A huge red transport truck stood in front of the little roadside restaurant. The vertical exhaust pipe muttered softly, and an almost invisible haze of steel-blue smoke hovered over its end. It was a new truck, shining and red, and in twelve-inch letters on its sides--OKLAHOMA CITY TRANSPORT COMPANY. Its double tires were new, and a brass padlock stood straight out from the hasp on the big back doors. Inside the screened restaurant a radio played, quiet dance music turned low the way it is when no one is listening. A small outlet fan turned silently in its circular hole over the entrance, and flies buzzed excitedly about the doors and windows, butting the screens. Inside, one man, the truck driver, sat on a stool and rested his elbows on the counter and looked over his coffee at the lean and lovely waitress. He talked the smart ladies language of the roadsides to her. "I seen him about three months ago. He had an operation. Cut somepin out. I forget what." And she--"Doesn't seem no longer ago than a week I seen him myself. Looked fine then. He's a nice sort of a guy when he ain't stinko." Now and then flies roared at the screen door. The coffee machines squirted steam, and the waitress, without looking, reached behind her and shut it off.
-- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939
There's a fly in the windowA dog in the yardAn a year since I saw youThere's a trunk in the cornerI keep all my lettersMy bills and demands I keep too
Well I can't help thinkingAbout the timesYou were a wife of mineYou aimed to please meCooked black-eyed peas-meMade elderberry wine
American Wood
I feel like weevil eating the corncob,an axe to American wood.
All I would is AmericaAs something more than puritanism.All I would is the farmhouse to be homewhere Daddy doesn't slap Mommy around,where Daddy doesn't plough Bobby into the ground.
I feel like a chainsaw to the church housebleeding American wood.
All I would is Americawhere Christianity is Christian,where Bibles aren't bashing souls to the ground,where peace isn't silent at night,violence a common sound.
--Steve Brown, 1989
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| Pahvant Valley from Cedar Mountain Road, acrylic on canvas, 14" x 10 1/2", Steve Brown 2022 |
Sunday, June 5, 2022, 6:17 a.m.
The sun peaks over a large juniper covered hill, sending light rays fanning out before sodium-colored clouds. A rare, humid day, the air smells moist, almost coastal. Birds chirp, cluck and squawk. In front of me, a two-wire electrical fence separates this gravel pull-out just off Cedar Mountain Road from the rock, rabbit brush, and snakeweed that transition down slope into fields of rye and alfalfa. A long chalky-white road drops into the scene at a diagonal, sloping down what was once a sandbar of ancient Lake Bonneville to the farms. Angus blot the pale green fields in clumps of black blobs. Elms do the same at a larger scale in dark green. These are my pastures of heaven, my Salinas, my long valley, only this one is some seventy miles across.
I have known this place so long that I don't know where I stop and it begins. That is how it should be for a writer, perhaps for everyone. No matter where we wander, we need a Zion, a holy land, a place that is distinctly us. It gives us a sense of being, a voice so intrinsic to who we are, it cannot be taken away. If I were strapped in an electrical chair on the other side of the world waiting for my execution, my last moments would quite likely be here in this valley, and though I might be urinating myself in terror, there would be a calm, steady part of me that says, I can do this; I can do hard things. That steadiness is rooted here.
It is in the giant shoe-shape of Pahvant Butte, an old cinder cone that rose form the depths of ancient Lake Bonneville 18,000 year ago, forming an island. It remains an island even though the waters receded long ago.
It is in the pale pink face of sunlit Notch Peak, which boasts the largest limestone cliff in the United States and some of the oldest trees on earth--the gnarled, hunkered-down, waiting for eternity bristlecone, the great preppers of the world, almost as timeless as stone itself, adapting to whatever the climate throws their way.
And then there is Swasey Peak, a little to the north, gnarled briefly with twisting shadows showcasing canyons and ravines in the morning before fading to pastel blue-gray for the day.
This is where I belong. It is a big place with few inhabitants, less than two people per square mile. There aren't many trees either, except on the mountains to the east, and those we're losing quickly. There isn't much water--and what there is, is vanishing at an astonishing rate. We've already lost Clear Lake, a spring-fed oasis and bird refuge. It is now dry but for a short season in the spring.
Yet, this place could remain spiritually much the same if we could just keep our skies. Distance is the language here, and distance is beholden to clean, eternal skies, which are all but gone.
The poet John Clare went crazy when the Enclosure Acts of the 1800s fenced off his wild places and shut down forever his connection with his own long valley. I believe I have it within me to be stronger than him, but I get it. Everything I am, everything I write, is because of here.
I may not be able to do much, but I need to do what I can to protect my tide pool, even if that means trying to change the entire world in the process, even if that means failing miserably. I'm not a pessimist, but I am a realist. From this pin-point in time, the data does paint a pretty bleak picture. Adaption will be inevitable if insanity is to be avoided, but resiliency also comes from putting up a good fight.
Pahvant Valley, here I am, listening to your birdsong, ready to give you my everything. If I end up in an insane asylum, so be it. At least you will know someone cared enough about your grand skies to not let them slip silently away unnoted.
But then, again, I don't think I really ever had a choice in writing this book. It was built for the future long ago when I first encountered John Steinbeck, a voice I knew way back then I needed like birdsong. Only, unlike with birds, I was drawn to the particulars, the cadence of each and every image, the spark of each and every sound joined simply with and one "and," and then another, until a whole was achieved most spectacularly through sounds and images connected like strands of DNA--the fabric of America.
I heard and felt the same grasp of Americana, ironically, through the music and lyrics of British songwriters Elton John and Bernie Taupin, something I labeled getting down the grain of American wood. It was people, landscape, the mythic general through very local particulars that I was after. I felt like I needed to be a sort of farmer harvesting America through words, an idea captured magnificently in the lyrics of Taupin, although in his very English sounding lyrics to "Lady, What's Tomorrow":
Look up little brotherWill it be the same as now?
Will the farmer push the pen?
Will the writer pull the plough?
Spring Break 1989. Terlingua, Texas
I sit in an all but empty café in Terlingua, Texas. Ceiling fans spin gently overhead. Across from me sits Karen, her brown eyes beaming behind almost round spectacles, a thin smile on her lips. The light is behind her, flooding in through tinted windows from the stark, stark desert beyond, backlighting and softening her already fine features. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and I love the shape of her ears, almost perfect half moons. Small strands of brown hair are picked up by the stirring of the fans, tossed around in the light.
We talk. It comes so easily, which is not normal for me, especially around women. It seems like a dream. I'm tired, oh so tired, but in a good way, floating around, released from all the anxieties I know so well as myself. We have been hiking in heat. I am drained and happy. We eat tacos and drink a Blue Sky Soda each from a can.
Karin explains symbiotic relationships, like those between plants and animals in lichen, and talks about M.C. Escher, how he's her favorite artist because he captures so well those connections that keep life bound together in strange and meaningful ways, like us.
There has been the usual classic rock playing softly in the background, and I haven't really been listening. I know them all anyway. "Magic Bus" by the Who. "I'm Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band) by The Moody Blues. "Elenore" by The Turtles.
Then, all the sudden, something I don't know. Distant. Real. I guess it's country, but not the country I know. It sounds like this place. This diner off the beaten path pounded by relentless heat and stark, stark light beating life down to the essentials, to points and needles and harsh, harsh shit.
But it would be just as real in Kansas or Ohio.
"This is amazing. Who is this?"
It's not unreasonable to think Karen will know. She seems to know something about everything. It's clear Germany educates their youth far better than America. A biology major, she knows all my architectural heroes, like Le Corbusier and Mies ven der Rohe.
"Patsy Cline."
"Wow. What is it? It sounds so American."
"'Crazy,' of course," she says in her cute German accent, and then starts singing to point out the obvious reason for the title.
"Now this, this is what I'd like my poems to do."
"Do what?"
"Whatever this is. The bedrock. America. Humanity. This diner. This place. There's got to be a way to get that down."
She smiles that thin-lipped graceful smile. Her eyes beam through those smart, almost round, but not quite-round spectacles.
September 1989. Arlington, Texas
It's late. The window is cracked open, the A.C. going. The hope, I guess, is that it will either be cooler inside or outside, and one way or the other, there will be relief.
I don't mind. I like the sounds. The sounds outside of occasional talking, especially if it's girls. There is just something in their voices. I like the yellow light from my desk lamp too. And these new almost all-nighters trying to keep up on the readings for Dr. Estes's class. Slow, inept readers probably should not switch majors from architecture to literature. But, that's exactly what I've done.
I mark up my books in hot pink or lime-green highlighter. No code, no pattern. Just something to note the important passages, which always ends up being eighty percent of the book.
I've just read about the grey and red country in the first paragraph of Chapter 1 of The Grapes of Wrath, and already my old electric typewriter that my mom gave me is clacking away, the separate key arms flinging up towards the page, getting stuck together now and then.
We had been to the red country, Utah not Oklahoma, the hot walls with junipers dotted along the top, just under the dry blue sky, acid film etched with cat-claw clouds.
Now we were in the gray country, Utah not Oklahoma. We crossed into the basin on the new section of I-70, met I-15 and headed north. Thirty miles past Cove Fort, the town of Meadow was thrown out the back window, the blue-gray flat-topped oak and pine mountain above it. Ahead, was the long, dry, rye valley, bleached to white. So, the gray country was white. I was home in July, as always; July at home was white, as always.
I pause my typing. This Steinbeck guy. He's like no other. But if he is, well, he's like Patsy. Both have something I want. No, need. There's something fundamental here that the world is missing.
A thought rhymes. A line from Cindy Lauper slips in. The night doesn't end; there is no end. Until it does. I look up and see light coming in through the window.
"Shit, how am I going to function tomorrow today?"
For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, so much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis.
-- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939
Sunday, June 5, 2022
I knew then if I ever had anything to say in my writing it would not be connected to Dallas, that big, giant spinning cobweb of interstates, subdivisions, glass-box office towers, boggy rivers, malls and cottonfields, I'd so embraced in place of home.
No, it'd be the wide, dry valley I'd been raised in and once couldn't wait to get away from--dirt as deep in my soul as the Elton John songs my brother played in the little house on First West as I watched the corn outside the open kitchen window late summer evenings sway under the blue light of the moon as the crickets chirped and the big, old straggly elm cast shadows across the old white shed.
Get it down before it's gone forever. What else is there to do?
Will it be the same as now?
Will the farmer push the pen?
Will the writer pull the plough?
