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God is Wakantanka
I had learned a painful lesson (once again), one that I need not have repeated—a writer’s conference has never been a good environment for me and that remained “my truth.” I was simply not at all comfortable talking about myself or my work to strangers who had the same terrified look in their eyes invading my own when my work was the subject of scrutiny. It was rather pathetic, really—I could say this only because I felt I was pitiful when I used the side trips from life as a search for acceptance from others who had the same insecurities as mine. The simple truth was that I needed to be the one accepting myself because until I did, anyone else attempting to validate me was a lost cause.
Hoping to quiet the storm the conference had awakened within my head, I retreated to our friend’s house tucked into the lush spruce-speckled hills with a book I had been given during our first trip to South Dakota—Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s That They May Have Life: The Episcopal Church in South Dakota 1859-1976. The boys—Jim and his friend—took fly fishing trips to area lakes and went into town to play while I devoured the recount of the church’s history with South Dakota tribes. It had become an important piece of literature documenting the actions of the Episcopalians working among the Native Americans, and Sneve wasted no time in getting to the crux of the matter, beginning her first chapter “God is Wakantanka” with this paragraph:
“When the missionaries brought Christianity to the Dakota or Sioux Indians, there was a great change in the native value system. Some Indians were able to retain old values and integrated them into Christian beliefs, so that the old was combined with the new and conversion to a new religion was an easy extension of the old. For others the conflicts were insurmountable and there was hostility and resistance to the missionaries and to Christianity.”
As I lumbered deeper into the past through her words, I felt a great ache for people who had been duped time and again by church and state, and I realized I had gleaned something that made my one day at the writer’s conference worthwhile. The evening speaker the night before had said, “Effort is the key: know your subject and work at it.” I used that as my battle cry, the only thing that made plowing through the material showing how the past had spiraled around the Native Americans like a snare tolerable. I was intellectualizing it all, of course; I knew better than to think such trauma could be emotionally understood by someone like myself who hadn’t experienced it. I was okay with that, as I felt I could at least be a witness to a subject no longer brought to the fore in our culture’s consciousness; and I just might instigate change at the very most.
“…in times of crisis and disorder,” Sneve wrote, “many Dakota slipped back to the old traditions and religions. Christianity among the Indians became very much like Christianity among the whites. Those who remained faithful Christians and accepted the new order realized that the old Dakota way of life was doomed: it could not stand against the stronger white civilization. They knew if they were to survive, they must adopt Christian standards and behavior.”
Sneve regresses in time, telling the stories of the missionaries’ interactions with the Sioux, noting the first convocation which took place in Santee on October 5th and 6th 1870, well over a century before I had attended one. With her description of the reservations reverberating in my head, we drove out of Steamboat heading toward South Dakota in an ornery Ford Bronco Jim had left at his friend’s since selling his half of another Steamboat retreat several years before. We would be using the brute of a vehicle for our transportation in South Dakota and it felt like the perfect workhorse as it thrust through the thin high-mountain air in the crispness of a late summer morning.
With the first touch of light coming into the sky, we drove the winding road as the brightness turned magnificently blue against the stark relief of the peaks looming black and bold. Along the road, the tips of wheatgrass sparked like paintbrushes dipped in a radiant sheen, and the racks of the antelope grazing in the fields glowed as the sun illuminated the summer’s velvet covering their horns. I juxtaposed this predawn beauty that enveloped us as we drove out of the Rocky Mountains with the words of Issac Heard, who wrote the History of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863. Sneve quotes him in her book, his descriptions of the Great Plains as the earliest reservation dwellers found them terrifying:
“It was a horrible region, filled with the petrified remains of the huge lizards and creeping things of the first days of time. The soil is miserable; rain rarely ever visits it. The game is scarce, and the alkaline waters of the streams and springs are almost certain death.”
With these images floating in my mind, we descended into the high plains and the land known as Wyoming, its resolute flatness stretching as far as the eye could see. It would have been ominous to traverse the dry and dusty high-valley floor on foot as many of the Native Americans did in the early days. We drove through the color of gold-kissed beige for so long that my eyes began playing tricks on me, making me believe everything around me was radiating like the scene was being filtered through heat. It was as if there was no other color existing anywhere in the entire world, as parched grass was interrupted only by the occasional tumbleweed clinging to the grid upon grid of barbed-wire fences.
The Bishop had certainly been right about the proliferation of land being cordoned off, an ironic fact given that one of America’s greatest mottos had always been “Don’t fence me in.” I had already convinced myself that if we had only had the good graces to have remembered this caveat when first interacting with the natives of our country, history could have been vastly different. What were we thinking? I wondered as we moved through the flatlands that comprised the middle of a country I had assumed I’d understood, only to come to realize I didn’t recognize it or its politics at all.
As the light harshened into late afternoon, I found myself missing home terribly, knowing the soothing surroundings of the world I had created for myself were farther away than ever before. Was I meant to be continually jerked away from anything closely resembling a haven so that I could serve as a testament to what was transpiring in the world around me? It seemed this continued to be my fate while all I wanted was my own bed, my own pillow and a room of my own in which to unravel all of the angst that the world brought tumbling into my life. Home, I thought; what a breathy word when spoken, what an emotional one when contemplated. I had had the opportunity to choose where to make my home. According to the books I was reading, the Sioux had been denied that privilege, and I was having a difficult time reconciling the fact in my heart and in my head.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
It just happens to be Let's Blog Off (on Twitter as #LetsBlogOff) and #TravelTuesday again. See how my pals are answering the question, "What is home?" here.
Primal Decorum
As we winged our way west toward Steamboat Springs, I was reading an article in Harper’s by Paul West titled “My Body, Myself.” In it he wrote, “I had always had a sense of being intimately linked with stuff that I was not—if indeed I knew where I began and stuff left off.” He deemed his sense of connection a “primitive hunch,” adding, “…I began to think of myself in the third person but I was too blurred even to maintain the consistency of that primal decorum…”
I felt I knew what he meant when he said, “I hovered,” as I sat in a high-backed seat, floating through the sky on my way to yet one more destination with which I had no permanent relationship. I was thrilled that the particular spot I would be visiting was at least one of my favorites. I had never been to Colorado in the summer so I was eager to see the difference warmth brought to the town I’d only known when its bowl of a valley ringed with jagged peaks was filled with white powder.
Our first morning there, I opened the curtains to find a black cat with glowing golden eyes watching the thickets that bristled at the hem of the woods. As I pulled the curtains back further, its eyes swung my way, focusing on me as its body tensed, its crouch deepening as if it were readying to spring away. When I didn’t move, the feline turned its gaze toward the half-empty birdfeeder and studied it with intense interest. I wasn’t in the mood to see a bird or a chipmunk mauled on that particular morning so I slid the door open a bit, causing the cat to bolt into the bush, its tail swinging into the thickets as it disappeared.
As soon as it was gone, a chipmunk roused itself from the woodpile in which it had been hiding and unleashed a round of chirping chatter that berated the cool, clean air for its collaboration with the monster that had been stalking it. The louder he chirped, the more frantic his tail flipped behind him—like a conductor’s wand during a particularly stirring segment of a symphony, though his tail’s movement was a delusional testament to his prowess at having warded off the cat! After a final crescendo, he inched his way toward the scattered seeds beneath the bird feeder, keeping one eye on the tree-line just in case, and helped himself to a mouthful of breakfast.
The next brave beings to return were the Stellar’s Jays, and they were closely followed by the magpies—cautious but bossy as they sparred for domination over the birdfeeder. The chipmunk made the mistake of commencing a series of squeals and one of the magpies hopped over to it to give it a piece of its mind. As the bird squawked a refrain, cocking its head sideways to see if its point was being made, the chipmunk backed up a few paces but was far from ready to acquiesce. Its chirping intensified and the Stellar’s Jay scooping feed with its enormous beak rotated its head so its closest eye could see what the ruckus was about. So much drama everywhere in life! I thought as I closed the door on the cacophony.
The bold landscape touched me as much in its summer gentleness as it had in its wintry hush. The rising breath of the breezes stirred the wildflowers and rustled the silvered leaves of the aspens, the bright colors of the flowers superimposed against the pale spotted trunks of the trees seeming to testify that the earth was indeed good. The storms at such a high altitude were no different than they were at home or even at sea level in Panama City Beach, as they swooped in and rubbed out every inch of light in the same manner they behaved in any other landscape. The flat tops of the distant peaks still held drifts of dull snow, as if a great white hope belonged only to their loftiness. The matchstick trunks of the long-dead pines pointed at the heavens as if to accuse the mountains of not seizing the day, their bare bodies—ravaged by borers during the 1940’s—serving as a reminder that death was always just one step behind.
The wilderness threatened to consume me as I rested my head on a burned-out tree trunk and sank into the foliage that softly licked at my skin as the breeze dictated. I listened intently but couldn’t tell whether the rushing stream was involved in a dialogue with the steep hillsides or whether it was simply a soliloquy understood only by its own rippling currents. The babble sang its message to whatever party happened along and I was glad it was performing for me in this idyllic moment in time. The sun came and went, ambivalent toward my desire for warmth, and I celebrated my last lazy day for a while, as I would be attending the Steamboat Springs Writer’s Conference the next day.
I was nervous about meeting other writers and having my work critiqued. My skin had always been so thin when it came to my strung-together sentences, and I turned out the bedside light that night wondering whether I might have grown out of the shyness that had always kept me from connecting with others who might have something to teach me.
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This post is a #LetsBlogOff contribution, the question of the moment being “What do you look for in a Blog Off; or what motivates you to participate or not?” I would like to tell the esteemed leaders of our fearless tribe that I’d prefer less specific topics, ones with broader philosophical implications because these ask me to dig deeper. And, hey: thanks for asking—such a rare show of respect in our fast-paced, communication-rampant world! To see the other posts of the day, click here for the list.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
The Bottom of Discontent
I journaled most of the trip south, admitting in writing that I’d fallen completely in love with the mountain house, which was becoming hidden from the road as the woods dressed in shiny green—the lushness making me feel poignant about missing a minute of the ever-changing beauty. It seemed the only place I was ever able to relax was the screened porch with its “eye” on nature—her cooling breezes accompanied by an elemental soundtrack that included the splash of the waterfall and birdsong. But leave we always did and when we arrived at the fairgrounds in New Orleans, the festival was vibrating with so many types of music that the percussions shook the ground, a feeling akin to the earth having an oddly rhythmic form of palsy. The tents spreading out as far as I could see held gospel, blues, reggae, calypso, contemporary jazz, big band, Cajun, Zydeco and other genres of music I’d never known existed. The mass of people flowing through the grounds created a psychedelic ocean of color that not even Jackson Pollack would have thought to splash on the same canvas. I felt as if I were floating through a kaleidoscope of sound, hues and aromas.
The food ranged from barbecued alligator and crawfish étouffée to oyster poboys, and of course, beignets, which were brought to the festival by the famed Café du Monde. The aroma of barbecue was tantalizing as it floated above the row of food booths, battling it out with the smell of hot grease emanating from the proliferation of deep-fat fryers. Drinks were almost as varied as the dishes served—wine, beer and Bloody Mary’s tempting at every turn. I reached a point at which I declared I had to stop putting things in my mouth because the run I’d taken that morning was becoming a token effort given the excess of food and liquor I was consuming. There were so many outlandishly dressed people that my brain couldn’t fully process the scene as I scanned the crowd, trying my best to remember details that would color the backdrop of any story or poem I might write about the experience. My favorite fair-goers were the ones who stood as close as they could to the stage and swayed their bodies with the music—eyes closed as if they were making love to the rhythms.
One such guy was dancing in the grass by a steel police barricade that protected the acts on the stage from the public. He was moving to the music of the Bluebirds—his skinny hips gyrating in shiny tight leotards. His scrunched socks were pillowed neatly above his Reeboks, which shifted on the grass as he flexed his knees to coincide with the whine of the guitar and the pulsing drums. His tan was obviously hard won and he would monitor it as he went along, shifting a sleeve farther up his arm when he sensed the beginning of a tan line or adjusting his shirt at the neckline as he spritzed himself with a spray bottle he kept at the ready in the beaten-down grass next to a bright blue towel he used to keep the sweat from his eyes. His hair was the color of cinnamon sticks and was clipped short except for a skinny braid that flicked around on his thin brown neck. His head was the liveliest part of his body—it shot to and fro as his arms stayed glued to his sides. Watching his thin butt vibrate to the grinding of the blues made me chuckle, and I was irritated that Jim and the gang were determined to move me along because I could have watched him for hours as I absorbed details that might have explained a bit more about how he lived his life away from the gregarious activity he was enjoying so keenly.
As I sat in the hotel room the next day watching the ships coming and going, I pondered how life kept me tossed about, supposing it would for a while no matter how much I hoped for a better balance. I was grateful for experiences like the jazz festival but I wanted so keenly to be able to be still and write. It was almost comical how many people asked me, “What problems could you possibly have?” I couldn’t explain even to myself why I considered it to be an insult except that it brought about waves of guilt to think about how well off we were materially and how unhappy I could be at times. I guessed people believed this because for most of them, their nemesis had always been a lack of money. Even in moments when I doubted I had a “right” to my grumblings, there was one valid point at the bottom of my discontent and for this I wanted to give myself the acceptance to continue my search. I was extremely happy when I was bettering myself intellectually and creatively. In fact, doing so helped me to relax into a part of myself that was calm and loving. Therefore, I believed my desperation for betterment and for creative time was a valid one; not merely a phantom of psychological dis-ease. The bottom line, though, was that time for neither of these treasured things would fit into my life as it was, and my creative flow was drying up under the pressure of relational issues.
Knowing the spiral that took place when these subjects were uppermost in my mind, I decided that sitting and mulling them over would only push me into a darker place so I decided to take a walk. I headed to Jackson Square where I saw one of the most curious specimens of humanity I’d ever come across. It was a man who must have spent hours in front of a mirror putting on makeup and wrapping himself in rags. He had glued small tusks into his mouth, which pointed up into his painted, tortured expression. His eyes had been a lively shade of green before the bleeding of red had overcome them. He was a study in torn cloth, string and burlap—all smudged with dirt except around his shoulders where he’d fashioned the “costume” into a cape of sorts. At first, I couldn’t tell whether his skin was black or just so dirty that it appeared to be black.
His hairline answered the question, proving that he’d used dark body paint or some such substance to color his face because it had seeped into the hair framing his forehead. Were the blond and red goatees real or were they applied with glue as they extended from the bottom of a patch of white he’d painted to frame lips bulging with tusks? I wondered, standing completely absorbed as he slowly crawled toward a cigarette butt that someone had flipped onto the sidewalk. He extended his hand toward it in slow motion, picked it up with fingers slightly hidden by torn rags and raised it to his nose. He sniffed it like an animal would investigate something before eating it and then rolled it around in his fingers. I felt shy snapping photos of the man but the interest didn’t phase him—he must have wanted the attention given the trouble he’d taken to draw a crowd in a busy square.
Afterwards, I sat in a café recording my impressions of him, curious as to what type of person would think that doing what he was doing was fun. There had to be some thrill in it or he certainly wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble! I wondered what his mother would have said if she’d seen him in his get-up. Were there hints of his bizarre personality in his childhood? I questioned. Or was he perhaps merely a frustrated actor getting his kicks on a spring weekend? My musing made me think of a radio program I’d heard the week before during which Alex Haley said American family values were disappearing. While I listened intently to the interview with the famed author, I marveled at how he made me feel as if I were sitting on the back porch with him as he talked about his aunts, great aunts and grandmothers. He charged every person to interview his or her parents and grandparents because the current generation would be the first to not know who they were in terms of family if they did not. “Go and hug your grandparents,” he commanded. “Say thank you to them because it is from them that you received your life.”
I wondered about the swaddled man in Jackson Square. Did he stay in touch with his grandmother; was she still alive? Did his mother “get him”; was his father kind to him or did he see a man who was either insane or practicing his performance art in an embarrassingly bizarre way? Did the savage-looking man crawling along the cement know “who he was”? Did he care? Somehow it seemed to me his unique way of expressing himself was one of the most sane examples of individuality I’d ever witnessed, even while his behavior was about as demented as any I’d ever seen!
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Today's post is a #LetsBlogOff post. For a full list of participants telling everyone how they relax, click here.
Yes, Man!
I had stayed in Siquirres for the day, and my head was pulsing from the dampness, the moisture-laden air making every noise more intense. There was a great deal of sound in the outpost town. A bell clanged at the Catholic church as the priest chanted into a microphone, the words reverberating inside the big, domed concrete block building then echoing out into the streets. Roosters crowed and the train engine thrummed as the cars clanked into each other, jerking as the slack was eaten by motion. The furniture maker next door running his lathe paused, letting it sputter noisily until he was ready to make it sing again when it happily devoured the wood he fed it. Dogs barked and squealed as large diesel trucks coughed on the highway, then throbbed as the drivers employed their Jake brakes to slow down. A motorcycle fired and a baby cried simultaneously, the twin sounds creating a high-pitched drone.
When the woman next door sneezed, it sounded as though she was in the room with me—that’s how little noise the wire mesh covering the windows held back. As I listened, I felt so absorbed that I transcended the noisemakers to become the noise: I wasn’t the furniture-maker but the whine of the lathe. I wasn’t the priest or the microphone, but the chant. I became the woman’s sneeze, then, as her hands moved from her face to the dishes she was washing, I was the sloshing of the water rendering her hands raw. I wondered if her skin was as rough as the palms of the elderly black man’s who had shaken my hand the day before. His fingers had felt as though he had laminated them and then roughened the plastic coating with sandpaper. He’d said to me, “Good to see you, yes, man!” The minute he turned away, I was met with the surprise of my life. Barney trundled up with a bouquet of flowers and a basket filled to the brim with chili peppers and limes.
He handed me the gifts so self-consciously that my heart melted, an intimate moment that held only for a fraction of a second because the weather upped the ante on its terrible mood and gushed water, sending us both running for shelter. We stood beneath a tarp that Jim had strung between two trees and I struggled to think how I could recapture the mood so I could express my gratitude for his gift but he sensed my earnestness and pulled his poncho over his head, tossing back a goodbye and slipping away. As he sloshed through the thick mud toward home, I watched as he passed a pregnant dog drinking from the gutter—the filthy water rushing under her lapping tongue. He didn’t so much as glance in her direction and I stood there regretting that I hadn’t been able to tell him how much his gesture had meant to me.
I couldn’t begin to guess how many inches of rain had fallen in two days’ time. I simply knew it was significant because my clothes were so soggy they were beginning to sour. Lying on the bed in the mornings was unfriendly because the sheets were so damp they might as well have been pulled right from the washing machine. This was difficult for me and I hated myself for it. I kept thinking that surely there was some way for me to find the strength to gracefully deal with all of the challenges I faced, but good-humored acceptance continued to allude me.
After a brief respite of sunshine at midday, the sky scowled and the thunder rumbled yet again—threatening from a distance and growing louder with each chant. The ocean must have been aiming to free itself from its contents because water came in great torrents that obliterated everything from sight. I unpacked the goodies that Barney had given me and realized I was growing a bit more accustomed to life in a country where sweet limes were bitter and they called avocadoes pears. I would always remember mornings that dawned with jungle noises and the smoky smell of a fire lit by the furniture maker next door as he burned the sawdust from the previous day’s work—neither of which I’d ever experienced in my life until I had landed on a coastal plain where moss dripped like an old man’s beard from misshapen trees.
We were preparing to head home and I felt happy that I’d spent some time working on the material for “Mornings at Lakeshore” because we would be moving into a house perched on a beautiful bluff overlooking the northern edge of Chattanooga. I’d be floating far above a bend in the Tennessee River rather than steeped in the lake setting that had inspired the writing. My new world would be a levitating one that I imagined would bring its own fascinations, the newness of which I hoped would make up for my loss of the lushness of living on the water.
I watched Jim fuss with the building as he prepared to leave the job site unattended—his expression as earnest as a mom preparing to send her child off to the first day of school. I understood his passion for what he was doing but I felt the eggshells I’d been dancing around on were becoming slicker and more dangerous as the viscous of the slimy whites thickened every time I made a pass over the crumbled mess. At what point did the tiptoeing stop making sense? I wondered. At what point did I say screw it and set my heels firmly on the ground?
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! By the way, did you know it's #WriterWednesday on Twitter? Yep!
A #LetsBlogOff Redux on The Road to Promise
It's time for another #LetsBlogOff brouhaha and the subject we are to address today is "what makes a good story?" I think that identifying what constitutes a satisfying read for each of us is such a subjective thing that it's impossible to define the art-form with sweeping statements. I attempt to practice the craft here weekly (usually for #WriterWednesday) as I reveal bite-sized pieces of this memoir I'm determined to write and publish in book-form. Today I celebrate my 63rd post with this #TravelTuesday trip to the Appalachian Mountains near where I grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I received a beautiful gift recently when Rufus, a #LetsBlogOff crony, featured my storytelling efforts on Dog Walk Blog. I'd be interested to know if you agree with his premise that what I am doing is indeed storytelling. Even if you disagree, I'd like to know. To see my fellow blog-off'ers' contributions, click here: you will be well rewarded! And now, without further adieu, this week's chunk of my journey along The Road to Promise:
Berating the Wind
One night, I drank in the beauty of the full moon’s reflection as it cut a wide golden-silver swath across the lake, zigzagging its way from the other bank to ours. It seemed as if the radiant disk was determined to take a shimmering journey—casting off in the darkness as it searched for a mirror in which to view its visage. I reveled in the fact that from my spot on the deck, the lake seemed to have become the moon’s rippling partner in its quest.
The trip to the mountains had made a tremendous impression on me—it was one of the most spectacular days I’d had in quite some time. The pleasure arose from a combination of things: my good mood, the gorgeous weather, the music filtering through my headphones and my heightened awareness of the things around me. I could remember everything so vividly, especially how the sun had drenched each flash of my memory. It was my companion that day, illuminating things so unforgettably that my drive along the twisting and turning highways of the southern swath of the Appalachians seemed hyper-brilliant.
I’d perched for hours on a high bald and from my position on a blanket spread on the dandelion-strewn grass, I read several quotes by other writers about their families, one of which gave me pause for the poet’s use of the word “isolation.” Yvonne Sapia had written, “Aristotle told us that tragedy begins with the family. Isolation begins with the family. I write about the situations that separate us even though we are one. I also like to write about change, self-discovery and recognition of things. Finding a sense of place. Finding balance.” I thought about Aristotle’s premise as I stared at the statuesque stone tower rising above the hilltop, looking taller than a skyscraper from my prone vantage point. Because the ground wandered down a slope, it appeared as if the monument’s shadow had gone and fallen unceremoniously off the hill.
The dandelions, which glowed iridescent yellow when the sun struck them, bobbed their heads as the wind whipped up the sloping ground. It was as if they were nodding in agreement that they were all the prettier for their luminosity. A bird caught my eye, flying in circles above me as it put on a show—all powder-dusted indigo and white-tipped arcing wings. I sat, completely motionless, and forced myself to stare into more blue than any human could possibly absorb even as my vision swirled and my eyes begged me to close them so they could rest from the sky's intensity. Jim had gone off on his hike, leaving me to read and write. The only other person in sight was a boy who was lazing on the grass halfway down the ridge. Surrounded by the thin air, I thought about how Siler’s Bald seemed very close to the top of the world. The sound of the bees buzzing was so strong in the silence that it was as if they’d been primed with jet fuel and had been given extra power.
The hardwood trees had not yet sprouted green and the last withered leaves of winter clinging to their limbs were chattering along with the sere grasses skirting the edges of the field as the wind buffeted any exposed expanse it could find. Looking off into the distance where the mountains fell off to meet the valleys, it seemed certain that were I to put a finger on the seam between them, I would find a pulsing, a velvety green vein more alive than the one that snaked beneath the pale skin on the inside of my wrist.
I was writing in my writer’s notebook about how frightened I had been at one point on the trail when I’d had to traverse a skinny path with steep drop-offs on either side of my feet. I had steeled myself for the ten steps in front of me and had kept my eyes focused straight ahead. It was at that moment that we walked through a cloud. I looked to the sky as it was drifting around me and it seemed to be flying at a precarious speed into the clear air beyond my grasp. I was giddy as it rushed by, and I wondered if birds felt this same excitement when they were skimming along through a puff of fluffy moisture. I’d never thought of clouds as fun but having penetrated one, I’d found an altogether new appreciation for the whimsical side of what amounted to atmospheric vapor.
The sun was hot in the little clearing where I’d spread my blanket and I was contemplating moving closer to a scrim of gnarled and twisted trees weathered by an excessive exposure to sun, wind and rain when a girl came traipsing from the shade they created. She was on her way to Clingman’s Dome and she sat to rest for a bit, telling me that the trees would not be greening because a beetle was killing them. A blight had taken out all the Chestnut trees several years earlier, she said, lamenting that there were fewer canopies left during the summer months that ever before because the trees were garnering so many enemies.
I was anxious to get back to my reverie so when she heaved herself from the ground, the twisted branch with its splintered ends she was using for a walking stick making an indention in the moist earth, I smiled politely and returned to my sky-gazing. The only thing marring the beautiful day was the incessant intrusion of bugs as they repeatedly made Kamikaze dives at me. It was as if every insect in the world had decided to spend the day sightseeing just as I was. I wondered if there was a published itinerary somewhere entitled “Best Bug Spots of 1988” with a ping on a map that let them know this was the place to be on this particular afternoon. Maybe it was written in the star patterns at night and we humans weren’t privy to the language that would allow us to decode the map.
On the drive in, we’d seen first a bear and then a fox, each of them going about whatever it is that wild animals do, which due to their proximity to the road likely meant avoiding getting run down by automobiles. I was hoping nothing that intimidating would show up while I was lazing in the sun contemplating the razorback ridges with all their conifers gone. I was heartened that at least the trees were thinning only on the peaks, proof being that I’d spent almost an hour walking through the hollows on our way to the top of the ridge, feeling swallowed by great clusters of pines and firs that were breathing a chilly muskiness down my neck. I’d shivered more than once at the dense life-force they exuded, the experience reminding me that I’d always favored tree-lined streets to open expanses because they seemed so much friendlier with their protection from full-on sunlight. “If all the trees disappeared, the world would become disagreeable indeed,” I wrote in my writer’s notebook from my perch on high. “When will we humans begin to take this seriously?”
Seeking a better vantage point, I had moved to a large, flat stone, which seemed so ample it could have been a throne. As the sun moved away from the bald with the waning of the afternoon, I noticed that the seat, which was cupping me so generously, grew cooler and damper than when it had been warmed by stronger light. As I studied the scenery splaying before me, it seemed clear to me that when the mountains were formed in this part of the world, it was as if they had awakened to their new surroundings, yawned and stretched their arms to find their rippling muscles forever frozen in a sinewy display.
Because there were absolutely no “people” noises—such an oddity in the dizzy rush of a world I normally experienced—I’d begun to notice natural sounds, such as the groans emitted by the nearby trees. One in particular was decidedly fussy as the wind had its way with its contorted form. It was the saddest of them by far, one side of its leafless profile covered in thick green lichen. I wondered in that moment what the forest must think of the noises we humans make. I mimicked the tree’s sound as closely as I could and was surprised to hear an immediate echo. I said the word “tree” aloud in the best tree-like voice I could muster but it said nothing back. Hoping that it would repeat my word was too much to ask, of course, because it would certainly have wanted to wait until I’d left this patch of near-wilderness before it spoke of the name I’d given it to its gnarled cronies.
Just as I noticed that my hiking boot was perilously close to injuring a clump of tiny purple bluettes extending their faces from beneath the stone’s base, Jim ambled up—satisfied that he’d conquered another strip of the Appalachian Trail, or, as he likely saw it, had put another notch in his hiking belt. We headed back to the car and as I was about to turn a bend at the crest of a nearby ridge, I was startled when I heard the unmistakable sound of applause. I rounded the corner to see a bank of rhododendron bushes slapping their thick leaves. Suddenly I was flanked by two steep walls of them, and the sound they were making was delicious. We exited the ravine just as a cloud lifted its thumbprint from the mountain and I noticed there was a pattern to the twitching the wind inspired.
As I waited for Jim to unlock the car doors, I celebrated the beauty in which I’d been steeped that day, thinking of Henry David Thoreau’s statement, “I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.” I had certainly felt magnetism during my time on Siler’s Bald and it was my turn to applaud nature for entertaining me so thoroughly that day.
During our drive home, I revisited Sapia’s musings, especially her desire to explore “situations that separate us, even though we are one”—there was a time when we were one with nature; a time when “finding a sense of place” would not have been an articulated issue because we were “of a place” simply by being in (and staying in) that place. My life had become such a frantic ebb and flow of movement that I had no idea where “my place” would have been. Isn’t that what makes me feel so off balance so much of the time? I wondered. We were two months away from beginning a new project in Costa Rica and I thought of the prospect with trepidation. How in the world would I find my balance with that challenge looming before me? I asked myself silently, not daring to voice my consternation aloud as the light leaked from the evening sky and we slid silently westward toward home.
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The Life of a Writer
One of them called to a wasp, which had landed on the large mutilated shell at my feet as I combed the sand for unscathed offerings. I crouched and watched as it lingered a bit too long and was swept up in the surf, now littering the sand like its damaged fascination, its wings wet and useless. What an echo of life! I thought. The ocean had beckoned to the hungry creature, offering it a buffet of possibilities within the crevice it explored in the shell’s heart only to sweep it away with her choking liquid. As the wasp helplessly tumbled in her rolling embrace, I wondered why the ocean felt the need to take the breath of others. Didn’t she feel confident, as strong as she was, I questioned; didn’t she trust that she’d have enough of a life force to sustain her throughout eternity?
That night I watched a television interview during which Faye Dunaway remarked, “What do you do when you’re vulnerable? You cover it up and pretend you’re in control.” I thought of that wasp, so insignificant against an ocean that certainly wasn’t giving up its forcefulness. It struck me that my own sense of power had grown such a tiny bit as I continued to develop a small writer’s voice, and the thought soothed me as I turned out the lights to be sung to sleep by the waxing and waning waves.
The solace was short-lived as I faced the flight home the next morning. We slipped away from Panama City before dawn, the wings of our small plane vibrating in reaction to the unfriendly air mass we were battling as we clawed our way past Montgomery’s cloud-choked sky. The radar fanned on the control panel, seeking rain’s presence and painting itself spotty green in victory. It yellowed when finding heavy patches of Mother Nature’s wrath, the brilliance of the sunny hue the antithesis of what it represented.
Jim puttered around the cockpit doing what pilots do and I wanted to tell him to keep his eye on the road, though there was no need for him to peer through the embattled windshield, which was taking it on the chin as the rain pelted it in a staccato rhythm. Had the ride not been so bumpy, it would have been a pleasant experience sliding through the blueness of the sky as the day dawned bright above the blanket of clouds. I was determined to finish Weber’s article, which I’d started the day after I’d studied the boys on their bikes, but the plane shuddered to the point that the words were vibrating. As I held the magazine still enough that I could follow the text, I found Ford’s take on the life of a writer to be fascinating, as he saw it as a combination of self-sacrifice and self-championing. Could I champion myself if I ever found the courage to make the sacrifice to write? I wondered as I read that fiction writing was to Ford as useful a thing for a culture as there is. He went on to say, “Not that I’ve been so useful, but it is as high a calling as you can have…serious devotion to it purchases some rights: the right to presume, to make things up, to create.”
I knew I was doing certain things the “right way,” namely keeping my writer’s notebooks. Ford kept them; would spend months accumulating the “raw stuff” that would come together to make his novels or short stories whole. He maintained that anything that appeared to him to be singular would end up in his notebooks. “Here’s a sentence I wrote [that’s] not meant to be interesting to anybody else: ‘Christmas, comma, Jesus Christ.’ That’ll turn out to be a dialogue line.”
He went on to tell Weber, “A sentence in my notebook will come at a place where I never imagined it. And that’s what writing is for me, taking the raw stuff and recasting it into a logic that is its own. Taking lines which maybe occurred in life in one context, and then creating another context for them.” Ford says of the characters in Rock Springs that though readers may think of them as less articulate, the stories assert they have just as much to tell. When Weber mentions that the critics contend he gives his uneducated, unambitious characters too much credit, he responds, “It’s a philosophical point very near the heart of everything I write…If I were limited to just predictable responses, if we believe ‘Here is a guy who can only think this or that,’ that people live within their givens, then life’s pretty well set for us. But human beings continue to surprise us. It is just a fact of life that people pick up Volkswagens at moments of stress. People just say things that make you stare off, sometimes.”
As I clutched the magazine, stretching the page to a tautness that would keep the words from jumping around, I prayed I’d get to the point of being able to say what Ford declares next: “I’ve just given everything I’ve ever written my very best—my absolute, greatest best shot. And that’s all.”
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A Real Place in the World
In the piece, Weber stated, “The stories in Rock Springs…are populated by characters who are mostly down and out, natives of a remote region that simply doesn’t offer them enough. It’s a class of people familiar to readers of current fiction. But unlike those in, say, the early stories of Raymond Carver, whose work set the tone for many of the new writers of the 1980’s, Ford’s characters rarely yield to despair or defeat. They actively seek the high-minded solace that’s available in self-knowledge, in the future, in love.
“The individual’s struggle for transcendence is an old literary theme, of course. But in the narrow mainstream of contemporary American fiction, it’s absence has been well-noted—and by an increasing number of critics missed—particularly in the spreading influence of the so-called ‘minimalists.’ According to many literary observers, short-story writers like Carver, Mary Robison, and Amy Hempel, by virtue of their many imitators, have spawned what has become a dominant fashion in American writing.
“The perceived minimalist formula is marked by a technical expertise resonating primarily in the service of characters so burdened by powerlessness, diffidence or anomie that their engagement with the world around them is superficial or oblique. Their often introspective revelations tend to reinforce this sense of isolation…Ford is onto something new…providing American fiction with the theme that life is serious, rather than life is trivial or that life is very grim. That there are issues in this life worth trying to clarify.
“Raymond Carver, who is Ford’s close friend, is unequivocal. ‘Sentence for sentence,’ he says, ‘Richard is the best writer at work in this country today [1988].’ Ford says, ‘I really think that human beings accommodating themselves to a landscape, to a place, is natively dramatic, that that in itself is potentially the stuff of literature.’”
This made me think of the people I’d been meeting in Costa Rica and how dramatic life felt to me just by the sheer fact that the people there were responding to such a fierce environment. Ford went on to say, “The stories didn’t exhaust all the things I care about, the things that move me to write…The other books are novels, and in writing them, I exhausted everything which is, in a way, my own private definition of a novel. I try to exhaust my own interest in a place. Then I’ll just move on, write about someplace else where I kind of notice again how people accommodate themselves to where they live. That accounts for the kinds of things I write.”
The article made me want to read his work so I put Rock Springs at the top of my book-buying list. One of the main reasons I was anxious to see how his writing style unfurled itself on the page was this statement by Weber: “Ford’s sentences are raggedly lyrical, an eclectic music equally capable of the elegant, vaulting language that seeks to encompass an ambiguity and the brisk simplicity of vernacular speech…Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the stories in Rock Springs is a climactic explication. In his most trenchant passages, Ford launches an almost essayistic probe of human yearning and the stories resonate finally with the conviction that his characters have a real place in the world, however strained.”
Ford tells Weber, “What I write is fiction. What I do is imagine a place and call it a name.” Weber asks Ford about his relationship between the place on the map and the place on the page. “Me,” he answered. “It’s just me. There is a place, and there is an impulse to write, and I am the only important meditative there. Which is not to single out my own importance, just my responsibility.”
I sat for a while, staring out at the deepening blue of the water as the day waned, feeling envious of someone who could talk so confidently about writing, the writing life and his responsibility within it. I wanted to rest in that hallowed place so badly I could taste it but the writing I was doing was paltry and stunted. Would that ever change? I wondered.
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The Road to Promise #LetsBlogOff Nod
Follow the Leader
One night I tucked myself into bed with a magazine and came across this quote by Milan Kundera from The Art of the Novel: “Novels can flourish only where there is a spirit of inquiry, not inquisition. A novel worth its name asks questions about the world but won’t answer them, even if its author tries to. Most great novels are a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.” I wondered if this applied to someone like me who was completely without intelligence about the fiction I was writing given the fact that I was too new to have a clue. Somehow I thought not as I drifted off to sleep. What I would have given to be able to discuss this with someone as actualized as Mr. Kundera!
I was overjoyed to find that the bookstore at Seaside had a copy of Kundera’s book, which I bought and delved into as the light leaked from the evening sky. Quite a bit of it was over my head but there were moments of inspiration, especially when Kundera spoke about creating characters: “All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped?” I drifted off to sleep that night with these questions ricocheting through my brain. How does one even begin to answer such monumental questions? I wondered.
With Kudera’s questions fresh in my mind the next day, I decided to study three boys who’d taken over our little beachside street on their bicycles. They held sway over the crumbling asphalt that petered off to scrubby sand—little more than an alley, really, cut off as it was from any main route of traffic. The edges of the street were pocked with grasses and cockleburs, an odd setting for the crafty psychological machinations the kids were playing out. Two of them were obnoxious and bossy, picking on a smaller and younger boy, his size and age making him a target for their bullying. I stood outside the door of our condo pretending to read The New York Times magazine while Sam puttered around the driveway so I could eavesdrop. Their first “game” involved a stick, which they had set at a particular distance from a starting line.
Each of the trio was to try and jump past the stick on their bikes. The young kid shocked me by being the first to speak up. “I’ll betcha $60 that I can!” The mean kid moved the stick about six inches farther and said, “I’ll betcha $50 million that you can’t jump that.” They haggled ferociously, their voices growing louder and more raucous as a little girl with a big attitude walked up, putting her finger to her lips. The boys grew silent as she took on the role of mediator and judge. She moved the stick to a point that everyone could agree upon and stepped back as the little boy copped his most earnest expression and stomped on the first pedal to launch his bike into action.
He picked up speed and flung himself and his bike into the air, straining everything he had to “make it.” He touched the tip-end of the stick, which moved only slightly, then landed on the far side of it with an elated expression on his face. The mean kid said, “That was no good!” The little guy countered, “What? It is so; it’s exactly the way you did it across the street!”
“That was over there,” the mean kid responded. “This is over here and over here it doesn’t count if you touch the stick!” The little girl yelled, “You owe him $50 million!” The dejection on the smallest boy’s face was heart-wrenching. Their next game was “Follow the Leader” and you’ve likely already guessed who the leader would be: the oldest kid with the nasty attitude. The first task the leader set for them was to see who could pull off the best fishtail. Of course, fishtails are tricky because there has to be good speed, a spot of dirt on a flat road and perfect timing of slinging the backend of the bike around while simultaneously hitting the breaks hard.
The little guy had one tiny problem: he had no brakes. That didn’t stop him, though; he simply put the bike into motion and drug a foot while he scooted the backend of his bike around. I was amazed that he was coordinated enough to pull it off and I bet his mom was trying to figure out why the bottoms were worn off his Reeboks! After a perfect round of fishtails, the mean kid decided another round was required to see who was the winner. He went first and, as fate would have it, he fell while he was trying to execute his award-winning coup.
What happened next was brilliant on his part. He froze in position on the ground, clutching the handlebars of his bike just above shoulder-height and said that because it was “Follow the Leader,” each of them had to do a fall exactly as he had done. He stayed in what he called “crash position” and advised each of the other kids to closely observe how his body was placed so they could do the same. It was hysterical seeing the other kids try to make exactly the same move happen without hurting themselves, which fortunately they managed. Of course, the mean kid won because everyone else looked forced as they tried to execute a controlled crash! The next day, I learned that the young boy’s name was Jeremy and that Michael was the mean kid’s name. They must have raided both their father’s garages to gather such a wealth of paraphernalia for washing their bikes because they had the makings of a full-service carwash.
I spent the best part of an afternoon recording their shenanigans in my writer’s notebook and thought about how Michael’s psychological manipulations seemed so modern, something I wouldn’t have even thought about had I not read “Dialogue on the Art of Composition,” one of the chapters in Kundera’s book. “Encompassing the complexity of existence in the modern world demands a technique of ellipsis, of condensation,” he said. “Otherwise you fall into the trap of endless length.” This made me wonder how much of the information from the boys was simply background—for me to know—and how much of it a reader required to get the gist of their characters. The question lingered in my mind through dinner, when Jim commented how distracted I seemed. If he only knew how deep my processing as a fledgling writer was taking me…This, I have come to understand, is the epitome of living a deeply creative life.
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And with thy spirit...
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
The U.S. has just sent light infantry troops into Honduras.
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
It seems the Sandinistas crossed the border and fighting broke out between these rebels and the Contras, whose camps are scattered along the border inside Honduras.
“Pray for peace. Pray for the safety of the young service men traveling to Honduras.”
[Jesus takes up his cross.]
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
Noreaga has yet to resign and there’s no chance for peace in Panama as long as he’s in control. More unrest today as doctors and nurses at the major hospital in Panama City threw rocks at soldiers because they will not be paid this week.
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
It appears that the President of Honduras has asked President Reagan for a show of muscle. Troops will be based 125 miles from the fighting. No democratic government in the world will be refused military aid against communist aggression.
[Jesus is striped of his garments.]
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
The skirmishes increased on the border between Honduras and Nicaragua. Men on Nightline argued; called each other liars. Who’s right, Ted?
[Jesus is nailed to the cross.]
Government policy. Amen.
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
Father says, “I’m a chaplain in the armed forces; we’ll definitely be in Panama soon. They’re killing our country with drugs. I bet we’ll also have to get to Mexico before the drug traffic stops.”
[Jesus dies on the cross.]
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
Father says, “I don’t usually have a homily before the service but I’d like to introduce our program for later. Fifteen years ago, I took my first mission trip abroad…a child died in my arms. He had worms and if you know nothing about worms, they take over the body to the point that they crowd into the esophagus and the child chokes to death.”
[The body of Jesus is placed in the arms of his mother.]
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
Manuel Noreaga squints from the television and asks, “You want a revolution?”
“Save us and keep us, we humbly beseech you, O Lord.”
“The peace of the Lord be always with you.”
“And with thy spirit.”
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[The image at the top of this post is one of the Stations of the Cross created by the incredibly talented artist and architect Alberto Alfonso, who is one of four architects featured in my book Four Florida Moderns, which W.W. Norton & Company published last year.]
The Gates of Hell
In the scattered villages along the ocean’s edge, dugout canoes littered the shore, each a perfect piece of artistry made whole by hours upon hours of work and many thrusts of a blade. One spot near the ocean held the poorest shack I’d ever seen—the façade looking so tired that it seemed to be straining with all its might to hold together. The ragged boards, uneven on top and bottom with gaps in between, were topped with a rusted zinc roof that skewed precariously due to the jaggedness of these supporting planks. Laundry hung from a drooping line in the yard, and on the crumbling cement steps a half dozen small children, bodies covered with thick mud and hair matted with the same dark ooze, played games.
When they heard our engine droning, they stopped and looked our way. A dog ran under the house as we drove by—skin and bones and pleading eyes. I winced, convinced that if he ran into one of the boards that served as a support for the house, it would tumble into a pile not unlike a scattering of thick pickup sticks. It was obvious that a major tropical storm had not blown through in quite some time since this tenuous structure was still standing in this incredibly wild setting at the edge of the sea.
The sun stayed with us when we arrived—unlike the previous trip when the heavens opened and we were forced to have the beach mass surrounded by a handful of stoned Rastafarians. The Caribbean was fierce, pounding the shore and infusing the already damp air with its salty spray. We decided to put in an encore appearance at Sanford’s, the dubious scene of our impromptu communion before. As Tobie and I walked in ahead of the others, the stoners looked us over with a mixture of lust and hate. There was a peculiar difference in these men that set them apart from any other group I’d seen. They didn’t even try to disguise their feelings: you knew, without a doubt, how they felt about you the minute your gaze met theirs. Lust and hate would seem to me to be a dangerous combination, and I’d never thought of it before, but wouldn’t being regarded with these emotions rather than adoration explain the difference between being made love to and being fucked?
The word fuck had come up in conversation with one of the volunteers the day before. He had mentioned how much he’d enjoyed a recent trip to Belize and I was reminded of Ellen Gilchrist’s short story “Belize,” which I’d just finished.
“You might enjoy it, although it’s a bit trashy,” I said.
“What’s trashy about it?” he asked.
“Her abundant use of the word fuck in the story,” I replied.
“You say fuck all the time, so why wouldn’t you write it?”
“Touché!” I said; “maybe I will.”
I admired Gilchrist’s courage, especially since this story, as well as others as brazenly honest, were published in Drunk With Love in 1986, well before most women writers, especially those from the south, had had the courage to use profanity in their writing. In “Belize” her protagonist takes no prisoners:
“‘What do the rest of them do?’” I say. I am sick of Whit. He’s so goddamn jolly all the time. So goddamn gung ho. Davie had fucked me that morning while I thought about the orange peels. I feel like I’ve gained ten pounds. It’s hot as the gates of hell.”
It would be a very long time before I’d have the courage to put the word in a piece of my writing, and it’s a strange coincidence to me now that Gilchrist had mentioned George Gabb, the Belizian woodcarver who had inspired my poem “Adam’s Perspective,” though not by name:
“Whit’s been out exploring. ‘They have two industries,’ he says. ‘A man who carves sharks from mahogany and a man and woman team who make herons from the horns of cows.’”
When we had visited Gabb in Belize City, I had had the same impression Gilchrist’s protagonist had had of the town:
“The capital city is like a little town in the Delta, only dirtier; dirtier than anything in the world. The bays that cut into the land from the Atlantic are filthy. Things float on them. Paper cartons, shoes, orange peels…”
I would have added the broken partial ribcages of cows and scraps of fish skin, especially near the central market in town where sea turtles were turned upside down and slid under a shelf on rough concrete, their flippers slowly pulsing as if they were dreaming of water. When I read that their shells are so sensitive, they can feel a blade of sea grass as it brushes across them in the water, I was horrified at the treatment they received, though the fisherman who snagged them did not handle them with mal intent as they were simply seen as food to be sold and consumed.
That day on the beach in Costa Rica, I looked around our long table at everyone, settling on the face of the volunteer who’d called me on my resistance to writing profanity, and thought how strange life was that it had brought us to the same table. Everyone was laughing because there was no way to be heard over the pulsating music, though it didn’t stop anyone from trying to talk. The waiter brought beers for everyone and we toasted the fact that we’d landed in such an incredibly amazing spot for an afternoon of exploring. I felt grateful that I’d been given the opportunity to see several of my friends in this odd world. They certainly didn’t seem to be depressed about the experiences they were having—in fact, they seemed as if they were having the times of their lives. I was left asking, yet again, Why can’t I?
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