White paper, created as part of my Technical Writing role at Decentralized Finance Labs.

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Note: This creative nonfiction short story was written for the capstone class of my English Literature degree. It is written in the style of Terry Tempest Williams, whose nature writing in “An Unspoken Hunger,” is incredibly moving. This story is about a place where I found solace.

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Few know Alviso Port’s story, but it is still there, stuck firmly in the muddy history of San Jose, California.

Over the last year I have made unplanned pilgrimages to Alviso, always finding myself amidst chaos of one kind or another: high wind, glaring sun, rain and sleet, cracked mud and high water filled with plastic fragments the size of my fingernails. Once during a dry week that I saw Alviso’s hidden face: deeply cut channels and mud-covered foundations of a long-forgotten pier and port town. Then the rains came and it melted back into the anonymity of the bay waters.

I discovered the place by accident. Sometime in early February, upset, I drove blindly looking instinctively for a place to feel better. As my car’s jangling engine pulled into the parking lot I looked up. There was a fluttery feeling in my stomach. By some random chance I had found the tail end of San Francisco Bay, and in front of me fields of flowing water stretched into a foggy distance further than my eyes could see. It was astounding.

I wrapped myself against the cold and began to walk. The whipping wind coming off the water smelled sharp with salt. Clouds marched across the valley. My faint breath was stolen again and again by the wind.

Winter rains had pelted the dirt paths that looped around and away into the distance, and the blooming of pickleweed plants had begun. I knelt down by the lapping bay waters and saw bright green shoots tinged with red among the bits of brick. When my clumsy fingers broke a small sprout, I smelled the newness of salty, watery life contained in its stem.

I sat on a fallen, half sunk brick chimney with my knees pulled into my chest. I watched, mesmerized by the ebb and flow of marsh life. Sandpipers and long-billed birds stalked soundlessly through the shallows. As the sun lowered, the vast marine layer creeped closer over the hills to the west. A six car Amtrak blew its horn twice as it traversed the bay on my right, seeming to hover over the waves. There was so much in the reach of my eyes, and that day I settled with watching the clusters of small birds that swirled together like disorganized tornadoes above the vast waters. I ran my fingers over salt soaked rocks, grounding myself. Something let go inside of me and there was calm.

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Since that windy February day, I have made a commitment to see Alviso as often as I can. I believe if I look hard enough I can feel the ghosts of the place that has now been given back to nature. Rotting wooden posts stand in vast rows and channels of water flow in unnatural ways, reinforcing the mud underneath it all. Broken bricks and concrete mix with the red rust of fallen iron gates.

From the beginning of time, the vast area had stood untouched by the rush of civilization. Until one day in 1840, when Ignacio Alviso decided he had had it with life at Mission Santa Clara de Asis.Working quickly, he established Alviso as a town, and in a few short years Alviso became the steamboat transport hub for the south Bay Area. Travelers flocked to the new port. A profitable mill was established. In the Great Depression, Alviso became home to dance and gambling halls. The marshland was subject to yearly dredging that hauled thousands of tons of mud out so that sailboats and passenger ships could dock easily. But then came the age of trains that made boats superfluous, and after floods that put the entire town underwater in the 1980’s, Alviso was abandoned.

Dismissed like the decades-old bottle caps I sometimes find rusting under the pickleweed. Things we thought we forgot.

Salt marshes are not the most pleasant places. Exposed to the elements and letting off unpleasant gasses, they are landscapes defined by decay and desiccation, crystallized salt sticking to anything that can’t be broken down organically.

But Alviso is uniquely situated where the surrounding mountains and bay meet. No wonder there is chaos there. As a passing rain cloud moves through the area, I watch from a seat of old planks as birds huddle in the tall marsh grasses. The squirrels are underground. I don’t mind the rain falling on my insulated jacket. Sitting quietly for stretching minutes I lose myself in the process of syncing my breath with the waves, which makes me calm. With surprise I see a beam of light breaking through the quickly dissipating clouds, falling a thousand feet from where I sit. It isn’t long before the cloud disappears altogether and I am struck by the gleam of light reflected in all the drops clinging to my jacket.

“I keep thinking about Lee,” writes Terry Tempest Williams in An Unspoken Hunger. [She] responds to [the] park as a lover, who rejects this open space as a wicked edge for undesirables, a dumping ground for toxins or occasional bodies. The Bay is her home, the landscape she naturally comprehends, a sanctuary she holds inside her unguarded heart. And suddenly the water-songs of the red-winged blackbirds returned to me, the songs that keep her attentive in a city that has little memory of wildness.”

The winds whip me when I visit, and I can’t ignore the churning foam mucked with small bits of plastic. But I found something beautiful. A sense of belonging that has no root in community or class or grade point average. I found my sanctuary in the muddy history of San Jose, in an old forgotten port called Alviso.

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note: This essay was written and published on my [now inactive] Medium page as a reflection on having a rare disorder.

Vertigo is the unpleasant sensation of feeling violently drunk when you are quite sober.

The room spins, you can’t balance, and there’s a strange feeling in your head. Sometimes it happens very suddenly and without warning, which is what unfortunately happened to me on a Tuesday in November, while sitting in a lecture hall at university. Suddenly very clammy, my palms gripped the arm of the desk while the writing on the board slanted sharply down and to the left. My hands shook as I made my way to the restroom, and I spent an hour sitting in a stall, the world spinning.

Shortly after that fateful day I went to see a doctor. I knew instinctively that something was wrong.

The path I took to find a remedy began with a school nurse, and would end with Stanford’s head neurosurgeon. Along the way I would become more connected to myself and those around me. By the end, my life would change dramatically.

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I began my medical inquisition with the school nurse. She dutifully checked my ears for imbalances, as that is often the cause of vertigo. I did not have such luck: my ears were perfectly healthy. To further investigate, I needed an MRI. The truth was that no matter the threat, studying was something I preferred to acknowledging that there was something wrong with me. But I had a bad feeling.

So I had the MRI. And the message the nurse left on my cellphone said simply, “Ms. Robinson, your scan is free from any tumors. However, there has been an incidental finding.”

I am the eldest sister of three girls. Always called upon to set the right example. My parents had raised us with healthy meals and lots of books. My mom is a small business owner and my dad is a computer scientist. They taught me the importance of curiosity and continual learning. But at age nineteen, having survived the peril of applying and actually being admitted to college, I knew little about the world and even less about myself.

I had never questioned my right to exist, or that I deserved happiness. I was very introverted, and read constantly. As one of my favorite authors Thomas Hardy once remarked of a young woman, I was “a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience”. But now I was lost in a new reality: I had splitting headaches and tingling in my hands and feet. Something was wrong with my body.

I was referred to a neurologist, who referred me to the man who would be my neurosurgeon. At our first appointment I sat with my dad and the surgeon. He wanted me to have another MRI. I complied. For the second appointment I brought both of my parents. This time, the surgeon explained to me that I had a rare inherited disorder that caused my skull to squeeze the portion of brain called the cerebellum. It was being funneled into the space reserved for my brain stem, and as a result my spinal fluid had been forced into a bubble (called a syrinx) in the middle of my neck. This is why I could not feel my hands and feet. My malformation has a formal name in honor of the Italian neurosurgeon who discovered the disorder: Arnold Chiari Malformation.

Fantastically rare, this disorder appears often at the beginning or end of adolescence. Mine had decided to rear its head at age 19, when my college life had blossomed into real friendships, a relationship, and a stable sense of self. For any hope of a full life, I would need to have surgery as soon as possible. I decided to drop out of school formally after Winter quarter, and I scheduled my surgery for the 31st of March, only four months after my initial symptoms had been revealed. I hid in bed for hours, feeling like a bird trapped in a hurricane. While my classmates were relaxing during Spring break in San Diego, I was forcefully reminded of my own right to exist, of my own mortality.

A week after the last appointment with my neurosurgeon, my boyfriend broke up with me, and all of a sudden I was in a mental place I had never been before. I did not know how to recognize my feelings, so I buried them. I was heavily weighted with sorrow and indignation and betrayal. Increasingly, intense headaches would visit whenever my heart rate increased.

A month later, when I packed up my dorm room, my roommate was not there. I was to have surgery a week from then. What had I done wrong, to deserve this misfortune? I had no answer. More than anything, I felt for the first time a real sense of despair, like my choices were being made for me, and fate had decided to do me off early. The night before surgery was the worst night of my life, with little to compare. Sweating, shivering, crying in the looming face of sharp hospital smells, needles in my arm, painkillers, dreamless sleep.

The next morning at 4 am I woke and dressed and was driven to the surgical wing at Stanford. My last memory was the outline of my parents dimming as I was wheeled away. Surgery was six hours. They opened the back of my head, shaved the first vertebrae down, cut a section of my skull out and put a patch of bovine heart over the new hole in my head. Decompression, they call it. This let my brain breathe and expand, and my surgeon hoped that it would help my spinal fluid begin flowing again. I was stitched up and sent back to the land of the living.

Healing became my job. For five days immediately following my surgery, I was in intensive care. In retrospect, those memories are fuzzy. I remember that nurses asked me questions every four hours: what is your name? Your date of birth? Your hometown? I answered them dutifully. I was fortunate. My 2 inch scar was sewn beautifully and no spinal fluid was leaking. Slowly, my body began the healing process. I went from an IV of pain meds to physical pills. I drifted in and out of wakefulness. Finally, my mother drove me home with a bag of medication in my lap, pillows on either side of my head.

I took muscle relaxers and pain pills every few hours for a month, then I gradually weaned myself off of the vice grip they had on my body. After two months, I was not taking pain pills and I could think clearly for the first time since surgery.

At this point I had time to reflect on my near miss with mortality. I had come through the valley of death, and survived. Maybe it was the drugs talking, or just me, but I also felt a connection that I had never felt before. The fact that other people were also suffering was something I was now able to recognize and understand.

So at age nineteen I took on the world. I was driven by curiosity and continual learning. I read the news, my friends' personal blogs, and independent journals. It wasn’t very hard, sitting in bed with pillows piled around me.

My brain had been given more room in my head, and now my mind was expanding. What became immediately evident to me was the amount of suffering that uniquely targeted women. As the eldest sister of three girls, it seemed like a logical focus for further inquiry. Personally, I felt like a strong human being behind closed doors, but found my psyche frequently targeted by cat-callers, online trolls, and older people who looked at me and questioned my intelligence or right to voice my opinion.

And it got worse: the president of my university was denying the faculty and staff access to abortions. Women online wrote about being abused by their boyfriends. The more I read, the more I looked into feminist herstory. I was absolutely incensed.

When I finally returned to school eight months after surgery, I was eager to share what I had learned and discovered. My new understanding of suffering pushed me to reach out to others who felt the same. I joined the sustainability club, the gay-straight alliance, and a budding feminist group. I went to meetings and I participated, and it felt good. We were openly talking about inequality. I wasn’t satisfied with my impact, but it felt good to express my thoughts and meet people who felt the same way. At the end of the school year, I applied to lead the feminist club for the next year.

I advocated for its funding by writing a detailed paper on the need for discussion about women’s issues, and presenting it to school officials. After consideration, they approved the funding, and I became the leader of Feminists for Justice for the next school year.

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What have I learned from these years after surgery? Scary things can help you, and they almost always reveal a part of yourself you never knew existed. Most importantly: death is a part of us always, and when you get past the fear, it can be a fundamental source of change. It showed me that life is so precious, so vibrant and full of nuance and happiness and sadness all the same.

Sometimes I wish that I could talk to the scared girl experiencing vertigo in class all those years ago. I would tell her that she would not be broken by her health. Yes, brain surgery would happen, but life will continue. Not once was I ever really alone, because I had friends, family, and plenty of doctors to help me along the way. And it is what happened after the trauma, how I chose to let it shape me and guide me, that always mattered the most.