Show: Earth Script

"Compass Points"

Program, Air, Earth, Earth's script, Fire, Water, Slideshow, Main

An original collaborative script for live, mediated, and distanced performers. Edited by Nadja Masura written by Moira Jackson, Nadja Masura, Beth and Jimmy Miklavcic, and Aaron Tobiason

Nadja (Compass Points):
To the North are the redwoods,
To the South is the city,
To the East are the hills,
To the West is the Pacific.
Nadja: Following the road home
the highway that stretches North between gold hills and the Pacific
I am anticipating the smell of Redwoods, dirt and gravensteins ripening, the taste of blackberries and the touch of fog.
I can hardly wait – watching the landscape of farm and field unravel into warm daydreams of familiar places, peopled with woods, creaks and houses I’ve known.
The road, snaking between the hills and curves until, like a blessing, I find my dirt lane, my passage home, and the path to my heart.

Moira: I grew up in the heartland. On the plains you can see forever, the stars are brighter.
Camping is the best…
I love sleeping on the earth
Recreating sleeping in the earth mother

Aaron: This is one of those rare places on earth where I imagine it’s damn near impossible to be an atheist.
Moira: Now my joints ache
So the tradeoff will be comfort over closeness

Aaron (Compass Points):
To the North is the very first Starbucks; the rainiest spot in the continental U.S., tallest mountain in the lower 48
To the South is where I came from/started
To the East is Mt. Adams, where I will continue my search
To the West is my home; Goat Lake
Aaron: On May 18, 1980, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake triggered the largest landslide in recorded history. In a matter of seconds, the entire north flank of Mt. St. Helens slid into the pristine waters of Spirit Lake, sending waves more than 300 ft. up the valley walls. Thermal vents, which had been feeding a bubble of pressurized gas beneath the mountain for the past several centuries, were suddenly exposed. The resulting eruption blasted a wall of super-heated gas and rock that vaporized trees up to 5 miles away, and leveled the surrounding forest to a distance of 17 miles. It was my second birthday, and I spent it standing in front of my grandparent’s television.
Moira: Every kid should have a sand box.
No better place to build your first castle…
Make your first cake.
Beth: Mud pie
Aaron: I’ve been told I took great joy in pointing at an image of the enormous ash plume that would eventually circle the planet, and saying “Boom!”

Nadja, Moira, Jimmy and Beth: “Boom”

Aaron: When the blast had finally spent itself, the area around Mt. St. Helens was, in the words of a local paper, “as barren as the surface of the moon.” A crust of impossibly fine ash and scalding pumice had replaced the dense carpet of evergreens – the surface was now almost white, an unnaturally light and brittle shell, arid and lifeless.

Moira (Compass Points):
To the North is the crystalline cold
To the South is warm and spicy
To the East is adventure and mystery
To the West is my childhood and my growing up

Moira: North Dakota earth is black, heavy, rich. It can suck you right down. It can trap you.
Don’t ever go walking across a new plowed field after a heavy rain…you’ll never get across. The earth will eat your boots, and hold your feet fast, if you’re not careful and it will never let you go.
Best farming land in the world
Nadja: A gardener’s hands are never clean
The soil stains them, the earth marks them as her own. I remember his hands. He’d have to scrub them with pumice soap.
Everyday in the early light and at sunset, in sun and in shade,
He knelt, muddy knees, bending back, warm hands kneading the soil-
Busy covering lettuce, planting seedlings, pulling pigweed, fighting gofers,
Rising slowly to the triumph of tomatoes, beans, carrots, and melons.
Moira: Growing up, we always had a backyard vegetable garden. Our own “home grown” carrots were always better than “store bought”, sweeter. My children have never tended a REAL garden with me. Never enough room and the soil around our home has too much clay in it.
Beth: Every year we plant a garden. Our daughter has her very own next to her playhouse. She always grows the best tomatoes.
Nadja: Someday, in my own home, I’ll have my own little spot of earth to dig in, to tend like a sister, or to cherish like a lover, to decorate with dahlias, to plant my own apple tree.

Jimmy/Beth (Compass Points):
To the North is the Point of the Mountain
To the South is the Point of the Mountain
To the East are the Wasatch Mountains
To the West are the Oquirrh Mountains and the Great Salt Lake
Beth: We drove out to the Spiral Jetty created by Robert Smithson. It takes two hours from Salt Lake City driving North to Promontory Point – the Historical Monument representing where the Union and Pacific Railroads met in 1869.
Jimmy: May 10, 1869: The "Wedding of the Rails!" Many of the journalist of the day recount the events of the ceremony and record the event as happening at Promontory Point - when actually the rails were joined and the ceremony held at Promontory Summit - 35 miles away. As a result of this inaccurate reporting, most people today, more than a century later, still believe the rails were joined at Promontory Point.
Beth: It takes another hour on an obscure dirt road with ruts and boulders to get out to the Salt Lake. On the way we passed by an abandoned disintegrating amphibious vehicle with peeling green paint. It was rusted and lonely sitting out there partnered with an old trailer – signs of someone’s faded dream from long ago.
Aaron: The last half mile of the ascent is a slope of fine pumice, sort of like a beach tilted at 45 degrees, where each step forward is half a step back. It’s one of those geographical oddities, where you can ask a descending climber how far you are from the top, and be told it’s only another 45 minutes. You can ask the same question after hiking another twenty, sweaty minutes, and be told, amazingly enough, you’re only about 45 minutes from the top. It was here that I saw my father confront the physical compromises of his own mortality with a humbling grace that brought tears to my eyes.

Moira: My mother died last summer.

Nadja: My grandfather died at 97. I watched as they planted him
with ceremony not unlike those I conducted as a child, when I buried a cat or its prey, a baby rabbit, with forget-me-nots in the backyard.
Moira: When I buried my dog I just wrapped her in her favorite blanket. Eventually blanket and dog will be earth.

Nadja: They planted him like he was a seed waiting to grow,
Like he were a new hydrangea bush, pot-bound and ready to bloom
Like he were a tin-lunch box or arrow-head buried down by the creek waiting to be found, like a human secret
But as I watched, all I could think of….is that he was a man.
And I was afraid, when the truck backed up and emptied all that earth
Filling the hole where he was laying.

Moira: A funeral is laying claim to your own forever, little patch of the earth.
Jimmy: In one year, 98% of the atoms in our bodies have been replaced. In a sense, we are constantly recycling the material of our environment (iron, calcium, carbon). What was once just minerals, now becomes a living being, only to return one day to that original state. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Aaron: Every step I took over that scoured landscape was a promise, each breath a defiant cry that my life would prove me the exception to Thoreau’s maxim that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. It was the quiet part that scared me. But I kept coming, because I knew that that landscape, so barren to some, was actually vibrating, literally pulsing with life. I felt like it was a secret that only I knew, and that, if it didn't’t have answers, at least had hope.
Moira: Making things out of clay is like being God in a way. Moist clay, so malleable yet fragile. Centering clay on a potter’s wheel requires constant, “just right” pressure. Too much will throw the clay off center; too little and nothing is accomplished.
Jimmy: It was October, but still 90 degrees. The lake has felt the effects of the long drought. The boulders of the Jetty are made up of black lava. With the receded lake the pocked round lava looked as if it was covered in snow, but really it was salt left behind by evaporation.
Nadja: We live on a minor fault line, and I know the fence that marks the San Andreas on the ridge about 14 miles from home. That’s where the special wildflowers grow, lovely miniature orchid and sunflower shapes among the rocks.

Beth: Colored pink puddles of water filled with brine shrimp remained in pockets of the white salt plane.
Nadja: People from out of state think were crazy to live here, but I prefer earthquakes to tornados or snipers any day. Somehow it just seems natural that there are shifts in plates, in life and death, it’s almost as if the earth is swallowing her own.

Jimmy: We walked the spiral, laid down, and looked up at the sky in the center of a small universe.
Aaron: This is a place that reminds one there’s an entire world below our feet. That we’re all just living on chips of earth floating on a sea of molten rock. It’s a vast testament to the fact that what we see and hear and taste and smell is only the surface, and that all we call real is just a dim reflection of a terrible beauty we’re too proud and too scared to see.

Moira: Dust gets in your hair, your eyes. Blowing earth. Being in the center of a dust storm is as close to being in the earth as you can get with out dying.

Nadja: There is no living without dying, no earth untouched by erosion, no healthy plants without compost.

Beth and Jimmy: And when it was time to leave we unwound the spiral, forever changed by the primitive beauty of this surreal moonscape.
Aaron: Each time, the life does come back.

Moira: To the North is white.
Aaron: And it does so with an awe-inspiring lack of intentionality.

Jimmy: To the South is the point.
Aaron: It doesn’t see itself as part of some great narrative, as one element in a cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Nadja: To the East is the sunrise.
Aaron: It just lives, only knowing that it must continue.

Beth: To the West the road disappears.
Aaron: That is its sole responsibility…just to live.