telling ourselves stories in order to survive. Creating, remembering, and consuming each other’s theories to understand our surroundings, and eventually, how we ended up in a position where we had to run from what we knew in order to shed the distaste of being a young woman.
“… one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”
-Joan Didion, Goodbye To All That
Reaching the iron gates of Missionary House, we were keenly greeted by Jon, the property owner and (as he identified) “family director.” As we toured the farm, we were gradually introduced to the other (again, as he described) “families,” all of whom had puzzling grins built into their faces and linen shawls draped over their shoulders. The children running naked through the fields, the wooden crosses planted at the foot of every doorstep, the loose cattle and shared labor in preparation of communal dinner–it all felt normal here. Strangely normal but seeds of worry bloomed in our heads that became increasingly hard to ignore. In short, I tried to wrap my head around the contrast between the property listed and the property we arrived to. I failed to do so.
It was somewhere between an accident and destiny, that maybe we happened upon Missionary House by the last sliver of adventure we had once irradicably craved. Maybe it was by the skin of our teeth that we had been able to find yet another moment to be completely shocked by, that it was seldom we found instances to compile into a dictionary of “what once was” and “what will soon be recollections.” Maybe it was the handwritten proclamations of God written on the board above where we ate; The pure certainty of a thought so deeply engraved that it must be passed from one mind onto the next. Or, maybe, it was the miles of almond trees that shaded the ground that once bore nature but had somehow found the “blessing” of becoming dust for someone else’s encouragement. In some pessimistic way I felt as though I could compare myself to the seeded almond trees, that I had once been a predestined creature that someone else felt needed more alteration. More change. More encouragement.
Somewhere along the way we had decided, fleetingly, that psychedelics would combat the peculiar energy that Missionary House had been graciously providing. If the patterns fixed into the wall were clearer, I’d be able to understand why one would take the words of BC as if they were made up fresh this morning. If the yellows in my pajama shorts were brighter, I’d be able to understand why one would devote every eternal Sunday morning to Him. By somehow evoking my untapped subconscious, I’d be able to understand Missionary House a bit more — as if Missionary House was the one that needed to be understood.
On a property with no cell service, no internet, and no other means of communication with the outside world, the only chance at seeking solace was through reading the books stuffed in our trunk. It was a polite absurdity to find that, while on these psychedelics, we had spent the entire three days at Missionary House reading Joan Didion.
Didion made us feel like God. Each time we opened a new book and began reading its contents out loud to each other on the cicada-filled grass field, the books slowly turned from novels into scripture. We sat for hours rereading chapters, highlighting lines, and scribbling notes; If one of us needed a shower, the other sat on the toilet and read aloud. If we felt our eyelids slipping as the nights went on, we’d brew yet another pot of tar black coffee, our nauseating communion, with grounds that stuck to the roof of our mouths and between our yellowing teeth. I finally felt the importance of sermon, and Didion was the preacher.
Her books, both fiction and nonfiction, communicated things that felt coincidentally personal, almost as if she printed herself copies of my hidden journals and dedicated her writing to my collapsing ego. She wrote about the importance of driving alone, how travelling purely with oneself, with or without a destination, offered a “seductive unconnectedness” to the outside world that we are usually deprived of. Given that I was on day five of a (nearly solo) road trip, Didion’s fixation on the loneliness of transportation felt deeply intimate — but nonetheless stirred the tribulation of my toothless grin, my lack of skill in the art of acceptance and the detachment that comes with the lifestyle I was experiencing.
She wrote about how one can become a voyeur, not only to the lives of others but our own as well. You always become your own voyeur. How we can be in a constant ricochet between falling in love with ourselves and growing to hate every fiber of our being, I don’t think I’ll ever know, but she told me that morning, in one of her sermons:
“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”
-Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
She even wrote about writing. She wrote about the pain that comes with writing. She wrote about the deception that comes with having to prove a story, that you have to convince each and every reader of your honesty. The simple act of arranging words on a piece of paper becomes intimate, a slice of one’s mind, and is something that she believes deserves more tender care than her physical being.
As I lay there, reading on the grass field (of what I honestly, at a certain point, believed to be a cult farm), wearing my four-day-old outfit and legs swinging in the air, I had finally begun to understand what Didion meant by magical thinking. I had reached the point at which my life laid before me; its peccadillos intricately sprawled across each delicate page, phrases now tainted by experience, and a reverie tainted by knowledge. I felt the femininity ooze from its spine, that maybe, Didion herself would rise from the dust at my feet and look me in the eye. What I wouldn’t tell anyone, I would tell her. I would see myself in her; I would see the pessimism, the curiosity, the concern, the disconnect, the ease. I felt as though I could compare myself to her, that I had once been a predestined creature that someone else felt needed more alteration. More change. More encouragement.
I had only ever considered the things that I couldn’t do. One of which was writing. I had never considered writing something that would ever be read by someone else, or even reread by myself, but I knew that there were certain aspects of my life that I not only wanted to write about but needed to write about. I needed to write about the various places I had visited and how they all seemed to feel outside of my grasp. I needed to write about the grief that comes with entering your 20’s. I needed to write about how family and friends seem to stay permanent until they’re not. I needed to write about the power in reading — in being able to escape your mind and enter someone else’s. I needed to write about the gust that slaps your cheek when you realize you, and everyone around you, are all slowly dying. I needed to write in order to release, because maybe, seeing words organize themselves on paper will make them easier to swallow.
Although I was surrounded by wooden crucifix’s nailed to the brick walls and proverbs carved into the cracking floor, the only profound knowledge I felt was in my presence was the pile of books sitting on the edge of my bed. I was calling to myself from beyond my own grave, grasping at every last gold string running through my mind in an effort to save the foundation that had, somewhere along the way, become so weak. The words that I used to write in my journal never held any authority, the thoughts became repetitive, phrases became futile, and the pages were compacted with insecurity. I don’t know if it was her words specifically that held significance, or the apprehensive setting of Missionary House that I had put myself in so willingly, but, finding my own voice within Didion’s writing was a debt that I could never repay.
Her books now collect dust on my writing table — a table that I sanded myself, stained and re-stained until the hues felt honest, housing a lamp with an old bulb and dried roses from my 21st birthday — a table that now holds as much relief as Missionary House once did. The titles lay stacked on the edge, a reminder that I can keep writing until my fingers bleed from my heavy typewriter, until the ribbons run out of black and red ink, until the lightbulb finally goes out; The titles lay stacked on the edge, a reminder that I’m not writing for anyone. I’m not writing to convince. I’m not writing to prove. I’m only writing.
Luckily, through all of the confusion and recollection, I learned that God only has one book, but Joan Didion has nineteen.
