Yesterday, I drove along the Hood Canal from Sequim, Washington to Portland, Oregon. It was the sixth time I’ve done this trip since April 26th, the day my father was taken by ambulance from his home to the hospital because of an accidental overdose (or in medical parlance, “over sedation”).

Much as this trip is long and the reasons for travel emotionally taxing, I also love driving along Puget Sound and always feel my spirit restored as I look across and up the Hood Canal. The water is never the same — some days flat as glass and grey blue, other days hard rippled with wind and tide and looking steely grey, still other days glinting with wave and sun and sparkling impossibly blue — and it butts up against hillsides treed with oak, madrone, and fir, and the Olympic mountains, the fastest growing mountain range in the world (2 inches a year, which in geologic circles is GINORMOUS!).

The houses along the Canal range from 50′s style cottages to more yuppified cedar shake numbers with red or green metal roofs.  In other words, classic beach houses.  These houses are interspersed with state parks and two different bits of Coast Salish indian reservations.  Like all reservations this time of year — at least on the West coast — these guys do a bang-up business selling fireworks.  The fireworks these guys sell — Roman candles, bottle rockets, killer bees, and firecrackers – are illegal in Oregon.  That’s what makes them so much fun.  I imagined getting some Roman candles to light off, you know, after a gin and tonic, or two. (Light fuse and get away, the warnings on the side of fireworks say.  I always thought this would make a great tattoo.  You know, after a gin and tonic, or two…)

As you cruise north through the town of Potlach, there’s the Danger Zone Fireworks, Cheap Cheap Fireworks (no comma), Patti’s Fireworks and Seafood, Indian Munitions, and finally, Illeagle Fireworks (sic).   I stopped to make sure that I had read the sign correctly, hoping it was a typo and not a painful cultural comment.  There it was, one word: Illeagle. 

Now, normally, typos make me laugh but this one hurt my heart with its irony.  Ill Eagle.  Where do you even start with that one?  The quality of indian education?  Insight into the soul sickness afflicting native communities? A comment on the disrepair of our nation? 

I decided to start with the most obvious: the language and the amazing things you can do with 26 letters.  Then I thought that even though Illeagle was one word, maybe the sign maker intended this — a kind of Sherman Alexie joke on white people who would first expect the typo and second, then go to a place of f  benevolent condescension that assumes the sign a prime metaphor for the lack of hope facing indians.   

I tried to recall other stunning typos, but mostly I just drove along feeling sad for the sign maker and all the broken promises that have led to the sickness of our national symbol and our nation.  Red, white, black, yellow we are all suffering.  From the Gulf Coast to Homer, Alaska.  From West Virginia to Oregon.  Our policy of manifest destiny, begun 234 years ago,  hurts.  Every.  Living.  Thing.

Happy 4th of July.  I won’t be on the balcony shooting off Roman candles.  Instead I will be quietly mulling what it is that I personally can do to help heal the ill eagle.

…but thinking makes it so.

– Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2

How many times have I seen Hamlet staged?  Before yesterday, I’d seen it twice in Ashland, once on video with Sir Laurence Olivier, once with Mel Gibson (surprisingly good even with Gibson).  And then yesterday, a fabulous third time in Ashland with Dan Donahue playing Hamlet.

This is an interesting staging of Shakespeare’s 400 year-old play and it shows how much the Bard’s plays can bear and how they maintain their relevance. The set looks like a grey and foreboding castle and then you notice the razor wire on the ramparts and the ever blinking and panning security cameras mounted on the castle walls.   It’s enough to make anyone paranoid and crazy.

But, I understood Hamlet’s descent into madness differently. Rather than craziness brought on by betrayal –  before I’d thought Hamlet’s madness a reaction to the shock of his mother’s betrayal — I now  understood how the death of a parent and the attendant grief and regret that could really send a person over the edge.

My father died less than a month ago.  I have regrets.

He wanted to die at home and I promised him this. But he died in an ICU bed, attached to oxygen, a central line, heart monitors, and O2 monitors.  And I was powerless in the face of the medical establishment, finances, and my mother to change this.  The night after he died, I thought I would go mad with grief.  It pounded over me in a way I’ve never experienced and I felt at times as if I couldn’t breathe and was going to be forever lost in the sea of regret and despair.  I wailed in a way that could only be described as keening for a man I wasn’t even always sure I liked.

Slowly the grief has abated.  I think of it like water sloshing in a bathtub.  It keeps moving for a long time, but only those first initial waves wash out of the tub and onto the floor.  In my case — and Hamlet’s, too — the key to calming the water is to stand porter at the doorway to my thoughts.  Rather than revisit the scenes that cause my wailing, I get on my bike and ride, a sure fire way to quiet my head.  Or watch hours of television on Hulu.  Other times I just sit looking out the window thinking nothing at all.

For the price admission, art continues to save lives.