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There’s a big hunk of rock on 82nd and Sandy covered all over with douglas-firs and yellow cedars, right next to highway 205. It’s the Grotto. A chunk of old-growth forest that never got cut down all the way, because the Catholics wanted it. I’m not sure why- before a week ago, I didn’t even know that it was there. But it’s there, just a few blocks from my friend’s house, past the Rocky Butte Pub with the pale guys in sleeveless shirts slouch against the wall out front, smoking resentfully in the good clean light of afternoon, mad at the smoking ban, blow-dried mullets trembling un-ironically in the wind from the freeway.

The Grotto is right across the street from that bar and around the corner from a car dealership whose blinds are never opened, wrought-iron gate high and closed, five new cars gleaming in the sunlight. There is a residence upstairs, some place with curtains, a lamp glowing softly in the window.

And Sandy running through like the Sandy river of its namesake, only more rushing, not like a river at all, more like a waterfall or an ice age or a landslide, cars moving and exhaust and concrete and dust and nothing to breathe it in but the wind-battered apartment buildings and small shuttered houses with dirt yards. Sandy near the Grotto is something obscene and traumatic, going on and on and on. And it intersects 82nd right here, too, 82nd is narrower with no place for bikes to ride and ambiguous with strange sex shops marching up and down in barred-window houses painted the color of conversation hearts, tiny grass yards and then taco shops, too, on their concrete aprons, those places actually look delicious, like I might get a taco there someday.

The bus. And the bus blows by, rumble rumble, smoke. It’s the guttering baritone of the landslide traffic symphony. Harrrrrrumph! Hiss of air. I never ride the bus.

I’m at the Grotto, I’m standing in the forest with its fresh breathing leaf-litter and I’m staring up at a diorama of the virgin Mary cradling poor dead Jesus, their smooth robes draped handsomely about their bodies, all of this carved out of the brightest stone and set back in a massive cave of dripping slabs of rock that’s lit with electric candelabras and stuffed with potted flowers. A latin hymn is pumped from a loudspeaker that’s nailed way up in a Doug-fir.

The cave ends way up in the rock bluff, and on top of the bluff is the other part of the Grotto. You have to take an elevator up there and it costs some money but if you come here after hours you can just hop the turnstile and no-one will come hunt you down, no monks in brown woolen cloaks, I promise. You can also scramble up the hillside where the bluff meets the backside of the apartment complexes on 82nd, and find a sort of road through the forest, it’s trimmed down there and the hemlock boughs are stacked in drifts, there’s an abandoned hobo nest, too, is there anything more sad, flattened tent and sodden scraps of clothing, the requisite moldering shoe.

But back to the rock-cave and its shadowy diorama- out in front is a broad expanse of stone for standing on and looking around in awe, and on either side the flickering lights of a hundred red glass candles, white ones too, lined up straight in a tall metal stand, each one cupped safely in a green metal band with a green metal cross on front.

I watch the candles flicker in the shadow of the rock bluff. It’s bright sunlight out on 82nd, unseasonable warmth and glinting car-metal, but here it’s all dampness rising off of rock and moss and gibbering pools crammed with wet pennies. I walk up to the candles in the metal case, smell their burning wax smell, and I am reminded of my mother’s long papery hand, yellow with nicotine, as she pulled me into the churches of my childhood, tall stone catholic churches that smelled of dust and wood, big and empty and peaceful, always open. I’d leave her to genuflect and dab herself all over with water from the cold pewter bowl and I’d slip into the side room where these candles were kept, carpeted there and secret, a metal box to buy a wish, a prayer, a small votive candle, flames dancing hopefully, a forgotten book of matches. I didn’t have any money but I’d light a candle anyway, pocket the matches. Then I’d sit for a while in a pew, way I always liked to worship, (I was a true believer sort of catholic up to the age of 11, then it was god and Santa Claus stopped existing in the same day) looking up at the vaulted ceiling or running up to the balcony or rearranging all the bibles, depending on what sort of mood I was in. Outside downtown Anchorage was putrid bus malls with shops that sold frozen burgers and dusty postcards to drunken homeless people and drunken people who had homes, too, and shops that sold fur coats to the tourists and strips of whale baleen that you could hang above your mantle. But inside these churches it was empty and smelled of wood and burning votives, and it was always like this. We never went in the churches when there was anybody in them, my mom was too crazy for that. She was afraid of people and them looking at her and plus she smelled like rotten coffee grounds, if coffee grounds could rot somehow, but I don’t think they can. She smelled the way she looked- terrified and furious, her body forever set to “panic”, that and a bad acid trip that never ended, even though she’d never done acid not even once, was a basketball player in high school and had friends and did flips on the trampoline in the western Colorado sunshine. Now there was a horror movie playing in her head, it had been playing for years, and all the characters were cast from the depths of her own imagination, and she had lost the remote control, and couldn’t turn off the VCR.

After I am done thinking of my mother and remembering one of the nice parts of my childhood (after we left the church we’d go to the giftshop across the street, and finger the cheap pewter saint medallions, and she’d buy me a blue plastic rosary or a wooden one, if she was feeling rich) I take the elevator to the top part of the grotto, where the woods have been sort of carved out into a sunlit gallery of the virgin Mary, leaving the biggest trees of course, yellow cedars so big around you could hollow one out and live in it, if you didn’t have too much furniture. There are a handful of Japanese tourists walking around in raingear like they’d gotten the weather off the internet, snapping pictures, but no-one else. I tramp through the woods off-trail and find an abandoned shed, a nice sunlit clearing, a cemetery for the priests. I wander back and find a small wooden chapel, candy-apple red, gathering sunbeams in a grassy clearing. Inside are oil paintings of our blessed mother, lit from above with florescent lights, a place for kneeling, a potted geranium. I circle the tiny structure, looking at its neat wooden sides, and add it to the list of places I’d like to occupy after the collapse of civilization, if I get the chance.

I get Catholicism, I get the romance of it, I get why they used to do the masses all in Latin. If it was a new thing I might just sign up, especially if I thought it was all stained-glass windows and the worship of young pregnant women in the forest who had been turned to stone, somehow, and just might bring you to tears, looking up past the treetops with their blank smooth eyeballs.

The forest is beautiful and I spend all day there, park on the prickly duff beneath a yellow cedar, wad up my puffy vest and use it as a pillow, read my book. When the shadows get long and the breeze picks up I walk to the “meditation” chapel, a glinting modern building perched on the edge of the rock bluff, and open the clear doors to the warm air inside. It’s a big open room with four over-stuffed leather armchairs that look out at a tall, tall wall of glass, and through this glass you can see the blank-eyed sprawl of the airport, the crawl of 205, the Columbia River in the distance and beyond that mount Adams, with its jaunty cap of clouds. I sit. I am swallowed by the chair. I open my book, wonder how long I can read before someone kicks me out (a monk from the stone monastery with its thick yellow windows that sits next to the cemetery? A heathen groundskeeper pulling a plastic cart?). I watch the sun set in the west, it gets too dark to read, no-one kicks me out. The lights twinkle on along 82nd. Standing before the glass is a modern sculpture of the Virgin, enclosed in a clear glass tube to protect her non-stone skin from the heated air. She is like an artful mannequin, fingers cracking, her armpit-skin lifelike where it folds above the blue cloth robes on her chest. She holds a sort of toddler, blonde and blue-eyed, of course, who I assume is Jesus. She looks young, like mothers used to be. Her toes poke out from the bottom of her drapery, they are alarmingly lifelike, knobby and asymmetrical. She reminds me of my mother, again, because my mother was young and beautiful, and for a moment I am grateful that I will never be a young, beautiful mother, that I have skipped that part of life altogether and have opted instead to be an asexual butch lesbian, sort of haggard in my mid-twenties, not wanting to nurture a single thing and entirely obsessed with myself. Way it should be.

A family comes into the meditation chapel, talking loudly the way families do, grandma in her wheelchair and mom fussing about plans for dinner, daughter stuffed into her shapeless tween clothing and dad standing at the glass window, stoic, looking out over the Columbia, thinking about manly mechanical machines and aeroplanes or at least pretending to. Mom and daughter settle into the leather chairs and grandma parks nearby and they start up a lengthy chat about vacation time shares in Panama city, which they have but which they do not use because Airfare is just too expensive they really should bring airfare down they really should and I think of all those houses, all the houses of the world sitting empty, waiting for no-one, heat set low for the furniture. I stare at my open book, eavesdropping. They exhaust the talk of timeshares and move on to bringing grandma up to date on all the distant cousins and neighbors and friends of cousins scattered throughout the country, children getting older every year who are smart or brilliant (genius, really!) or at least good at sports, or at the very least trying very hard, or at the very least autistic. Mom paints a hopeful picture for grandma, grandma listens along, silent, she lives in a little wind-beaten cottage in the twinkling grid below, doesn’t have a timeshare, uses a rented wheelchair, says GROTTO across the back on the blue leather. Dad stands at the glass, stares out, says nothing. Eventually the family leaves and I do too, a few minutes later, riding the elevator back down to street level and passing the banks of candles, brighter now in the dark, single man sitting alone on one of the cold benches, posture twisted in prayer, or sleep, whichever.

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