Weber—The Contemporary West Spring/Summer 2014 by Weber—The Contemporary West

VOLUME

30 | NUMBER 2 | SPRING/SUMMER 2014

Deriving from the German weben—to weave—weber translates into the literal and figurative “weaver” of textiles and texts. Weber (the word is the same in singular and plural) are the artisans of textures and discourse, the artists of the beautiful fabricating the warp and weft of language into everchanging patterns. Weber, the journal, understands itself as a tapestry of verbal and visual texts, a weave made from the threads of words and images.

An Artist Worth His Salt As a journal grounded in the region, Weber—The Contemporary West has always had an affinity for salt. That is of course largely because of Utah’s cultural and geographic connection to the Great Salt Lake, and because local artists of every stripe—or grain, shall we say—often connect their work to the rock and soil from which it emerges. Salt, and the journal along with it, is also associatively linked with the La Sal Mountains located in Grand and San Juan counties. Towering over much of the southeastern part of the state, the range took its name from Spanish settlers describing the snow-capped peaks they saw as mountains sprinkled with salt (Sierra La Sal)—perhaps in the hope that they might replenish their provisions with a mineral long known to be essential for survival. Indeed, salary, as the English word for pay, is said to derive from the Roman word salarium, the pay of soldiers in the form of salt or as a way of affording to buy salt, thus coupling employment, salt, sustenance and protection in a vital arc of association. Then, as now, salt is vital for survival, just as art has been a sustaining element for the species ever since humans became self-reflexive bipeds wielding instruments of protection and inscription. At Weber—The Contemporary West, that association—between salt and art—became explicit in Spring/ Summer 2008, when the journal featured a special section on Lake Bonneville (the geological precursor to the present-day Great Salt Lake) from a variety of perspectives, including geology, ecology, and history. In this issue, salt and survival again take center stage in the work of Motoi Yamamoto, a Japanese sculptor—or better, artisan of salt—creating powerful installations to express his own, unique vision of art. This vision includes remarkable precision, diligence, patience, and skill, as well the need, as only an artist can express it, to commemorate the death of his sister.

Front Cover: Motoi Yamamoto, Labyrinth, Solo Exhibition—Salz, Kunst-Station St. Peter, Cologne, Germany, Salt, Diameter 12 m, 2010.

VOLUME 30 | NUMBER 2 | SPRING/SUMMER 2014 | $10.00

GLOBAL SPOTLIGHT/INTERVIEW FOCUS 2 1 Siân Griffiths, Writing the Trans-Genre Novel—A Conversation with Pam Houston

EDITOR

Michael Wutz ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Kathryn L. MacKay Brad Roghaar Russell Burrows Victoria Ramirez

101 Susan Matt, Thinking Journalism, Thinking History—A Conversation with Rick Atkinson

MANAGING EDITOR

ART

Kristin Jackson EDITORIAL BOARD

Susan Clark, Eastern Sierra Institute Katharine Coles, U of Utah Duncan Harris, U of Wyoming Diana Joseph, Minnesota State U Nancy Kline, independent author & translator James A. MacMahon, Utah State U Fred Marchant, Suffolk U Madonne Miner, Weber State U Felicia Mitchell, Emory & Henry College Julie Nichols, Utah Valley University Tara Powell, U of South Carolina Bill Ransom, Evergreen State College Walter L. Reed, Emory U Scott P. Sanders, U of New Mexico Daniel R. Schwarz, Cornell U Andreas Ströhl, Goethe-Institut Munich James Thomas, editor and writer Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, author Melora Wolff, Skidmore College Delia Konzett, U of New Hampshire Kerstin Schmidt, Universität Eichstätt Jericho Brown, Emory University EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

85 Katie Lee, Memory and the Materialities of Salt—A Conversation with Motoi Yamamoto Pam Houston.........................21

ESSAY 2 Anna Flügge, Problematic Mothers, Problematic Adaptations—The Descendants and The Help 48 Don Lago, Unidentified Mountainous Objects 64 Maple Andrew Taylor, Sister 134

Tamara Kaye Sellman, Intersections

140

Jessica Marie Jackson, Fire-Watch

34 Cheryl Diane Kidder, Bad Moon Rising 69 Susan DeFreitas, The Circus on 2nd Street 116 Phillip Parotti, The Disturbance in San Miguel

Jared Copeland Zachary Metcalfe

124 Richard Dokey, You Have Messages

EDITORIAL PLANNING BOARD

POETRY

Bradley W. Carroll Brenda M. Kowalewski John R. Sillito Angelika Pagel Michael B. Vaughan ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Meri DeCaria Elaine Englehardt Shelley L. Felt G. Don Gale Mikel Vause

Barry Gomberg John E. Lowe Aden Ross Robert B. Smith

LAYOUT CONSULTANTS

Mark Biddle

Brandon Petrizzo

44 Rose Postma, One morning before winter and other poems

Anna Flügge............................2

62 Michael Bazzett, Somewhere and other poems 83

Tim Bellows, Thoughts Viewing Antelope with Marcy

96 Doug Ramspeck, Alluvial Child and other poems 131 Ciara Shuttleworth, Night Holds its Own and other poems

EDITORS EMERITI

Brad L. Roghaar Sherwin W. Howard Neila Seshachari

Motoi Yamamoto...................85

FICTION

LaVon Carroll Nikki Hansen

EDITORIAL MATTER CONTINUED IN BACK

148 C.R. Resetarits, Looking West and other poems

151

READING THE WEST

Rick Atkinson........................101

E S S A Y

Anna Flügge

Problematic Mothers, Problematic Adaptations The Descendants and The Help

he film versions of The Descendants and The Help came out in 2011 to critical acclaim. In 2012, The Descendants (adapted to the screen by Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash and directed by Alexander Payne) received a Golden Globe for “Best Motion Picture—Drama” and George Clooney one for “Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture—Drama,” and an Academy Award went to the film for “Writing (Adapted Screenplay).” Similarly, both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for “Actress in a Supporting Role” were given to Octavia Spencer, who plays Minnie, one of the domestic servants in The Help, adapted to the screen and directed by Tate Taylor. Both films are good examples of film adaptations’ tendency to soften certain aspects of the novels on which they are based. This can for example be seen in Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, in which vio-

lence is not as strong as in the novel, or in George Armitage’s adaptation of Charles Willeford’s Miami Blues. Here, sexual coercion is an important aspect of the novel, but is not mentioned in the film. This strategy makes the films more palatable to, and more suggestive for, a larger audience. In the film adaptations of The Descendants and The Help, the most significant change occurs in their depiction of motherhood. In both novels, published in 2007 and 2009, respectively, the mothers are dying. Both of them have been problematic as mothers for their daughters, who have to try to understand and forgive them and, in the case of The Descendants, make sense of their own role,

their own guilt, since the mother is being punished by sickness and death. in a coma. In the film versions, on This is problematic for film. The (old) the other hand, the mothers’ darker Production Code asked for exactly sides go unmentioned. In the novel that—for women who did not conform The Help, Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan to their role as good homemakers to has to live with a mother who does be punished for their choice; they not really accept who she is, while “paid the price for it, which was often the film shows a mother learning to death” (Dick 180). The genre Dick admire her daughter’s courage. It discusses here is the “Woman’s Film,” seems that the film and addressing the versions shy away problematic mothfrom showing moth- It seems that the film versions ers while leaving ers in a less than the plot unchanged shy away from showing positive role, thus would have put the mothers in a less than positive keeping to a myth adaptations of The of the mother that is role, thus keeping to a myth Descendants and The so firmly established of the mother that is so firmly Help in this category. in American society Avoiding the “mothestablished in American as to be untoucher issues” altogether society as to be untouchable. able. While being is thus a safe deciclose to the novel, sion for both adapWhile being close to the novel, especially in the case tations. One of the especially in the case of The of The Descendants, mothers is not conDescendants, the adaptations demned, at least by the adaptations are careful not to her children, for the are careful not to question the question the basic kind of mother she basic “motherliness” of the “motherliness” of has been, while the mother figures portrayed. the mother figures other changes and portrayed. Doing accepts her daughter so would have been as she is. The promiproblematic in several ways, most nent role problematic motherhood notably commercially. Film is usutakes in the novels makes its absence ally directed at a larger audience and very conspicuous in the films. needs to, before being profitable, recover its production costs. Bordwell The Descendants and Thompson write: “More than most arts, film depends on complex In Hemming’s novel The Descentechnology. . . . Films are not only dants, the narrator Matt King, a lawyer created but produced. Just as imporand the main trustee of a substantial tant, they are firmly tied to their piece of land on Hawaii, is faced with social and economic context. Films are the fact that his wife, Joanie, is in a distributed and exhibited for audicoma after a boating accident. He has ences, and money matters at every to take care of their daughters Alex, step” (1). Furthermore, the novels are who is eighteen and struggles with potentially unsettling in depicting addiction, and Scottie, who is ten and “bad mothers,” and they also allow seems estranged from him. He has for a reading that these mothers are never spent much time with them,

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

E S S A Y leaving their upbringing largely to Joanie, a model who likes parties and alcohol, and their maid, Esther, who seems to be the one to raise Scottie. He finds out that his wife has an

he has always preferred to see the young, pretty and fun mother (16), he knows that her love of fun has negative sides. She has often threatened to leave him, showing a lack of commitment to a marriage that bores her, and she has always sought danger and wanted her daughters and her husband to be the same. Joanie likes to “mold” people, as Matt points out (199). His daughters tell him about most of her negative characteristics in the course of the narrative, either directly or through his interpretation of their behavior; some of these The Descendants (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011): Matt and his daughters consider life characteristics are new without a wife and mother. to Matt, others he has affair, which has also been the reason just always preferred not to think for a falling out between her and about. In the course of the novel, it Alex. Matt knows that his marriage becomes clear to him that his daughhas not been perfect, that they “don’t ters are much more like him than he treat each other very well” (46), but used to think, and therefore much likes the routine they have together less like his wife, his opposite in and assumes that Joanie liked their almost every way: while he is frugal relationship too. He tries to underand wants to spend nothing of what stand and ultimately forgive his was entrusted to him by his anceswife, since he learns that she will not tors, Joanie likes the good life, has survive. many friends, especially male models, However, while the relationship and has no emotional attachment to between husband and wife is probthe land as such. She wants to see it lematic, the novel also focuses on developed, as does Matt, before her Joanie and her relationship with her coma leads him to realize how much two daughters. Part of the informahe has been “corrupted “ by her. tion the reader gets is from Matt, Matt perceives Alex and her which is inherently problematic since mother to be close, but then sees that he lacks insight into his own role. closeness ending. In the course of the While mentioning that the last time narrative, Alex, while crying when he was alone with Scottie was more she hears that her mother will die, is than eight years ago (6), he blames his very focused on the negative aspects wife for the mistakes she has made of her mother’s character. Apart from regarding their daughters. While the fact that her mother cheated on

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

her father, she has been ambivalent makes Matt feel relieved: “Thank God toward her for some time, blaming my daughter isn’t a happy person” her for always wanting her to be like (154). Like Matt, she is highly critiher, a model (a career that her father cal of the laid-back lifestyle he sees opposes and ends). She tells her everywhere around him. father that she hid her period from Matt learns even more from Scother mother for an entire year. Asked tie’s stories and her odd behavior. to explain why, she says that this Scottie, who loves her mother and would have brought on even more learns very late that she is going to pressure from her mother to be an die, fears that her mother thinks she adult: “Maybe it’s because she was is a coward for having no desire for always pushing me to look older and extreme situations. Scottie harasses act older, and this would have cona classmate, and Matt thinks that she firmed it. Me being a woman and all. learned the cruelty toward people Maybe I didn’t want to be one yet. I (and the idea that it is fun) from her was thirteen” (124). When she became mother (38). Scottie takes risks in involved with drugs, Alex was sent to order to have a good story to tell her boarding school and returned there mother at the hospital. Matt reflects: voluntarily after a fight with her “Alexandra had to do the same thing mother. Matt only learns later that [making a better story for her moththe fight was about Joanie’s lover. er]—knock herself out to get some On a trip they take to find him, Matt attention from Joanie. Or perhaps to sees Alex’s insecurity when interacttake the attention away from Joanie” ing with a group of girls, and learns from her that her mother once went out with Alex’s friends, while Alex herself stayed home (164); Joanie going out and he staying home was a standard situation in Matt’s marriage, showing him how much Alex is like him. He and Alex always got along, and he has missed their relationship (16). While their new relationship is everything but easy—he fears that both his daughters “have The Descendants (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011): Matt and Alex scout out Joanie’s lover. been ruined by privilege and consigned to aimlessness,” as Joanna Kavenna observes— (56). The story Scottie tells her father he still notices characteristics in her first, in order to practice, involves that show she is his daughter. An her pressing her hand on a sea urchin ironic comment of hers about inter(55). The ending of her story is espeisland airport security, for example, cially revealing: when she wants a

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

E S S A Y boy to do something he is reluctant to do, she tells him to “Stop being a pussy,” a phrase her mother always

him with social interactions. His parenting is very unconventional at best: he takes his daughters on a trip to another island to find his wife’s lover and to let him know about her impending death, and he enlists Alex to help with Scottie and makes her his confidante in regard to Joanie’s lover. As Kavenna writes: “Hemmings relishes this interlude, a carefully fashioned perversion of the family holiday: the wife declining The Descendants (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011): The family walks along the beach. in the hospital, the cuckolded husused when she wanted Matt to do band stalking the lover, the children something (57). She thus uses the splashing far from innocently in the wrong lessons in how to treat people. waves.” At the same time, he wants Also, she asks her sister to apologize his daughters to have fond memories to their mother for the fact that they of their mother. This does not work at are girls, while their mother wanted all. When they walk along the beach, boys (131). Instead of dangerous he reminds them of Joanie’s love of sports, Scottie likes her scrapbook in adventure and her sense of humor, which she documents family histelling them a story that Joanie loved tory, having “ripped out a few pages to tell, but his daughters have not from three local history books before heard. (He does not tell them what I [Matt] caught her” (36). While this he alone knows, that the story is not seems strange behavior to Matt early true). Scottie has thus tried to crein the narrative, it shows him that ate situations in order to impress a she, like he, cares for his family tradimother whose own stories are made tion; later on, he takes an interest in up. They have begun remembering her scrapbook, wondering about the other stories when Scottie asks Matt sequence she has chosen, and calling what he loves about Joanie. He cannot her “our keeper. . . .Our family histocome up with anything substantial, rian” (275). settling on random aspects of their Initially, Matt believes that he relationship, the fact that she “forgets wants to show his wife that he can to wash the lettuce and our salads are handle everything, even “correct” always pebbly” (174). Alex gets angry some of her parenting, and he wants at the randomness of this list, but neiJoanie to wake up in order to help ther she nor Scottie can add anything more substantial; Scottie likes the fact

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

that her mother is better-looking than other mothers, and Alex likes her for “not [being] afraid of anything” (176). Neither Matt nor his daughters can thus come up with characteristics such as warmth, goodness, or kindness; their statements express only admiration. The conversation makes Matt miss Joanie for the reason that she is the one to understand him the most. Another more scary thought, however, begins to take shape in his mind: that he and his daughters might be happier without her. That thought becomes a realization when he sees his father-in-law, Scott, at the hospital when it comes time to say goodbye to Joanie. Matt and Scott have never gotten along, and now that he moves further away from his wife, he can let go of his father-in-law’s disapproval, too. When abused by him—Scott thinks he should have bought her a boat of her own and that she might still be fine then—Matt does not tell him about his wife’s shortcomings. He is surprised that his daughters and Sid, Alexandra’s friend and later boyfriend, defend him against Scott, and he realizes something he would have never thought possible, that he and his daughters might be a happy family, only without Joanie: Our united front feels strange, like we’re some other family. One of those happy families I see occasionally. And then I think: Are we? Despite everything, are we on to something here? Yet wherever we are, whatever we are, it would exist only with Joanie’s absence. This has all been made possible by her silence. I think of Sid telling his mother that his father’s death was the best thing to happen to them, and I realize he didn’t say it to be

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

malicious or insolent. He said it because it was partly true, painful but true. How brave he must have been to say it. I could tell Scott that money isn’t going to make my life better; his daughter’s death is going to make my life better. Deep within me, I know this. I don’t want to be in this situation, I don’t wish this upon her, but now that it has happened, now that I know what’s going to happen, I am confident my girls will make it out and will become strong, interesting people and I will be a good father and we will have a better life than the one we thought we were destined to have. The three of us are going to do well, Joanie. I’m sorry about that. (259-60)

While perhaps harsh in that it speaks badly of the dead, Matt realizes that the traditional “complete” family with two parents is not the best option in their case. An important aspect that needs to be addressed is the sale of the land Matt and his relatives own, since it is closely connected to Joanie as a wife and mother and also to what the novel never addresses directly: namely, what would have likely happened had Joanie survived. A friend of hers tells Matt that she intended to divorce him. She would most likely have taken their daughters with her, and Matt would never have had a chance to get to know them and to realize that they are worthy descendants who will take care of the land. As mentioned above, Joanie has no connection to the “pure” land; she “loves gentrification” (31). She pushes Matt to make a deal that would benefit her lover. Joanie is “in the way” of purity and the duties Matt feels toward his inheritance. Thus, it has been a close call for Matt: he nearly

E S S A Y Troy is thus a “descendant” who lives off his ancestors’ success, which is what Matt himself tries not to do. Joanie and Troy stand for a group of good-looking and easygoing Hawaiians who are aware they live in paradise and are eager to enjoy this at every opportunity. Interestingly, Matt sees his cousins, who co-own “his” land, as belonging to her group of people. Like Joanie, all they The Descendants (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011): Matt talks with his cousin about do is go to the beach and do the sale of their land. sports, which leads Matt to lost his daughters, his land and, to muse about what has become add insult to injury, partially for the of “the descendants,” concluding that profit of his wife’s lover. In the course they lead the exact kind of life they of the novel, he begins to realize this, asked the natives to give up: and also what he has to do, namely I don’t know what any of them do. to keep the land, not to spite his wife, To their credit, the cousins are not but to keep his family tradition. greedy or gaudy or ostentatious. Matt’s world is dominated by Their sole purpose in life is to have people who are not like him at all. fun. They Jet Ski, motocross, surf, Joanie likes going to parties, thinks paddle, run triathlons, rent islands that Matt is greedy for not touching in Tahiti. Indeed, some of the most his inheritance, and her father goes powerful people in Hawaii look so far as to blame Matt for Joanie’s like bums or stuntmen. I think of death. Joanie’s friends share her interour bloodline’s progression. Our est in partying, and Troy, who drove missionary ancestors came to the the boat when the accident happened, islands and told the Hawaiians to put on some clothes, work hard, and is described by Matt in a particularly stop hula dancing. They make some negative light: Troy is so slow. His great-grandfather invented the shopping cart, and this has left little for Troy to do except sleep with lots of women and put my wife in a coma. It’s not his fault, but he wasn’t hurt. . . .Troy isn’t wearing a shirt. He never wears shirts. The man has muscles I didn’t even know existed. He’s athletic, rich, and dumb, with eyes the color of a hotel swimming pool. The exact kind of person Joanie befriends. (66-67)

business deals on the way, buying an island for ten grand, or marrying a princess and inheriting her land, and now their descendants don’t work. They have stripped down to running shorts or bikinis and play beach volleyball and take up hula dancing. (157)

Since the “bloodline” was begun by a Hawaiian princess and a white banker who fell in love with each other, it is difficult to follow a tradi-

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

tion, and Matt is rather vague about Joanie’s affair more easily. While he is what that tradition should be. Howthus portrayed as a negligent husever, he acknowledges how brave band, the fact that she is not criticized his ancestors were in marrying each as a mother in the film does not bring other against all the resistance they about his feelings of parental guilt encountered, and he makes keeping that he has in the novel, and he can their land, after having almost signed more easily forgive his wife and ask the contract to sell it, and passing it her to return to the family. In spite of on a priority. At the same time, his his anger at Joanie’s affair, Matt never decision to keep the land in the family expresses any ambivalence about the shows a desire for purity and new need for her to come back to her old beginnings, for the youth his daughlife, never thinks that they will be betters have. They are with him in the ter off without her. other group, one he had heretofore The film shows Joanie, who is thought comprised only himself; havrenamed Elizabeth, in a more posiing them on his side tive light. She has enables him to break an affair here too, free from the opinbut any criticism ions and demands of The film shows Joanie, who is of her as a mother others. The novel’s is muted. She and renamed Elizabeth, in a more last sentence, “I try Alex fight about the positive light. She has an affair affair, but the other to steer us to shore in as straight a line conflicts between here too, but any criticism of as possible” (283), them go unmenher as a mother is muted. She shows that he is tioned. This omistaking responsibility and Alex fight about the affair, sion is helped by for the future of his the fact that Joanie’s but the other conflicts between new, but happier, profession is never them go unmentioned. family. developed, and Thus, the novel along with it, Alex’s portrays Joanie complaint that her as a complex character and a probmother wanted her to be a model. lematic, if not outright bad, mother, Alex’s other issues with her mother which also highlights Matt’s role in are not mentioned either, namely hidan interesting way: his guilt here is ing her period and the fact that her not about his marriage, but mostly mother went out with Alex’s friends about his failure to take care of the while she stayed home. Although girls earlier, instead leaving them Alex “apologizes” to her mother for with a mother who was not good for needing money for private school them. The film version, which is close (that Elizabeth could have used on to the novel except for the portrayal “facials”) and for being “not good of the mother, is kinder to them both enough,” the lack of context does not as parents; Matt here accepts the fact invite a reading of her anger that goes that he has failed as a husband from beyond anger at her mother’s affair. the start, being only ready to “talk” The film also suggests that Joanie and to “change” when it is too late raises Scottie, to whom she seems to (Payne). This helps him understand have been a good mother. (Esther, the

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

E S S A Y maid who Matt has always thought they did not need and who is impor-

is easier to accept the new situation: Matt does not feel the pressure to do any better than Elizabeth in regard to their daughters. While the novel ends with them taking the ashes out to sea, the film version adds one more scene: of Scottie sitting on the sofa watching TV, Matt bringing both of them ice cream, and Matt handing his ice cream bowl to Alex The Descendants (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011): Matt and his daughters relax together in the concluding scene of the movie. once she joins them. They all tant to Scottie in the novel, is left out cover themselves with the quilt that in the film version, as are Scottie’s used to cover Elizabeth’s bed in the need for stories and Joanie’s condehospital (“Hawaiian Style,” DVD scension toward other people). The Special Features), thus showing that film suggests that Scottie’s photoshe is with them. It is a harmonious graphs, which her teachers describe scene, relaxed, but also bereft of grief. as disturbing, and her sending unkind Except for Matt telling Scottie the messages to a schoolmate, are conkinds of ice cream they are eating, the sequences of her mother’s coma, not TV is the only sound. Lena Machado’s her bad parenting. Matt asks, “With song “Mom” about loving and missElizabeth gone, what kind of a chance ing a mother, plays when the credits will [Scottie] have with just me?” roll, is apt for the film’s somehow The disturbing scene in which neutral or ambivalent, if not to say, Matt, his daughters, and Sid walk generic ending. on the beach in search of Elizabeth’s lover has been altered significantly. The Help In the film, Scottie asks Matt how her parents met; Alex and Scottie agree In terms of the mother-daughter that their mother has many good relationship, the film version of Kathstories, and Matt asks if his daughters ryn Stockett’s novel The Help is difknow the story about their mother ferent in an important way. What A. and the shark; the rest of the converO. Scott writes of the film Being Flynn sation is replaced by music. is also true of The Help: “The meloThe novel’s emphasis on Joanie’s drama of parent-child reconciliation, role as Matt’s opposite in almost of redemption and recovery and hard every way is subdued in the film. It lessons tenderly learned is a staple of 12

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

movies and television, and the magShinolator) and giving her a special netic pull of that therapeutic genre is tea to straighten out her suspected hard to resist.” The “staple” trumps lesbianism. She does not accept Skeethe idea of the novel that is being ter’s refusal to become a bank teller adapted. The character of Skeeter’s because of the prospect of contact mother in the film version develops with the opposite sex. She does not from one rejecting her daughter’s like her daughter’s writing ambievolving independence to one coming tions because she is sure Skeeter will to accept her sense of being and her not meet a husband that way. Mrs. accomplishments. Phelan has very retrograde views In contrast to the situation of of gender and race, thinking that Joanie’s daughters in The Descendants, her African American help always Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, one of have to be watched when with the the protagonists in The Help, still has opposite sex since, as she puts it, some time with her sick mother to ask they “can’t help it” (70). She does her questions. Her mother has never not want her daughter and the Afriaccepted her the ways she is: tall, can American employees to watch intellectually interested, and without the news together, switching off the a husband. She does not care for the TV when a speech by Medgar Evers fact that Skeeter, as opposed to her is being broadcast. She is a deeply girlfriends with whom she attended religious woman, which makes it easy the University of Mississippi, has for Skeeter to get away regularly by actually graduated; she would have pretending she will go help at the preferred had she gotten married, church. She tells these lies to hide the although she is convinced it will be fact that she is interviewing African hard to find a husband for her tall daughter. Skeeter has grown up and gotten used to being reminded of her failure to be beautiful, while her mother used to compete in beauty contests. Skeeter mentions off-handedly that her pictures stop when she is twelve, while there are many recent ones of her handsome older brother, leaving open if she refused to be photographed or if her mother does not want to display these pictures. The Help (Dreamworks II Distribution Co., 2011): Skeeter (Emma Stone) coiffed and dressed up for her first date with Stuart. Mrs. Charlotte Boudreau Cantrelle Phelan tries everything, to a comical extent, to American maids for a book she wants change Skeeter into a more presentto write and that she is in contact with able daughter, spending hours on her an editor in New York. She also keeps hair (with the help of the expensive her first date with Stuart Whitworth, SPRING/SUMMER 2014

E S S A Y protected, exempt. Mother won’t criticize me in front of him, for fear he might notice my flaws himself. She won’t nag me in front of him because she knows that I’d react badly, whine. Short my chances. It’s all a big game to Mother, to show only one side of me, that the real me shouldn’t come out before it’s “too late.” (242)

Skeeter eventually softens toward her mother when she becomes weaker and is diagThe Help (Dreamworks II Distribution Co., 2011): Skeeter and Stuart reconcile. nosed with cancer. She leaves secret material—pages from the the good-looking state senator’s son, book about maids in Jackson that she secret for fear of her mother’s many is working on—at Hilly’s house and questions. While Skeeter fears that offers to stay with her mother instead Stuart may not like her, her friends of hurrying there to retrieve them Elizabeth and Hilly—Stuart is Hilly’s (180). When her mother’s condition husband’s cousin—encourage her, worsens, she is more careful not to Hilly on one occasion telling her that talk back to her. Conversely, at least she should not believe what her mothin one instance her mother too shows er has taught her to believe about a softer side. When Stuart tries to win herself: “And damn it, I’m not going Skeeter back, after having broken up to let you miss this just because your with her, the mother notes: “If Stuart mother convinced you you’re not doesn’t know how intelligent and good enough for someone like him” kind I raised you to be, he can march (88). With her girlfriends married straight on back to State Street. [. . .] and her maid Constantine gone when Frankly, I don’t care much for Stushe returns from college, Skeeter is art. He doesn’t know how lucky he lonely. Constantine is the reason for was to have you” (357). While Mrs. the central conflict between mother Phelan pays a compliment mostly to and daughter: Skeeter suspects that herself for having raised her daughher beloved surrogate mother did not ter well—while Skeeter thinks that leave of her own accord but was fired it is really Constantine who did the by her mother. job—her mother for the first time The first date with Stuart is a disasacknowledges her intelligence. Furter, but after he has come to Skeeter’s thermore, she acknowledges that her home to apologize, they start going daughter has some worth indepenout. She knows how important her dent of a husband, even disregarding relationship with Stuart is for her what a good catch Stuart would be in mother and that she will do anything the eyes of society. Skeeter apprecito convince Stuart that Skeeter is the ates her mother’s words, but Mrs. perfect choice for him: Phelan’s acknowledgment is a singular instance that does not reflect a Then there is Stuart at the house. changed view of the world. From the minute he walks in, I am 14

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

Skeeter’s suspicion that her mother necessity of telling Lulabelle “the fired Constantine proves to be true. truth,” and finally also justifies her Aibileen, the first maid to help with decision not to tell Skeeter earlier: Skeeter’s book, tells her this, and “I knew you’d blame me when it—it Skeeter asks her mother about it; she wasn’t my fault” (364-65). While her has done so before, but gets the full hesitation may hint at her fear that it story only now. Skeeter learns from was her fault, she is not prepared to Aibileen that Constantine’s daughadmit it or to allow for the fact that ter Lulabelle passed for white, and Constantine and she are equal in their since life with her in Mississippi was feelings. Skeeter has to come to terms extremely difficult and Constantine with her mother’s discrimination and was ashamed of a reconciles her lack white daughter, sent of redemption her to an orphanage with the love she Skeeter has to come to terms in Chicago. When feels for her. For with her mother’s discrimination that very reason, Mrs. Phelan hosted a meeting for her DAR and reconciles her lack of she does not want chapter, Lulabelle redemption with the love she feels to leave her, and came to see her does not want to for her. For that very reason, she mother, but instead put the story of does not want to leave her, and of adhering to the Constantine and separation between her mother in the does not want to put the story whites and blacks book, although the of Constantine and her mother that Mrs. Phelan editor has asked in the book, although the editor demands, Lulabelle her to do so. She refuses to leave and has asked her to do so. She has has learned a lot, talks back to her but also lost her learned a lot, but also lost her mother’s employer. old life. She cannot old life. She cannot accept the Mrs. Phelan told accept the racLulabelle that ism around her racism around her anymore, and Costantine gave anymore, and has has reacted in a way that has her away because reacted in a way alienated her from her girlfriends. that has alienated she was ashamed. Constantine, in turn, her from her girlunwilling to give up friends. her daughter again, Talking to leaves with her daughter for Chicago, Aibileen has changed her perception where she died three weeks later. of the world around her, opened her Upon hearing the full story, eyes, and given her knowledge she Skeeter is shocked and unable to find did not possess, especially regardanything that excuses her mother’s ing the relationship to Constantine cruelty: “There is no redeeming piece and her mother. While many African of the story.” Her mother does not American children grow up with admit to any wrongdoing, but instead mothers who spend their days lookshows outrage at Lulabelle’s behaving after white children (or, like ior. She accuses Skeeter of “idoli[zing] Lulabelle, without parents), Skeeter Constantine too much,” justifies the has always been privileged; she has

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

E S S A Y had two mothers. She learns that her die” (384). The location of the fambeloved Constantine was a problematily farm outside of Jackson and her ic mother to her own daughter, which sickness isolate her and protect her likely makes Skeeter herself more from unpleasant knowledge; she is forgiving toward her own mother, unaware of the “war” between Hilly especially since Lulabelle seems to and her daughter, and there is no have forgiven Constantine. indication that she has even heard Too weak to sit for longer interabout the book. Her obsession with vals, Mrs. Phelan continues makmaking girls look pretty protects her ing lists for Skeeter in order to tell as well. This manifests itself in her her which clothes to wear after her reaction to Hilly who has come to death. She clings to her ideas so tell her that it was Skeeter who wrote much that Skeeter begins to think the book. It should be mentioned she is kept alive by here that the book the thought of what features maids’ would become of accounts about her, Skeeter, if she working for white Skeeter has always been were not there to women, and it conprivileged; she has had two make sure her hair tains chapters on mothers. She learns that her and clothes are Elizabeth and her acceptable. Skeeter’s being a bad mother beloved Constantine was a tone shows admirato Mae Mobley problematic mother to her tion for her mother, and on Hilly firing own daughter, which likely her will to live, her her maid, Minny, relative composure and then eating makes Skeeter herself more when Stuart breaks a pie that Minny up with Skeeter after forgiving toward her own brings her, learning already having asked mother, especially since only after having for her hand. Mrs. eaten two slices that Lulabelle seems to have Phelan envisions Minny made that forgiven Constantine. her son as a lawyer pie from her own and Skeeter herself excrement instead as someone who has of chocolate. Hilly, to take care of her for her part, looks appearance, telling her: “Don’t think disheveled in this scene, marked you can just let yourself go after I’m by her efforts to tell people that the gone. I am calling Fanny Mae’s the book is not about Jackson, while she minute I can walk to the kitchen and is working at punishing Skeeter and make your hair appointments through the maids she interviewed with1975” (371). Her ideas about gender, out revealing her role in the book. just like the ones about race, are still Mrs. Phelan, scaring Hilly by how firmly in place. What has changed ill she looks, does not even notice is Skeeter’s attitude toward her. Hilly’s reaction to her; she, in turn, is She goes on a date with a relative in shocked by how Hilly looks: order to please her mother, who tells Hilly blinks at her several times. I do Skeeter that she has “decided not to not know if Hilly is more shocked at

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

The depiction of the relationship between Skeeter and her mother shows that difficult situations cannot always be resolved, that the protagonist has to do the psychological work by herself and may not get much help from outside in accepting situations. Skeeter has matured by learning about others’ lives and by accepting the complexity of her relationship with her mother. Mrs. Phelan has not lost her old The film version readily picks up spirit, though. She does not let Hilly on the comical aspects of Skeeter’s say much.Instead, she asks her if mother (at times too much, as Manohshe is ill and tells la Dargis notes in her she should take “’The Maids’ Now better care of her Have Their Say”). appearance so as to The depiction of the Mrs. Phelan’s obsesplease her husband. relationship between Skeeter sion with clothes She claims that she and her utter obliviand her mother shows that will need to make on to everything she appointments at the difficult situations cannot does not want to see hairdresser’s for always be resolved, that is an obvious target. both girls, then goes Even her being sick the protagonist has to do to bed. Hilly is so is used comically: baffled that she leaves the psychological work by she is sick from the without having told herself and may not get beginning, which her (421-22). only shows in her much help from outside in Skeeter, with the thin hair that she encouragement of accepting situations. Skeeter hides under wigs; Aibileen, has decided has matured by learning otherwise, she uses to take a job as a copy her cancer almost as about others’ lives and by editor’s assistant in New York. It is her accepting the complexity of her a means to make her daughter feel bad dream job, but she is relationship with her mother. when she does not hesitant about acceptoblige her. She tells ing it since she does her that she is sick not want to leave her and wants her to try on her dress, and mother—although her mother claims when Skeeter asks about Constantine, to be feeling better and Skeeter realher mother tells the others at the table izes that “staying here for my parents that her daughter “upset my cancer will surely ruin the relationship we cells” (Taylor, The Help). Skeeter then have” (425). She also does not want to runs outside and remembers Constanleave the maids with all the problems tine in a flashback, telling her that not the book will cause them. She tells being invited to a dance, which SkeeAibileen that her mother hates her ter wants to hide from her mother, is long hair, but there is no mention of not the end of the world, that she is her reaction to Skeeter’s leaving for a fine person and will create a very New York. how my mother looks, or the other way around. Mother’s once thick brown hair is now snow white and thin. The trembling hand on her cane probably looks skeletonlike to someone who hasn’t seen her. But worst of all, Mother doesn’t have all her teeth in, only her front ones. The hollows in her cheeks are deep, deadly. (421)

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

E S S A Y special life for herself. Constantine is the person, the mother, Skeeter wants and needs.

on the door, Mrs. Phelan redirects her to the back door. She sees the disapproval in the face of one of her guests and has to act under pressure. Rachel—Lulabelle’s name in the film version—however, ignores Mrs. Phelan’s demand and enters the house the way she had intended to, telling Mrs. Phelan that she actually is on her way to the kitchen, but wants to The Help (Dreamworks II Distribution Co., 2011): Constantine offers Skeeter some “motherly” advice. greet her mother Like in the novel, Mrs. Phelan before she does so. Mrs. Phelan’s seems unable to even think about the friend tells her that she does not “put possibility that Skeeter may stay sinup with this kind of nonsense,” which gle, and like in the novel, she orders leads Mrs. Phelan to tell Constantine’s the expensive Shinolator to make daughter to “get out of this house,” Skeeter’s hair look better. Unlike in and when Constantine offers to take the novel, however, she knows about her daughter to the kitchen, Mrs. the date with Stuart, and when SkeePhelan, after another comment from ter leaves, she gives her some parting her friend, adds, “both of you. Leave. instructions on proper behavior and Now.” It seems to break Mrs. Phelan’s finally yells, “I love you,” a sentiment heart to see Constantine looking in which is difficult to imagine Skeeter’s from outside the glass door, but seemother saying. She switches off the ing the approval on the faces of her TV here, too, during Medgar Evers’ guests for having handled the situspeech. When Skeeter confronts her ation like they think is proper, she mother to find out why she fired Concloses the inner door in Constantine’s stantine, taking her needlework from face. her to get her attention, her mother’s Skeeter’s face, when hearing this, first reaction is: “She didn’t give me a shows utter disbelief. After defendchoice.” Mrs. Phelan proudly recalls ing Constantine, she tells her mother that she had just been made state that Constantine “did [her] the bigregent by the Daughters of America gest favor of her life. She taught me and that Constantine had “gotten so everything.” Her mother just accuses old and slow.” her in turn, saying “you idolized In the reenactment of the scene, her too much; you always have.” when Constantine’s daughter knocks Skeeter shoots back that she “needed

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

someone to look up to.” Mrs. Phelan placement. Skeeter’s claim that her defends herself by saying that she mother likes Rachel suggests that she went to Constantine’s house the next has seen her before, while Lulabelle/ day, but that she had already left. (In Rachel comes back to see her mother the book, she only sends a check to for the first time in the novel. Most Constantine in Chicago, and when it importantly, the film here continues arrives, Constantine is already dead). where the novel leaves off: while the Her mother claims, like in the novel, scene ends with Mrs. Phelan saying that she knew Skeeter would blame that Constantine lived for three more her for something that was not “[her] weeks, in the film she finally breaks fault.” Skeeter wants to run to see her, down, acknowledging her wrongfulbut learns that Constantine is dead, ness. This admission sets in motion that her mother sent Skeeter’s brother the change that she goes through and to bring her back, but that they were that becomes more pronounced in the too late. In the finale of this confrontafollowing scenes. tion, Skeeter claims that Constantine While Skeeter is able to mourn died because her mother ”broke her Constantine and smile at the memoheart,” storming out of the room in ries she has of her, Mrs. Phelan is tears, while her mother, with a touch among the people who are shown of guilt and regret, acknowledges: “I reading the book The Help, she who am sorry, I am so sorry, I’m sorry.” does not read anything but the Bible The scene is thus much kinder to and her DAR newsletters in Stockett’s Mrs. Phelan than the corresponding one in the book. Mrs. Phelan goes to Constantine’s house herself and then sends her son to Chicago to bring Constantine back, showing that she must have realized her mistake. There are other changes too: the actress LaChanze who plays Constantine’s daughter Lulabelle (the Rachel in the film) does not “look white,” a casting decision that does away The Help (Dreamworks II Distribution Co., 2011): Constantine and a young Skeeter. with the problems the novel raises. The orphanage in Chicago goes unmennovel. In the film, her face betrays tioned, thus relieving Mrs. Phelan realization, as does her quick look at of the responsibility of having to her sleeping husband. She will soon fabricate “the truth “ about Rachel’s use the knowledge she obtains from

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

E S S A Y

The Help (Dreamworks II Distribution Co., 2011): Mrs. Phelan reprimands Hilly.

The Help on Hilly, who has come to inform her that her daughter is responsible for the scandalous book, hoping to punish Skeeter by doing so. Hilly is worked up and has a sore on her lip, and Mrs. Phelan is scarily calm and superior: while her hair is hidden under a turban, she looks well when stepping outside onto the porch, as opposed to her appearance in the novel. Mrs. Phelan’s reaction to seeing Hilly is the following in the film: “You know Hilly, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’ve been eatin’ too much pie. In fact, I’m sure of it. Now you get your raggedy ass off my porch. Go on. Get off my property. Now! Before we all get one of those disgusting things on our lips!” This scene is important in several respects. It takes the somberness away from a scene that is darkly comic in the novel. The film, as A.O. Scott noted about Being Flynn, needs to resolve the mother-daughter difficulties that have to be overcome by Skeeter alone in the novel by making

the mother change. The words the mother uses in the film are almost identical to the ones she uses when she tells Constantine and Rachel to leave. This indicates that she is truly sorry about what she has done: she punishes a woman who is white like herself, whose family and social standing would heretofore have been reason enough to make her perfect in Mrs. Phelan’s eyes, were it not for her ill will toward Skeeter. Furthermore, Mrs. Phelan’s anger at Hilly seems directed at Hilly’s treating her help badly, which in turn indicates Mrs. Phelan’s regrets for having fired Constantine. The “redemption” Skeeter does not see in her mother’s narrative of her firing Constantine in the novel is given here, even if it comes too late for Constantine. It also suggests that, while Skeeter has lost Constantine and her friends, she has won a new one in her mother. Having thus defended her daughter against Hilly, Mrs. Phelan smiles while Skeeter, who has been

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

witnessing the scene with an open from Skeeter to a problematic and mouth, laughs out loud. With Hilly finally redemptive mother figure, the gone, Mrs. Phelan tells Skeeter that film avoids the difficulties that a more they “will be going shopping” the one-dimensional mother would have next day, since “no single daughter meant for the film. of mine is going to New York City In conclusion, the novel versions representing the great state of Misof The Descendants and The Help sissippi without a proper cosmopoliunderwent significant changes as they tan wardrobe.” She thus returns to were translated from print to screen her obsession with clothes, but also with regard to the presentation of clearly approves of Skeeter’s going to the mother figures. In both adaptaNew York (which Skeeter, for herself, tions, these changes were made to has not even decided to do yet). She ensure production code compliance encourages Skeeter to and, more imporgo and find her own tantly, to reframe the life and morphs into question of maternal While in the novels, it is the kind of supportive punishment for poor the daughters who have to and motherly figure parenting. While in modeled by Constanthe novels, it is the do the “work” of coming to tine and Aibileen. daughters who have terms with their problematic to do the “work” of What is more, Mrs. Phelan is even willing mothers, the mother figures coming to terms with to acknowledge that their problematic in the films are simplified Skeeter’s ambition and mothers, the mother and, hence, allow for the integrity is superior figures in the films flattening of some of the to her own unprinare simplified and, icpledness and lack of more complex motherhence, allow for the commitment: “Courflattening of some daughter interactions visible of the more complex age sometimes skips in the print narratives. a generation. Thank mother-daughter you for bringing it interactions visible in back to our family. [. the print narratives. . .] I have never been This is all the more more proud of you.” Skeeter thanks noticeable because the problematic her mother for this suprise approval relationships of daughter to mother and accepts a kiss on her forehead, are central to the narrative tension in adding “mama,” after which they the novel versions, while their corembrace. Skeeter’s mother in the film responding filmic renditions—for all thus accepts the error of her ways and their so-called faithfulness in many not only apologizes to her daughter, other ways—present a more sanitized but also defends her against others relationship in the interests of what and accepts her as morally superior. Hollywood is often famous for: crossShe is the one to make their relationgenerational audience empathy and, ship right. By shifting the “work” ultimately, box office success.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

E S S A Y Works Cited Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 8th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Dargis, Manohla. “Movie Review The Help (2011):’The Maids’ Now Have Their Say.” The New York Times 9 Aug. 2011. Web. 6 Mar. 2012. Dick, Bernard F. Anatomy of Film. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010. Hemmings, Kaui Hart. The Descendants. 2007. New York: Random, 2011. Kavenna, Joanna. “While You Were Out: The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings.” The New York Times 20 May 2007. Web. 6 Mar. 2012. Scott, A. O. “A Father and Son Reunion on the Way to the Abyss: Paul Weitz’s Being Flynn, Starring Robert De Niro.” The New York Times 1 Mar. 2012. Web. 2 Mar. 2012. Stockett, Kathryn. The Help. New York: Amy Einhorn, 2009. The Descendants. Dir. Alexander Payne. Adapted to the screen by Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash. Perf. George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller, Nick Krause, and Judy Greer. 2011. DVD. Fox Searchlight, 2012. The Help. Dir. and adapted to the screen by Tate Taylor. Perf. Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas How- ard, Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis, and Jessica Chastain. DVD. Disney, 2011.

Anna Flügge (Ph.D., University of Freiburg) teaches American Literature at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. She is the author of James Ellroy and the Novel of Obsession and currently writes about waste lands in modern and contemporary American poetry and fiction. Her fields of research include film and twentieth century poetry and fiction. She likes traveling and skiing and taught at Weber State University in the fall of 2011.

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

C O N V E R S A T I O N

Siân Griffiths

Writing the Trans-Genre Novel A Conversation with Pam Houston

Adam Karsten

PRELUDE In March 2012, Weber State University hosted writer Pam Houston for a week while she served as artist-in-residence. During that week, I was fortunate enough to talk with her about her approach to writing literary fiction and non-fiction. Our conversation ventured from a discussion of writing craft to her love of Irish Wolfhounds, world travel, and the Intermountain West.

Houston stormed onto the literary scene with the publication of her first short story collection, Cowboys Are My Weakness, in 1992. Since then, she has published four more books: Waltzing the Cat, A Little More About Me, Sight Hound, and, her latest novel, Contents May Have Shifted. She currently directs the creative writing program at The University of California at Davis, dividing her time between her home there and her ranch in Colorado.

CONVERSATION You’ve got a remarkable voice when you write. It’s really easygoing, but profound at the same time, and there’s a lot of wit. I was wondering if you could talk about your process. Does it (your voice) evolve naturally? Is this something that you think about when you’re away from the desk?

book when I had no idea what I was doing, I had going for me. I think I really come to it naturally. I’ve taught a zillion people over the years and I teach all the time, and we are always talking about how to find your voice, and I honestly don’t have an answer to that question because I think mine came with me.

No, I think I was lucky because, in a certain way, my voice was the one thing—and when I say my voice, I mean the cadence and the rhythm and the construction of the sentences—I had going in. My mother was an actress and a performer. My father was a businessman, but he was very funny. He had excellent comic timing when he told a story. My mother was actually a comedian, among other kinds of performer. So I think I came by it naturally. Honestly. And again what I really mean, there is the sort of rhythm and maybe perhaps the way to build a paragraph so that the length of the sentences are pleasing to the ear, and they help shape the paragraph. Those aren’t things I think about actively. Those are things that, even in my very first

It seems like, in the best voices, that’s what the writer’s discovering: what do they come with? Rather than how do I make an artificial—

Right, and a lot of times I just try to get young writers to sound how they sound when they are speaking. My voice on the page is very like my voice, but that’s never an exact thing. What I have worked on over the years in terms of what I would still put under that category of voice is compression. I write the sentences in first draft in that cadence that is familiar and pleasing to people and natural to me, but what I’ve wanted to do over the years, and especially with this current book, is to say, “How do I want this book to be different

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

from the other books?” Well, for one thing, I have worked on making those sentences work want the language to work harder. So then, harder without violating the original rhythms. it was a real active decision on my part. It I’ve noticed even within the paragraphs always is to compress. I mean, I grew up in that they’ll start, and we’re in a normal evthe time of Ray Carver, and so it’s all about eryday situation, and it feels really relaxed, trying to make the sentence work as hard as familiar. Not “everyday,” but familiar. possible and trying to take out the fat, and And then it’ll go—zing!—insight. This is taking out the fat, and taking out the fat. right where I was the whole time, but now It’s important not to violate, not to wind up I’m seeing it fresh. sounding like Barry Hannah, not to violate my Since we’re talking about Contents own style, but still make the sentences work May Have Shifted, the new book, I harder. Make the actual words work harder. noticed that on the front it’s labeled as a Staying with those kind of rhythms that have novel, and yet it really takes some stylistic created the paragraph in the first place. risks. It works in some ways like interconBut I did an extra thing with this book, nected flash fiction. The story doesn’t imwhen I thought I had compressed as much as mediately reveal itself. You read the stories I could. I spent actually four months when I and you meet characthought I was really done ters, and the through done, and I just played lines sort of come out this kind of random game My favorite place to write is of those situations, and with my manuscript. Every I was curious if you in between fiction and nontime there were widows, could talk about the a couple words that went fiction, in between novel and structure of the novel over to the bottom, I stories—in between poetry and and how you arrived at pulled them up. Even in a that. fiction, even. I’m not a poet, section in the book that went over onto a new but I revere poetry. Well, you know, my page, I had to pull those favorite place to write is up. I literally spent four in between fiction and months compressing rannon-fiction, in between novel and stories—in domly, essentially. What I learned from writbetween poetry and fiction, even. I’m not a ing for the magazines is that, you know, if a poet, but I revere poetry. This book owes itself lipstick ad comes, you have to take 500 words in many ways to the poets I studied with in out, and that’s just it. There’s no getting grad school and the poets I have continued to around it, because the lipstick ad runs the read since. So this book is really in-between. magazine. What that taught me was that you Some people have called it prose poems. It can always take something out. And it almost is a novel. It says so right there in the little always makes it better. So I spent literally four cloud. Some people have called it a memoir, months pulling up widows and orphans, and I which it is not officially, and some people took seventeen pages out of a 287-page manhave called it—Terry Tempest Williams called uscript, and it was great. I mean it was great. it—my own personal book of runes. (Laughter) So I guess I would say that I was lucky But I like the undefined. Actually, a woman enough to be born with that kind of memoin Santa Cruz called it a trans-genre novel, rable, or in some ways pleasing, cadence and which I loved. I loved that expression because that’s what comes out of me naturally. I don’t it also suggests trans-gender. You know, my write particularly clunky, fat sentences ever. It narrators are always kind of macho women, comes out of me that way. But over the years I and so I love that word “trans-genre.”

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

C O N V E R S A T I O N I can tell you how it was born. I was invited ago. Write down something that happened to Wisconsin to be a part of an evening called in the last forty-eight hours. And when I was “Unveiled,” where four of us were asked to in Wisconsin for the weekend and writing read work that was completely untested and feverishly the twelve that I wrote, right before untried. I took the assignment so seriously I had to go read, I went downstairs, and I that I didn’t start writing until I was on the was going to print it out, and I looked at my plane to Wisconsin, and so I did what I always e-mail real quick to make sure I had done do at the beginning when I am first starting everything they asked me to do and it said, something. I had about seventy-two hours. “The only caveat is that you have to mention It wasn’t like I had to read when I got off the the state of Wisconsin.” I was like, shit. plane, but I had about seventy-two hours So I took out “Goosenecks of the San total to work on the thing I was going to read, Juan,” and I went down and sat on the street and I write in bursts, and fits, and starts, so corner in Madison. And I waited for something that wasn’t as bad as it sounds. I just did to happen, honestly. And then it did. So I what I always tell my students to do, what I went upstairs, and I wrote it down, and then do all the time: write the I read that evening an little things out there that earlier version of these glimmered at you. Write first twelve. Richard I think of art or my own the little moments that Bausch was there, a art, probably all art, but arrested your attention. friend of mine and a And because I didn’t really certainly of my own books, as wonderful writer, and he have time to construct said, “Write a hundred mathematical equations of a a story, I thought, “Well of these and it’s your certain kind. It’s easy for me what if I just put a bunch next book.” Of course, I of those together? What hadn’t thought that far. to think of them as Rubik’s if I just wrote these?” I was just trying to have Cubes or Spirograph flowers, Because I always say, “If something to stand up or tangled Slinkies. I see them your raw materials, the there and read in front stuff you bring in from of all these people. in kind of shapes and Venn the physical world, if they diagrams in my head. And I think in twelves. all have integrity, your I don’t think in tens. So story will have integrity.” I thought, well, 144, a So I thought, “What if gross. And that idea just I took all twelve of those, twelve of those little appealed to me so much, this idea of twelve moments, and believed in the possibility that twelves, because I have a kind of mathematithey would be unified through the mechanism cal mind. Even though I’m an English type, I of my subconscious.” Like the fact that I had scored higher on my math GREs. I think of art chosen them all on the same day would mean or my own art, probably all art, but certainly they would speak to each other in some way of my own books, as mathematical equations and make some sort of whole, you know? And of a certain kind. It’s easy for me to think of they did. They are roughly the first twelve in them as Rubik’s Cubes or Spirograph flowhere, although not precisely, and this is the ers, or tangled Slinkies. I see them in kind method, not method with a capital “M,” but of shapes and Venn diagrams in my head. this is how I teach all the time. This is how I So, I had my twelve and then I just kept get people writing, especially beginners, but writing them and then the challenge was to not just beginners, my grad students too. trust that they would add up to something. To Just write down a glimmer from five years trust, as you said, that the narrative through

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

lines would emerge over all 144, which started to seem like a lot. Not that there would be too many to write, but 144 would be a lot to cohere. So in order to keep myself from panicking about that, I told myself for the first few years of writing this, “Well, there is no meaning.” I told myself these things that I don’t believe—like we’re all tired of linear narrative, and we’re all tired of people making progress. People don’t really make progress. It’s just a kind of nihilistic world. Anyway, I told myself all of these sort of doomsday, “life is only a shattered bunch of pieces” kinds of things, so that I could be brave enough to keep writing and giving years and years to this project, and then I could see that—what I hoped was true and what I always tell my students is true—your subconscious takes care of all that while you’re describing the color of the light in the sky or the conversation you overheard at the drugstore. Your subconscious is organizing and making sure the story’s happening, and then once I knew that it was going to be okay, that these were going to relate and that sleeping dragon of narrative arc was under there whether you wanted it to be or not, that it was just going to be under there, that time is undeniable and that narrative arc is undeniable, and it’s really how much you let it rise, but it’s always there. Then I started to say much more hopeful things like, I want her to learn and grow and

get somewhere, and let that line come up a little, and then I started to sort of organize somewhat with that line in mind. But it was a tricky thing because I wanted to let that line come up, but I also didn’t want to violate the premise of the book—I mean not the premise of the book, but one premise of the book— which is that the meaning we make associatively is richer and deeper than the meaning we make logically. That’s one of the things I am trying to explore or examine. I wanted it to still seem really random and kind of haphazard, but of course it’s not. Every single piece has been moved a hundred times. “Goosenecks of the San Juan,” funnily enough, was one of the first twelve, and in my own experience of the Goosenecks of the San Juan, I was not with Rick. I was with a friend, actually a version of Fenton, the human. It came really early, and it was completely different, and then much, much, much later, years later in the writing process, I thought, oh well I need one more scene where it’s kind a’ good with Rick because I wanted it to fall just a little more that way. I didn’t want the end of the book to reveal whether they were going to make it or not, but I wanted it to fall a little more positively, so that scene came all the way to 119 from, like, three. Because of meaning by proximity. It changed its meaning entirely, being back here. That’s just one example of one that moved. At one point,

I could see that—what I hoped was true and what I always tell my students is true—your subconscious takes care of all that while you’re describing the color of the light in the sky or the conversation you overheard at the drugstore. Your subconscious is organizing and making sure the story’s happening, and then once I knew that it was going to be okay, that these were going to relate and that sleeping dragon of narrative arc was under there whether you wanted it to be or not, that it was just going to be under there, that time is undeniable and that narrative arc is undeniable, and it’s really how much you let it rise, but it’s always there.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

C O N V E R S A T I O N it was with girlfriends that I went down the San Juan. It kept changing, and it’s just an interesting one that had been everywhere in the book. It had been so early and so late, so that kind of gives you an idea of all these movable pieces and how their meanings changed depending on where they are.

Reading it, it feels a lot like life. As you mentioned, these glittering, glimmering moments of life that stand out, and then you think back, and then you construct something out of them, depending on the way your mind works or the way you’re inclined. Compiling them in a book adds up to something, and it seems like it works like poetry that way. You mentioned that you read poets and love poets. Who are some of your favorites? Well, my favorite poet of all is probably Carl Phillips. He teaches at Washington University and has a whole bunch of books. He’s a gorgeous poet, and his poems are so complicated, and they reach for these questions about, I don’t want to say the spiritual life, but they’re always reaching into the kind of ineffable. But then, he’s really self-conscious about that, so the lines always double-back on themselves and apologize for themselves. They’re always erasing and then re-writing themselves. It’s just so beautiful, and I’ve recommended him to a lot of people, really super smart readers, and they always say that when they hear him read, then they can read him, but you have to hear him read first. A book that I would recommend is Riding Westward. Actually, the epigraph of Contents May Have Shifted is from that book. I was at the University of Utah when both Mark Strand and Larry Levis were teaching there, and so even though I wasn’t brave enough to take classes from either of them, I knew them well and knew their work well, and I really think this book is hugely influenced by Larry Levis.

It’s a good person to be influenced by.

(Laughter) Yeah. There’s a poet in Santa Fe named Jon Davis, who has a newish book out called Preliminary Report, and his work reminds me so much of Larry’s, so his work is also important to this book. I was hearing Jon read from Preliminary Report repeatedly when I was writing. But there are so many poets I read and love. Dana Levin, Dorianne Laux, Louise Glück, Stephen Dunn, Stephen Dobyns, and David St. John. I feel as though I learned more from poets than from fiction writers.

That makes a lot of sense. In Contents May Have Shifted, you mentioned not wanting to, I can’t remember exactly how you put it, but you don’t wrap up the relationship in a bow or say they’re going to make or they’re not going to make it. And even though there are these moments of profound insight, it’s not necessarily epiphany, or “my life is now going to change and be okay.” There’s still that suspicion against whether that actually happens. Sure, sure. Yeah.

The title implies that it really is looking a lot at how travel changes us inside. And I was thinking especially of the “bumps on the way,” and then I wondered if “bumps” was exactly the right word because that implies maybe only turbulence or trauma shift us, and it’s more like these subtler moments are what startle us into alertness. I was wondering if you wanted to talk about how travel shaped you and why it’s so important to you.

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

Yeah. There are so many million ways to answer that question because it’s so important to me obviously. My parents were travelers. I guess that’s the place to start. They lived to travel, and oddly enough, even though they dragged me everywhere, and I was a really good traveler, they thought of me as sort of an impediment to their travel, only because I cost money, I guess. (Laughter) I was a good traveler. I mean, honestly, I was eight years old and riding the London Underground by myself and going to museums while they went to the places they wanted to go. I was a good traveler, so I don’t believe I exactly impeded them. But of course now that I am a step-mom, I do understand it’s different traveling with kids. But I wasn’t like a kid. I was like a thirty-eight year old woman when I was born. Anyway, they loved traveling, and they made me love traveling, and we were not a happy family, obviously. And so there was both the idea of going, getting away, getting out of that situation, but also we… My father, for all the difficulties in our relationship and how scary he was in many ways, I still love the things he taught me. I still love the things he taught me to love. I love baseball, and I love ice hockey, and I love getting in a car going somewhere in spite of, you know, he did break my femur. He broke my leg when I was young. He was scary and dangerous and drunk, but I still love the things he taught me to love, and that’s more and more valuable to me now that I’m kind of over being afraid.

It seems like it’s more than sightseeing or anything like that. There’s something about going to a place and immersing yourself in it. Yes, I always say that it’s not a trip until I’ve thrown up. It’s like, if you don’t throw up you’re not really somewhere.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

(Laughter) I don’t know what to make of that. I want it to be hard. And I’m trying not to be that person all the time. I love Hawaii, but I’m really traveling if I’m getting a yellow fever shot. That’s how I really know I’m traveling. And for me, it’s such a driver for the writing, a landscape I haven’t seen before, whether it’s Mongolia, where I just was in September and was taken by the landscape and its people, or North Dakota. I happen to have never been to North Dakota. It’s the only state I haven’t been to. I’m going there later this month for a conference. I’m so excited to know what North Dakota looks like! I imagine that it doesn’t look vastly different than South Dakota, but still, I’m excited, because I’ve never been there. Even Ogden, I’ve never been to Ogden before. I’ve been to Logan, I’ve of course driven past Ogden, but I had never been to Ogden. I was downtown this morning taking pictures of all the fake Christmas decorations for a movie. But it’s interesting, you know. If I were a more enlightened person, I would be able to see the new in the extremely familiar, but it’s easier for me to see it in the un-familiar. So there’s that. And of course the title itself, Contents May Have Shifted. It’s funny, I spent days on the Boeing website—I knew I wanted airplane language in the title, so I read the whole Boeing training manual. I read the Air Force code of conduct; I read everything I could think of online that was plane-y. And then it occurred to me that this thing that I hear every day of my life was the perfect title. First of all, the meaning you said, but also the fiction/non-fiction line, like, this is a memoir where the contents have shifted. It’s working on a lot of different levels.

Yeah, and just reverberating off of all the times that they almost crashed. (Laughter)

C O N V E R S A T I O N Near-death experiences seem to be a recurring theme.

and these mountains—they must be roughly concurrent in age, or the climate must be, because when I am there, when I get off the plane in Tibet, or somewhere like Tibet, I am so happy! It’s that same feeling of belonging. I grew up in New Jersey, so I don’t technically “belong” here, but I get kind of giddy with it to myself. It’s not the same in the Sierras. It’s not the same in the Cascades, though those are beautiful places, and I like them very much. It’s something about the age of the mountains, the arid climate, the

(Laughter) Yeah. Exactly, that’s right. That is true.

I’m interviewing you for Weber: The Contemporary West, and because throughout your career, you’ve always written about the contemporary west, I wanted to know if you could talk about what makes this landscape so important to you as a writer in a way that, say, New Jersey, may be not. I haven’t written much about New Jersey, have I? And I love New Jersey, I do in a way. I have great affection for New Jersey, especially the Jersey shore, but it doesn’t compel me to write about it the way this landscape does. Well, first, I’ll just say that every single time I come back here from wherever I’ve been, and when I say here, I mean here in the bigger sense—Denver International Airport, Salt Lake International Airport, Missoula—the Intermountain West is what I mean when I say “here” because it’s all very related to me. It’s just the quality of the light—if I were a painter this would all make more sense, what I am about to say—the quality of the light, the color of the sky, the color of the air, kind of. Even just last night, we were in Chicago, and it was snowing, and I had been in Chicago for three days, and oh, it was crappy, and it was gray and heavy, and we’d come through all this turbulence for two hours and we got down low enough to see Salt Lake, and even in the dark of night you can tell that you’re back in the West—the way the lights look on the ground. There’s none of those halos. It’s just clean, clear, houses and streetlights. Then this morning waking up and having this out my window (gestures to Wasatch mountains), I just feel like myself here. And when I’ve traveled in Himalayan Asia, it’s exactly the same. There’s something about the quality of those mountains

way the rocks and the trees work it out up there—there’s something about it, it makes me feel at home in a way that lends itself to writing, and this landscape is so various compared to other landscapes. If you take just for instance the whole state of Utah, there’s so many things to describe here. I can’t imagine ever feeling like, “Oh well, I did that, I wrote about that already,” whereas even the California coast, which is another place I love, I feel like, “Okay, well that was that. I wrote about that in a couple of essays that I am happy with, and I wrote about San Francisco in a story, so I kind of got that.” I don’t feel that way at all here. I feel like it just keeps offering itself up again to be described.

In Cowboys Are My Weakness, you wrote that “The west isn’t a place that gives itself up easily. Newcomers have to sink in slowly to descend through its layers and I am still descending.” Are you still

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

descending, or do you feel like you’ve found your feet?

of my head, places that I love, that I feel at home when I arrive there, but not at home like this—not anything on that scale, but let’s That’s a good question. It’s a long time since take Seattle. I love Seattle. When I get there I I wrote those words—twenty-two years probathink, “Oh, this is my home away from home.” bly. I think it’s important to a writer to always Or the South of France, or Great Exuma Island, feel like they’re a little bit of an outsider. I’m Bahamas, and I think, “oh, just like coming more at home here than anywhere, by far. Just home”—but I mean that in a much lesser giving a reading here, they already know me, way than I mean it about here. And maybe like when I read down at The King’s English a that’s the reason why I say that writers need few weeks ago, we already know each other, to never quite feel at home or maybe I never and we already underwant to quite feel too stand each other. I can much at home because read in San Francisco, I want to be able to I have always had fantastic and they appreciate me make my home briefly because they go running relationships with women, in these other spots, or whatever, but it’s not these other landscapes, with my friends, and I the same as here. So I that I want to feel I can take a lot of risks in those certainly have found my write about, that I can feet much more than I had relationships, and I will take kind of own, at least in 1990, which was probin that temporary way a lot of risks to preserve them ably when I wrote those enough to write about and fix them if they are broken them. But I’m not really a words, but I’m still from New Jersey. But see, I do and maintain them. In that westerner. I’m really from these things on purpose. New Jersey. Still, I know arena, I’m very brave and The two places I live when how to negotiate this I’m in Creed in Southwest- loyal and sort of healthy, I landscape, and I think ern Colorado—they think think (Laughter). But it has I understand it much I’m a total intellectual better than I did in 1990. been much harder with men. I elitist snob, and when I wouldn’t have had a child for go to the university, they This seems to be think that I’m really quaint those reasons. something that comes and countrified. I love up with your female Buddhism, for instance, protagonists as well. but I’m not a Buddhist. On the whole I would I’m attached, I’m so attached—I’m attached say, they tend to be really rugged women. to that, you know? I’m always standing on They go out river rafting on the Selway or the edge of the thing that I love—and I still hunting in Alaska out away from anybody, feel that way about the west in certain ways. and they have the bravery to go out there, Terry Tempest Williams and I are very good but in their emotional relationships, in friends, and we always talk about this. She their emotional lives, they may not have the is of this place in so many ways, but I’m not, same bravery. They struggle more. What and I know the difference—I understand the draws you to these types of characters? difference. I don’t know what that means in Well, I am that type of character. That’s the the larger way. I mean, it may make it easier main thing that draws me. We were talking for me to fall in love with other places. I could yesterday in Chicago, and someone asked me, name probably twenty-five right off the top

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

C O N V E R S A T I O N “What’s the bravest thing you’ve ever done?,” and I said, “Being a stepmother.” There’s no question about it. And I’ve only been one—I mean, I’m not legally a stepmother, but I essentially am—for the last five years. It’s terrifying, raising a child, and I don’t really raise her—I only raise her, I mean, me personally, probably only a twentieth of the time.

ficult time was because of the child, and I feel like I’m in a whole new country. I’m still not having an easy time making choices between going off to “fill in the blank” and doing my domestic duties to my partner and his daughter, so I am still constantly in that flux.

But you get that profound influence on her life.

And it’s not tragic. He’s very good about letting me go. That’s one reason that we get along so well. He understands that about me, and he doesn’t really put pressure on me to say no to certain kinds of travel that I love to do, but I put the pressure on myself because Kaeleigh is only going to be this age once.

I do, and I feel hugely responsible to that. I think having a child is an opportunity to feel like an asshole every minute of the day, I really do. And there’s nothing else I do that that’s true about—nothing. I might screw up out on the river, or I might screw up in the classroom, or I might screw up in a piece that I write—but then it’s over. (Laughter) With a kid it’s constant; it’s just one more opportunity to make a mistake—constantly. I have always had fantastic relationships with women, with my friends, and I take a lot of risks in those relationships, and I will take a lot of risks to preserve them and fix them if they are broken and maintain them. In that arena, I’m very brave and loyal and sort of healthy, I think. (Laughter) But it has been much harder with men. I wouldn’t have had a child for those reasons. I liked my life the way it was, and I wanted to travel, and I wanted to be an artist—I’m kind of a throw yourself in 100%—and I didn’t think I could do that with art and children. I know women do, and more power to them, and they do it beautifully, but I didn’t think I could. And I had never been with a man who I wanted to share that with. I had never been with a man who I trusted enough to do that with. That’s about me, I am sure, and my choices and my fears. That’s one thing obviously this book is talking about. I have in the last five years been in a very good, committed relationship—it wasn’t very good at first, (Laughter) but we worked really hard on it, and now it’s really good. Part of the reason I think we stayed together through that dif-

You’re torn between those two.

There’s a wonderful scene, an incredibly tender scene, where the daughter Madison wakes up in the middle of the night and they make cinnamon rolls together. I read that and, as a mother myself, would have told her to go back to bed and leave a light on, (Laugher) but Pam in the book gets up, and they make the cinnamon rolls, and it takes them all morning and it’s just so lovely. Well, thank you. That’s an important scene to me too. You know, my life feels so much richer because of her, but when push comes to shove, I don’t say, “No, I don’t want to go to Greece.” I can still do that. When my partner, Greg Glazner, and I first met, he was kind of demolished, so I really had to step up—and that’s one thing that made his daughter and I very close. But now he’s much, much better—he’s all put

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

together again. He gets jealous if Kaeleigh and I do too much together. So it’s good that I’m there sometimes and not there all the time. It’s all fine, but feeling that pull inside me is a new thing. I have godchildren, who I love very much, but my time with them is super-limited, and I can make the time. I took my goddaughter to Alaska, and we had a fantastic time several years ago, but I didn’t have to compromise anything about my own travel or writing life because it was a one-time thing, you know. This is the first time it’s been in the mix as a major priority.

Staying on the domestic front but going a completely different direction, dogs are also really important in all your books, and in Sight Hound, I would say Dante is as much a main character as Rae is. I was wondering if you wanted to talk about the importance of animals in general and maybe dogs in specific. Horses are there as well, but maybe they don’t get the same sort of named presence. All those years that I didn’t have anything like a family, the dogs were my family and still are. They’re hugely important to me—I miss them so much right now. I mean, I’ve seen them twice. I drove through a blizzard to see them about a week ago. They have not become any less important because of the addition of the ten-year-old girl.

Which dogs do you have right now? I have Fenton, the K9, who is a Wolfhound. (Laughter) And I have William, who’s also a Wolfhound, and they’re terrific. Right now, they’re in Truckee, California, with their dogsitter. They have such big personalities.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

In Sight Hound, you talk about how dogs come into our lives at these moments where they can help us learn something about ourselves and Rosie, the… Labrador? Golden Retriever? Now I am forgetting… You know, what’s so funny about that is she’s a Wolfhound too, but everyone thinks she’s a Golden Retriever, and isn’t that bizarre? I didn’t say what she was, and I sort of wanted people to think she wasn’t a Wolfhound, but everyone thinks she’s a Golden Retriever.

I thought she was a Golden Retriever, I think maybe because of just, the silliness of Rosie. (Laughter) But that idea that they all come in and teach something different—Rosie’s got this unabashed joy for life and Dante’s much more reserved and steady. (Laughter) It’s hard to write about dogs well. It’s hard to capture the personality of a dog when you know that so many people out there think, “that’s just a dog.” It’s also hard not to be sentimental, but sentimentality is a risk I am willing to take as a writer. My dogs are hugely important to me. My former editor, Carol Smith, who’s now deceased, used to say, “your readers need dogs.” That used to make me so mad. I was like, “they do not.” But they still wind up in there, (Laughter) no matter what. My readers are smarter than you think they are.

You not only get interviewed a lot, but you interview other writers. I love the interview with Toni Morrison and Oprah— she’s amazing, full stop. My students all know that I have a huge writer crush on Toni Morrison. But, as an interviewer, what interview question have you never been asked, but wish you had—and how would you answer that question?

C O N V E R S A T I O N Well, that day that I spent with Toni Morrison, quite liked me. We went shoe shopping; she’s was the best day of my whole life. This isn’t got a shoe fetish. We went and looked at what you’re asking, but just for your inforfixtures for her new bathroom, and then she mation as a person who has a crush on Toni asked me to stay for dinner, after we’d had Morrison, I had the biggest crush on Toni this long lunch, and I said, “You know, I’m goMorrison ever. I decided before that interview ing to go, because you’ve been too generous, that I’d re-read all of her books and read the and this has been like the greatest day of my new one, which at that time was Love, twice. whole life, and I’m just going to go,” and she I was completely sleep deprived; I decided I said, “Well, you know, honestly, the person wasn’t going to write any questions because that’s coming to dinner I don’t really like, so I wanted it to be an organic conversation. if you stay it will be fun.” And I’m like, “Okay, Then, on the cab ride to her apartment, I was don’t twist my arm.” So I stayed for dinner, like, “Dear God! What was and I’ve just got to say it I thinking? I didn’t write was the best day of my down any questions!” whole life. And then, she That was such a good invited me to her 75th That day of interviewing idea, until I was in the birthday party, which Toni Morrison and her cab. Then I got there, and had a lot of very fancy I was supposed to be with understanding that I really people at it—including her from ten to twelve, Bill Clinton and Morgan understood her work on a and the second I met really deep level, was, I believe, Freeman—and that was her, she just completely super-fun too. But really, what made her want me to put me at ease. She was that day of interviewmost elegant, articulate, hang out with her all day, was ing her and her underfunny. These sentences standing that I really really the most gratifying day just come out of her understood her work on mouth—perfectly formed. of my life. a really deep level, was, I believe, what made her Every time I see her, I want me to hang out with just think “wise.” She is her all day, was really the most gratifying day the wisest person I have ever seen. of my life. She’s better than you could even imagine in your wildest dreams of her perfecI’ve had the good fortune to meet a handful tion. She laughs at herself—she’s super-selfof my heroes and I have to say, most of them possessed, but she’s not at all ego-maniacal. have been even better than my absurd expectations of them, but no one more so than her. I didn’t ask any Waltzing the Cat quesI was supposed to be with her till noon, and tions, but I know that one is one of your we concluded that interview at noon. (There’s favorites. a much longer version of that interview, by the way, in a book of interviews with Toni MorIt is, that’s my sleeper book. But at the rison. It’s much better than the Oprah version, moment, Contents May Have Shifted is my in which I was so limited). And then she’s like, favorite. I love Waltzing the Cat—it was kind “what are you doing right now?” and I said, of like my problem child—it was really hard “Oh, nothing, I just came to New York to do to get it published and then it didn’t sell very this,” and she said, “Well, I’m taking you to well compared to the other books. It’s like lunch.” She kept me around all day. She really loving the kid with the speech impediment;

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

I do think it’s a much smarter book than Cowboys. I like it much better than Cowboys.

It’s interesting because Waltzing the Cat is the one that, up and down these halls, everybody kept talking about. That’s really great. I love to hear that, because that’s what I wish. When Updike chose “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had” for the Best American Short Stories of the Century—I say that casually as if stuff like that happens to me everyday—that was the second best day of my life. I was so gratified that it was that story and not “How to Talk to a Hunter.” “How to Talk to a Hunter” is fine, but I was really just imitating Lori Moore, and it happened to give me a whole career. And that’s beautiful—that’s incredible serendipity—but “The

Best Girlfriend You Never Had” is much more like me doing what I do, the hardest I can. So I was delighted that that was the inclusion and not one of the more, you know, adventurer stories, or “How to Talk to a Hunter,” which would have been the obvious choice as far as most of the world is concerned. Honestly, if I had a dollar for every time someone said, “Oh, I liked your first book the best,” it’s like, “Well thanks, I’ve written four since then, but okay.” You don’t really want that to be true, but they say it as if you do. Waltzing the Cat is my favorite until now, but I’m very pleased with Contents May Have Shifted. Like Waltzing the Cat at the time, this really feels like me doing precisely what I’m inclined to do.

This was a real pleasure. Thank you so much for talking with me today.

Siân Griffiths serves as assistant professor of English at Weber State University, where she directs the Creative Writing Program. Her work is published in Quarterly West, Ninth Letter, River Teeth, Clackamas Literary Review, Oregon Literary, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Permafrost, Court Green, and The Georgia Review, among others. Her story “What Is Solid” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and Janet Burroway included her poem “Fistful” in the third edition of Imaginative Writing. Her first novel, Borrowed Horses, has just appeared from New Rivers Press. Karyn Johnston

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

F I C T I O N

Cheryl Diane Kidder

Bad Moon Rising

ack corralled his group of plaidjacketed salesmen, making sure they unfurled the banners, unpacked the boxes of flyers and made last minute swipes at dusting the bank of twenty brand new, color, fifteeninch TVs in the Motorola booth of the 1969 Las Vegas Electronics Show. He made sure all of the TVs were set to NBC, usually a safe bet to have travel shows or sports on during the weekend. He kept a sharp eye out for breaking news of the UNLV Libraries Special Collections latest body count and made sure to change the stations to lush tropical scenery or fresh-faced women selling Cadillacs and Dentyne as soon as he heard the words casualty or Viet Nam or insurgence. “Where’s the wife, Jack?” “Margaret didn’t come this time.” “A little trouble on the home front, Jacko?” The group of salesmen all joined in the ribbing. Jack had been married longer than any of them, fifteen years. Margaret always went with Jack to the yearly dealer’s show in Las Vegas. This year she had stayed home. Jack was sensitive about it. “We’ll have to make sure Jack has a good time, boys. A little blackjack, a little roulette?” “That won’t be necessary. I plan to get a lot of work done.” Three of the TV salesmen moved off to greet a waiting prospective buyer, leaving Jack alone with the demos. He fiddled with some of the knobs until he got an even tone of reds to blues, then turned each of the ten TV sets to the same station. The evening news was on. He tried not to think what Margaret might be doing right now. Was she watching the news too?

He straightened the brochures on the front table so they all faced oncoming prospects, then ran his hand through his hair, a bad habit since the Brylcreem always came off in his hand. He took out his handkerchief and wiped it off. As usual there were too many salesmen in his booth. Motorola had sent every representative they had from the western states this time. Jack knew that’d mean fewer sales for him unless he really hustled. But every time a new prospect walked into their radius, Bill or Henry, or that new guy from Utah, Al Holdings, got them. Jack wasn’t used to hustling. He never had to before. His store in Bakersfield always surpassed sales quotas without him really trying too much. He didn’t believe in the hard sell. Jack leaned back on one of the displays and turned the volume up a bit on the news. He wondered if Margaret was going to watch Bonanza tonight, like they did every Sunday evening. The news switched over to the latest body counts coming out of Phom Penh. He turned the volume off again. “Jack, this is Louise Montez. Louise, Jack Shipley.” Jack instinctively stretched out a hand before looking into Louise’s face, and when he did he was instantly tongue-tied. Although she seemed quite young, Louise had the poise of a much older woman: a special knowledge, Jack felt, under the eyeliner and hair spray. “Bill’s told me you’re the best in the western district?” “Well, that’s not entirely true,” Jack stumbled. “Don’t be modest, Jack boy. It’s true. Won more awards as top salesman than anyone here tonight. Quite a feat I’d say, eh Louise?” “Very impressive, Jack.” She smiled at him. “Thank you,” Jack managed to say before Bill whisked Louise away toward the gaggle of other salesmen. He guessed Bill was somehow in charge of Louise, though he wasn’t sure how those things worked. He watched his fellow salesmen circle around her, ignoring prospective customers to talk to her, impress her, whisper a joke in her ear. Jack had always turned his back on this type of behavior at shows. He looked again at the news. He stared at the screen, watching soldiers in helmets drag away bodies in jerky motions. Too much red, he thought, and fixed the balance again. That night he decided not to have dinner in his room. When Margaret was with him they went out to a different restaurant every night. This trip he’d never left the casino/hotel. What was the point? The show’s here, his work’s here, why leave, he’d just lose money gambling. After dinner in the casino he walked into the bar and drank whiskey. He went over and over the fight he’d had with Margaret. He didn’t understand how you could be married to someone for so long and still have fights — fights about nothing. This time was different, though. This time they hadn’t resolved it. “I think I should go, Jack.”

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

F I C T I O N “But why? You didn’t even know the guy.” “You know I’ve worked with Clarisse for eight years now. It was her brother.” “It just doesn’t have anything to do with us, Margaret.” “The war has nothing to do with us, Jack?” “You know what I meant. If he wanted to go over there, then it was his choice.” “We don’t all have the same choices, Jack. We were lucky you didn’t have to go. What would I have done without you? You know, Clarisse supported her brother for years and he was just trying to pay her back.” “By getting killed?” Jack felt the sting once more of Margaret reminding him why he wasn’t over there, why he wasn’t in a body bag, why they were so lucky. He didn’t consider it lucky. He considered his low draft number lucky. He’d looked forward to joining his buddies who’d volunteered to go. “I can’t just ignore that this is happening to people I know,” Margaret said. “Well, I don’t know them. You’ll have to go alone.” “If that’s the way you feel.” That was the way he’d felt. It wasn’t his fault he was in college when his number came up. It wasn’t his fault Margaret lost the baby either. But there it was. He ordered another whiskey and looked around the bar. People were starting to filter in from the restaurant. All couples it seemed. Then he saw Bill coming in and started to flag him down until he saw Louise follow close after. He turned back to the bar. Bill was married too but never brought his wife to the shows. This was why. Jack never understood it, why get married then? Though he had to admit it, Louise was beautiful. He stole a look at her in the mirror over the bar. She had long black hair and big dark eyes. Her midnight blue dress was so tight it seemed more like skin. Still, Jack thought, it’s cheating and it’s not right. No matter how tempting. He left the bar in a hurry not sure where to go or what to do. He didn’t want to go back to his room. He turned toward the slots and figured why not. Picking one, he stared into the blinking neon lights trying to read the instructions. His eyes blurred up a minute before he could see. He reached deep into his pants pocket and pulled out several quarters. Then he pulled up a stool and started playing. Three days passed in the same hypnotic way. Shows always seem to blur the days into time somehow separate from reality. Without Margaret along Jack felt more afloat than before. He drank more after dinner and was losing close to fifty dollars every night at the slots. Twice he’d watched Louise walk out of the casino with different men. They seemed happy, always laughing and arm in arm. There were always beautiful women hanging around the convention, available to the

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

salesmen, but Louise had seemed different: younger, sadder, despite the laughter. That’s crazy, she’s just like the rest, scavengers. So many men here without their wives for a week’s trade show, they got lonely, drank too much, gambled too much. A girl could make a living, Jack figured, just on all the different shows that came through this town. One afternoon on lunch break he walked out of the casino. He didn’t know why, just had to get out. Walking down the strip in daylight was a vastly different experience than at night. Jack felt it: first the heat, then the brightness of the light. It was desert sun lighting up the place instead of neon and spotlights. He squinted. There were few people on the street. There was a heaviness about the place. Jack walked past Caesar’s Palace. The statues in the fountains looked weighty and dull. The water flowing over them didn’t look cool or refreshing at all. The traffic moved slowly. He passed a newspaper stand and almost stopped to get one but read the headline, “Latest Body Count,” and walked on. Then he saw her. At first he didn’t recognize her. Her hair was up in a ponytail and it made her look even younger and she wore no makeup. She was coming out of a supermarket with a bag of groceries. She walked over to a bus stop and sat on the bench to wait for a bus out of town. Although he knew it was Louise, the shock of seeing her outside the casino stopped him midstep. She was nothing like the girl he’d met the other night. He stood watching her until finally the bus came. She picked up her bag of groceries in a most ordinary way and got on the bus. Jack stood for a long time watching the bus pull away, then move down the strip and out of town. He walked back to the International in a daze. If he had been that wrong about Louise, what else had he been wrong about? That night in his room a call came through from Margaret. At first he didn’t recognize her voice. At first he thought it might be Louise. She sounded a long way off. “Are you there, Jack?” “Margaret?” “I know you must be busy with the show.” “No, it’s all right. We’re done for the day.” “I just called to —” Jack waited to hear the reason for the call. There was silence on the other end for a long while. He knew it really was his place to say, “It doesn’t matter why you called, just that you called,” but he didn’t. “I called to, well, see how things were going.” “They’re fine. Fine.” Jack had a feeling this wasn’t enough. “Is it hot there?” “About the usual, I guess.” “Well.” Jack knew Margaret was waiting to hear certain apologies but he wasn’t going to give them. He had no idea what to say next.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

F I C T I O N “I miss you, Jack.” Jack stared at the painting above the dresser. It was a seascape, waves crashing into the frame with gobs of white paint flecking the tips. “I wish I was there with you, Jack.” “Well, that was your decision.” “Yes.” He could hear her sigh heavily and he knew exactly what her face looked like at the other end of the line. “Yes, it was.” Why had they put a seascape in the rooms of a desert hotel? Maybe they thought it would be mood altering. Jack felt hot and sticky. It wasn’t working. “I was thinking, Jack. I prayed about it and I think we need to forgive each other. Maybe I could come up for the last weekend. What do you think?” He unbuttoned all the buttons on his shirt and started walking around the room holding the phone in both hands, stretching the cord beyond where it was supposed to stretch. He stopped by the window. It was wide open. He could just barely feel a breeze through the screen. The desert sky was clear and full of stars. The strip was lit up like Christmas as far as he could see. “Jack?” “Yes?” “I said, maybe I could come up.” “If that’s what you want to do, Margaret.” “Well, I won’t come if you don’t want me to, Jack.” “I think that’s up to you.” “You’re still mad at me then.” “I’m not mad, Margaret. You were the one who was mad.” “Let’s not start, Jack. I just thought, if you didn’t mind, I could —” “That’s up to you, Margaret. You know how I feel.” “Yes, you’ve made that clear.” Jack heard some sadness in her voice. ”Come up if you want to, Margaret.” “Maybe I will,” she said weakly, her voice drifting off. “If I do I’ll wire the hotel, OK?” “OK.” “Jack?” “Yeah.” “I love you.” “OK.” After they hung up Jack stood a long time at the window. Then he went down to the bar for a drink. He’d had more than a couple when Louise climbed into the seat next to his. “Hello, Jack.” He wasn’t surprised to see her. He’d watched her approach in the mirror behind the bar. He stared at her before speaking, trying to

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

detect a hint of the girl he’d seen getting on the bus earlier. But this girl was covered up by eyeliner, and hair spray and gaudy jewelry. And she smelled like flowers, not one or two, a whole bouquet. “Louise?” He leaned toward her to breathe her in. “Yes. You remembered. That’s nice.” He saw she wore a silver cross on a chain around her neck. “Can I buy you a drink?” He reached out to touch the glittering cross, and then stopped short. “No, thanks. I don’t drink.” “Oh?” He wondered how long before Bill showed up again. “Where’s Bill?” “Oh, I’m not seeing him tonight.” “Would you like to dance?” He took her arm and led her to the floor. Tonight her hair was swept back on one side and she wore a bright green dress that sparkled and hugged her body. On her shoulder was a piece of chiffon that floated out whenever she turned sharply. It looked like a cloud. “You must love to dance,” he said in her ear. “My husband and I used to dance every weekend.” “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” “No. No, it’s all right. It’s wonderful to dance with a man who knows how to dance. Frankie was a great dancer.” “Was?” “I’m a widow.” The combo changed the pace with a samba and Jack threw up his hands. Louise laughed, throwing her head back, then took his hands and showed him how. Jack enjoyed her manipulation of him. She’s so different from Margaret. Not just in looks. Something else. The band returned to a slow jazz number. He put his arm around her waist. ”You seem so sad.” “Please forgive me, Jack. I haven’t been a widow long.” She pulled back from him and smiled. “But, for you I will try harder. This is your time off. OK?” She laughed and suddenly swung Jack around hard so that he laughed too. When Louise went to the ladies’ room Jack threw back another shot of whiskey. He leaned on a barstool with one hand and ran the other through his hair. He knew it would be like this. Without Margaret around, he knew it would be different: a beautiful woman, drinks, a band, dancing. He tried to convince himself he’d had days like this in college. Nights like this. He reached back, further and further but couldn’t quite grasp the memory. “Would you like to go outside for awhile?” Louise was beside him, linking her arm through his and they were out on the brightly lit sidewalk before he could answer. He looked up into the flashing neon of the casino sign and was blinded. The huge bulbs blinked on and off. Close up they seemed to have no pattern,

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

F I C T I O N though he dimly remembered them spelling out the name of the place. “Are you all right, Jack?” “Oh, sure. Fine.” “It’s bright here, isn’t it?” Jack shielded his eyes and put an arm around Louise’s shoulder. “Come on,” he suggested, ”I have a rent-a-car around here somewhere.” “All right Jack, all right.” “What is this place?” He pulled the Ford Galaxie onto a gravel drive, following Louise’s instructions. They’d driven out of town about twenty minutes or so. He’d lost track of time. “It’s all right, Jack. We’re at my place.” He sat up straighter and realized they were driving in the middle of the desert. He pulled in where she pointed and hit the brake. In front of the car was a picnic table, on the table, an oil lamp, next to the table, a tent, a one-person tent, a military tent. She got out of the car and lit the lamp. He shut off the car and the headlights. The little oil lamp was the only light as far as he could see. “You live in the desert?” Louise peered around the flap of the tent. “It’s a campground, actually. But, yes, it’s desert all around.” “God. Who else lives out here? Are you all alone? Aren’t there animals, coyotes, bears?” She laughed. “No bears. Maybe a coyote or two, but they’re more afraid of us than we are of them.” Louise kept talking as she disappeared into the tent. He watched her dim shadow moving around inside. “Still.” He took a step or two closer to the picnic table and put out a hand to steady himself. “How do you get by out here? What about groceries? What about showers?” Louise came out of the tent in a one-piece silver swimsuit, pinning her hair up. “That’s easy. I swim every morning. Come on, a swim would do you good.” “Swim?” Jack was incredulous. “Where? Here?” Louise pointed off into the darkness. “Over there, Lake Mead. It’s lovely at night, very cool, refreshing.” She sat on the picnic bench next to him, very close to him. Jack focused in on her eyes. In the lamplight her lashes made feathery shadows on her cheek. Her mouth was close to his. He paused, then turned away from her. “I don’t have anything, any trunks or anything.”

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

Louise went back into the tent and rummaged around. “You better come with me. Not a good idea to just sit by yourself out here.” She came out of the tent holding up a red pair of men’s trunks. “Why’s that?” “Well, when I first put the tent up I noticed a large hole in the ground just over there. See it? So I moved the tent away from it.” “Gophers maybe?” “Tarantula. I saw it peer out of its hole a couple of times but it hasn’t bothered me.” She motioned for him to stand up and held the trunks up against his hips. The top of her head brushed softly under his chin. There was jasmine and honeysuckle. He held his breath for a moment then took the trunks from her and went into the tent. At the door he paused and looked back. She was fiddling with the oil lamp but then looked up at him questioningly and smiled. “Go ahead, Jack. You’re safe, I’ll protect you.” He hesitated. “No, it’s not—” He stared straight at her. “You’re very beautiful,” he said, then ducked quickly into the tent. As he changed he heard her humming a song. He thought he knew the song too. He pulled off his suit jacket and undid his tie. He could almost hum it along with her. He sat on the edge of a cot and looked around the little tent. It looked to be army regulation and very spare. Besides the cot there was a small table and stool and in the corner a large, well-worn suitcase. A candle burned on the table in front of a silver-framed picture of Christ and a smaller one of a man in uniform. Jack stood up and undid his pants, leaning closer to the photo to get a better look. The man in the photo looked handsome, exotic, foreign. He was dark with dark eyes and under his cap, dark hair. His mouth was full, his cheekbones sharp. And yet, there was something else. He tried to see into the face as if he were looking at the man himself. Deeper into the eyes, imagining the mouth speaking to him, seeing the eyes flash in a smile or in anger. “Why in the world are you living in a tent?” he asked Louise, as he walked out of the tent still wearing his wingtips. “Let’s go down to the water. You don’t need your shoes. Here, put them inside. No one will bother them.” She took his shoes and placed them neatly inside the tent flap, leaned in and blew out the candle. They didn’t speak on the sand path down to the water. Though it was quite dark, Jack’s eyes slowly adjusted to the night and soon, with the moon overhead and no clouds out, he was able to see quite well. He walked behind Louise, keeping the light of her silver suit in front of him and letting it guide him. She walked smoothly over the sand, though he often felt pebbles and cactus needles sticking into the soles of his feet. They came to a large maze of hip-high brush. Louise found the way through and suddenly the lake opened up before him. On the far shore he could make out hills burgundy and purple in the moonlight.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

F I C T I O N To his eyes the water shone brighter and truer than the neons at the casino. They walked across the beach close enough to be hand in hand. He followed her right into the water and soon they were in up to their shoulders. “What happened to your husband?” he asked her, as they moved further out into the lake. He couldn’t feel the bottom any more and started treading water. “Frankie died in the war.” “Yes. I thought it might be that.” Jack moved his arms slowly out from his sides making circles. The lake didn’t seem like water at all, it was so warm. “When?” “I was notified three months ago.” She seemed to still stand solidly on the bottom of the lake, the water lapping gently around her shoulders, catching the ends of her long black hair and pulling them down. “I had been living with his mother. She answered the door. I was at work. She called me some hours later and told me she wanted me out. She was overcome by grief, of course. But I had nowhere else to go. “They told her it was somewhere on the Mekong Delta, a regular patrol. Perhaps a sniper. He was the only one who died that day. I knew from his letters that if only one soldier dies, they consider that a good day.” Jack watched her face move in and out of the moon’s shadow. He could feel the whiskey in his blood and his chest and legs and fingers. Her voice was the only sound he heard, her face and the moon, the only light. “Two months earlier we had come to Las Vegas on our honeymoon. We saw Elvis Presley at the International and stayed in the honeymoon suite. We were there three days and used up all our money. We both gambled. We had champagne breakfasts and Frankie bought me a diamond. So when Mrs. Montez kicked me out I came back here.” The moon grew brighter on the water. Each ripple they made in the lake glistened with light. Jack focused on her mouth. He didn’t want her to stop talking. “Was he drafted?” “Frankie enlisted. His friends were over there and he’d felt guilty. He told me, he didn’t want to get killed but felt he should be with his buddies.” She looked off to the far hills, turning away from Jack. “I didn’t think he should go.” Jack waited. She lowered her head. Her hair came undone and hid her face. He leaned over and brushed it aside. She straightened and faced him. “That’s a lie. I told him—” Her voice caught. Jack reached out a hand to her but she had drifted further away from him. He wanted to tell her not to go on about Frankie if she didn’t want to, he wanted to tell her she didn’t have to sleep in the desert any more, that she should be taken care of, and prized and not be alone, but he didn’t want her to stop talking either. 44

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

“I told him a man would fight.” She looked right at him and didn’t blink. ”I told him only a coward would stay home fixing cars while his friends were dying for him.” She looked into Jack’s eyes for reassurance. “I told him I couldn’t live with a coward.” She started to float away. ”And then he enlisted.” Jack grabbed her arm as she drifted away from him. He pulled her in to him then tried to kiss her. She wriggled easily out of his grasp drifting on her back toward the center of the lake. He tried to catch up with her but found himself going nowhere, treading water, breathing hard. “He wrote me every week. He wrote his mother too. I was not to show my letters to her. He wrote pretty things to her. What the country looked like, how his friends were, what the food was like. To me he wrote about the bodies and the stink and the whores. He wrote me that it was hot there. Always hot. He wrote that his clothes were never clean, that everything smelled like rot and piss. That once that smell got in it never went away. He never told me if he killed anyone. After a couple of months his letters were different. They were shorter. He seemed to have less to say. And then I’d only get a few lines on a page. I didn’t even recognize his handwriting. The last letter I got said, “Rain for ten days. Captain never leaves the pit. Air raid last night. Three guys killed. All in my hooch. Paper’s wet. Sorry.” Louise suddenly dipped under the surface and swam away from Jack with a strong stroke. He watched her glide through the water, then took off after her with choppy strokes and flailing kicks, all he could manage. The darkness grew up behind him. He kept his eyes on the far shore. It might be miles before they hit the beach. He caught up with her and they swam side by side. They swam as if they could swim all the way to Arizona.

Cheryl Diane Kidder has a B.A in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Her work, nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared or is forthcoming in CutThroat Magazine, Weber—The Contemporary West, Pembroke Magazine, Brevity Magazine, Brain, Child, Identity Theory, In Posse Review, and elsewhere. For a full listing, see Truewest— http://cheryldkidder.blogspot.com.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

P O E T R Y

Rose Postma

One morning before winter had fully made up its mind to settle in and unpack its wind in the narrow vertical spaces between the rows of homes up and down the street— she is surprised by workmen crawling up and down ladders, putting up storm windows and scraping gutters clean outside her kitchen window. So she doesn’t finish rinsing out the coffee pot but goes down to the street and stands under the oak tree whose empty branches are pulled to attention by high scattered clouds. Letting the sky fill her one large intake of breath at a time— she picks up a handful of leaves hoping what’s left of the green will drain into her fingertips and spread through her veins filling her with the same pleasure she feels when rubbing the point of a well-sewn dart, and it lies flat without a pucker announcing its beginning.

Gravity She says the feet feel it first, feel it the most—the cold in thin shoes and on slick hardwood floors— heels grown thick, cracked, snagging on sheets and gray, once white socks. It’s this constant sweeping up of crumbs and lint and pulling down of spider webs from corners and plaster ceilings. It’s the endless carousel of laundry, and it’s the grime that collects in the grout. She says she imagines floating in black and gray space like Richard Wolfe aboard Mir orbiting over Indianapolis—and he’s laughing with his mother across thousands of miles while children listen on radios all tuned to the same station, and his mother—she has dinner on the table maybe a roast and green beans seasoned with nutmeg and butter. But the dining room table, the orange cups and red plates, and the sugar bowl in the shape of a chicken are all too far below to have any real weight.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

P O E T R Y

Disenchanting On Sunday nights in winter, her father took the long way home from church to drive her past what she believed was the last known enchanted castle. It stood glittering against the blackness of the valley, whisping smoke from turrets up until the day a careless family member mentioned it was only the Simpson Paper Company, and she was crestfallen to find that no princess, freshly rescued from a dragon’s lair, resided there. And when the mill closed for good—sitting empty like an unseeing eye—she was relieved as if a long outstanding debt had finally been paid.

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

Dissection I slice open the hairless mink sternum to pubis as he lies glazed in formaldehyde—resting in a foil roasting pan much like the one my mother used to bring her roasts to church potluck dinners, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to find that everything looks the same inside. No pink heart or purple kidneys or yellow liver like the cheerful diagrams in books where it’s easy to tell one organ system from another. Intestines precisely the same color as the stomach they are curled up against, which is only a slightly lighter shade than the nearby spleen. It’s kind of like that moment—traveling on a plane, flying over bulky Midwestern states and hoping there are thick borders drawn upon the ground.

Rose Postma was raised on an almond orchard in Central California. South Dakota, where she lives with her husband and daughter, is home for now. Her work has appeared in Plainsongs, Tar River Poetry, Atlanta Review, and The Briar Cliff Review, among others.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

E S S A Y

Don Lago

Unidentified Mountainous Objects

Mystery Valley Petrified Sand Dunes, Matthew Crowley, www.matthewcrowleyphotography.com

thought I was hiking on solid rock, but then the rock began to dissolve and flow. My boots told me that the rock was hard, and so did my muscles and sweat and breath. My eyes told me that I was hiking up a mountain. The mountain told me that it had tall cliffs and steep slopes because its rock was strong, stronger than gravity and thunderstorms and time. The mountain warned me that if I slipped and fell, it would prove to me how hard it was. Yet my eyes were also noticing the redness of the rock, and all the lines and thin layers in it. My boots were confirming that this was sandstone, for the sandstone was dissolving back into sand, and in places the slopes were coated with enough sand to make them slippery. In little pockets in the land, sand was gath-

ering into small dunes, dunes with the same slopes and shapes as the lines and layers in the sandstone. Time too began to dissolve, to get slippery. I began to see the cross-bedding in the rocks as ancient sand dunes, sand once as free as the wind. I saw the winds of 280 million years ago, winds illustrated by all the sand they carried. I saw sand blowing across a vast desert, blowing and piling up into long dunes, then blowing down again, the dunes dissolving, the dunes migrating downwind to build new dunes—a herd of millions of sand turtles crawling for miles, for millennia. I felt the desert heat and heard the whooshing of the wind. I saw the sand dunes glowing softly from the star-dunes of the night sky. I left my footprints in the sand and then I turned and watched my footprints dissolve away. Even when the

sand dunes buried one another and piled up higher and higher, they showed no talent for being a mountain. I watched the sand piling up into one particular slope, and a moment later I stepped upon that slope, stepped back into the present, and discovered that the sand had become the solid hard rock of a mountain. I reached the top, and abruptly reality shifted from vertical to horizontal. The top of Bear Mountain was flat. Bear Mountain was, in fact, not a mountain at all, but a plateau. Bear Mountain wasn’t just its own plateau, but the edge of a plateau that stretched for hundreds of miles. I had just climbed up the edge of the Colorado Plateau, 2,000 feet up. The top of Bear Mountain was flat for a few hundred feet, then it wrinkled into a series of dips, saddles, knobs, and plateaus, and then the flatness became solid and long. To the north some twenty miles away I saw the San Francisco Peaks, beneath which I lived. These peaks were a genuine mountain. From the base of Bear Mountain I had thought I was seeing a mountain; I’d been looking up at the sky and seeing an arc of rock. But now that I was standing on the same plateau on which I lived, my perceptions changed and I felt that I was looking down into the earth, earth bear-clawed away by erosion. I was x-raying the rock layers that lay beneath me all the time, the rocks that upheld my land and my life, unseen and unappreciated. I was looking down as if from the rim of the Grand Canyon, except that here there was no opposite rim, only one rim eroded into ridges and side canyons, peaks and spires. I was looking down on the red-rock formations that surround the town of Sedona, formations that humans have neglected to give any name of their own and so simply refer to as “Sedona.” It’s as if people called Yosemite, Yellowstone, or the Grand Canyon by the name of the closest tourist town. The red rocks had SPRING/SUMMER 2014

been there for eons, the town of Sedona only since 1902. Sedona had remained a village for half a century, and had legally incorporated itself into a town only in 1988. Yet this blip of human activity had imposed its identity onto the ancient rocks. Originally the name “Sedona” wasn’t even a village, but just the name of the wife of the area’s first pioneer. It was as if Yosemite was referred to as “Patty,” Yellowstone as “Bob,” and the Grand Canyon as “Margaret.” A name was only the beginning of the projections of human identities and desires onto the ancient rocks. After my hike I stopped at Sedona’s little bookshop and petted the store cat, and then I walked to another bookshop a few doors away, which offered mostly New Age books. On a doorway flier I noticed that this evening there was a meeting of Sedona’s MUFON chapter. MUFON, or Mutual UFO Network, was the world’s leading organization devoted to investigating reports of UFOs. Sedona was famous for its UFO activities. For anyone with a curiosity about the subject, a MUFON meeting in Sedona should be interesting. I had always been curious about the subject. I was born a year before Sputnik, before humans had gotten a close look at the rest of our solar system. Scientists had long suggested that our neighborhood planets might hold life, perhaps even intelligent life. Science fiction writers were still placing civilizations on Mars and Venus. It had been less than twenty years since Orson Welles had landed Martians in New Jersey, where they were greeted quite seriously. In one human lifetime human technology jumped from the Wright Brothers to Sputnik, and in the 1960s it was leaping toward the moon, so there seemed to be no limits to technological progress. Before long, humans would be traveling to Mars, Venus, and beyond. 51

E S S A Y It seemed reasonable, then, that if there cist who had made a modest name for were Martians and Venusians, their techhimself as a spotter of UFOs, and I was nology would be far superior to ours, and amazed at how shoddy his “research” they would be flying to Earth to investiwas. Eventually I tuned out the entire gate us. As I was growing up, the media subject. Over the years I was aware that was full of reports of alien spacecraft in the aliens were becoming odder and our skies. The U.S. Air Force seemed to odder: now they were abducting people, take this possibility quite seriously and cutting off the tongues of cows, cutting was conducting a scientific investigation patterns in fields of crops, channeling of it. It was true that even before Sputnik messages through psychics, and, though some astronomers were warning that the aliens had mastered the technology Earth-based instruments indicated that of interstellar travel, they were incredibly the planets were inhospitable: Venus was incompetent pilots who were constantly quite hot, Mars was cold and dry, and Jucrashing their saucers. piter’s clouds were so thick that sunlight Still, I retained a vague nostalgia for might not reach its surface—if it had any the subject, though perhaps this was basisurface. But in the cally nostalgia for years before human innocent-and-gone spacecraft reached childhood, nostalgia I did find it puzzling why the real the planets, anything that could have been flying saucers didn’t seem very seemed possible. triggered as easily good at disguising themselves; if Flying saucers by a video of John became part of the Glenn’s flight or by the aliens were trying to observe culture of the 1960s, a 1964 Beatles song. us secretly, why did they place alongside the space Now, in Sedona, I bright, colored, flashing lights on race, the Beatles, found that I liked secret agents, John the idea of seeing their saucers? F. Kennedy, and what the aliens were Mickey Mantle. up to these days. Aliens made appearances on TV every week. I was fascinated To keep myself busy for the several by Star Trek, in which humans traveled hours before the meeting I bought a out to meet aliens, and by The Invaders, in copy of Life on Other Planets, written by which the aliens were traveling to Earth Emanuel Swedenborg in 1758, 200 years and disguising themselves as humans. I before Sputnik. I headed for the Red did find it puzzling why the real flying Planet Diner, which had a science-fiction saucers didn’t seem very good at disguisdécor, with murals and decorations ing themselves; if the aliens were trying of Martian landscapes, flying saucers, to observe us secretly, why did they place aliens, Star Trek, and Star Wars. I ordered bright, colored, flashing lights on their a Roswell Burger. saucers? The diner fit in well with Sedona’s As our spacecraft began landing on architectural anarchy. While some AmeriMars and melting on Venus, the aliens can towns have an architectural theme made a rapid retreat, entirely out of the that is true to their historical identity— solar system. They also seemed to be the Spanish of Santa Fe, the French of losing ground when it came to the credNew Orleans—Sedona never had much ibility of their advocates. In the 1970s I of an identity, and the efforts of developattended a lecture by a university physiers to invent one has resulted in a chaos 52

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

of contradictory themes battling one another from every corner. The most prominent building in the downtown is the Matterhorn Lodge, as if no one would notice the difference between the Swiss Alps and the Arizona desert; maybe Sedona’s buttes and spires were supposed to be like the Matterhorn. Much of the rest of the downtown was done in Old West style, and some shops and restaurants have cowboy themes. Just down the road is Tlaquepaque, an upscale shopping center built in the 1980s to look like an elegant Spanish village; tourists often assume that it is an old Spanish mission. Many of Sedona’s resorts have Spanish names and styles, though Sedona has almost zero Spanish history. Many other buildings are done in Native American pueblo style. Some franchises have tried to dress themselves in pueblo or Spanish style, but many remain anywhere-andeverywhere. Sedona has art-deco buildings, modern buildings, space-age buildings, arts-and-crafts buildings, Victorian buildings, and just plain bland buildings. Only the mountains were secure in their ancient identities, as humans tried to make their confused identities as solid as wood and brick and concrete. Mr. Spock watched over me as I read Life on Other Planets. Swedenborg was a Swedish polymath, a scientist, inventor, politician, Christian theologian, and mystic. God opened up Swedenborg’s “interior faculties” and allowed him to speak freely with angels and the spirits of the dead, who taught Swedenborg the secrets of the spiritual world, secrets traditional Christianity hadn’t grasped. Later, Swedenborg began meeting spirits from other planets, who revealed to him the vast spiritual plan of the cosmos. Far ahead of the astronomy of his time, Swedenborg declared that the universe held hundreds of thousands of solar systems. God had created these planets and planted them SPRING/SUMMER 2014

with humans in order to breed spirits to fill heaven with glory. After death, spirits remained on their home planet and continued learning and evolving spiritually. All the beings and spirits in the universe were Christians, but they were more spiritually evolved than the dimwitted Christians of Earth, and they had important lessons to teach us. Swedenborg learned about the vast scale of the cosmos from the spirits of the planet Mercury, who possessed a greater curiosity and ability to travel than the spirits of the other planets in our solar system. The spirits of each planet had unique attributes. The spirits of Mercury took the form of round crystals, because in the spiritual world spiritual knowledge is represented by crystals. The spirits of Mercury were so spiritually advanced that they disliked encountering spirits who were still preoccupied with material realities, even with the beauty of mountains or rivers, which were frauds compared with the beauties of heaven. The spirits of Mercury were appalled by the Christians of Earth, who pretended to be religious but who behaved otherwise. The inhabitants of Mars were so spiritual that their speech was almost silent, like the speech of angels, heard with inner faculties. When Martians spoke, their feelings registered precisely on their faces, making it impossible for Martians to practice deceit or hypocrisy. Martians could speak openly with angels, and God was so pleased with Martians that he walked visibly among them. Martians didn’t have kings but lived in democratic equality. Occasionally a Martian began to value power or wealth or ego, but they were exiled into rocky deserts until they recognized their errors. The inhabitants of the moon needed to speak with thunderous voices, because the moon’s atmosphere was too thin to carry sounds like on Earth. The moons of Jupiter and Saturn were also inhabited, 53

E S S A Y for it was inconceivable that God would create moons with no purpose. Venus was divided into two halves, with one half inhabited by gentle, benevolent beings, and the other half by giants as fierce as wild animals. The inhabitants of Saturn were so spiritual that they didn’t worry about the body, about appearances, clothing, food, or even burial when the body died. The inhabitants of Jupiter were jovial, with round, happy faces. They went naked without embarrassment or lust, for they were pure and innocent. They were so spiritual that they couldn’t conceive of greed, crime, murder, or war. The spirits of Jupiter refused to associate with the spirits of Earth, who still reeked of human corruptions. Angels transported Swedenborg to several planets of other stars. On one planet he explained that humans communicated the Word of God by printing it as symbols on paper, and the inhabitants were dumbfounded by this primitive method, unknown elsewhere. For spiritually advanced beings, divine wisdom was received directly, telepathically, from the angels. Mr. Spock agreed fully that humans were an inferior species, hopelessly illogical. The MUFON meeting was at the Episcopal church, which I found a bit reassuring, suggesting that UFO folks were sober and conservative, not Pentecostals speaking in alien tongues and cheerleading the end of the world. And in fact MUFON had a reputation as a conservative organization, relatively speaking. They trained members to scientifically investigate UFO reports, to interview witnesses, search for physical evidence, and weed out aircraft sightings and outright hoaxes. While it had become trendy in UFO circles to think of UFOs not as spacecraft but as interdimensional energy beings, 54

MUFON remained committed to “nuts and bolts” highest-tech spacecraft, piloted by the equivalent of our astronauts. The Episcopal church did give one sign that it was located in Sedona. On its parking lot was painted a large, mazelike circular design. A crop circle? More likely it was a labyrinth, an old spiritual symbol that had become popular again. The leader of the MUFON group was an elderly, wise-looking man who could have played a college professor in a movie. Most of the fifty or so people present were middle aged or older, including women attired in full Sedona style, with long purple dresses, crystals, turquoise, and Egyptian symbols. Our guest speaker tonight was Louise, who had just published a book about her long acquaintance with one alien. Louise admitted that her book was partly fictionalized, but this was only to protect the identity of the alien. Aliens, of course, were all around us. There were aliens working at Burger King and at the car wash. Just the other day Louise was walking in Boynton Canyon, the site of one of the vortices, when she recognized that a woman was really a reptilian alien. In Sedona it was a common thing to be in a New Age store and hear someone mention that they were from Andromeda. At the average meeting about UFOs, Louise said, the crowd included two or three aliens. I glanced around the crowd. I didn’t notice anyone glancing at me. The aliens, she explained, had been on Earth for a long time. In previous centuries people had mistaken the aliens for angels. The aliens/angels were indeed here to guide our spiritual evolution, to prepare us for Ascension to a higher vibrational level. The aliens were benevolent beings far more spiritually evolved than humans. They came from planets where spirits had no further need of bodies, and they traveled the universe as interdimensional energy. Aliens lived

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

inside of Earth, which was hollow, and of their atoms. The rocks contained the their flying saucers were often seen energy of stars and supernovae, which around Sedona and Mt. Shasta because had fused atoms into heavier atoms, into these were portals into the hollow Earth, the heaviness of stone and metal, the as well as maximum energy nodes from heaviness of mountains. The red color of which the aliens charged their flying the rocks was iron that had been fused saucers. The U. S. government knew all in the final stage of the building of atoms about the aliens and was masterminding in stars, the final stage of the life of stars. a massive conspiracy to hide the truth. The iron atoms had accumulated in the President Eisenhower had signed a treaty core of stars, as other atoms had accumuwith the aliens, but the lated before them— U. S. government had carbon, oxygen, broken the treaty many nitrogen, sodium—but times. the iron atoms reIn previous centuries people The audience added fused to fuse into still had mistaken the aliens for their comments. Several heavier atoms; the iron angels. The aliens/angels people reported their atoms refused to fuel recent encounters a star’s burning. When were indeed here to guide our with aliens, includtoo much iron had spiritual evolution, to prepare ing waking up in bed, accumulated, a star’s us for Ascension to a higher totally paralyzed, as a burning shut down; grey alien examined the star collapsed; vibrational level. The aliens them or fondled them. the star exploded as were benevolent beings far One woman had seen a supernova; the star luminous energy beings more spiritually evolved than shredded itself into in her backyard and space. humans. They came from recognized that they’d The rocks also planets where spirits had no just emerged from the contained the energy further need of bodies, and hollow Earth. Another of a cloud of gas and woman said she was dust knotting itself they traveled the universe as sure that one famous into our solar system. interdimensional energy. UFO had come from They contained the Venus. heat of the newborn Venus? The VeEarth, erupting as nusians had been melted by their 900 F volcanoes. They contained the impacts of degree heat half a century ago. comets and asteroids. They contained the energy of continents moving and collidThe rocks pulsed with energy. The ing and pushing up mountain ranges and rocks that tricked my feet into expetriggering earthquakes. They contained riencing them as solid and hard were the winds that drove the sands for miles actually bee swarms of energy. In every and piled them into massive deserts. atom points of energy swirled around They contained the rains and sudden and around, swirled as they had swirled waterfalls of millions of years, and the without a second of hesitation for nearly crumpling of the earth into forms on its fourteen billion years, swirled with the way to formlessness. energy unleashed by the Big Bang. The The rocks also pulsed with human rocks also contained the energy of the imagination, with the images and names Big Bang in their structure, in the fusion humans had imposed upon them. One SPRING/SUMMER 2014

E S S A Y ridge is called Snoopy Rock for its profile of Snoopy lying atop his doghouse. Another ridge is Submarine Rock; local lore says it was named by Walt Disney, who was taking a Sedona vacation during the filming of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A ridge named in 1880 is Steamboat Rock, and nearby is The Sail. Many rocks bear the energy of the American national story, of the conquest of a vast continent: the names of pioneers, and names taken from the sixty western movies filmed around Sedona. Zane Grey and his works are honored with Zane Grey Wash, Thunder Mountain, Robber’s Roost, and the Call of the Canyon Picnic Area. The Jimmy Stewart western Broken Arrow gave its name to the Broken Arrow Trail. Other human meanings imposed onto the rocks are Castle Rock, Chimney Rock, Coffeepot Rock, the Teacup, Gibraltar Rock, Courthouse Butte, Capitol Butte, and Bell Rock. Even geologists had shown a limited imagination: they had named one rock layer after a nearby real estate development. At least I liked the name of the rock formation I was climbing: Cathedral Rock, its many spires pointing upward. A young couple on the trail asked me eagerly: “Is all of Cathedral Rock the vortex, or is the vortex concentrated in one spot?” I didn’t like to burst anyone’s bubble, but I wasn’t interested in being hailed as another vortex pilgrim. “There aren’t any vortices,” I answered. They looked at me with surprise, as if I was an imbecile, or a satanist shouting in a cathedral. “Why do you say that?” the guy asked indignantly. “You know how in the grocery-store checkout line the National Enquirer headlines talk about psychics predicting the Super Bowl, elections, and the return of Elvis? It was a National Enquirer psychic who invented the vortices around 1980.” 56

Actually, in the 1970s some people were already talking about Sedona being a “power place,” but it was psychic Page Bryant who channeled, from her spirit guide Albion, the revelation of which specific rock formations were vortices. Bryant also suggested how the vortices worked, the differences between them, and their connections with other points in Earth’s chakra system, and with cosmic ley lines. The Bell Rock vortex, for example, was a receiver of astrological energies from the planet Pluto, energies that facilitate healing. The vortex at Red Rock Crossing, right below Cathedral Rock, greatly enhances psychic powers, allowing you to see and talk with spirits. In an amazingly short time the Sedona vortices became a firmly established part of the New Age cosmos, drawing tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world. Within ten years Bryant was disgusted by how shabby the vortex craze had become, with all sorts of bogus claims about them, and with rent-a-shamans charging pilgrims large sums of money for vortex spiritual experiences. The guy scolded me: it was a wellknown fact that the vortices were ancient and sacred Native American shrines. Native Americans made pilgrimages to Sedona from hundreds of miles away. The vortices were quantum energy nodes connected with the similar energy nodes at Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids, and Machu Picchu, which is why those shrines had been built in those locations. Sedona spelled backwards was “Anodes!” My mood marred, I finished the hike without noticing that the red-rock cathedral was celebrating the journey of iron from supernovae to blood that quickened with red-rock sunsets. This time I had planned my Sedona hike to coincide with MUFON’s monthly meeting.

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

Tonight’s speaker, Gary, had writHopis, had three peaks, and there were ten a book proving that the Hopis had three pyramids at Giza. This couldn’t be arranged their villages and sacred sites in a coincidence. Gary showed us a photo a pattern that matched the constellation of the Phoenix lights, a famous UFO Orion. Gary had been inspired by a book sighting, and reminded us that Phoenix, that showed how the ancient Egyptians Arizona, was named for the Egyptian had laid out their pyramids in the pattern god Phoenix. Phoenix was located on the of Orion. But the Hopi’s Orion grid was 33rd latitude, and the Masons, masters of more complete and sophisticated than the Egyptian lore, called the highest degree Egyptian’s grid. The three stars of the belt of Masonry the 33rd degree. Harry Truof Orion coincided with the three Hopi man had been a 33rd degree Mason, and mesas. Gary admitted that the real sky he was also the 33rd president of the map of Orion didn’t fit the real Earth map United States. Someone in the audience of Hopi villages, but if you turned the pointed out that the Phoenix UFOs were Orion map upside inscribed with Madown and backsonic symbols. wards, then it did fit, Orion’s arm lay atop the Grand In connecting and it fit lots of other the Hopi dots, Gary Hopi landmarks too. Canyon, even if it curved in the was practicing geoOrion’s arm lay atop opposite arc, and one star lay mancy, or sacred the Grand Canyon, geometry, which atop the sipapu, the Hopi’s place even if it curved in had become an octhe opposite arc, and of emergence within the Grand cult fad in England one star lay atop the Canyon. Other stars matched ruins in the 1920s. By consipapu, the Hopi’s necting ancient rulike Betatakin, Canyon de Chelly, place of emergence ins with “ley lines,” Homolovi, Walnut Canyon, and within the Grand you could find Canyon. Other stars Wupatki. All of these matches larger, meaningful matched ruins like patterns. There was couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. Betatakin, Canyon an entire book on de Chelly, Homothe geomancy of lovi, Walnut CanSedona, connecting yon, and Wupatki. All of these matches the vortices and mountains with pentacouldn’t possibly be a coincidence. If grams or the outlines of serpents or birds. you extended one of the lines of Orion All animals seek patterns in their into New Mexico, it pointed straight at experiences. Deciding whether a shape Roswell, and if you extended another line in the forest is a fruit or the head of a into Nevada, it pointed straight at Area predator is a matter of life and death. In 51. This was proof that the Hopi prophets humans this pattern-seeking had expandhad received a revelation that Roswell ed until it included the entire universe. and Area 51 would hold great signifiAs with patterns of food and predators, cance in the 20th century. The Hopi god weather and disease, the human mind Masau’u had grey skin, just like the grey sifted the patterns in the sky for their aliens. The ancient Hopis were also commeanings for human life and death. municating with the ancient Egyptians. Sometimes astronomical patterns did inGary showed us how several Hopi words deed fit into human events: a star or conwere very similar to Egyptian words. stellation might appear at the right time The San Francisco Peaks, sacred to the for spring planting, summer hunting, SPRING/SUMMER 2014

E S S A Y autumn harvesting, or winter solstice. themed garden in Sedona, centered But other times, in grasping at something around a glass pyramid 481 feet tall, far outside their Earthly experience, the height of the Great Pyramid at Giza. humans made erroneous connections. In Bearcloud was opening this gallery/ this room tonight I was seeing the ancient telescope store to raise funds to build his human searching for patterns in the sky, pyramid. for connections with the cosmos. Here the The grand opening was a big sodrive to find cosmic meanings in human cial event, with wine and cheese, fancy life was so powerful that it overrode evclothes, and a white guy playing a Native ery fact or gap that stood in its way, and American flute. The biggest excitement it had little conscience about inventing was in the back parking lot, where things that served it. several telescopes were set up. Many After the meeting I went to the grand people had never seen a telescope before, opening of Sedona’s telescope store, and they made many amazed comments which offered stateabout the telescopes of-the-art Celestron and about the views telescopes. The telethrough them. I hung All animals seek patterns in scope store doubled out for an hour, going their experiences. Deciding as a New Age art from scope to scope. gallery, with paintings whether a shape in the forest is The conversations I of Egyptian pyramids, a fruit or the head of a predator overheard seldom Native American came from the asis a matter of life and death. In ruins, and astronomitronomical universe. cal objects mixed with humans this pattern-seeking There was much talk sacred symbols and of astrological signs. had expanded until it included spirit beings. The store the entire universe. As with One woman asked belonged to Bearcloud, what, exactly, are patterns of food and predators, an Osage Native stars, and she was American who had amazed to learn that weather and disease, the human discovered secrets of stars are suns just mind sifted the patterns in the Egyptian pyramids like our own, only that had eluded schol- the sky for their meanings for far away. She was ars for 5,000 years. The human life and death. reassured to hear that passageways inside astronomers recogthe pyramids, their nized the constellabends, stairs, dead tion Aquarius, which ends, and chambers, spelled out a hidden was what was going to usher in the Age star language. Bearcloud recognized this of Aquarius. One person wanted to see language because it was similar to his the Face on Mars. One telescope was own Osage shamanic tradition. Beartrained on the Pleiades, the home of the cloud also recognized Osage symbols Pleiadians, one of the most prominent in crop circles in England. Bearcloud alien races, who live on a crystal planet had traveled to England many times to and frequently channel their messages investigate crop circles, and one time he through Sedona psychics. witnessed an alien spacecraft landing. A When a flashing light flew overhead, few years ago Bearcloud received a vision one person declared it was an alien that he should build a great spiritualspacecraft. It was heading for Airport Mesa, the mesa that held the Sedona 58

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

airport. Airport Mesa is a hotbed of UFO activities. Is it possible to see a mountain while you are climbing it? I am climbing Bear Mountain again. Normally I would use the word “hiking” and not “climbing,” but Bear Mountain’s steepness—2,000 feet in about two miles—shifts my emotional gears into climbing. From the trailhead parking lot I can see the whole of Bear Mountain, and though the trail isn’t visible, I can surmise the contours it needs to follow. After a flat zone, I am face-to-face with a cliff, and I lose sight of Bear Mountain. In the course of the hike, Bear Mountain disappears many times. It disappears even when I am staring right at it and feeling its firmness and measuring it with my muscles and lungs. Bear Mountain shrinks into one square foot of rock around my foot. The trail requires constant close attention, for it has lots of ledges, loose rocks, slippery sand, oddly torqueing slickrock slopes, Manzanita branches, yucca bayonets, and cairns. As long as I am moving, I can’t afford to look at the mountain. As if the mountain gets annoyed at me for not seeing it, it steals my breath away and forces me to pause, and then I can look at the mountain. Yet even then I often see only the slope I am on, not the mountain top, not the bulk below me. I see other mountains better than the mountain I am on. Casual tourists at Sedona shopping centers can see Bear Mountain better than I can. As my climb goes on, Bear Mountain shrinks not just my vision, but my identity. Hadn’t I started this hike as a human searching for beauty? Now I am just an animal searching for danger, searching for a safe place to place my foot and not slide or trip or fall. Now I am an animal laboring hard, sweating hard, breathing hard, muscling hard, feeling the limitaSPRING/SUMMER 2014

tions of biological matter against geological matter. I can’t avoid feeling an adversarial relationship with the mountain. I resent it for making me work so hard, and I dislike its potential for making me turn back before the top, a defeat for my pride. Can you see a mountain while you are seeing only yourself? Tonight’s speaker, Jim, was one of the best-known alien abductees. Jim was living a normal life as a successful North Carolina real estate developer until he was thirty-four years old, and then the alien abductions began and continued for eight years. Unlike most abductees, who didn’t remember their abductions until they were hypnotized, Jim remembered nearly everything. The aliens visited Jim frequently, using their field technology to transport Jim through solid walls to their spacecraft, where they conducted long, often painful medical procedures on him, extracting all kinds of tissues and fluids. Jim was so traumatized by these encounters that his life fell apart and he became a nervous wreck and a Howard Hughes recluse, hiding in his house, his hair and beard long and dirty. When Jim became enraged at the aliens and shouted obscenities at them, they paralyzed his mouth. The aliens wouldn’t stop coming. There were grey aliens, reptilian aliens, Nordic aliens. They taught Jim a symbolic language so he could communicate with them, and then they started communicating telepathically. Jim learned that the aliens had been on Earth for thousands of years. They were neither benevolent nor hostile. They were simply using humans as cattle, to grow useful organs and genes. But now humans were bringing environmental doom upon themselves, and the aliens were intervening to save their investment. The aliens went to Earth’s leaders and offered them advanced alien technologies that would solve all of humankind’s energy, pollu59

E S S A Y tion, food, and poverty problems, but Earth’s leaders had refused, since solving these problems would undermine their political power and corporate profits. Now world leaders were orchestrating a massive cover-up to hide the presence of the aliens and to ridicule the people who knew the aliens were real. Now the aliens had turned to Jim to save humankind, to warn the world about the danger of global warming. The aliens were also using Jim’s superior genes to breed an alien-human hybrid. Jim was also visited by future humans who were traveling back in time to harvest genetic materials to heal themselves. During a break I went outside, under stars that appeared to be real, and soon I was joined by Jim and three women coming out to smoke. One woman thanked Jim for his testimony. Her life had been a wreck; she’d even had a drunken car wreck, careening down a slope. She’d been having crazy hallucinations, and she’d thought she was mentally ill, but then she read Jim’s book and realized she was being abducted by aliens. UFO culture had changed a lot since my childhood. The first time aliens had contacted humans with an important message, back in 1952, they had been wholly benevolent, their message one of spiritual enlightenment. The aliens had come straight out of Emanuel Swedenborg—literarily. Swedenborg had left a large imprint on western mysticism. A century later Madame Blavatsky combined western mysticism, eastern religions, and occult traditions like Atlantis, Egyptian pyramids, and the channeling of higher spirits, into theosophy, a spiritual system complex enough to have enduring appeal. In the 1950s theosophy underwent a sudden, major mutation. George Adamski was a devoted theosophist who, in 1934 in California, founded his own vehicle for it, the Royal Order of Tibet, and he wrote several 60

books about it. No one paid much attention. In 1947 the idea of flying saucers burst out in the media and captured the public imagination, including Adamski’s. A few years later Adamski reported that he had been contacted by an alien from Venus, a Nordic-looking youth named Orthon, who had an urgent message for humankind. Orthon’s message was pure theosophy, some of it taken word-forword from Adamski’s previous books. This time, Adamski became a worldwide celebrity. Theosophy had latched onto the cultural energy of a powerful, scienceflavored, high-tech idea. Now alien theosophy was offered as the answer to the anxiety of a lonely species fearing its own imperfections in the new atomic age. Theosophy coming from the mouths of aliens worked much better than theosophy coming from the mouths of Native Americans, who for 200 years had been abducted by whites to serve as their mediums, the Hopis the most abused and exasperated of all. One of Adamski’s true believers was a Swiss woman, the cousin of psychologist Carl Jung; she wrote a book lauding Adamski and did her best to convince Jung. In reply, Jung wrote his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, in which he observed that flying saucers were psychological projections, but possibly healthy ones, their round shapes symbolizing a quest for wholeness. Jung was fascinated by how ancient religious impulses were trying to grapple with the bold new raw materials of the space age. By the time I reached the top of Bear Mountain, I felt the mountain inside me. Bear Mountain had translated geology into biology, translated the tightness of rocks into the tightness of muscles, the striations of dunes into the cross-bedding of muscles, the bonds of motionlessness into the chemicals of motion, the redness of sandstone into the rallying of blood.

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

I was weighing the mountain on a scale ing as “swamp gas,” and the national of bones and flesh, and it was heavy. media ridiculed him. Chagrined, Hynek The energy of ancient winds emerged set up his own university-based institute from the rocks and triggered the energy to research UFO reports in a scientific of my breathing, my breathing out the way, but now Ann was reassuring us same molecules that had piled up these that Hynek’s scientific persona was just dunes and that now blew with a greater a façade. Hynek was really one of us—a aspiration. The ancient raindrops that true believer. He was secretly a member had left tiny fossil imprints in this rock of the Rosicrucian Order. He had seen an now fell as sweat that propelled me alien spacecraft for himself. upward. The gravity that had worked Ann told us of how, after Hynek’s this sand into angle-of-repose slopes now death, she had been contacted by “the spiraled through my Sisters of Light,” a ears and brain to build group of female aliens a balance that defied who gave her an By the time I reached the top gravity. urgent message for of Bear Mountain, I felt the When I reached humankind. Planet X the top I looked back was going to return mountain inside me. Bear down at the huge cone very soon! Planet X Mountain had translated of sandstone beneath was four times larger geology into biology, translated than Earth and was me. It was like the cone of sand in the inhabited by superior the tightness of rocks into bottom of an houraliens who had created the tightness of muscles, the glass. This hourglass humans as slaves. contained the flowing striations of dunes into the Planet X had been in sands of 280 million the outer solar system cross-bedding of muscles, the years. All of those eons bonds of motionlessness into the for a long time, but had flowed through now it was approachchemicals of motion, the redness ing the inner solar me on my climb, and they did not find any system, and it would of sandstone into the rallying landscapes they did trigger catastrophic of blood. I was weighing the not recognize. earthquakes and tsumountain on a scale of bones All of those eons namis on Earth. The had been within me recent earthquakes and flesh, and it was heavy. all along. All of the in Haiti and Chile forces that had built had been caused by this mountain had been within me all Planet X. Planet X was already clearly along. All along, human bodies contained visible in the night sky. Ann showed us a mountains, unidentified. photograph from the website of a psychic channeler, showing Planet X right next The next night’s speaker was Ann, to the sun and just as large and nearly as who for years was the assistant to Dr. J. bright as the sun. But I noticed that Planet Allen Hynek, the dean of UFO researchX didn’t have any shadow on it like a real ers. Hynek was a professional astronoplanet would if it were next to the sun. mer who in 1948 was tapped by the U. Someone from the audience asked why, S. Air Force to analyze UFO reports and if Planet X was already as large as the find natural explanations for them. In sun, it wasn’t being reported by amateur 1966 Hynek dismissed one UFO sightastronomers? SPRING/SUMMER 2014

E S S A Y Amateur astronomers?—I thought. a cover-up became more elaborate and What about you? Didn’t anyone in this aggressive, so did anger at the governroom ever look at the real night sky? ment for denying a truth that was deeply Didn’t anyone know even the elementary important to believers. UFO culture facts of astronomy? descended into a spiral or paranoia, Ann answered that the U. S. govwhich seemed to effect the aliens themernment had forced all astronomers to selves. They went from being human to remain silent about Planet X. The govbeing reptilian, from friendly spiritual ernment knew all about Planet X and lectures to abductions, medical tortures, had built massive, secret, underground cattle mutilations, and dark plots against facilities to save the elite of humankind. humanity. MUFON had been the bulOne audience member recalled how in wark of the traditional idea that UFOs the 1970s Sedona was swarming with are nuts-and-bolts spacecraft, and it had government trucks, undoubtedly buildwaged a long battle against the idea that ing the underground UFOs are interdimenfacilities for the coming sional energies, but of Planet X. Ann said now, in Sedona at least, that when Planet X was UFO culture descended MUFON had been destroying Earth, the thoroughly abducted. into a spiral or paranoia, Sisters of Light, who When George Adamski were pure benevolence, which seemed to effect the introduced the idea of aliens themselves. They would transport their aliens offering spiritual true believers to the messages to humans, went from being human fourth and fifth dimenhe’d remained periphto being reptilian, from sions, where humans eral in a UFO culture friendly spiritual lectures to would exist in bliss. that was largely nutsI thought of how abductions, medical tortures, and-bolts, but today UFO culture had started the spiritual impulse out so innocently. Aliens cattle mutilations, and dark was the core of UFO plots against humanity. were once next-door culture. Spocks from Venus Like Carl Jung, I and Mars, paying us a was fascinated to watch neighborly visit. It was human religious needs only a matter of time trying to digest spacebefore the aliens landed and introduced age ideas. Yet I was amazed by how themselves. Yet as the decades passed, disconnected this process was from the the aliens retreated. When the solar astronomical universe, and how ready system turned out to be barren, the aliens people were to believe anything. In all the retreated to distant stars. They failed to MUFON meetings I attended, the only leave even one bolt from a spacecraft, one peep of doubt I heard was the guy who footprint, one document, one compelling asked why no one was seeing a sun-sized photograph, so the aliens retreated into planet in our sky. Some UFO ideas did interdimensional energies or into being offer a good fit for human religious temcovered up by a massive government plates; aliens make pretty good angels conspiracy. With every decade without and devils. Yet in other respects, UFO good evidence for aliens, belief in a coverideas are too limited and specialized to up became more crucial. Yet as belief in add up into a comprehensive religion,

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

which needs a cosmogenesis, a theology of good and evil, and personal affirmations from God. It was not surprising that UFO culture was struggling terribly in its efforts to turn UFOs into a religion. I stepped outside into the clear night sky. The mountainous horizon was dark and mysterious. The sky held mountains of stars. The sky was full of human shapes and stories, star dots that humans had connected into patterns that offered meaning. The sky was a movie screen onto which humans had projected the passions and events of biological beings. The sky was full of promises and warnings, rewards and punishments, lessons and hopes. And somewhere beyond the blinding fog of human desires, there was a real universe, the one that had projected its brilliant energies into the shapes of Earth and of humans. I had become convinced of one thing. The MUFON group was indeed full of aliens. Earth is full of aliens. Humans are deeply alienated, alienated from the planet and the cosmos that gave birth to us. Humans could spend whole lives walking upon the hard earth and never make contact with it. They could see the starry night twenty thousand times and barely notice it. They could climb many

mountains and never feel any affinity for them. They could see in their fellow humans nothing but threats of violence and targets for conquest. When humans see the mystery of their existence, they are frightened by it and try to hide from it. I looked into the sky, and I saw a mysterious light. At long last, I was seeing a flying saucer. It was a disc, with a dome on top. It was huge; it filled the sky; it was the mother ship. It was full of lights, thousands of lights, like the windows of an airplane or an ocean liner, proclaiming the unknown lives going on within. Beyond my perception, it had billions of lights. It was the Milky Way. Our Milky Way saucer was a vessel of mysterious origin and unknown purpose. Looking beyond our galaxy, I saw billions of other disc-shaped galaxies flying alongside one another in formation, streaking from the Big Bang and into the deepening night. I saw the enormous power of creation that would not stop burning, the light that became life. I saw a great journey out of mystery that left spaces behind but that never left behind mystery. I saw a universe of unidentified beings groping for identity, asking the mountains and the lights in the sky to tell us the secrets of ourselves and our journey, asking because we were unwilling to admit that the universe will forever remain unidentifiable.

Don Lago is the author of three books of creative nonfiction, including On the Viking Trail: Travels in Scandinavian America (University of Iowa Press), and a collection of astronomy essays, Starchild: The Human Meanings of the Big Bang Cosmos. He lives in a cabin in Flagstaff, Arizona.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

P O E T R Y

Michael Bazzett

Somewhere in these broken hills the mountain lion and the deer intersect—maybe the hooves survive maybe not maybe the deer goes slack as a drape: its sash-cord cut— then blood cakes lion’s claw as the magnificent hinge of its jaw opens the deer and steam curls into the cold air. Life and Death the narrator intones, the two words naming the one thing that persists: the deer becomes wise or the deer becomes the lion and words chase endlessly afterwards.

The Florida Center for Instructional Technology

I Was walking past the rock wall when it toppled and flowed liquid away then climbed rough-cut granite like a living rope: I felt it in my stomach a tensile thing a writhing not even snake yet I couldn’t quite find the name until it lay still just for a moment gray-green lank and dusty and the images came: a braided leather whip its head lifted like a thumb but then it was gone into dry grass sawing its way uphill and I was trying to write it down so I could put it in your hands and you’d feel rough skin slipping through your fingers as you flinched.

Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, 32 Poems, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Best New Poets. He is the author of The Imaginary City, recently published in the OW! Arts Chapbook Series, and his verse translation of the Popol Vub is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

E S S A Y

Maple Andrew Taylor

Sister

The Florida Center for Instructional Technology

rail and helplessly embroiled in the morning’s radiant updrafts, tiny winged insects rise like ashes from a fire. Suddenly, violet-green swallows are everywhere, breakfasting on these spiraling bits and bickering sociably. Then come the swifts sssssip sssssip swiping this way and that sssssip sssssip sssssip carving up the sky like little feathered Ninjas. Between these sundrenched rims, across this the sheerest canyon in all North America, is a volume that is anything but a void. It’s like a deep, crystal clear lake teeming with schools of birdfish. Everywhere swifts and swallows, and a thousand feet below pigeons flash into the sunshine from a wall of shadow and disappear as quickly into a hidden cove. Flop flop flopping from rim to rim, a red-shafted flicker seems to follow an invisible suspension bridge, losing elevation halfway across, then gaining it back again. From out of the canyon a redtailed hawk soars effortlessly up an elevator shaft of invisible thermal, gains immense altitude, scarcely beating wing. Across the canyon, up against the pegmatite-streaked and sunlit Painted Wall, a turkey vulture cruises dumbly, its shadow lags behind, catches up, lags behind, catches up. From below—and I hear it now— comes the roar. It is the same sound a passenger jet makes at the far end of the runway, near the end of a long roll, nose wheel light and springy, and pouring over the wings a heinous rage of wind that begins to pull the

heavy brute gently into the air. Twothousand feet straight down, that din. It is hell’s own water, whitely raging over huge falls, disappearing into bizarre suckholes and spiraling, evil vortices. The roar is incessant, pervasive, yet, strangely, unheard at times. It so overwhelms the ears that they, every now and then, simply quit listening. And I forgot again. Forgot to write down what time I began observation. So I estimate and enter some crude data on weather and visibility. Then I scratch: 1 S pefa ob I. Translation: One immature female peregrine falcon observed in eyrie. She has still not left the eyrie, the last of four hatchlings I’ve been observing for three months. And you can’t imagine a more unlikely nursery: a small cave, more like a ledge, about the size of a kitchen stove, twelve-hundred

feet above the river. Her nest mates, the most unbelievable. Homing in on unthree males, developed a little faster, suspecting swift or swallow, pigeon or which is normal, and left the eyrie a duck, the peregrine breaks downward couple of days ago. I did not actually and tucks its wings and streaks through see them fly away, only recorded them the air, more bullet than bird. The wind missing. The chances of seeing them at hisses over feather like a bottle rocket the exact moment they bail out into that and then pop! as fisted talons strike the immerse and teaming void are very prey and then pluck it from mid-air. It slim. But I know they have successfully happens so quickly and at such great done so, and have not met some ill fate, speed that even through binoculars because I’ve seen them perched about one has a difficult time deciphering on the wall and hear often their hungry what one just saw. And how does one wailings. The young even begin—in mere female is considerwords—to document ably larger than the such an occurrence? Homing in on unsuspecting male, and therefore This little, pale takes a bit longer to green book of notes: swift or swallow, pigeon or develop feather and Federal Supply Service duck, the peregrine breaks musculature for flight. (GPO) is printed on downward and tucks its wings the cover. It is a book Yesterday, one of the parents, perhaps the bound just like any and streaks through the air, male of the pair that other, except when more bullet than bird. The incubated and broodnew there’s not a wind hisses over feather like ed these four, flew by single thing printed the entrance of their on any of the pages. a bottle rocket and then pop! little cave and held out as fisted talons strike the prey But now it is ravaged, a freshly caught bird desecrated really, by and then pluck it from mid-air. all manner of abbreto the young female to entice it to fly. The viation and shorthungry hatchling hand. One would wailed and flapped its have a better chance wings and hopped out to the very edge, of translating some ancient scroll than out where the rock looks slippery and these sloppy, terribly inconsistent appears to round off (where I feared scratchings. for weeks that the birds might fatefully Pefa I’ve written in here hundreds plummet), and oh! how it looked like it of times. Short for (pe)regrine (fa)lcon. wanted to fly! The parent, in seeming I could have saved a ton of writing exasperation, dropped the prey to one by going to a pf or even a p. For three of the males perched nearby while the months it’s been consistent, quite an young female, wailing all the while, anomaly in these pages, although when slunk back deep into the nest. I began this log in April, I was meticuThe stunned and broken prey lous in the recording of data, having flapped a wing reflexively as the young been hired by the National Park Service male pecked away at its fresh breast. to do so. Specifically, my job was to find The peregrine’s meal appeared to be a any peregrines that might be nesting in swift and that anything could catch it is the Black Canyon National Monument,

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

E S S A Y locate the exact nesting sites, and docuthan the rest. A female, I suspected. ment reproductive success. I found this Then a week later I documented with nesting pair and, unbelievably, could certainty that there were three males see right into the eyrie. In fact, the angle and one female, and noted so with the from the rim was so perfect that when appropriate male/female symbols. the sun was just right the detail through June 23: translate: Young males appear the spotting scope was incredible. I sufficiently developed to fly. June 27: was, therefore, able to follow the entire translate: Young male peregrines have cycle of reproduction from egg laying left the eyrie sometime during the last through incubation and to hatching, 24 hours. Young female remains. But and got to know the parents and brood, curiously, instead of using the female very well. symbol I write sister; and later in my July now. And hot. I hike the short notes whenever I refer to the female I distance to the vehicle and in fifteen abbreviate sister to simply s. minutes I’m at the concession, sitting This iced tea is good and so is the on a picnic table in the shade thumbbreak from the spotting scope. It will be ing through my notes a long, hot afternoon and sipping iced tea. and I’ll probably have From front to back, the usual headache by then to now, my writ- The young female has been quitting time. ing degrades most Which I do. So I lie testing her wings most of the dramatically, not only day today and spends much back against my backin penmanship, but pack and massage my time near the edge, out where in content too. I must forehead. After hours force myself to make and hours of peering aspiring flight feathers can entries now that I’ve through binoculars feel the currents of wind. It followed these birds and squinting over shouldn’t be long now until for so long, this famthe eyepiece of the ily of faithful parents spotting scope my she leaves the nest. and three brothers eyes are so confused and a sister I’ve come that they fail to focus to know most intinormally for a time. mately. These baby falcons, hatched There it is again. The roar from from orangeish, far-away eggs, became below. Suddenly, like jiggling the short lumps of fluff that looked like tennis out of a stereo speaker wire. I look over balls, a whole nest full beneath the and down and I am overwhelmed with crook’d, shielding wings of the broodthat feeling, that feeling that I’ve goting parents. How quickly they matured ten too comfortable, much too casual as I watched from the far rim. Clean, lounging so near the edge. One careless cottony fluffs grew dingy and began to step, one little bump of rock or turn of waddle about the eyrie, bumping into boot and freefall two-thousand feet. or trying to climb a football-sized rock, The psychology of extreme heights is a rock they would later climb to pracdumbfounding, if not disturbing: one tice flapping and build muscle. moment one is terrified that one is goJune 12: translate: One hatchling ing to fall, the next moment one fights appears to be larger and downier a ghastly urge to simply lift up one’s arms and jump.

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

The young female has been testAfter a time she settles to her perch, ing her wings most of the day today looking almost comfortable. Almost. and spends much time near the edge, And just like that, my job at Serpent out where aspiring flight feathers can Point on the Painted Wall was over. feel the currents of wind. It shouldn’t Sister and her tightly wound, fast little be long now until she leaves the nest. brothers would now learn how to catch Tomorrow, no later than the next day, their own food in games of mid-air she will fly. I have the weekend off and catch with an unlucky swift or swalmust tend to other things, so when I low tossed about by their parents. They return the eyrie will be empty. would soon tuck their wings and dive Ten more minutes of observation fast and hard on a bird flying along and I’ll head back to the truck and call unsuspectingly, crack its spine with it a day. their fisted talons, then either grab it in As I refocus the eyepiece, the young mid-air or follow it down as it spirals female waddles to the precipitous lip brokenly and snags somewhere on of the small cave, grips the edge, and the rock. Just as soon, unbelievably, begins to beat her they would migrate wings, as she has many a thousand miles to times before. But this the tropical forests of They would soon tuck their time she simply lets Mexico where there go and slips right out would be zillions of wings and dive fast and into space. I slap at the hard on a bird flying along little birds to eat and binoculars and find her the living would be unsuspectingly, crack its quickly as she throws easy. out her wings and flies spine with their fisted talons, Sister’s parents from the wall in a short then either grab it in midwould return to the mad circle, then turns Black Canyon in the back towards the sanc- air or follow it down as it spring to nest again, tuary of her eyrie. She but she and her little spirals brokenly and snags struggles to gain back brothers would resomewhere on the rock. the altitude she has just main in Mexico anothlost, and falling desperer year before making ately short, smacks into their way back north. the wall and tumbles wildly down the Back here where they pipped awkrock like a stuffed toy. Just as I’ve given wardly from the encasement of eggshell up on her, knowing most certainly and took their very first breaths. Back that she will plummet brokenly to her here where they comically waddled death, out go her wings and she lifts their first little duck walks and where her body on them and flies! Twenty meone mad crazy instant mere weeks later ters. Come on Sister! Fifty. Go girl! Then they vaulted from that wall twelveinto the wall she veers, and frantically hundred feet above the river and beat beating her wings slops herself onto a their wings and soared for the very first small, jagged perch. Sister struggles to time. Back here where nature hardright herself, turns around once, twice; wired the platform of their gyroscopes then stands very much upright, picking to always return. Back here on the absoat and mending her mangled feathers. lute sheerness of God’s own rock wall,

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

E S S A Y bounded below by the Devil’s own rage of water, where they too must tend a brood of their own, tend it fiercely and unfailingly in perfect partnership with a mate. Of course I wonder about Sister. Did she meet some ill fate on her long and perilous journey south begun only a few weeks after she flew for the very first time? Did she survive her first year and follow that flight plan deeply imbedded in her DNA and meet up with a mate and hatch and fledge a brood of her own? Even though I babysat her from the time she was an orange, faraway egg until her almost fatal first flight, there was nothing I could ever have done to actually help her, watching

her at such great distance. She was always on her own and everything she did she did herself. True, without her parents she wouldn’t have survived even one day. And true, she shared that crowded ledge with three (count ‘em!) little brothers. But ultimately, she was always on her own and in many many ways alone. More though like a single word disconnected from other words by space—before and after, top and bottom—stands alone in a line of a story. But some words, even though they stand alone, hold the power of the whole. That word, in this story, is Sister. That last evening I sat with her until it was too dark to see. Even then I stayed a while.

Maple A. Taylor, currently a writer-editor for the U.S. Forest Service, has worked as an oilfield roustabout, wildlife biologist, and professional backcountry guide and outfitter and river-rat. He lives in the little mountain town of Ouray, Colorado, where he snowboards, trail runs, ice climbs, and races pack burros. Maple’s stories have appeared in American Airlines’ American Way, The Denver Post Empire Magazine, Gray’s Sporting Journal, The National Park Service’s Courier, Sporting Classics, and many other magazines. Among other awards, his work was selected for the 2002 Olympic Arts Festival Land That We Love anthology and shortlisted for the Orvis-Wildbranch Nature Writing Competition.

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

F I C T I O N

Susan DeFreitas

The Circus on 2nd Street

hen Catie met Huckleberry, he was juggling by the side of the street with a rose between his teeth. In that dented bowler hat, busted out corduroy vest, and those dirty Carhartts—held together by nothing more, it seemed, than the patches attached to them—he looked like some seedy sideshow hobo, circa 1920. Which is to say, he looked Susan DeFreitas like Catie’s future bohemian lover. Catie sidled up beside him, cast him what she hoped was a scandalous glance, and asked, “Boy, did you run away with the circus?” He smiled, revealing a slight gap between two front teeth. Catie, for some reason, had always dreamed of having a bohemian lover. Not a boyfriend—she’d had a number of those—but a lover: the kind of person artists and revolutionaries casually introduced to their friends at parties. And not the kind of wannabe frat parties that had characterized her last two years at State College High, but rather, the kind of parties where people wearing nothing but various shades of bright acrylic paint might discuss the essential failures of some noted political theorist while passing around a spliff, the way they did in Europe, or maybe a bottle of wine. Catie had assumed moving West to a school offering such courses as Chomsky: Manufacturing Dissidents and Ecological Issues in Site-Specific Dance would pretty much guarantee her entree into such a scene. But during her first month of classes at Deep Canyon College, she’d encountered nothing more than your run-of-the-mill college keggers and potlucks in crappy houses—such as this house here, at the end of 2nd Street, where some unfortunate furniture had been hauled out among the trees in the front yard. “You know,” she told her bohemian lover, “I’ve always wanted to learn how to juggle.” He launched two pins in the air and caught them behind his back, one after the other, his expression neutral. He said nothing. Which was probably for the best, because what she’d told him wasn’t exactly true.

F I C T I O N Juggling, as far as Catie was concerned, fell into roughly the same category as spelunking and chinchilla breeding, in terms of general interest. What she had, in fact, always wanted to do was: 1) move out West 2) become an artist, and 3) fall in love. She’d pitched Deep Canyon to her parents on the basis of its environmental science program—if they’d caught wind of its rep from the sixties, she knew, they never would have agreed to foot the bill. But here she stood, a bone fide resident of Crest Top, Arizona, and now, having accomplished her first objective, it seemed entirely possible that the dark-eyed boy in the bowler hat might be able to help her accomplish her third, and possibly her second as well. Her bohemian lover launched his third and final juggling pin high in the air. It flashed yellow-green though the cloudless blue, then dropped back toward the earth, landing on his outstretched foot—stalled, miraculously, on his big toe. The boy’s feet were filthy. Somehow, even that seemed charming. With his free hand, he plucked the rose from between his teeth. “There’s a show tonight at the Black Cat,” he told her. “A benefit for the Green.” The Black Cat, as far as Catie knew, was an avant-garde dance troupe, and the Green, the new campus commons. But then, just as she was about to open her mouth and embarrass herself, she spied it, a sign beside the house at the end of 2nd Street, half-hidden by the weedy trees: The Black Cat Infoshop. “Very cool,” she said, in a way that she hoped didn’t sound too eager. “I’m Catie, by the way.” “Huckleberry.” Huckleberry was holding that rose delicately between one thumb and forefinger now, his wrist turned elegantly out. For a moment Catie thought he might reach out and hand it to her, or at least extend his hand. But her future lover simply tucked that limp red rose into his breast pocket, kicked the pin on his foot high overhead, and started the same routine all over again. Catie had started off with a dressy top, then thrown that aside in favor of a turtleneck, then dismissed that as too Midwestern. She stood before herself now in the T-shirt from the vacation she’d taken with her dad when she was ten, the summer her parents had separated, the summer he’d taken her to see the circus in Madison Square. On the front of this shirt, a silkscreened elephant teetered atop a tiny chair, juggling with a blond majorette who Catie had always thought looked like her, but skinnier. The image seemed appropriate, considering the way she and Huckleberry had met, but really, who knew what you were supposed to wear to things like this?

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

She could have asked Jenna for advice, but all her roommate ever wore was jeans and flannels and boots. How the girl dressed like a lumberjack and still had to fend off male attention every time she left the house was beyond Catie. Jenna, the straight-A soil science major in her second semester, whom Catie’s mom had loved—for her laugh, maybe, the way everyone did, but also for her secondhand furniture and potholders and slotted spoons and whatever else Catie’s mother had been terrified she would have to do without here at 737 Sun Street, some three thousand miles away from home. The fact that Deep Canyon didn’t have dorms had been a major sticking point for her, as had the neighborhood, which was maybe a little seedy (Catie preferred to think of it as diverse). But no one could argue with the fact that it was cheap: the rent on her actual room in this actual house ran a hundred bucks under her sister’s dorm at State, which was roughly the size of the Ford Fiesta Catie had left to rust in their parents’ garage. She could ride her bike in Crest Top year round—something you’d have to be off your meds to attempt in central PA—saving further cash on gas. So what if her tuition was more expensive? Catie stepped outside and marshaled her bike around the side of the house, then set sail into the blue wash of twilight. She rolled past the house bounded by leaning sunflowers, a string of Tibetan prayer flags swaying gently on its porch. Past the Hispanic guys barbecuing off the back of their truck in the apartment building parking lot. The old dude who always sat out smoking Old Golds in the lawn chair in front of his old trailer lifted a hand to Catie as she passed, and she waved back, weaving her way through a tangle of kids on bikes; they called goodnatured obscenities to one another, ignoring her. This was her neighborhood, her mountain town, her funky Shangri-La. Barely two months had passed since she’d landed, but already, it felt like home. Autumn here didn’t smell the way it did back home, but in the gathering darkness, something in it was the same. The dry leaves crunching beneath her tires, the wind in her face, increasingly crisp; the sense of small shadows darting away at the periphery of vision. October now, coming on Halloween, and she could feel it—the sense that some new thing was possible. Catie spied the house at the end of 2nd Street. Round orange lanterns had been hung from the trees now, a glowing constellation of moons. A crowd had gathered on the broken-down couches and easy chairs out front; the sagging front porch was now a stage. Catie pulled to a stop as quietly as possible, her brakes squealing slightly, and leaned her bike against a pile-up of secondhand cruisers beside the fence. She made her way to an open spot in the crowd and settled cross-legged in the dirt. A girl in an old-fashioned striped bathing suit and a black skullcap stood at the head of the front porch steps, cradling a ukulele.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

F I C T I O N This was the very tall, flat-chested girl with the Olive-Oyl hair Catie had seen somewhere on campus, eating with chopsticks from a container of sprouts, looking lonely and awkward and odd. But then the girl struck a chord on the ukulele and started to sing, her voice high and tinny like a Smithsonian recording, and suddenly, she was beautiful. Catie recognized faces in the crowd, but no one she knew well enough to approach. Irene and Nadia sat like queens in the front row, their dreadlocks pinned up in matching crowns, wearing pink sateen dressing gowns that might have belonged to someone’s mother. They’d come from San Francisco as a couple, she knew, and were TAing a class called Ecofeminism and the Social Justice Movements of the Americas. Catie scanned for Huckleberry—casually at first, but then in earnest. The only bowler in evidence belonged to a guy with a dark unibrow, taped-together glasses, and an anxious expression. Her eye kept snagging on him in the crowd, and she realized now he was watching her. As quietly as possible, Catie extracted herself from the audience, stuffed a dollar in the jug marked Save the Green, and made her way through the thin trees, the orange lanterns and the fairy lights, down a path composed of broken concrete and mosaics into the still and the dark. Lights flickered in an outbuilding beside a tree. Was there a party going on back here? Catie blinked and adjusted her contacts, and the grainy interplay of light and dark resolved itself into what appeared to be an old Super 8 movie, playing in a shed behind the house. The shed proved empty except for a series of grotesques: the giant head of an Easter rabbit had been mounted to a pair of pajamas and strung up on a coat-rack, a bloody red splotch over its heart; a papiermâché polar bear rearing out of a backpack appeared to be engaged in some sort of tortured yoga pose. A flock of foam birds with surprised eyes hovered beside the door, bits of plastic garbage bags and pop-tops tangled up in their legs. A spectral projection played on a sheet rigged up to the far wall of the shed. Catie hovered at the threshold. The projector clicked beside her, running through footage from what seemed like some kind of protest. A swarm of people chanted soundlessly, thrusting signs: No Globalization without Representation, and No Farms No Food. They surged forward, as if breaking through some final line of resistance, only to be thrown back by a phalanx of police officers in riot gear with water cannons. The protesters retreated in a rush; one large, elderly woman who might have been Catie’s kindergarten teacher fell and was lost in the crowd, and the whole thing started over again. A branch snapped behind her. A little man stood in the shadows, just beyond the door of the shed. “Hey,” Catie said, shivering. She still forgot sometimes how fast the temperature could drop in Crest Top after dark. “I believe that’s some footage from Seattle,” the little man told her, stepping closer.

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

It took her a moment to realize he was referring to the film. “That’s cool,” she said. Except, obviously, it wasn’t; in this film, people were getting blasted with water cannons. She tried again. “What’s up with the puppets?” The man stepped into the light of the doorway—careful, she saw, to maintain a comfortable distance from her, mindful of her space. He wore his hoodie oversized, like a student, but his beard was streaked with gray. “The puppets are for the protest on Monday.” “The protest?” “To save the Green.” Hadn’t she seen something on a flyer in the mailroom about this protest on Monday? Something about an endangered lizard? “Is that,” she asked, “kind of a big deal around here?” “It is kind of a big deal,” he told her, as if this were some very intelligent question on her part. “Have you ever been to the headwaters of the Green River?” “No. I just got here, actually. To Crest Top.” “Hey,” he said, “welcome.” He smiled. “You know what? I lived in the Pacific Northwest for a long time, and they’ve got some pretty rivers up here. But the headwaters of the Green, as far as I’m concerned, is the most beautiful place on the face of the earth.” “No shit.” This, too, was not the right thing to say. She knew it, somehow, but she didn’t know why. Was it just because people out here didn’t swear as much as people back home? Or because she felt like she should already know all of this? “Driving north toward Paulden, it’s just this dry, brown ranchland full of scrub oak. Then you take a left turn down a little two track and all of it turns to green. A few minutes later you’re surrounded by these giant cottonwood trees that lead down to the river. If you stand in the current, you can catch a glimpse sometimes of this little striped salamander with golden eyes that’s one of the rarest creatures in the world. Giant blue dragonflies just cruise the corridor. Herons, kingfishers, golden eagles, swifts. All kinds of birds. All kinds of everything.” “That sounds amazing.” “It is amazing.” A fleet of moths had gathered in the beam of the projector, obscuring the film footage. For a few seconds, Catie and this little man, whose name she did not know, stood together in the shadows. The dim light seemed to soften the expressions of the puppets in the shed before them. The rabbit looked more heartbroken than hunted; the polar bear might simply have been caught in the process of standing up; the round white eyes of the birds were almost comical. The man blinked as a moth landed on his cheek. “I’m sorry,” he said, “My name is Dyson.” “Catie.” “It’s good to know you, Catie.”

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

F I C T I O N The way Dyson said it, she felt as if he meant it—that she, in particular, was a good person to know. He smiled, and the crow’s feet beside his eyes disappeared. Dyson had kind eyes that drooped at the edges, like her father’s. He seemed about to tell her something, something important, when the roof of the shed above them compressed and decompressed in sharp little pops and cracks. A cat, maybe—or a large raccoon?—was walking along the spine of the roof. The clicking of the film projector seemed to pause just long enough for Huckleberry, bowler in hand, to drop to the earth beside them. He rose to his feet and flicked the brim of the hat up along the inside of one arm, into the crook of an elbow, and—in one smooth motion—up and onto his head. “Huck,” said Dyson. “Nice of you to drop in.” Huck acknowledged this poor pun with a lift of one eyebrow—clearly it didn’t deserve two—and inclined the brim of his bowler in Catie’s direction. “I take it you’re acquainted.” Was it Catie, or did she detect some note of amusement in Dyson’s voice? “Mildly,” said Huck. He smiled. “Very mildly.” Catie had the feeling Huckleberry could somehow tell her ponytail, casually mussed, had in fact been the end-product of various other failed attempts in front of the mirror that evening. Her Levis seemed now suddenly too tight, her child-sized T-shirt seasonally inappropriate. “Are you coming with us on Monday?” Huckleberry asked her. Monday. To the protest. “Maybe.” She hesitated. “I have class.” Huckleberry glanced at Dyson and grinned that gap-toothed grin; the whiff of condescension was as palpable as a sudden pocket of humidity. Catie wondered, how old was Huck? Twenty-two, maybe? Twenty-four? Dyson cleared his throat. “I left you a little something.” At first, Catie thought he was talking to her. But no, of course not. He was talking to Huck. “What’s the occasion?” “No occasion.” Huck held Dyson’s gaze. Something heavy seemed to settle between them. Finally, the little man with her father’s eyes made a gentle motion, as if wiping away a tear, and a moth flew off into the night. This moment, clearly, had nothing to do with Catie. But she wasn’t willing to just leave them alone to talk about whatever it was they weren’t talking about because she was there. The sky through the branches of the tree overhead was clear, glittering with stars. The harvest moon was swollen and golden, like a moon in a movie. On the front porch stage, someone spoke, and the audience erupted in laughter. Catie imagined what her sister Rachel was doing right now: probably blowing dirt weed into a Pringles can stuffed with dryer sheets,

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

just like they had back home. Or making out in her dorm, maybe, with some dumb jock with bad breath. Whereas she, Catie, was here at this bohemian party full of beautiful people—people who were beautiful not because they were trying to be beautiful, but because they believed in something. She tried to think of something interesting to say. About how cool it was that Dyson and Huck were using puppets at a political protest; how she’d once acted in a stage production of Silent Spring; how her whole family was hardcore into saving the earth. She simply couldn’t imagine that she’d arrived at this moment—this moment that was everything she’d imagined back home, making asinine small-talk at yet another suburban sleeper—just to stand there, stupidly, like Rachel, who dreamt of nothing more than one day becoming a dental hygienist. Another moment passed in silence. At that point, it probably didn’t even matter what she said; if Catie didn’t speak, she’d disappear. She turned to Huckleberry and said the first thing that came to mind. “Where did you come from?” “Me?” He fingered the back of an earlobe. “I come from Kentucky, ma’am.” Dyson chuckled. “No, I mean, just now. How’d you get up there?” Huckleberry gently opened his hand, as if releasing a dove, and all three of them, at the same time, looked up. They stood nearly beneath a tall, bare-limbed tree—it took Catie’s eyes a few moments to adjust, but then she saw it: a tree house hung just south of the golden moon. She could just make out its open door and slanted roof. “Are you fucking serious?” Was there really even a little window up there, and a little potted plant on a little windowsill? The image of it washed over her in some woozy déjà vu. Huck cast a glance at Dyson, that look that tried to say something, whatever it was. But Catie didn’t care. The little house perched in the tree above them was her childhood fantasy and adolescent longing all rolled up into one. It was—somehow, without knowing it—what she had wanted her whole life. In volunteering to help Dyson at the Black Cat, Catie realized, she had assumed that Huckleberry would be there. But when she arrived on Thursday after class, the only other people making puppets were Nadia and Irene, Olive Oyl and Unibrow, and a stand-offish girl with bleach-blond, punked-out hair named Michele. They were set up in the front yard, dipping strips of newspaper into buckets of papier mâché and pasting them onto the chicken wire frame of a giant puppet. The mâché was only flour and water, but it was cold and slimy and looked like someone had puked up oatmeal. After an hour or so, Catie halfdecided to bail.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

F I C T I O N Instead she wandered the Black Cat, which appeared to be a kind of anarchist lending library set up in someone’s house. Handmade zines were filed alongside paperbacks and hardcovers on shabby bookshelves presiding over various pouchy couches and easy chairs. Catie selected a book entitled Art and Revolution: Milosevic and the Politics of Passion wedged on a shelf between Food Preservation for Everyone and Our Bodies, Ourselves. She was signing her name and number on the clipboard at the self-service station when she glimpsed Dyson in the kitchen with Michele. Michele, a figure drawn tight, folded into herself, elbows and cheekbones all set at sharp angles; the ring through her septum gave her child’s face, oddly, the severity of late middle age. Dyson spoke in low, soothing tones. Something about the way the two of them stood, leaning against the counters, their proximity—were they a couple? Dyson must have been pushing forty, and Michele—how old was Michele? Not much older than Catie. And yet, Catie understood, they lived here. The Black Cat was their place. Back out front, Olive Oyl (whose name was Trinity) and Unibrow (whose name was Jonas) were working together on a ragged deer composed of recycled produce boxes. They sat quietly beside their misshapen creation, their pale hands occasionally intersecting as they reached for a paintbrush or marker. When Catie returned to her spot beside them, they looked up, thin-faced and startled, like does. Bike brakes squealed to a halt in the driveway beside them and there was Huck, towing a box labeled Food Not Bombs loaded with squash. Huck, in those same stained Carhardts, that same corduroy vest. He loosened the bungees from the bike trailer, hoisted the box aloft, and dazzled her with a brief smile before disappearing into the house. “Darlin’, that boy ain’t nothing but trouble.” This was Irene, stuffing nylon pantyhose with soft foam. She and Nadia sat on the couch in the front yard working, their dreads tied up in bright scarves, like African queens. “Why’s that?” Catie asked. Irene drew the pantyhose tight around the foam, twisting it shut like a garbage bag. “Because he’s a boy.” “Duh.” Nadia grinned. “You could save yourself some heartache. Play for the home team.” Irene pulled a threaded needle through the pantyhose as she spoke, creating an indentation in the stuffed form. Personally, Catie didn’t know if she had what it took to play for the home team, but she watched, fascinated, as Irene repeated the same motion and, magically, two eye-sockets appeared in the flesh-colored nylon. Nadia asked if Catie wanted to help. Digging a set of paints out of the box of art supplies, Catie felt a kind of hum in her chest. Remembering the way she’d felt as a kid, smearing slick globs of green over a sheet of butcher paper, and later in high school, racing the bell to finish a portrait. She thought of her parents,

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

their crazy-making inconsistencies. True, they were hardcore into saving the earth, but saving the earth, for Catie’s parents, was all about money—where they spent it, and who they gave it to. Her dad, maybe, had been different once, but he’d toed the line to save his marriage. That glimpse they’d had of the circus that summer, when he’d told her she could do anything, be anything—like the beautiful Russian lady on the trapeze—was long gone. Like Catie’s mom, he preached against materialism and wanted Catie to “find her own path,” but as soon as she’d brought up art school, he’d started going on about job security and health insurance. Hence, her mandatory major in environmental science. Science, which was nice and middle-classy—environmental, which would help to alleviate some of that privileged middle class guilt. She caught up with Huck the night before the protest, dumping the congealed globs of papier mâché in the compost behind the Cat. “Psst, Huck,” she said, glancing around. “I’ve got a proposition for you.” He cast her a sidelong glance. “I’ve got some seedless Humboldt rolled up in my pocket.” Catie leaned in closer. “I’ll smoke you out if you show me your tree house.” They stood for a moment beside the stinking compost pile in the descending dusk, the slick mass of papier mâché still quivering between them. Whether Huck was considering her proposition or her, personally, Catie couldn’t tell. She had no idea if he even smoked, but it had seemed worth a shot. “All right,” he said, finally. “It’s a deal.” It took her a second to realize he was offering his hand. She reached out and took it, and there they were, shaking, like Bugs and Daffy in the dark. Later that evening, Catie stood in the backyard of The Black Cat watching as Huckleberry ascended the tree. He grabbed hold of the lowest branch, then reached up and caught the next behind his knees, like a trapeze artist. From there he sat up, grasped the top branch, and swung out onto the platform of the tree house. A moment later he let down a rope ladder, and a little thrill passed through her, like a bass beat. The tree house was smaller inside than she’d imagined. By the light of a Coleman lantern, hung from a nail, she could make out a little shelf with exactly two books on it: Jonathan Livingston Seagull and A Natural History of the Mountain West. An internal frame backpack lay propped against a wall, and next to that, a guitar case. All Huckleberry seemed to possess by way of furniture was a futon mattress covered in a wellworn quilt and an old steamer trunk. What did you expect? Catie asked herself. A kitchen table? He was watching her, she realized. Not in a ’you’re-so-pretty way,’ but not in a bad way either. “This is awesome,” she said, plopping down on the mattress. “Did you build this place?”

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

F I C T I O N “Me and Dyson.” Catie leaned back and rummaged around in her jeans pocket. “Fuck. You don’t have a lighter, do you?” “Maybe.” He popped the latch on the steamer trunk and felt along its inside lining. “No worries.” And quicker than thought he was out the door, dropping onto the roof of the shed. From the tree house window, Catie watched him disappear into the Black Cat. If Dyson and Michelle were home, she couldn’t tell. Huck’s quilt was composed of fraying denim panels covered in an intricate tree that must have taken someone hours to embroider. The denim marked up with Sharpie, in what appeared to be peoples’ names: Nolie, Scatch, Erik the Redd, Lillith, Foghorn, Unis. His crew from who knows where. Moths flittered helplessly around the lantern, and Catie realized, a moment later, the steamer trunk was still propped open. She found a few old notebooks inside, some yellowed love letters in looping cursive script, and some photographs of Huck with what must have been his mom. Also, two boxes of what appeared to be old zines. Their edges were dog-eared, but their Xeroxed print remained bold and clear. All the zines were consecutive issues of a single title, Caterwaul. Page after page, all in the same block letters, typewriter type, and photocopied illustrations. Caterwaul contained a guide to eating free in most major U.S. cities, legal information for avoiding arrest, and a basic bike repair primer, along with what appeared to be internal memos from oil and timber companies and detailed maps of hydraulic pumping stations on various Western rivers. Catie glanced around before digging deeper in the stack, where she found issue number fifty-four, a special edition with a special heading: How to Set Fires Using Electrical Timers. Catie paged through it, squinting in the light of the lantern. It looked so innocuous, this recipe, like instructions for a science experiment. But this science was not nice, nor was it middle-classy; her parents wouldn’t have liked it at all. Catie flipped farther, through the pages of instructions and illustrations, remembering high school chemistry. The colors of the flames on the Bunsen burner, blue and yellow and pale lemongreen. The sense that certain basic elements in fact wanted to explode. She felt the same way about this recipe: it too wanted to explode. It wanted to explode over and over again, in different places and at different times, and maybe it already had. Catie placed the special edition carefully back in order with the other zines, shut the trunk, and settled on the bed. A moment later, Huckleberry swung soundlessly back in through the door. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you up top.” For a moment, clinging to a limb of the tree, Catie thought she might faint, but Huckleberry was patient, offering his hand or even sometimes his knee as a step when she couldn’t reach the next branch. Eventually

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

they arrived at a packing pallet tied high in the branches with a thick red length of climbing rope. “Is this where you sleep at night?” she asked him. They were sitting on the North Face bag stretched out on the platform. “Unless it’s raining.” Huckleberry, it seemed, was a man of few words. She decided to take that as a yes, as it hadn’t rained once since she’d arrived in August. He handed her the lighter and she sparked off the joint, taking a long drag and handing it to him. The dry weed pulled harder than she’d anticipated, and she coughed. “You’re pretty good at climbing trees,” she said, finally. He licked a finger and moistened a spot where the bright red cherry was running. “I used to live in a tree.” “A different tree?” “A bigger tree.” “Where?” He exhaled the word: “Headwaters.” It came back to her, from her Environmental Justice class that semester: Julia Butterfly Hill, the activist who’d protested the clear-cutting of old growth in Headwaters National Forest. Julia Butterfly Hill, who’d lived high in a redwood tree for 208 days straight. Julia Butterfly Hill, the activist who’d saved the thousand-year-old tree redwood named Luna, and succeeded in getting ten acres of the last remaining North American old growth protected in perpetuity. Reading about this woman’s heroic act—Julia Butterfly Hill had always seemed a woman to her, even though she hadn’t been much older than Catie at the time—she’d seemed so impossibly brave and beautiful, so selfless. But now, sitting here with Huckleberry, Catie could see how simple it must have been, really, how peaceful. To just decide what you stand for, and refuse to come down. “Was it quiet up there?” “Aside from the chainsaws and helicopters, yeah.” Catie blinked, her contacts fogging. “I’d love to live in a tree.” Huckleberry was staring off into the darkness now. The two of them were simply suspended there, floating. “I used to climb this tree when I was a kid,” she told him. “Just in my folks’ backyard, you know, but sometimes I used to sit up there and pretend I was an owl, and that the day was really night, but I could see, because I had super night vision.” “That’s cool.” “Did you climb trees in Kentucky?” she asked. “My mom tells me I climbed most anything around.” She thought maybe he’d go on, but he didn’t. So she just sat beside him in the dark, on a packing pallet strapped to a tree, high on Humboldt greenbud, thinking of Huckleberry, high in his redwood tree. Unencumbered by society or parental expectations. Probably his folks thought what he was doing was great. They were probably behind him all the way. SPRING/SUMMER 2014

F I C T I O N “So what do you do for…” She couldn’t think of a good way to ask what he did for money. Maybe there was no good way to ask. “Street performing, mostly.” Duh. Had she really thought he’d learned all those tricks just to get girls? “Did you always know you wanted to do that? Like, deep down?” He kept quiet a moment. “Not exactly.” “But it’s cool, right?” “Cool enough.” “Have you and Dyson been friends a long time?” “Catie.” “Yeah?” “Check it out.” Huckleberry lay back on the sleeping bag. She lay down beside him, careful to touch him only a little, and only in a way that was clearly accidental. She blinked. Above them, the Milky Way was so distinct through the bare branches that Catie thought at first it was a cloud, hazy and drifting through the night. But there were no clouds, and no humidity here in the high desert; no nothing in between them and the vast vault of the heavens but miles of empty air. “That’s…” she tried to conjure a word. “Incredible.” “Rent’s not bad either.” She laughed at this, feeling comfortable, just lying there next to him in the dark, not touching. But then another moment passed and it made her want to scream. There were limits, Catie realized, to what she would do for love. She might flirt with a boy she had only just met on the street. She might insinuate herself into his world and not quite tell him the truth, sometimes, to make herself look more interesting. She might even bum a joint off of her roommate and invite herself over to his place to smoke it. But she would not take his hand, lying beside him in the dark. She would not kiss him first. Somehow, just knowing this made her feel better about herself. “I saw a guitar case in your tree house. Do you sing?” “Yes, ma’am.” “Well, then, Huckleberry, sing me a song.” He cleared his throat, and for a moment she wasn’t sure he would. But then his voice opened up around them. The song he’d chosen was a song she knew, by Gillian Welch—a long song, stretched out, she imagined, in the circular rhythms of traveling and longing and sitting in the woods by yourself for days and months on end. If this song were a color, it would have been the blue wash of twilight tinged with red. If this song were a shape, it would have been a circle, returning to itself in different ways, over and over gain. Catie knew it was not really her Huckleberry was singing to, but it didn’t matter. For the time it took him to sing this song, she was the girl

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

he loved, maybe, the girl with the cursive handwriting who’d written the letters in his trunk. Gillian Welch’s raw clawhammer and husky whiskey voice had sustained Catie through bouts of heartache and homesick and crushing self-doubt over those past two months. She’d put on Revelator sometimes late at night and smear the canvas with the ugliest colors she could find—dark browns and yellows and pinks—until she didn’t feel scared about it anymore: being an artist. Until she could feel her parents’ fear of poverty, her own fear of mediocrity, break apart inside her and dissolve. Huckleberry was silent a long moment when he finished, and Catie thought maybe he might kiss her then. Or even just take her hand. But he didn’t, so she lay there in the dark that was coming on cold, and would soon be freezing, under the stars, which seemed suddenly cliché, with her hands shoved deep in her pockets and her toes going numb. A part of her thought, it’s okay, we’re just getting to know each other. But another part of her understood, intuitively, this was as close as they would ever come. A month later, she’d almost managed to forget about him. This was after the protest in Flagstaff, after Trinity and Jonas had officially become an item, and after Halloween—after Catie had kissed a girl for the first time, and hooked up with Kyle, the sad-eyed boy from her Environmental Justice class. After Thanksgiving Break, after the networks called Ohio for Bush. Catie returned home one Saturday morning to find those two boxes of Caterwaul sitting on her bed, and beside them, a single, wilted rose. Catie lived on the second floor of the house she shared with Jenna. Jenna, as far as she knew, had spent the night there, and Catie had just let herself in with the key. Which meant the house had been locked. She stepped to the open window, examining the tangle of branches outside—the way those branches hung over a long drainpipe, which might be accessible, for the right person, from the ground. Catie had a sense not of foreboding then, but of despair, like the morning after the election. Like whatever was happening had already happened. She could hear Jenna tromping up the stairs behind her, and a moment later, her roommate stood in the doorway, chewing a fingernail. “Catie, did you hear?” The rest of Jenna’s nails, Catie could see, had already been whittled to the nub. “Hear what?” “The FBI raided the Black Cat last night.” “No shit.” “That guy Dyson apparently burned down some timber mills in the Northwest back in the day. They’re calling everyone on the Cat’s mailing list.” Jenna lowered her voice, as if the room were tapped. “Are you—I mean, are we on their mailing list?”

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

F I C T I O N Catie nodded slowly, feeling the pieces of everything in motion falling down around her. “Catie? You all right?” Catie was not all right. Not at all. But she knew what she would do. She would load up those two boxes of zines—including special issue number fifty-four—in the milk-crate on the back of her bike. She would sail silently through the sun over the cracked concrete of the barrio, past 2nd Street, and up the road to school. She would climb the stairs to the obscure third floor of the Deep Canyon College library, balancing one box on each hand, a wilted rose between her teeth. There she would take those dog-eared zines and place them gently on a shelf between back issues of the old Earth First Journal and The Early American Train Circus, or whatever it is that sat next to it. She would pause, and take Huckleberry’s rose from between her teeth. She would place it delicately behind her ear. No one would be here to observe this, she knew. But in that moment, she would be beautiful. And when they called her, if they called her—this ominous ’they,’ with their tired routine—Catie would tell them she’d met Dyson Lathe, or whatever his name was, at a party once, like everyone else. If they inquired about Huck, she would tell them she’d never known anyone by that name. And she would look these people in the eye as she said it. She would say the words with such conviction that even she would believe it.

Susan DeFreitas’s work has been (or will be) featured in Southwestern American Literature, Sin Fronteras, The Bear Deluxe, and Bayou Magazine. "The Circus on 2nd Street" is from her novel-in-stories, World’s Smallest Parade. She holds a MFA from Pacific University and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she serves as an editor with Indigo Editing & Publications.

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

P O E T R Y

Tim Bellows

Thoughts Viewing Antelope with Marcy

The Florida Center for Instructional Technology

Creatures on this green world, grant us our lives. Ordain us to western sun and air to the degree that we listen with inborn tunefulness— even as we walk chosen paths and listen for pronghorns at the forest edge. This is the way our self that sees in the dark finds itself made of moon-soil, maybe made for dwelling in leafed hollows, in woodlands of wonder and good rest. May we submit to each glimpse we catch of handsome animals. May each strike our eyes with hidden forces, balms, even the weeping joy of love’s late talk. Let’s plan to put off the chores in garage and bath. As we wake mornings to songs pledged to spinet, lute and frame drum. Clean tunes celebrating long-legged creatures who roam, who suggest garlands to our minds.

P O E T R Y Let’s sing well and strangely bless their fawn-colored upper parts, pale undersides, necks long, tan, and tasty to our startled spirits. Let’s go with the unwavering fire and high art of their fleet steps ‘round dumb rocks on these open lands. Legs quick and belly furred explain innocence, explain the animal mind clean as fast waters. And so goes our morning ride in the guide’s military jeep; and so our sighting of easy beasts, who prompt thoughts born white. We watch, eager for this day that will not be raped as the wind wakes itself with perfect conviction, weaving its silken cloaks easily around beasts and all willing bodies walking, loping, bounding along this earth world.

Tim teaches writing at Sierra College in Northern California. His focus tends to be on the spiritual and earthy dimensions of poetry, innovative thought, and crucial tips for writers. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s published work in over 200 literary journals. His newest release is Citrus & Green. His poems also appear in Desert Wood: An Anthology of Nevada Poets, and in Wild Stars (Starry Puddle Press). M. HU.

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

A R T

Katie Lee Koven

Memory and the Materialities of Salt— A Conversation with Motoi Yamamoto

Rick Rhodes

Labyrinth, Solo Exhibition—Return to the Sea: Salt Works by Motoi Yamamoto, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC, Salt, 7 x 7 m, 2006.

Born in Onomichi, Hiroshima (Japan), in 1966, Motoi Yamamoto is an internationally renowned salt artist who earned a B.A. from Kanazawa College of Art in 1995. He has exhibited his award-winning creations around the globe in such cities as Athens, Cologne, Jerusalem, Mexico City, Seoul, Tokyo, and Toulouse. He was awarded the Philip Morris Art Award in 2002, as well as a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2003. Although he participated in a group exhibition that same year at New York’s P.S. 1 gallery, his work has yet to be widely seen in the United States. Weber State University’s Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery will host Return to the Sea: Saltworks Feb. 24 – April 12, 2014, a traveling exhibition of new work that includes drawings, paintings, sketchbooks and a video about the artist’s process. Central to the exhibition will be Mr. Yamamoto creating one of his salt installations over a ten-day period in the Gallery. Katie Lee Koven, former Director of the Shaw Gallery, is excited to host Mr. Yamamoto and this solo exhibition of his work, having worked with him in 2007 as part of a group exhibition of emerging, contemporary Japanese artists. This traveling exhibition is organized by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina. A special thanks to Tazuko Nakano Olson, Ph.D., Adjunct Faculty in Foreign Languages, and Kenta Miyoshi, a recent alumna of Weber State University, for their assistance with translating this interview.

Stefan Worring

Labyrinth, Solo Exhibition—Salz, Kunst-Station St. Peter, Cologne, Germany, Salt, Diameter 12 m, 2010. 88

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

Stefan Worring

Labyrinth, Solo Exhibition—Salz, Kunst-Station St. Peter, Cologne, Germany, Salt, Diameter 12 m, 2010. SPRING/SUMMER 2014

Motoi, can you tell us about yourself—where you grew up, your age, and where you studied art? I am 47 years old. I studied art at Kanazawa College of Art in Kanazawa, Japan. I was born in Hiroshima in 1966. My parents had a small motorcycle shop. When I was a child, I watched the oil bottles for making oil being mixed and poured for motorcycles every day at my parents’ store. So, when I was thinking about drawing on the floor with salt, I remembered those bottles.

What kinds of materials were you working with before working with salt? What was it about salt, as a material, that you were interested in? I studied oil painting in college. Before salt I used wood, concrete, acrylic paint, grass, plastic—every conceivable material. At Kanazawa, I made mostly two-dimensional works, but when my sister became ill, my work changed direction and moved more toward installation.

I know that you began working with salt after your sister passed away. Why did you select salt as your medium? The first reason I selected salt is because of the role of salt in funerals. In traditional Japanese culture, salt is revered as a valuable commodity that represents wholeness and purification; it represents tradition in Japanese life. Salt also suggests an interconnectedness with all living things, the connection between life and death. At the time, I had a hard time blending my work in with the structure and the systems of traditional Japanese funerals.

Does working with salt have the same meaning to you as it did when you started working with it?

Stefan Worring

Sakura-Cherry Blossom, Solo Exhibition—Mikiko Sato Gallery, Hamburg, Germany, Salt, 2009.

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

Stefan Worring

Sakura-Cherry Blossom, Solo Exhibition—Mikiko Sato Gallery, Hamburg, Germany, Salt, 2009 (detail).

In traditional Japanese culture, salt is revered as a valuable commodity that represents wholeness and purification; it represents tradition in Japanese life. Salt also suggests an interconnectedness with all living things, the connection between life and death.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

When I started working with salt, I only thought about myself—how can I overcome my sister’s death? At the funeral they used the salt, and I became fascinated by its crystal clearness and its translucence. Eventually, my perspective broadened. One of the major differences between now and then is that, at that time, I didn’t consider what other people thought about the salt. Now I care about people’s perception of the work.

When you are creating your salt installations, what are you thinking about? Any particular thoughts or thought processes? It is a nothingness I feel. I differentiate between what I am thinking of or what I am doing with what I want to be thinking about, or what I want to be doing. I want to trace particular memories with salt, typically a precious moment with my sister. I really want to see my sister in my memories. That is why I concentrate on nothingness—in order to try to see her.

Is it almost like a meditation? My purpose is meditation, but I don’t know if I am actually meditating. As well, when—during the creative process—I am interacting with the audience watching me, say, by answering questions for instance, I am naturally not meditating.

Often you are making work where there is an audience. It obviously affects you when people are present. Do you prefer to work alone or with people present? I am comfortable either way. When I am alone and meditating, the creative process tends to be much easier. However, since I am trying to convey a message about what I am trying to create, having an audience watching me can also be facilitating.

Can you tell us a bit about your process for each salt piece. For instance, how do you determine the design of the overall piece in relationship to the place? I essentially favor two types of design, a labyrinth or a swirl. For the labyrinth, I do not need to predesign everything; I can design some of it as I go. For the swirl, I actually draw it out ahead of time.

Do you intuitively translate these designs from a small scale to a large scale? How do you achieve that? First, I draw it on a small piece of paper and then I translate it to a large piece of paper and place corresponding marks on the floor. Day by day I record and check what I have made to make sure it is correct.

What do you hope viewers take away after seeing one of your salt installations? The salt came from the ocean. I want viewers to help return the salt to the ocean, and the salt then can come back to me.

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

Rick Rhodes

Labyrinth, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC, Salt, 7 x 7 m, 2006.

If you could create one of your salt pieces anywhere in the world, where would it be? Hmm… Salt Lake City. (Laughter) Possibly my hometown, Onomichi. I made a piece 7-8 years ago for my hometown. The installation in my hometown was an opportunity to rediscover precious memories that had been forgotten in my web of memories and pursue them further in my artwork. A hometown has a unique and special place in our hearts, especially for the ones who live away from it. Everything that exists in my hometown has some kind of connection to my memories—narrow alleys, crumbling old signs, the whistle of ferry boats—everything has a special place in my heart.

What is the most challenging aspect about working with salt? It’s definitely humidity. I go to humid climates so that the qualities and the behavior of the salt changes. I take any opportunity that I can to work with those challenges. When I started my work, I didn’t think about the material qualities of salt, but now I appreciate its peculiarities all the more. Makoto Morisawa

Forest of the Skyscraper, Solo Exhibition—To the White Forest, The Hakone Open-Air Museum, Kanagawa, Japan, Salt, 3.45 m x 2.6 m, July 2011 March 2012.

Rick Rhodes

Floating Garden, Solo Exhibition—Return to the Sea: Salt Works by Motoi Yamamoto, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC, Salt, 10 m x 8 m, 2012. 94

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

Makoto Morisawa

Forest of Beyond, Solo Exhibition—To the White Forest, The Hakone Open-Air Museum, Kanagawa, Japan, Salt, 16.5 m x 16 m, July 2011 - March 2012. SPRING/SUMMER 2014

Floating Garden, Solo Exhibition—Return to the Sea: Salt Works by Motoi Yamamoto, Laband Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Salt, 10 m x 8 m, 2012. 96

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

Any advice or words of wisdom you would give to young artists today? I cannot advise in general. What I know is—find something you enjoy and are skillful at. I’ve now reached the point of concentrating at what I am good at because I have gradually eliminated, one by one, what I am not good at.

Floating Garden, Solo Exhibition—Return to the Sea: Salt Works by Motoi Yamamoto, Laband Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Salt, 10 m x 8 m, 2012.

Brian Nicholson

Katie Lee Koven was the Director of the Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery at Weber State University at the time of this interview. She now directs the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University. Her particular interest is exploring ways to make contemporary art accessible and of interest to people of all walks of life. Prior to acting as the Director of both the Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery, and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Katie was the Assistant Director of The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design (CCCD) at the University of North Carolina Asheville, where she curated exhibitions, administered the national Craft Research Fund grant program, and led the curriculum development team for the textbook Makers: A History of American Studio Craft. Before working at the CCCD, Katie was Assistant Director and Curator at the College of Charleston’s Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. Currently, she serves on the Ogden City Arts Committee and the Board of Directors for the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center in Asheville, NC. Katie has a B.A. in Art History from the College of Charleston and an Intercultural M.A. in Art History from Richmond, The American International University in London.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

P O E T R Y

Doug Ramspeck

Alluvial Child

Sandra Ovono

We think, The night is black mist. Or, These flies are levitating their dark presence. Or we watch two crows and imagine, Here is a black tapestry of motion. There is something primitive in this, our thoughts sagging like a child almost too large for his mother’s arms, something that reminds us of how, in Vermeer’s Music Lesson, light falls through the window as a melody, falls into a strange silence that must be a ghost or must be the child of my earliest

memory, our neighbor boy who drowned in the river so that my mother wept beneath a wasps’ nest drooping from the eaves of our garage. Let’s pretend our hands are scripture now, that we come to this out of our own bodies, the years soft as rainwater. Or say the moon approaches from the black bodies of the trees, that the sky is a kind of paraffin. We come to see the dark as preparation. In one story the boy is the moon that spins itself out of the fire of our grief. In another there is just this interrogative of sky, the mud of the earth, the loam unable to form a human shape.

Fixed Gaze Mornings she carries her son into the back yard and places him on his belly in the grass. Here is this infant that sprang from the mud of my body, this creature that grew like an epidendrum from my flesh. The sun blisters above them and the mosquitoes barely lift themselves from the weeds. The woman’s feet are bare and dark with dirt.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

P O E T R Y She loves her child with the devotion of unknowing, with the dialogue of deep sky. And remembers from childhood her father slipping one evening from the barn roof and breaking his neck, how the chickens scattered at something remarkable: a man tumbling toward them out of the heavens. Now, most days, she is troubled by the sound of the garage door opening and closing, by the patterns of clouds above the neighbor’s roof, the wind chimes banging like skulls. All the streets in the neighborhood turn back on each other, warrens of dead-ends and turn-arounds. And the river across the fence is forever moving away from her like a gray horse, the hours silhouetted beyond the trees. And sometimes the hawks rise in the growing dark or bury themselves in dimming air. Occasionally one will drop to the earth like a bucket tumbling down into a well. And here, each day, is the fixed gaze of sky pinning itself above her. She lifts her boy like a cumbersome sack and carries him through the sliding glass door, entering the glare of day and white heat. Watch how the hawks at the field’s edge mistrust the earth, worry their grooves above the yard and her child. Watch how their blood tails churn and dip in the open sky.

100

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

Ritual Earth Here are our ancient signs: it is raining in July, the widower next door keeps his blinds closed, light forgets to fall inside the shadows. Can a ghost be an altar, be a stone? And then: nothing. We watch the sky for palpitations, the body brittle where the bone hollows. We have seen four ghosts in five days. Or now this paper birch with its torn skin. Articulated dreams where mud sags. The hours can’t find the smallness of death inside their bodies. This is our language of woven flies. Something ruptures in the years, the chest—it rains behind the ribs. This dim domain you can’t recall with any clarity. In one dream I imagine a wife washing her face with a cloth, morning ablution like summer mud clinging to boots by a back door. What we carry we carry by rote: crows lifting bodies into stain, hours burning memories into smoke. I think the dead grieve for us with ancient heat rising from the mud behind the house. We name the hour blank page, name the grackles rising from the earth, gesturing sky. With our original cries, sunlight gathers in the trees. With our original baths, grass lifts from the body of the earth, bending in invisible wind.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

101

P O E T R Y In the afternoon, thunder is beautiful from far away, speaking to us in the voices of low-slung clouds, a few stray stains of rain and their cuneiform writing on the driveway. The weeds beside the road tremble to exist, and dandelions with bright faces whisper secrets from the next world. You close your eyes the way the moon sleeps, night the shucked skin of a snake. Watch how my neighbor grips a newspaper to his chest. Listen how we talk of clouds the way mystics read bones. There is a coffee cup waiting on the kitchen table, bifocals waiting on a nose. Rain falls. It batters us, cleanses us, forgets us. Day slips to night slips to day.

Doug Ramspeck is the author of five poetry collections. His most recent book, Original Bodies, received the Michael Waters poetry prize and is forthcoming from Southern Indiana Review Press. His poems have appeared in journals that include The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Slate, AGNI, and The Georgia Review.

102

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

C O N V E R S A T I O N

Susan Matt

Thinking Journalism, Thinking History A Conversation with Rick Atkinson

Sigrid Estrada

PRELUDE Rick Atkinson is the author of The Liberation Trilogy, a three volume work on the American liberation of Europe during World War II. The first volume in the trilogy, An Army at Dawn, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Atkinson is also the author of The Long Gray Line (1989); Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (1993); An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 (2002); In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat (2004); The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943– 1944 (2007); and The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944–1945 (2013). Atkinson worked at The Washington Post, first as a reporter and then as a foreign correspondent and investigations editor before becoming a full-time book author, with continued periodic assignments for various newspapers. His many awards include the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for history; the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting; and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for public service, awarded to The Washington Post for a series of investigative articles directed and edited by Atkinson. He is winner of the 1989 George Polk Award for national reporting, the 2003 Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award, the 2007 Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense, and the 2010 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. Atkinson has served as the General Omar N. Bradley Chair of Strategic Leadership at the U.S. Army War College, where he remains an adjunct faculty member. For a fuller sketch of Atkinson’s career and his work, go to http://liberationtrilogy.com/rick-atkinson/ I met Atkinson in November 2012, when he spoke at the Ogden School Foundation Fall Author event on the 70th anniversary of the Allied invasion of North Africa. Our conversation centered on the meaning of war and the nature of history.

CONVERSATION I’ve often thought that history is in some sense autobiographical—the topics we write about are not randomly chosen but come from who we are. I’ve read about your childhood in Germany, but would you talk a little about the autobiographical influences on your work.

but it was very much part of the landscape. And then there was always the question of “What were we doing in central Europe in the early ‘50s, why were we there?”

Well, I was born in Munich in ‘52. My father was a professional military officer—we actually lived in Salzburg, it was back when the American army was still in Austria. Growing up on military posts, which I did for 18 years, certainly one of the things that was part of that landscape—culturally and, in some cases, physically—was WWII. My father was a WWII veteran, he’d enlisted in the army in 1943. All of my friends’ fathers were of WWII vintage, or maybe a little after that,

Yeah, it was part of my cultural legacy. Then I became a journalist and worked in Kansas at first, then Kansas City, and then Washington starting in ‘81, and for The Washington Post starting in ‘83, then in ‘93, I went to Berlin to be the Bureau Chief. And so, I went back to Germany in a sense, though I had never really been there to start with, but I’d been in Central Europe until the age of three. I happened to be there for the endless succession of 50th anniversary commemorations—50th anniver-

104

So, trying to explain that has been a driving force in your work?

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

nies—one was that the subject is bottomless. People will write about WWII five hundred years from now and hopefully read about it. So there’s more to do, particularly if you’re an archive rat; you will continue to find, as I have found, wonderful stuff. And then secondly, and I realized this as part of that 50th anniversary commemoration, it didn’t start at Normandy, which is what most Americans think. Most Americans think the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor, and then there That they’re still grappling with... was D-day, and something bad happened at the Battle of the Bulge, and then we won. Right, the Germans are It’s much more sophisstill grappling with their ticated than that, it’s legacy, though they’ve much more complex in grappled with it quite The Germans are still grappling that it’s really a triptych. well. It’s omnipresent, with their legacy, though they’ve The liberation of Europe every German kid is starts in North Africa grappled with it quite well. It’s taken to Sachsenhauand then moves through sen, or Buchenwald, omnipresent, every German kid the Mediterranean to or some hell-hole. And is taken to Sachsenhausen, or Italy, and all of that they are taught from a comes together in that Buchenwald, or some hell-hole. very young age about last panel, and that’s the catastrophe and And they are taught from a very Normandy and the end their responsibility for young age about the catastrophe of the war. So that’s how it. And not collective I conceptualized it in ‘98. and their responsibility for it. guilt, but collective responsibility—that’s the And not collective guilt, but Was your father still German approach to it. alive then? collective responsibility—that’s So that really kicked my the German approach to it. interest off. I’d become He was alive then, kind of a military histohe’s alive now. ry writer and had writWhat was his reaction to your books? And ten a couple of books about Vietnam and then what have been the reactions of other vetthe Persian Gulf War. But then I thought, okay, erans? Do they object to the fact that your how about some real history, serious history. books demythologize the so-called “greatest So when I came back to Washington in ‘96, I generation”? ran investigative reporting at The Washington Post, and all the while I’m thinking about this The veterans in general have been great, but subject and also looking for something else to I don’t really write for them; I write for their do, frankly. I was tired of being a daily journalchildren and their grandchildren and hopeist and I wanted an opportunity to write books fully their great-grandchildren. My father for a living. The voice of book-writing was specifically has been terrific—he didn’t have something that I much preferred to the voice a dog in that fight. As a professional army of a newspaper. So, as I was thinking about it, officer, he was accustomed to screw-ups. He I had two little epiphanies, very little epiphawas in Vietnam, he was not in North Africa, sary of D-day, 50th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, 50th anniversary of the end of the war—so I would write stories about that occasionally, and it really re-kindled my interest in the subject. There were a lot of veterans who came back, and they were still compos mentis then. And it just got me re-interested, and of course I knew it pretty well through the Germans too. I was around Germans; of course they have a different legacy...

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

105

C O N V E R S A T I O N he wasn’t in Italy, he got to Europe at the very end. He wasn’t at Omaha Beach, he never bought into “The Greatest Generation” stuff for sure, and actually most of them don’t.

taken leave twice from the newspaper to write books that there is something else. Now, writing books is really completely antithetical as a lifestyle to living in a newsroom. It’s very solitary. I always have the feeling of—this is They know that it’s a Tom Brokaw creridiculous because I am not a sailor—getting ation? in my little boat by myself and sort of sailing off, and when you finish the book, you find Tom Brokaw is a great friend, and God bless land again. So if you’re not disposed to that, him, but this idea of “The Greatest Generaor if you don’t find ways to mitigate that, it tion” is nonsense. I mean, greater than the can be problematic. But beyond that, I think Founding Fathers? Greater than the Civil War that the ability to write generation? Which narratively, long form, if generation? My father you’ve got a knack for it, Writing books is really completely was born in 1924, Eisenhower was born antithetical as a lifestyle to living if you know how to do it, can be very gratifying. in 1890. That’s not the in a newsroom. It’s very solitary. The voice just seems to same generation. I always have the feeling of—this be so much richer and deeper—the relationNo, that’s a very good is ridiculous because I am not a ship with the reader is point. sailor—getting in my little boat much different. They’ve It’s a big war and it invested 30 bucks, or by myself and sort of sailing off, spans generations. and when you finish the book, you if they buy it electronically now, 17 bucks, I read elsewhere, and find land again. So if you’re not but they’ve invested you just confirmed, a lot of time. They’re disposed to that, or if you don’t that your interest invested emotionally find ways to mitigate that, it can evolved from journalin a different way than ism to longer form be problematic. But beyond that, somebody who bought non-fiction; why? the morning paper and I think that the ability to write is doing this while they Well, part of it is voice. narratively, long form, if you’ve are trying to get the kids I was a reporter and got a knack for it, if you know how to school and all that. an editor, a couple So it is a much, much to do it, can be very gratifying. different flavors of different relationship editor, and a foreign and one that I like more. correspondent. There It is a more meaningare plenty of guys my age and older who are ful connection with readers. So that was the reporters and do it with great aplomb. I think main reason. Even at The Washington Post, it’s kind of a young man’s or young woman’s which is very indulgent of long form journalprofession—getting on a plane, going someism, and it’s a dying art in the newspaper where, schlepping around—I got tired of it. I business because newspapers are dying, it’s started in ‘76 as a reporter on a small paper harder and harder to expect a newspaper to in Kansas, and I love the news room, there’s sanction writing long—long meaning short nothing like it, it’s a calling. At election time, by book standards. Trying to sustain that in there’s nothing like a newsroom. But I wanted the journalism world is increasingly difto do something else, and I knew having ficult. So I just felt, make the plunge, do it.

106

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

about it, but because the confusion and all the rest of it makes it difficult. No two accounts reconcile perfectly. So, that’s one factor. Now, I violated that, obviously. I find as a journalist, access is the name of the game; if you don’t have access, you don’t have the story. In 2003, when I’d gone off to be a book writer, basically, Don Graham, the CEO of The Washington Post Company, asked me to come back for a while. At that point, it looked Reinforcements and artillery press inland from Omaha Beach two days after the initial invasion. like bad things were Within a week of D-Day, more than 300,000 Allied troops and 2,000 tanks had arrived in France, but the beachhead remained pinched and crowded. http://liberationtrilogy.com/photos-video/ going to happen in Iraq. historical-photos/ He said, “Come back You’ve written about war as a journalist and do whatever you want. Go off with a unit, and as an historian. And what strikes me if you want, or do whatever you want to do.” is how very different your relationships to Then I decided to do some general shopping, your sources have been over the course of because you want someone who’s going to your career. As a historian, writing about give you access, and I knew Petraeus from WWII where there are some people alive the time he was a major. We are exactly the to interview, you can examine papers and same age—he was sixty yesterday, and I’ll be memoirs. You’ve also worked as a reporter sixty next week. So I knew him a little bit, and covering war, and then also as an embedI knew that he was smart and press-friendly— ded journalist with very direct access to not a publicity hound necessarily, but very Petraeus and everyone else. Any comments sophisticated in his dealings with the press— on your proximity to or distance from and he had been in Washington off and on, so sources, and how it shapes your work? he knew that game too. He’d taken command of the 101st Airborne, I sent him an email— Yeah, it’s a good question, it’s an interestthis was in December of 2002—and I said, ing issue and as a historian; you appreciate “We’ve met a couple of times. Can I come it more than most. I mean, I wrote a book down to Fort Campbell, KY, and talk to you entitled Crusade on the Persian Gulf War that about possibly deploying with the division came out in ‘93, and after that I swore I would if and when you go?” He replied instantly, never write about people who were still alive. as he always does even today—it’s like he’s Just because of egos and reputations, and waiting there for your email to arrive—and particularly when you are writing about war, he said, “Sure, come down.” So I did, I went it’s really hard to find out what really hapdown and we had a conversation about what pened. Not necessarily because people are I was interested in doing, and basically we so venal or that they are being mendacious sealed the deal. Having that kind of access,

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

107

C O N V E R S A T I O N And you know what it means in retrospect. and I was at his side every day for a couple of months, is absolutely critical to doing that Right, you know what it means, you know kind of reporting. You’re not inside his head, what it has led to, you know the context. but if you’re at his side, you’re pretty close. It’s a very long winded answer, but it’s an Writing as a historian, I do almost no ininteresting historiographical question. terviewing of veterans. I just find that even if they are completely coherent, a seventy year I was interested that you used soldiers’ old version of the events is not trustworthy, graffiti as a way to get a sense of soldiers’ they’ve told the story so many times. The conperspectives. Were temporaneous record of there other sources the event is so extraoryou found that were dinary—it’s so rich, it’s In terms of being around useful for getting into so vast, it’s so accessoldiers’ heads in war, soldiers, what you’re looking sible, including terrific particularly in the oral histories. The army at as a journalist is to be as more recent conflicts had an enormous oral unobtrusive as possible—to avoid you’ve covered? Perhistory program that haps it’s easier when the Heisenberg Principle, the act started before the war you’ve got the jourof observing affects that which is ended, and they would nals and the diaries go and interview combeing observed. If you can meld from WWII folks, but bat soldiers at all levels with current conflicts into the environment somehow, and low stations, evyou don’t have access erybody. All of this is at then you can watch it unfold to those sources, so are the National Archives. with a minimum of posturing or there other sources or That allows you a differtechniques you use? whatever. So that as a journalist ent kind of entry; you don’t have to be in their is generally what you are trying Eavesdropping—standheads, but you can see to do. It’s a whole different thing ing in the chow line the contemporaneous with them and listendoing historical research. records. I prefer the ing to that soldier latter, I think it’s a truer patois—that’s priceform of reconstructing less, it’s the verwhat really happened. If I can see with my nacular. Nobody keeps diaries now, own eyes, what Petraeus is doing or, I can see that’s a catastrophe for historians. him... We had a terrible helicopter flight into I know, emails if they ever… Iraq when the war began, it was the scariest moment, probably of my life, certainly of If they survive, if they’re preserved somehow, that war. Visibility was twenty feet, and he’d if they’re accessible, if you can read them 100 taken out this white rag, and he’s wiping the years from now. It’s a difficult issue, so there inside of the window (Laughter), and I can see are different delivery systems now. But in he’s as anxious as I am. When you can see terms of being around soldiers, what you’re that, that’s gold. But being able to go back looking at as a journalist is to be as unobtruand reconstruct what happened in December sive as possible—to avoid the Heisenberg 1944 with contemporaneous records of all Principle, the act of observing affects that kinds I think appeals to me more, and you which is being observed. If you can meld into have a longer lens, you think about it more. the environment somehow, then you can

108

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

watch it unfold with a minimum of posturing or whatever. So that as a journalist is generally what you are trying to do. It’s a whole different thing doing historical research.

Ernie Pyle.

Ernie Pyle. Not only were WWII reporters embedded, they wore uniforms, they were in the chain of command, they were subject to severe censorship. They were much more Let’s talk a bit about being an embedded beholden to what they were covering, but journalist. There are some controversies they still managed about embedded jourto do some fantastic nalism. On the one journalism. I use them hand, how do you get The army sees the world in a lot because, for one a story if you’re not strategic, operational and tactical thing, they were so right there, alongside good from that group, the military officers? terms as their lenses. Strategic, On the other hand, in WWII terms, is Roosevelt and they are the greatest generation of reporters. perhaps that access Churchill and Stalin and Yalta So it’s not a new thing has problems as well. and, as you suggest, Patrick Cockburn of and really the biggest arrows how else are you going The Independent has on the maps. The tactical, that’s to get around? If you’re written that embedded the lieutenant and his platoon a uni-lateral, as they journalism makes us call them, and you’re focus on the military or the sergeant and his squad, not where the story is, more than the political the battalion commander and so it can be really dangeror social context. In ous, it can be pointless. the Company of Sol- on. It’s really at ground level. If I don’t have Petraeus’ diers, there’s a point Operational in the army sense 256 helicopters, I’m where Petraeus was is in between—it tends to be not going to get into worried about what core and higher, they’re pretty Iraq, certainly with the you and Jim Dwyer expedition that I did. were writing. Was that big arrows on the map, tens of The question whetha concern? thousands of men, the big fish on er you’re co-opted, a battlefield. My ambition as a I was concerned for that’s a good serious him, that’s for sure. I military historian, as a narrative question. You can be tell that story to officers writer, is to integrate those three covering the Utah Legfrequently, because it islature, or the Washand to move between them, if not ington Redskins, or any shows the evolution of Petraeus. I just saw seamlessly, then without making number of institutions, Petraeus two weeks ago and drink the Kool-Aid. it seem too obvious. at dinner; he’s forgiven And you don’t want to me. He did because he offend your sources or knows what side the come to believe in the bread’s buttered on. In the context of embedcause... you know what I mean. That’s part of ded journalists, the relationship between being a professional journalist. It’s learning the embedded and the embedee, it’s not a how to maintain your distance, how to prenew thing. A lot of people assume that it was serve your objectivity, being tough when you invented in 2003, but there was a reporter need to be tough, telling the story that needs embedded with Custer at the Little Bighorn. to be told, warts and all, and learning to live with it. That thing with Petraeus is a good

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

109

C O N V E R S A T I O N example where he read Dwyer’s story online, and he just went nuts.

And the marked up copy... Petraeus was a speech writer for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and he’s a capable writer, but he recognized very quickly that he was not accustomed to being in that spotlight. In the same way that the WWII generation—George Patton, and Eisenhower, and Bradley— weren’t accustomed to having reporters around. Most of them had never even met a reporter, and all Honorary pallbearers at Roosevelt’s funeral include Bradley and Lieutenant General of a sudden, they’re on the cover of George S. Patton at the head of the column on the left, and, on the right, Lieutenant General Courtney H. Hodges and Collins (U.S. Army Military History Institute). http:// Time Magazine. And it is a shock to liberationtrilogy.com/photos-video/historical-photos/ the system, I think, particularly in erational and tactical terms as their lenses. contemporary cases. Today’s jourStrategic, in WWII terms, is Roosevelt and nalists are not wearing uniforms, they’re not Churchill and Stalin and Yalta and really the in the chain of command, and they’re much biggest arrows on the maps. The tactical, more ornery in some cases than that WWII that’s the lieutenant and his platoon or the generation—so it’s the sort of thing that you sergeant and his squad, the battalion comwork out, as we did in that instance. Petraeus mander and so on. It’s really at ground level. is now so much more sophisticated in dealOperational in the army sense is in between— ing with the press. He was pretty sophistiit tends to be core and higher, they’re pretty cated then, but now that he’s the Director big arrows on the map, tens of thousands of of the CIA, he’s talking to reporters all the men, the big fish on a battlefield. My ambitime—but they find the fingerprints. (Note: tion as a military historian, as a narrative David Petraus resigned from his position as writer, is to integrate those three and to move Director of the CIA on November 9, 2012, the between them, if not seamlessly, then without day after this interview was conducted.) And making it seem too obvious. I don’t think the if you see a good story from inside the CIA, story’s comprehensive if you don’t have all there’s a chance that the Director has been of them. My feeling is that, as a reader, I’m talking to that reporter. So that’s the kind usually ready for a break from something of thing that was a negotiation of sorts that if I’m reading about war, tactical war. I’m goes on between reporter and source under always ready to get away from the battlefield. any sort of circumstances. And the stakes So I’m always looking for the opportunity are high in war, the intensity level’s high, as a writer to go away from the battlefield. it’s all fraught, and you have to work it out. In this latest book, I’m always looking for In the Liberation trilogy, what was your an opportunity to get away to Paris, metastrategy for weaving the day to day experiphorically, or London, or Yalta. I found some ences of common enlisted men with those of great documents about Roosevelt’s death. officers? The mortician who prepared his body wrote an extraordinary emotional long narrative of Well, that’s part of the ambition of the thing. preparing the President for burial in Warm The army sees the world in strategic, op-

110

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

Europe, that you care to share with our readers? Well, as I said earlier, if you’re an archive rat, you can really find great stuff. They’re thinking in 1942, we’re going to have to enter the continent of Europe, those were the marching orders to Eisenhower, ultimately. How are we going to get into France or Normandy, or wherever it is? We know that it’s hazardous to have airborne operations or have parachuters jump in. We know that the German fortifications along the French coast, along the entire European coast, are very intense and that sailing into American paratroopers after jumping into southern France near Le Muy in Operation DRAGOON, Aug. 15, 1944. http://liberationtrilogy.com/photos-video/ Sword Bay, or whatever, is going to historical-photos/ be very difficult. How about digging a tunnel under the English ChanSprings. It’s fascinating—it’s very clinical, but nel? So they commissioned a study to dig the emotion carries. He had to wait outside a tunnel—what we would call a “chunnel” till Eleanor had come out of the room where today. They were ahead of their time, and they Roosevelt’s body was, and he’s a pretty good gave it to some poor major somewhere who observer too; when she comes out of the came back and said, “sir, we can do this.” room, she’s dry eyed. I’m in Europe for this They estimated it would take 15,000 men 6 whole book. How am I going to get to Warm months to a year, and they’d have to remove Springs, Georgia? Well, I do. He’s the great50,000 tons of spoil. They thought they est soldier of the war and it’s a little coda could do all of that, but what they couldn’t at the end. It so happens that Eisenhower, figure out was that last ten feet, where the Patton, and Bradley are together—it’s April entire German 15th army was waiting. 12, 1945. They happen to be together near Fulda, Germany, and Patton turns on the radio. His watch has stopped, he’s trying to check the time, and he hears the flash that Roosevelt has died. It’s midnight in Germany and he goes to tell Eisenhower and Bradley, so that is a segue that I can cut away. I am always looking for opportunities like that, and hopefully in a way that isn’t forced but in order to see those biggest arrows on the map and how they relate to some poor s.o.b. in the Bulge or in some frozen foxhole in the Vosges Mountains. As a writer, that is my ambition, to be able to do the gestalt of the war.

Any highlights of the third volume, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

Yes, you have to surface at some point. Yes, you have to come up, so cooler heads said, “okay, this isn’t going to work,” and the study was shelved. So I have a lot of things like that, not all that frivolous, about personalities. I spend a lot of time looking at the invasion of Southern France, which was August 15, 1944.

Which often gets forgotten... It does. It’s fantastic, the characters are great, it’s my Mediterranean crew. They started in North Africa, then they go to Sicily, then they end up over in mainland Italy and they stage

111

C O N V E R S A T I O N basically out of Naples for that invasion of further west in Austria. So I look for opSouthern France, and it’s one American army, portunities to tell stories, to do narratives, the 7th Army, and a French Army. De Gaulle about history that isn’t quite as well known. said, “we’re not fightThere’s been a lot of ing in Italy as long as we books written about have a mother country Normandy and a lot of The whole point of reading to liberate.” De Gaulle books about the Bulge insisted that these exceland so on. This is an ophistory, I think, is to instruct lent French divisions that portunity to break away ourselves somehow to learn were fighting in Italy be and to change the pitch. something so that you’re pulled out and be part of I read that you have the campaign in France, not completely ignorant of been teaching at Dicknot in the Normandy consequences. When I talk inson College and the invasion, but in the invato military personnel in Army War College. sion of Southern France, Operation Dragoon it was particular, I say that the thing To what extent—besides things like, don’t called. It was supposed to that I think you can learn invade Russia in the be simultaneous with the that’s most appropriate for fall and winter—can invasion of Normandy, but you learn from the past because of a shortage of you, as a serving officer, with in terms of lessons of shipping and other issues incredible responsibility and strategic leadership? I it was delayed until the the incredible privilege of recall in In the Commiddle of August. Then they go up the Rhone, leading soldiers, is to study the pany of Soldiers that you and Petraeus talk and then they turn east personalities and to see who about the lessons of through the Vosges Mounwould make good models for Vietnam and not retains and liberate Strasfighting the last war, so bourg, which is a fantastic ill and for good, what not to what do you think hisstory. I mean, they were do as well as what to do, and tory has to offer current on the Rhine way before how things fit together. And military leaders? anyone else was. Eisenhower refuses to let them to take considerable solace in That was Petraeus’ disjump the Rhine, because the fact that, however crummy sertation at Princeton, the other side of the Rhine lessons from Vietnam. you think your predicament is where the Black Forest I had the Omar Bradley is, and it’s a long way from is now, it has been worse for Chair, so it was only a where they want to be. A others. You will never have year and it was several lot of people, including years ago. The course is me, think it was ill advised anything like the Bulge, you offered by both the War by Eisenhower, but it is will never be at Valley Forge. College and Dickinson, a terrific story with great so I had a seminar of characters. The relationforty something Coloship between the French and the Americans nels and then a seminar of twenty something was intense, as it always is, but that army undergraduate liberal arts students. I put group ends up in Southwest Germany and them together a couple of times and brought then down into Austria. They didn’t get to them to Washington together; it worked great. Munich or Salzburg, but they were close,

112

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

generally managed to survive it. That is a great source of comfort.

The consolation of the past... Yes, it is. I think for military history, for active soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, it’s more of a consolation than it is for most people. You can be a fireman and read about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and think, well, that was pretty awful, but it probably doesn’t have quite the same resonance GIs from U.S. First Army hunt German paratroopers dropped during the Bulge, Belgium, as a captain leading a Dec. 18, 1944. http://liberationtrilogy.com/photos-video/historical-photos/ company in Afghanistan, reading about a captain I took them to The Washington Post and then leading a company in Operation Market Bradley and my homeboys from there came Garden in 1944. There’s five thousand years and talked to them, and then they came to my of history about warfare, and yet the seams house for pizza and beer before they had to that link those five thousand years together, fight their way through traffic on the bus back every scribbler since Thucydides knows that to Carlisle. The whole point of reading history, when you’re writing about war, you’re writI think, is to instruct ourselves somehow to ing about love and foolishness and all that. learn something so that you’re not completely That’s very useful for contemporaries of all ignorant of consequences. When I talk to sorts. You don’t have to be in the military to military personnel in particular, I say that the know that, and it’s what takes a particular thing that I think you can learn that’s most story, or tale of one battle or one war, or even appropriate for you, as a serving officer, with in wars past, even WWII, and propels it into incredible responsibility and the incredible a stratosphere that’s somehow eternal. privilege of leading soldiers, is to study the personalities and to see who would make good models for ill and for good, what not to do as well as what to do, and how things fit together. And to take considerable solace in the fact that, however crummy you think your predicament is now, it has been worse for others. You will never have anything like the Bulge, you will never be at Valley Forge. It has been awful, as awful as your imagination can make it be for others, and they have

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

Useful and useable. Yeah, and then lifts it above the temporal. As a writer, I try to be cognizant of that without being pretentious about that. Knowing that there are these resonances, I was reading on the plane here a new book by my old Washington Post colleague, Tom Ricks, called The Generals. Tom writes about the contemporary military a lot; he’s not a historian, but he’s

113

C O N V E R S A T I O N a very good military reporter. The Generals is about generals, starting with the WWII generals and looking at the ethic of generalship at the time, and then he moves through contemporary times. So he starts with Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton, and other people you’ve never heard of, and he then goes to Korea and Vietnam and more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He does some really direct comparing and contrasting, not only of their styles and their capabilities, but of the culture and the ethic of generalship. I don’t really buy it, but I’ve read the paragraphs that he had on WWII a year ago, and I told him, this is interesting. He has a thesis that I don’t really subscribe to, but having said that, I think it’s really useful. He’ll be up to the War College soon talking to 300 colonels. This is something that they should be thinking about. Whether they agree with it, or not, it’s something they need to think about.

And put their own experience in... That’s more journalism than history, but it’s very useful. And the stakes are so high, what they do, it’s so important for them to be encouraged to cogitate. It’s not a culture that is necessarily comfortable with intellectualism. There’s some really smart people like Petraeus with Masters and PhDs, but as a culture it’s “hooah, go out and do it—teach me how to form a defensive perimeter in Afghanistan.” But there are other issues here, larger issues.

Focusing on WWII, do you think other wars will be mythologized as WWII has been, subsequent wars. Oh, I hope not.

It doesn’t seem that the moral stakes are quite as clear. In WWII, the level involved 60 million dead, fought across 60 countries, 6 continents. The level of involvement just in this country, which got off, not scot-free, but relatively

114

easy, is not inconsiderable. We didn’t have 26 million dead as the Soviet Union. So these brushfire wars, 4000 dead in Iraq, 2000 dead in Afghanistan—that’s not nothing, dead is dead—a guy killed at Tikrit is just as dead, just as mourned. If you’ve ever been to section 60 at Arlington where the contemporary dead are listed, it’s just so heartbreaking, I’ve been there a lot and it’s just so heartbreaking to see the mothers sitting there reading to their boys. Every American should go there, every student should go there. I don’t know how I got off on that, but mythologizing of WWII, there was mythologizing of the Civil War...

Right, that’s the only other one I can think of ... There’s a different kind of Revolutionary mythologizing, but it seems to happen as the generations that were directly involved begin to pass. I don’t know my Civil War history like Drew Faust and others, but I believe that in the 1880s and 1890s there was a resurgent interest in it.

The Grand Army of the Republic reunions. That’s exactly right. God knows there’s nothing like a reunion of veterans to throw gasoline on the mythologizing. I think that we’ve seen this before, and it certainly happens in other countries too. But it’s hard to imagine that the same level of interest and the same tension between trying to do history straight, no chaser, and this kind of gauzy nostalgic glamorizing will continue with other wars. I got to know Paul Fusell, the author of The Great War and Modern Memory.

He just died. He did, he just died six months ago. He was a lieutenant in the Vosges Mountains and then in Germany, at the age of 20 or something like that, severely wounded, and he remained pissed off about it. I’m sure to the day he

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

died, certainly the last time I saw him, he was so angry about it and so determined to resist any nostalgia that he refuses to use euphemisms like “the fallen”; it was dead, they’re dead, they’re not fallen. And there should be a good dose of that in any talk about any war. It should be as bracing as you can make it because it’s misery, it’s human misery, it’s suffering of the first order. Trying to soften the edges is a disservice.

to Iraq, any thoughts on how battle has changed? More particularly, how have new communication technologies altered the experience of combat for the common soldier? Obviously, he has a much different relationship to the home front now.

Boy he does, doesn’t he? These days, every soldier’s got a laptop or a Blackberry or whatever they’ve got out there now. When communication is instant Right. Michael C.C. Part of my ambition as a with home, it cuts in a Adams in The Best lot of different ways. In War Ever describes historian is not so much to the old days, meaning the way that that myde-mythologize, but to be as 20 years ago, much less thology both encourbracing about war as possible. in WWII, you would ship ages other wars and out and you would get also makes every other There’s nothing good about letters and hopefully generation of soldiers 60 million dead people. It’s that would keep you in feel inadequate when as searing as section 60 at touch emotionally and compared to this imotherwise with what was possibly perfect group Arlington. You find mothers happening at home and of WWII soldiers. writing about learning that their with your loved ones. It That’s right. How can we son’s been killed. That really is didn’t abdicate worrying possibly be greater than or fretting or whatever— timeless—that’s Thucydides, the greatest generation. there was a remove, the Herodotus, Homer weeping Yeah, and as I said earliletter would get there er, the truth is that most over Hector, that’s completely six weeks after your kid veterans from WWII had broken his leg, or unchanged. It ought not be reject that greatest genyour wife had run off with glorified. It can be sanctified, but somebody, or whatever— eration case. Part of my ambition as a historian it can’t be sanitized. yet there was a distance. is not so much to deNow, it’s just instant, it’s mythologize, but to be as fast as the electrons as bracing about war as can move. It presents difpossible. There’s nothing good about 60 milferent leadership challenges, actually. What lion dead people. It’s as searing as section 60 you find is that NCOs and junior officers, in at Arlington. You find mothers writing about particular, tend to be much more attuned to learning that their son’s been killed. That rethe fact that PFC Jones just heard 20 minutes ally is timeless—that’s Thucydides, Herodoago from his wife that the dog died, or whattus, Homer weeping over Hector, that’s comever crisis it is at home; it could be a lot more pletely unchanged. It ought not be glorified. serious than the dog obviously. That someIt can be sanctified, but it can’t be sanitized. times requires direct intervention. He’s got to be very attuned to that, in that instantaneous Given that you’ve covered recent military awareness—and it’s not only instantaneous, interventions and wars from Somalia it’s incessant. You’re not always plugged

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

115

C O N V E R S A T I O N in, but you’re almost always plugged in. The first thing that happens is, the router goes up and the ability to communicate with everyone from places that you never thought would be possible. And so you’re texting back and forth from 5,000 miles away, 7,000 miles away, and it’s just incessant. And it’s not like you get a letter, and then three days later, you get another letter. You get an email or a text or something, and then twenty seconds later, you get another one.

And the Facebook posts... And the Facebook posts and all of that stuff. So, I don’t know whether at the schools for On the night of May 7, hours before the official end of the war in Europe, jubilant Americans company commanders that’s celebrate with the British at Piccadilly in central London. http://liberationtrilogy.com/ part of the curriculum, or if it’s photos-video/historical-photos/ something that they kind of delay in learning about it—whether there’s a pick up as they go along. I know it’s an issue fire-fight over here, or about things not lookfor them, that ability to be attuned to what’s ing good in Helmand Province— you’re much happening on the home front, not in your more attuned to that. So your little PFC Jones’ home, but in America, for example. To know world, actually, has a pretty wide horizon. that people are not happy about Iraq and to And that again is a leadership challenge. have that in your face every day, and to know that people think this is not a good war—overAny other differences you see between the whelmingly, the country’s turned against WWII soldiers and then later generations it—and to know that if you are death number of warriors? 4,612, people at home think that’s probably a wasted life. That’s a real leadership They’re so different. That WWII generation, challenge. As a sergeant, or a captain, or a they’re mostly draftees, they’re not nearly as lieutenant, or a general, you’ve got to be able physically fit, they’re not as well educated. to have an answer to that, to talk it through. It I can’t remember the percentage now, a can’t just be, “because I say so.” That doesn’t quarter, I’m making this up, but it’s in the work in the American army, it hasn’t since the ballpark—a quarter of WWII GIs had only a Revolution. So that is a leadership challenge grade school education. That’s hard, that’s a that is sort of accelerated by technology. The leadership challenge, your guys can’t read. other thing is, because you are in contact with And the percentage who actually knew your buddies around in a much more instanwhat we were fighting for was less than a taneous way, things that are happening that quarter, too. in previous wars it would be a much greater

116

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

Today, they are overwhelmingly high school graduates, 90 plus percent, most headed for college in some fashion—that’s why they joined the army, for the college money. You know, you’d read accounts from WWII guys, “dear mom, on the company run today, ran a whole mile, then Sarg let us stop and take a cigarette break” (Laughter). Today’s soldiers are much more physically fit, they are much more attuned to mental stresses—PTSD is something that they take real seriously. The officers tend to be much more educated, not only traditionally in terms of being college educated, but in terms of the army schooling system. It’s not common, but it’s not unusual, to find sergeants with masters degrees and guys like Petraeus and McMasters with PhDs, many of them with advanced degrees of one sort or another. The army and all of the other services have many schools.

So because it is a professional military, it’s much smaller— instead of 8.3 million as we had in 1945, the active force now is 560 thousand; that’s quite the difference. The U.S. has a population of 315 million today, 130 million in 1945, so in those days, most people had skin in the game; today almost no one has skin in the game. That’s quite a difference, I think. The technology obviously is just enormously different, not just in communications, but in everything else. The precision of what they are able to do, the precision of intelligence and killing systems and so on. But if you’re in some God-awful hell’s half acre in Afghanistan, it would be entirely familiar to some guy in some hell’s half acre in Southern France or Belgium. The eternal verities are the eternal verities.

Well, thank you so much.

Susan Matt (Ph.D., Cornell University, 1996) is Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Weber State University. She is author of Homesickness: An American History (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011) and Keeping up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930 (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

117

F I C T I O N

Phillip Parotti

The Disturbance in San Miguel

one of us, in so far as I know, has ever been able to offer a reasonable explanation of what brought two eight-foot long alligators this far north up the Rio Grande. San Miguel, you must understand, is a very small town, a village, really, located not far north of Fort Hancock and only a few miles south of Fabens. According to El Viejo . . . that would be old man Sanchez . . . , San Miguel is the point from which the gunrunners supplied Pascual Orozco and Doroteo Arango before those two noted revolutionaries attacked Juarez in 1911. But that knowledge is strictly hearsay and comes straight from an oral tradition, so I don’t think you will find it written down in any of the history books. I know a bit about that because I’ve looked, and I haven’t yet found a thing. Whatever the case, what we call “Gunrunner’s Ford” is located no more than fifty yards from the west end of town, and that, we think, is the place where the alligators emerged from the river and crawled into San Miguel. I happened to be sitting in the office when Norman took the call. I had the morning watch that day, so I’d been out on roving patrol since around 4:00 a.m., and in order to give myself a break, I’d stopped off for a cup of Lupe’s coffee. “Sheriff Archuleta speaking,” Norman said, picking up the phone. And then, after a short pause, he said “Ha!” And then, after another short pause, the expression on his face changed from one of mirth to something altogether different, and he said, “No, no, no, Señora. We take your call very seriously. I am not laughing at you, I promise. I had something in my throat. Where, again, did you say? Right. We will look into it immediately, Mrs. Borrego, and thank you for your call.” “Ed,” Norman said, hanging up the phone, a perplexed frown darkening his brow, “according to Mary Borrego, two eight-foot alligators just strolled up from the ford and ate two of El Viejo’s chickens. You’d better get over there right now and see what’s going on.” “Alligators?” I laughed. “Move it, Ed. This isn’t funny,” Norman said.

“Right,” I said, putting down my coffee cup, and rising to my feet. “Let’s just hope that one or the other of those reptiles has had sense enough to eat that old rooster that Sanchez keeps. That damn thing pecks everyone who goes near it.” “Never mind that,” Norman said, growing exasperated. “Just get over there quick, and check in with me the minute you have something to report.” “Right,” I said, making for the door. “Now you listen to me, Ed Hernandez,” Mary Borrego said, showing me skinny eyes and shaking her finger in my face, “I knew you and Norman when both of you were in diapers, so I don’t want to hear no nonsense. I was sitting right here on my front porch this morning when those lagartos came up from the ford, and I know what I saw because I saw them with my eyes, and as you can see for yourself, I don’t wear no glasses. They were big, those things, seven or eight feet, each of them, and quick as you can wink, they lunged into El Viejo’s chickens and ate two of them. They ate the brown hen that lays the big eggs and that old rooster that pecks everybody.” “That might count as a civic improvement,” I quipped. “I’m not counting no civic improvements,” Mary Borrego snapped, “and you’d better not either! Those lagartos ain’t doing no civic improvements at all, and you’d better get out there and catch them before they eat something else, like one of Lester Smith’s kids.” Lester Smith, the only Mormon in town, had a large family already numbering ten children, with one more on the way. “They didn’t return to the river?” I said, registering some surprise. “No they didn’t,” Mary Borrego said forcefully. “They moved straight up into town!” “Norman,” I said, as soon as I put through the call, “Mary says that they ate El Viejo’s brown hen and the old rooster. ” “To hell with that rooster!” Norman shouted over the phone. “Where are they now?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Mary said that they didn’t go back to the river. She says that they moved on up Main and into San Miguel.” “Oh, shit!” Norman said. “All right, Ed, here’s what I want you to do. Ditch the car. Get out there on foot and see if you can’t find them. Look for tracks. Those are mostly dirt streets down there, so you ought to be able to find something. Meanwhile, I’ll call Alex and Steve and get them out looking too, and in a case like this, I don’t think those guys from La Migra will mind giving us a hand. I’ll also call State Fish and Game, and I’ll have Lupe get out the word to the radio station. Any kids you see heading for school, send them home. Now, get cracking quick, and let me know the minute you find something.” I hadn’t gone a block up the street before I found something. What I found was little Roberto Alvarado sitting about ten feet off the ground in the crotch of Ace Popplecourt’s elm tree.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

119

F I C T I O N “Did you see those alligators?” he asked me. “No,” I said, ”where are they?” “They went that way,” he said, pointing up the street. “They got in a fight over there with Raul’s pit bull. Panchito barked at them and tried to bite their tails. And then, they went around the corner by Sally Feller’s house and knocked over her garbage cans, and that’s the last I saw of them.” “I think you’d better come on down and go home,” I said, reaching up to help him as he slid down the tree trunk. Sally Feller came out onto her front porch as I hurried up the street. She was smoking a cigarette and visibly nervous. “Holy Mother of God, Ed,” she yelled at me, ”why don’t you guys do something? Where in the hell did those things come from?” “The river,” I said, rushing past. “Where did they go?” “Up the alley behind the Silva’s place,” she said, pointing east. I broke into a run, reached the corner of the alley, and raced ahead, finding overturned garbage cans everywhere. Most of them were empty, the sanitation department having picked up the entire town on the day before. Halfway up the alley, I saw Tommy Trevizo and Ben Hammond, both of them armed with hunting rifles, both of them standing just inside their fences behind their back gates. “Ah, Norman’s going to be a little upset,” I said, “if you guys start shooting off those rifles.” “You might tell Norman that we’re a little upset to see alligators running all over town,” Tommy said. “Hijo, Man, why don’t you guys do something?” “We’re doing it,” I said. ”We just found out about them, not five minutes ago.” “What I want to know is where in the hell they came from?” said Ben. “The river,” I said. “That’s news?” Ben said. “Which way did they go?” I said, anxious to be away. “Up toward the filling station,” Tommy said, “moving fast.” When I got up to the filling station, I found Manny Holguin and Billy Sims, the boy who works for him, sitting on the grease rack, a good seven feet up in the air. “It may look funny to you,” Manny said, “but that damned lagarto came right in here after us, and that’s when Billy hit the hydraulic switch. Damn thing made a lunge for us and nearly got Billy’s foot before he could raise his boots high enough to get them out of the way. Just look at this place, Ed! That bastard’s tail knocked over nearly everything in here, and we’re going to have a hell of a time trying to clean up all this grease and oil.” “How did you get rid of it?” I wanted to know. “Tobacco juice,” Billy snickered. “Cut a corner off my plug right before the damn thing came in, so I just kept spittin’ on him, and I finally

120

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

hit him in the eye. That took him down a peg. He backed off and went on down the street.” “What about the other one?” I asked. “What other one?” they both asked at once. “Norman,” I said, over my radio, “I’m hot on the trail of one of them. It ran into Manny’s garage and left the place in shambles, but the other one seems to have split off, and I don’t know where it has gone.” “I’ll tell you where it’s gone,” Norman said, his words coming quick and sharp. The son-of-a-bitch just slithered past Linda’s Boutique. Alex spotted it while he was driving down here, and I’ve got Fish and Game chasing the thing right now. You find that other one, Ed, and do it fast, if you don’t mind. I’m afraid that one or the other of them is going to attack someone, and if that happens, there’s going to be hell to pay.” I found the second of the two alligators about three minutes later, slithering along the base of the rock wall that Tinda and Bob Melindrez had built around their place when they’d decided to keep goats. I don’t know if the alligator could smell the goats or not, but I thought there might be a good chance that it did and that it might also be contemplating an early lunch. I’d like to be able to attribute that discovery to something like my sterling powers of detection, but I can’t. The fact is, in this particular case, the alligator was impossible to miss because when I first came up on the scene I found about fifteen kids, ranging in ages from eight to fourteen, shrieking with blood-lust while pelting the reptile with a heavy shower of rocks. At the same time, wildly terrified parents, anxious to retrieve their as yet undamaged flesh and blood, seemed to be converging on the point from every direction. Consternation doesn’t even begin to describe the atmosphere. One woman, amidst hysterical tears of relief, threw herself onto her knees, snatched up her child, and folded the little darling to her breast; Victoria Castillo, exhibiting something like the rage of a Fury, seemed bent on whacking the fear of God into that kid of hers and nearly dislocated his arm while jerking him backwards away from the danger. It was a bad business, and in the midst of the pandemonium, the gator made a break for it, shot straight into the nearest irrigation ditch, and submerged in less than three feet of water. Knowing that a grate had been installed about forty yards down the ditch, I knew I had the disturbance cornered and called to inform Norman. “I’ll send the other Fish and Game crew,” Norman said. “Keep your eyes open and make sure the blasted thing doesn’t get away.” “Right,” I said. “What about the other one?” “Caught it,” Norman said. “They’re just now loading it into the back of Fish and Game’s pickup.” “Piece of cake?” I said. “Not exactly,” Norman said. “That tail was trouble. Knocked out two plate glass windows in the front of the grocery store and put one hell of a dent in the fender of a new Toyota.”

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

121

F I C T I O N “Hmm,” I said. “I’ve got your Hmm and then some,” Norman said, “so be darned careful when the boys start to work catching the one you’re supposed to be watching.” “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. The Fish and Game “boys” were named Eloy and Ray. Neither one of them looked to be much more than nineteen, and neither one of them looked like he’d been the valedictorian of the senior class. Eloy was wearing cheap cowboy boots, a scratched rodeo belt buckle, and a big black hat; Ray wore a dirty UTEP baseball cap and old tennis shoes. My immediate assumption was that both had seen the most of their government service as varmint trappers and made a little on the side by shooting coyotes for the bounty. “¿Donde está el lagarto?” Eloy asked, affecting a tall-in-the-saddle stance while projecting the voice of what he apparently imagined to be a seasoned pistolero. My first impulse was to ask the kid if he intended to shoot it out with the alligator, but after half a second, I stifled the urge and pointed toward the irrigation ditch. “It’s in there,” I said, “about ten yards up and submerged in the mud about three feet down. There’s a grate across that culvert up ahead of us, so it can’t swim away in that direction, and there’s another grate across that culvert below us. For the time being, it’s trapped. Want some help?” “No,” Eloy said, authoritatively. “We can’t get a rope around it ’less we get it outa there,” Ray observed. “S’pose you get a pole, Ray, and give it a prod,” Eloy said. I stepped back a few paces, anticipating an altogether good show, and I wasn’t disappointed. Ray went to the pickup, removed a fairly long pole, returned to the side of the irrigation ditch, dropped down the bank a foot or two, and began to probe, and as soon as he probed the alligator, it cut loose with its tail, breaking the pole and nearly knocking Ray clean off his feet and into the water. “Poles ain’t gonna work, Eloy” Ray said. ”Too big a tail on that sucker.” “Get the pipe,” Eloy said, clipping his words off tight. Ray went back to the pickup and returned with a ten foot length of galvanized pipe. “That ought to piss him off royally,” I observed. Eloy didn’t say a word; he merely pointed to where the alligator had last showed his tail, and Ray once more descended into the ditch. Ray’s manipulation of the iron pipe did piss off the alligator, royally, royally enough for it to come part way out of the water, hissing and snapping, enough to bring Ray scrambling back up the bank as fast as he could find traction.

122

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

“Now, we’re getting somewhere,” Eloy said, stepping to the pickup and returning with a long length of lariat rope. Eloy’s transformation from hardened pistolero to skilled vaquero took, in all, about fifteen seconds, and then, making a quick loop in the lariat, he twirled it once around his head and let fly. “Just like ropin’ a calf,” he said as the loop sailed down the side of the irrigation ditch. Well, as it turned out, roping an alligator isn’t just like roping a calf. As a rule, because a calf roper is chasing from behind, the calf can’t see the rope coming and therefore can’t avoid it. An angry alligator with its head and snout resting up on the bank of an irrigation ditch can see the rope coming, and this one did. It backed off into the water, and Ray had to go down once more and prod with the pipe. In fact, if I recall rightly, Ray went back down and prodded about nine times, and on his ninth try, the alligator lunged out of the water so fast that it nearly caught him by the leg. After that, Ray absolutely refused to go down for a tenth try, and that’s when I noticed that Eloy was starting to show signs of stress. Given another fifteen minutes, I would have taken even money that the “boys” would break under the pressure, and then, I suspected that they might resort to something like dynamite. Before I could allow a thing like that to happen, I knew that I would have to step in and take control. Early on, as Eloy had been quick to convey, any interference on my part would have presented a problem, but considering how shaken Eloy had been by his multiple failures to capture this particular alligator, I didn’t think he would want to make an issue of it. So, I made ready to move, but I was saved from the necessity because, before I could do a thing, Doña Serefina beat me to the punch. By that time, you’ll understand, a crowd had gathered, including everyone whose houses backed onto the acequia as well as a few who had wandered over to watch after the other Fish and Game crew had caught their alligator in front of the grocery store. That, I think, is what had so shaken Eloy. It wasn’t so much that he had made nine unsuccessful throws with his lariat; it was that he had made those nine unsuccessful throws publicly, in front of a crowd. His reputation as a dashing, devil-may-care rodeo cowboy was going right into the ditch along with the alligator. It was humiliating for him, and it was the humiliation which he couldn’t support. Doña Serefina stopped all of that, and by acting when she did, she more or less saved Eloy’s bacon by shifting all of the crowd’s attention onto herself. “Muchachos,” she called out, emerging through her back gate with a plate of chicken legs, “back away!” Boy, talk about the voice of a pistolero! Everyone who heard her took an immediate step backwards. Of course, everyone in the crowd was a citizen of San Miguel which is to say that everyone in the crowd already knew Doña Serefina, and I think it safe to say that there wasn’t a single one of us present that morning who hadn’t been stung by her tongue innumerable times

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

123

F I C T I O N in the past. Doña Serefina, you must understand, the daughter of an unrepentant Zapatista, had graduated from The University of Texas in El Paso back in the days when it was still called the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy, and following her graduation, she had returned to San Miguel Elementary as a teacher of multiple grades. At one time or another, all of us, every single person present, had withered beneath the verbal fires of this eighty year old dragon, and on the instant of her appearance, the crowd was stunned to silence by the heat of her voice. “Hmph,” she hissed, making diminutive footsteps as she crossed the space between her back fence and the acequia, “it looks to me like there isn’t a one of you who is smart enough to catch an alligator. Now, pay attention, all of you, and I will show you the way.” And with that, Doña Serefina lifted a chicken leg with her claw of a hand and tossed it into the water. The response was almost immediate because the alligator lunged and caught the drumstick before it actually made a splash, and then, Doña Serefina lifted a second chicken leg and tossed it half way down the bank, and then she dropped a third near the top of the bank, and then dropped a fourth about three feet beyond that in the middle of the grass at the top of the bank and went right on dropping them until she had used up every piece of chicken on the plate and reached her back fence. “Now, all of you tunantes and perfumados back away, far away, and give the lagarto plenty of space,” she ordered, “and you, Eloy, el señor macho goat-roper, you had better make an improved throw with that lasso of yours because I bought only one of these chickens, and I am not going to give you any more. Rope the snout of that reptile first and seal its jaws. Then, you must throw a second loop over the tail, and hog-tie the beast. And Raymond, when you and some of these other loafers who are standing around here using up the air with nothing better to do try to lift that creature, you had better be very careful of its tail. Do I make myself clear?” Honest to Pete, almost every one of us present put our knuckles to our foreheads and replied, “Sí, Doña Serefina,” using the same tones of voice with which we had responded to her in the first grade. And with that, Doña Serefina threw her blue-veined nose into the air, walked back into her yard, and slammed her gate. “So,” Norman said, when I later told him the story, “the Fish and Game boys finally managed to catch the thing, did they?” “Well, after a fashion,” I said. Oh, the chicken legs did the trick, all right, and Eloy finally got his noose around the alligator’s snout and snubbed it up, but the tail was more of a problem. Even after he managed to throw a loop over the tip and get the thing hog-tied, we still needed about six guys to control the tail. But that was one strong alligator, I mean to tell you, because even with all of us trying to hold it, it still managed to knock both Chuy and Bert Green into the ditch before we finally got it into the bed of the pickup. Not too swift, those two, Eloy and Ray, if you take my meaning.”

124

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

“Let’s just hope they get the damn things up to the zoo in El Paso without killing them,” Norman said. “Or without the alligators killing Eloy and Ray,” I said, “because if those things break loose, there won’t be any Doña Serefinas along the way to bail the boys out.” “Ha,” Norman said, “I don’t suppose there are any more Doña Serefinas around anywhere these days, and a good thing too. Talk about an oppressor! Man, she gave me such a hiding the day I brought that bull snake to school that it’s a wonder that I can still sit down.” “I remember that,” I said. “Don’t,” said Norman. “Some things are best forgotten.” “Like the alligators,” I said. “No,” Norman said, “you are wrong about that. We are not going to forget about those alligators, not now, not ever. And what that means, for you and Alex, is a long, hot afternoon because I want the two of you out on the banks of that river right after lunch. ¿Entiendo? You two are going to scour those river banks for at least three miles north and south of this town, and if you find a nest or eggs or even a place where those alligators have so much as disturbed the ground, I want to know about it instantly. All we need around here to turn perfect order into chaos is an infestation of baby alligators come spring, with the possibility of one or another of them getting up into the acequias and growing to size. Catch my meaning do you?” “In no uncertain terms,” I said. “I’ll get right on it.”

Phillip Parotti is Professor Emeritus of English at Sam Houston State University. He is the author of two collections of short stories and one novel. In 2011, The Sewanee Review awarded him the Robert B. Heilman Prize for excellence in book reviewing. After a long teaching career, he has retired to the mountains of southern New Mexico where he continues to write fiction and work as a printmaker.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

125

F I C T I O N

Richard Dokey

You Have Messages

ello,” Max Apple said. Max heard a pop, like a light bulb blowing, then a scratchy buzz, like Fourth of July sparklers. The cell phone had picked up interference again. All it did lately was pick up interference, which made Max think that it was time to dump it for one of those palm-size things with the bells and whistles he didn’t need. “Is this Endicott 4648?” a voice crackled. “You have the wrong number,” Max said, and returned the phone to his belt. “What was it?” Margaret said, coming into the room. “Wrong number,” Max said. “It sounded like the parrot.” “It was the phone.” “Mickey imitates your cell phone now. Isn’t that cute?” “He imitates everything.” “That’s true, dear. That’s why you mustn’t swear. If people are over and Mickey swears, what will they think? Now, be a love and fasten this for me, won’t you?” She turned, holding the clasp of the gold necklace he had given her two birthdays ago. “Be still, then,” he said. Margaret had watched a documentary about parrots on the History Channel six years before, so now there was this parrot. The parrot ate sunflower seeds. It scratched and tore papers on the bottom of its cage. It beaked up and down the wire walls of the cage, dropping sulphurcolored excrement into the shards and husks. He hated the parrot. “It’s my damned cell phone,” Max explained. “There’s something wrong. I’m going to get a new one.” “That’s fine, dear,” Margaret said. “Remember, we’re at the Shelbys for dinner tonight. That’s two bottles of Zinfandel. Remember. Two bottles.” “I’ll remember,” he replied. “It’s the Shelbys again?” He stared at her neck. It was a nice, white neck, though the flesh had grown thinner with age. He had given years to the mole just under

her left ear, licking it and picking at it with his tongue, while, beneath him, Margaret surrendered to the storm of youth that had blown them together. Now, in bed, when they sometimes found themselves naked, they were mariners navigating a wooden barque to still water, where they could rest, apart, and ignore the sea. “You’ll have a good time,” Margaret said. “You always did like Frank Shelby. After dinner you two can sit on the deck, smoke your cigars and tell your stories. Frank is so easy to talk to, Max.” He did not want to imagine it, but he did imagine it. He imagined Frank and Frank’s deck. He imagined Frank’s cigars and Frank’s brandy. He imagined listening to Frank’s talk. Frank’s cigars were not humidified. They were in cellophane wrappers in cardboard boxes Frank ordered by mail from Miami. Frank bought his brandy in jugs from Costco. While Frank and he talked about what Frank and he talked about, Helen, Frank’s wife, and Margaret sat on Helen’s print sofa inside and talked about what Helen and Margaret talked about. He drank Frank’s brandy. He smoked Frank’s dry cigars. He sat under the stars. They were Frank’s stars. The phone rang. He reached for his belt. “That’s the parrot,” Margaret laughed. “Can’t you tell? It’s coming from the kitchen.” Max went out to the car. He placed the cell phone on the passenger seat cushion. It was a simple cell phone, one of the early cell phones, nothing fancy, just a phone phone, for accidents, maybe, or if he ran out of gas or maybe got stuck in traffic or maybe if something happened and he needed to be in touch. He was not interested in games or web mail or downloading tunes or texting or even stock reports or anything about the weather. It was a phone phone, just in case. The phone rang. “Hello,” Max said. “Max, is it you?” “This is Max,” he replied. “I dialed Endicott 4648, and someone said, ‘wrong number.’ But that’s your number, Max. I’ve dialed Endicott 4648 a thousand times.” Max removed the phone from his ear. It was a tiny, inexpensive phone. He could close his hand over it. It had minimal functions. It had numbered pads, a miniature display window, which lit up with funny colors that dashed back and forth before settling down, and that was it. “Max?” the phone said. Max put the phone against his ear. “Who is it?” he said. “Who is who? Come on now, Max. This is Harold. Good ol’ Max. Still so serious. Hell, Max, it’s me. It’s Harold.” Max looked into the rear view mirror. The street behind was empty. Mildred Pointer’s house was across the street, the yard under the windows stuffed with yellow and scarlet roses. Mildred’s husband Jeff had

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

127

F I C T I O N died last year. Now Mildred tended her roses and organized neighbors to send care bundles to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Max thought, I have to get across the bridge. “I don’t know any Harold,” Max said. “My father was named Harold. I never knew any other Harold. Now, goodbye.” “Isn’t this Max Applebaum?” Max blinked. Something shivered his neck. He put the phone away, the way one puts away an image of something gross or vile. He had not been Max Applebaum for forty years. He had come from his home village upstate to the city as Max Applebaum. Other Applebaums were in the book, though, so he shortened the name to Apple. He had been Max Apple now for forty years. He liked being Max Apple more than he liked being Max Applebaum, with all the other Applebaums. “What number was that?” he said evenly. “What other number would it be, Max?” “What was it again?” “Endicott 4648. Your number, Max.” Max remembered the number. He remembered living with the number in the village before his brother Glenn died, before his father died and his mother married the man with the dark moustache and he was forced to smell the cigarette smell of a stranger’s breath. He remembered the number when numbers were names. He learned the number because his mother said something could happen. He remembered Endicott 4648. “What is this?” Max said quietly. “Come on, Max,” the voice replied. “You’re always so serious. This is Harold. Harold Schumer. Max, come on over.” He pressed the button until the tip of his finger grew white under the nail. The lights danced across the screen. The screen went dark. He put the phone on the cushion. It was a little phone, like a toy. This was a joke. Maybe it was Harold Schumer, after all these years. But it was Harold’s joke. Harold was a kidder. Somehow Harold had his cell phone number. Harold dialed the cell phone number, the actual number, and said, “Endicott 4648.” Certainly Endicott 4648 could be dialed, but the cell phone would not ring. There was no Endicott 4648. There were no numbers with names on phones anywhere anymore. Everything now was a number. He remembered the boy next door. He remembered building balsa wood models in the basement of the boy next door, or the boy in his own basement, thumbing the pages of Big Little Books and watching the figures move stiffly in the upper right corner. He remembered that he slept over at the boy’s house or the boy slept over at his house, or sometimes they slept under the stars on summer nights and talked about the other side of the world. He remembered Harold Schumer, whom he never remembered. Harold was Hare Schumer. Hare called him Maxmixer because Hare’s mother was always in the kitchen mak-

128

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

ing cookies with raisins and walnuts or making brownies or blueberry muffins or anything. Max sounded pretty close to “mix,” so Hare called him Maxmixer because when Hare’s mother had the mixer on, Max ran to see what she was making. Harold Schumer. Ol’ Hare Schumer. They rode bikes. They climbed trees. They built forts. There was nothing inside the house, only crackling voices from a wooden box with no face. Everything was outside. Ol’ Hare. Harold Schumer. Christ, he had not thought of Harold Schumer in forty years. Something tapped the window of the car. He lowered the window. “Max,” Margaret said, touching his shoulder, “are you all right? Is something wrong with the car?” “No. Nothing. I’m all right.” “What’s wrong?” “Nothing’s wrong. I told you.” “Max, you’re late for work.” “I know I’m late. I’m going.” “Do you have your phone?” He looked at the seat beside him. “Is it on?” she asked. “I don’t have it on while I’m driving.” “Dear,” Margaret said, “please turn it on, just in case.” “In case what?” “In case I have to call you, Dear.” “All right,” he said. “And leave it on, Dear. Please, just leave it that way.” “It’s on, Margaret.” She peered past him at the passenger seat. “Call me if there’s anything.” “I’ll call you if there’s a reason to call you, Margaret.” She straightened and smiled. “The Shelby’s will be nice. You know how much you and Frank agree about everything.” “Zinfandel,” he said. “I remember.” He rolled up the window. The phone was on through the commute traffic and on over the bridge. He did not want the phone on, but it was like Margaret to call to see if it was on. Crossing the bridge, Max looked at the ships anchored in the bay. They were large, gray-hulled ships from somewhere with something or off to somewhere with something else. A ship was there at night and during the day when he crossed the bridge. Then the ship was gone, and what was left was the flat, still water of the bay. He had driven over thousands of ships that were there and then not there. In the building he closed the door to his office. He looked at his mail, the usual memos asking for help, the usual reports talking about progress. He was the data base administrator for a general hospital in the city. There were several branches of the hospital. Sometimes he had to go to

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

129

F I C T I O N a branch to solve a problem. Sometimes members from all the branches came to the conference room in the building so he could explain something they should all know. He dealt in numbers: statistics, files, spread sheets, averages, ratios, annual reports, cost predictions. He had taught himself everything. As a young man he had seen the handwriting on the wall and trained himself before there was anywhere to get training. It was the hard way, of course, but the best way. He had crawled into computers and learned everything from the inside out. And that was the only way, he had come to realize. He was by nature independent. He liked keeping to himself. He could do things with computers that people with degrees could not do. He had a deep store of commonsense. Commonsense was his long suit. Others punched keys. They knew what the manual said. But the manual never said what something meant, inside, and inside was where everything was. He was like an artist or a philosopher who had gone so far that now he had only himself to talk to, like an Einstein or a Spinoza. Yet, from this summit of knowledge, he had come to hate instrumentality, the way an Oppenheimer hated the bomb or a Nobel hated dynamite. Yes, he had mastered what was alien. But it was a matter of survival. Now he could not truly explain anything, since nothing was explainable apart from everything else. What some thought to be impatience with stupidity, he knew to be despair. He had lost the connection to something for its own sake. It was time to retire. He needed to retire. He could retire this minute. But what would he do with retirement? He was a machine that ran. There had never been any thought of not running. The cell phone rang. He removed the phone from his belt. He set it upon his desk. Naturally, it was Margaret. Margaret had to be certain. Margaret had to be Margaret. Carefully, he touched the button. He raised the phone. “Hello?” he asked carefully. “Max,” the voice said. He jabbed the button. The phone was off the rest of the day. It was off when he left work early. It was off over the bridge and off in the liquor store for the zinfandel. It was off when he walked into the house. Margaret was not home. He went to the hall closet. He removed the cardboard box. Inside, with the other memorabilia, were the black and white photos. He took the photo from the fifth grade into the kitchen. He looked at the photo through the magnifying glass he kept in the drawer under the kitchen phone. Harold was there. Harold Schumer, from next door. He studied the face. He studied the other faces. Bits of memory appeared, bits of dry mortar holding something together. A few of

130

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

the bits became large. They supported events. They made a village of events from long, long ago. He went into the study. He sat down at the desk before his computer. It was a big desk. On the other side of the desk was Margaret’s computer. Margaret loved her computer. She loved it even more when he purchased the wifi setup because then being on the computer did not interfere with being on the phone. Margaret loved looking up recipes or profiles about celebrities. She loved tracing her genealogy. She found a relative who had been on the Mayflower. She found relatives in the South during the Civil War, who, after the War, went to Texas and then on to a colony in Brazil. She found the colony and the family name, buried in a cemetery in a tiny corner just outside São Paulo. She printed everything and kept everything in a drawer on her side of the desk. Max did not surf the net to find out anything about anything. There was a time when he had subscribed to the local paper. He had even subscribed to the Chronicle, which was published in the city. There had been something back then about wanting to know something that was going on, but through the years he had discovered that everything local was the same, murder and larceny, graft and corruption, injustice, high school teachers having sex with students, and grocery store ads, always the grocery store ads. He cancelled both subscriptions. Then he subscribed to The Wall Street Journal. There were no pictures of ripe bananas, no prime filets, no four-for-a-dollar and no weddings or gang violence, just big things, important things. Yet, after a time, he had sensed a litany in the narrative, a dishevelment of national morality, a shredding of national will. He began only to scan the headlines. Then he read only the editorials. The editorials were conservative. They knew what they were talking about. Then the subscription rose to over four hundred dollars, and he wondered, why should I pay four hundred dollars to read what I already know? So now there was no newspaper. He was about to turn on the computer when Margaret opened the front door. That evening they finished dinner at the Shelbys. Margaret and Helen sat on the print sofa. Frank and he went out on the deck. They sat in Frank’s chairs. Frank talked about socialism and the current administration. He talked about an electric fence along the Arizona border. He talked about the redistribution of wealth, the loss of freedom and how they might as well all get ready to move to New Zealand. Max tired almost immediately. That night, with Margaret asleep beside him, he got out of bed and tiptoed into the hall and down the stairs. He went into the study. He switched on the small desk lamp.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

131

F I C T I O N He turned on the computer. He put quote marks around Harold Schumer and hit “enter.” An entry appeared. It was from the tiny newspaper still being published in the village where he grew up. The entry talked about Harold. It talked about how Harold had lived all his years in the village. It talked about Harold’s contributions to the community, Harold’s family and how Harold had worked all his life at Bryson’s Furniture downtown, where Max’s mother had bought that first television, how Harold had become manager and then part owner of Bryson’s Furniture. It said that Harold had fallen onto the street from a heart attack in front of Bryson’s after locking up one evening. It said where to send flowers and how to contribute to the Heart Fund. Max looked at the date of the funeral. The date was three days before. He snapped off the computer. He sat a long time staring at the empty computer. The cell phone was next to the computer. He turned the cell phone on. The cell phone tweeped. Lights hurried back and forth. The screen lit up. The screen said, “You have messages.” Max turned off the phone. He went upstairs. He lay down in the bed next to Margaret. In the morning he went out to the car. He drove the car through the suburbs and onto the bridge. Halfway across he stopped the car in the far right lane. The traffic piled up behind him. He walked to the rail of the bridge. Horns blared. Men shook their fists, struggling to get by. Max Applebaum threw his cell phone into the timeless sea.

This is Richard Dokey's fourth story in Weber—The Contemporary West. His work has appeared recently in The Hopkins Review, Quiddity, upstreet and The Broad River Review. Pale Morning Dun, his collection of stories, published by University of Missouri Press, was nominated for the American Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

132

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

P O E T R Y

Ciara Shuttleworth

Night Holds its Own

Kristin Jackson

even on the darkest roads east of town where precious stones are still forming under the earth. This is where it doesn’t matter if your dreams have become twisted with the actual—no one can hear your mutterings and howls. The moon floats close enough to show you its mottled surface, always full, and the water, so pure, cures your sour stomach, your shaky restless binges. Under a copse of distant maples, rumbling tumblers darker than your mind, motorcycles gun their hope for chaos down the streets, and sirens widow-wail on the move. Rattle of night animals in branches, summer resuscitates, finally, prisms across your tongue.

P O E T R Y

Communion Auditorium silence is one thing—that amplified communal buzzing like mass without the murmur of prayer—but it does not match the silence of your own breath as you watch a jet trail far above the gravel road where you stand, no wind and summer heat pounds into your feet. This is the kind of quiet in which to see: horizon, gradation of road, field, sky twilight-stark, depths of blues pulling your mind to nothing but sight, so complete that when you reenter the auditorium, bodies and lights become plains of color painted abstractly, and above nothing but stars as you look through to sky, miles—land, road—beneath your feet forever gravel and your eyes that refuse to see noise.

134

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

Rats in the Dry Creek and nothing but angry left of the sky, and me: pacing from one side of my mind to the other. Every night, I give what I love to the rats, but now I wake and the eaves are on fire the rats (want more) nibble at gray matter, brain, despite the flames they must know another way out, escape I inadvertently go along with in their mouths, stomachs as plans go soggy in the rain of fire trucks even though there is no rule about how much fire one heart can hold or how long it takes to burn a heart to ash like how this town was built back atop the ashes of strangers who stayed, promising they’d get out and finally they did—all of them even the water gone from the old creek and nothing, nothing but angry left of the sky.

Ciara Shuttleworth’s work has previously appeared in journals including the Los Angeles Review, The New Yorker, and The Southern Review. She lives and works in New York City. She holds an MFA from the University of Idaho.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

135

E S S A Y

Tamara Kaye Sellman

Intersections

t the time, all we thought about was digging into the backpack for candy bars. My family arrived at Andrews Meadow at 6:45 a.m., jeans chafing and shoes squeaking after having forded the Queets River. My parents kept us all above the rapids by linking us in a chain of upraised and interwoven fingers, our fishing tackle dangling from their free hands at either end. We had just hiked through a damp thicket and into a golden swath of tall grass. The sun broke through, warm and clear. The two-mile hike past the fording point had been cloaked in a lingering mist we thought would never lift. Ahead, my older brother, Jim, and Mom knelt to lay down backpacks. My mom always packed well: aside from the candy bars, there was a tin drinking cup, a camera, toilet paper, pimiento cheese sandwiches, bug spray, a paring knife, matches, a flashlight, and a few Matchbox cars. The sudden zip and the sound of a soft plastic bag—the candy bars—became unnaturally amplified inside the gilded solitude of the meadow. Grasshoppers paused at their orchestrations. Dad put his finger to his lips. I held my breath, eyes wide. The first heads to break the grass were smaller. They had eyes as dark and glossy as bonbons. Their nostrils flared, sending mucus strings and puffs of steam into the morning air. Larger heads loomed then until, finally, the king took to his hooves. You can’t miss the Roosevelt elk migration through Andrews Meadow.

Wilderness River, Olympic National Park, Floris van Breugel, ArtInNaturePhotography.com

The elk always pass this way, just like the hikers and fishermen. It’s a well-known intersection. When you’re ten years old, it’s hard to gauge the size of things in general. On that morning, it didn’t help to be surrounded by giants already. We were in the Olympic National Forest; uptrail, we’d be passing the world’s tallest Douglas fir trees. The bull elk must have been ten feet tall. Shaggy in shades of olive, chocolate, and black, he looked as if moss had grown on his antlers. He didn’t bolt, just snorted a little.

“Sorry,” I whispered. Being the sensitive Only Daughter in a family steeped in boy culture, I felt bad that we’d interrupted his sleeping herd. It’s as rude as walking across another family’s campsite without saying hello. I was breathless with wonder as the herd lumbered away, a mass exodus of muscle and hide: one bull elk, a dozen does, and many more young. The ground rumbled deep and low—the first earthquake I’d ever felt. The darkness of adjacent woods swallowed them, leaving their musky perfume to linger. Mom doled out candy bars in silence. Who could speak? Without discussion, we understood: this was sacred space. I still find it miraculous that homesteaders had settled so deep inside the valley. Blackberry brambles woven into the meadow’s edge obscured what had once been a working dairy, the silvered skeleton of a hand-hewn spruce barn and hayloft rising beyond the grass. As we took the trail through the meadow, I glimpsed the rusted extension of an abandoned thresher. My dad explained how the acreage once supported cattle. Where the meadow rejoined the forest, small headstones and a cement gatepost marked the property’s original entrance. Many decades before, dirt roads—now choked with undergrowth—led directly to the settlement. Curiously, Dad insisted otherwise— he said that the Andrews patriarch rafted his way up and down the river to trade with local Indians. I suspect that was a fabrication fed by his upbringing in the Midwest, where rivers—the mythic landscapes of boyhood adventure—could actually be poled. The Queets River, however, is no slow and muddy channel: it rushes over large boulders and through glacial canyons in swift rapids, making it difficult to navigate.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

With Dad’s legend of the raft laid out before us, our fishing expedition officially began. It was as if our trip could not be blessed unless we passed through the meadow, made our peace with the elk, and heard Dad’s tall tale. My role in all this? Scout. On these excursions, I walked fast enough to lose sight of my family, drawn by the rich damp fragrances of the rainforest: blackberry vine, pine needle, rotting cedar. Nobody worried about safety. The idea of fearing Nature was foreign to all of us. The city and its alleyways were to be feared, the clusters of men on Burnside in Portland drinking from paper bags. This sensibility and my father’s obsession with stream fishing nullified any concerns about wildlife. We’d spy a few bears, but they always rambled off the trails, afraid of us. Other encounters were minor, but interesting: red fox, grouse, river otter, frog, banana slug, salamander, deer (with biting deerfly in tow). We met an occasional stinging nettle and took our fair share of bramble scrapes and slivers in our palms and knees, but beyond that, we moved through the landscape fearlessly. That morning, we hiked ahead a few miles. Then, while my dad and Jim fished, my little brother, Michael, and I played Land of the Giants. We built villages of pebbles, sticks and moss, then raced our toy cars through their streets. We ate little candy bars and handfuls of freshly picked blackberries to tie us over until lunch, when Mom broke out the pimiento sandwiches. If it sounds idyllic, it’s because it was. Or maybe because the intersections of memory make it so. After lunch, we regained the trail and I resumed my role as scout. That’s when I heard the first cat-like sounds. Growls, the occasional cry. Like a baby. They

137

E S S A Y came from uphill and seemed far away. and I dallied while Dad and Jim pulled I didn’t notice any movement in the in their limits, cleaning the glistening undergrowth, but I held back on the trail, bodies of rainbow trout at the water’s just the same, until I saw my Dad. He edge. They hung each fish by the gills was looking down an embankment to the from a long stick Michael had branright where a stream glittered through dished since the start of our journey and the trees about fifty yards away. anchored their catch carefully in a cold At that moment, he heard the cougar pocket of slowly swirling water to keep for himself and, without missing a beat, the fish chilled while we munched, first, said, “There’s a good hole down there. on sandwiches and, later, on the rest of Follow me, and be careful.” the candy bars, which we washed down No panic, no conwith dips of bubbling cern. Just urgency. I snowmelt running couldn’t tell for what. After lunch, we regained the straight off the rocks Either the fishing was of the river. trail and I resumed my role as that promising to my Meanwhile, father, or the cougar Mom and I kept our scout. That’s when I heard the was that intimidating first cat-like sounds. Growls, the eyes keen for campto him that he actuground smoke as the occasional cry. Like a baby. They afternoon grew late ally worried for our safety. Either way, we came from uphill and seemed and the going slow. spent most of the trip Each time we took a far away. I didn’t notice any down the slope on our new stream, Dad was backsides, digging our movement in the undergrowth, sure it was the main shoes into loose earth, but I held back on the trail, fork, only to discover hoping we’d land it wasn’t. The Queets just the same, until I saw my on a small beach of River, like so many dad. He was looking down an polished rocks rather alpine streams, cuts than into a biting cur- embankment to the right where a new paths through rent of glacial water. stream glittered through the trees the valley every year It would have been depending upon the ironic had one or more about fifty yards away. quality and volof us broken an ankle ume of the winter in the act. snowfall. What can become familiar to a It never occurred to Dad that we fisherman or hiker or ranger over a single might get lost crossing those smaller season can become foreign territory even tributaries in search of good fishing. Or into the succeeding season of the same maybe it mattered less to him than escapyear. Mother Nature doesn’t mean to lay ing the metallic gaze of a hunting cougar down roads to last a lifetime. so easily concealed in the litter of the rainforest. I don’t know which possibility made The fishing was good. The sun us more nervous: getting lost or being burned our cheeks and bare shoulders attacked by a cougar. We made jokes where we’d stripped away layers as the about having fish to fry, as if that would day warmed up, but we walked barefoot be enough to survive the night lost in the in the shallows, welcoming the iciness of deep woods. But the cat might still be the water in counterpoint. Michael, Mom, there, tracking us, the sound of rushing 138

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

water concealing its growl, even if we event might have been so traumatizing hadn’t heard from it in over an hour. that I pushed it deep inside that archive We looked to my Dad for direction: of early terrors we all bury in order his stoic face and reticence—unusual to psychologically survive our lives. I for a man given to anecdotes—told us only remember it as one of my father’s all we needed to know. Yes, we should anecdotes told around the campfire as we be afraid, but no, there was no point in practiced blowing elk whistles through panicking. our enfolded hands. It was only later, as an adult, that The thing is, a cougar wouldn’t leave I learned how much more afraid we that kind of situation readily. It wouldn’t should have been. Three children, a catch care a lick if you called it names. As long of fresh fish hanging from a stick, and a as it felt it was bigger than its prey, a coubackpack full of salty, gar would simply shiny, sugary food try to find a way to wrappings would frighten off my dad The thing is, a cougar wouldn’t have been ample and, with an eye on inspiration to keep the three of us—cryleave that kind of situation a cougar hot on our ing for Mom in our readily. It wouldn’t care a lick if trail the entire time. waffle stompers and None of us would you called it names. As long as hooded parkas— have known how to seek to bat us right it felt it was bigger than its prey, respond to an attackout of the tree with a cougar would simply try to ing wildcat, either. one long sweep of its find a way to frighten off my dad Banging loud pans claws. might scare off black But nobody and, with an eye on the three of bears, but cougars worried about safety us—crying for Mom in our waffle would only grow then. There were no stompers and hooded parkas— more annoyed and signs at the trailstimulated by the head warning of the seek to bat us right out of the tree sound. dangers of cougars with one long sweep of its claws. A previous in those days, so encounter in years we moved through past provided no those wild places better solution. While hiking a short loop wrapped in a cloak of ignorance and its trail closer to the campground, we had hood of divine luck. come upon a bull elk in mating season. It Probably the buried miracle in this pawed and stamped at the pine-needled story is that my parents even got away trail, preparing to charge my family, rage with doing these kinds of things with and rutting having obscured its already the three of us kids. When I tell this story poor sense of vision. My Dad quickly now, people are amazed by the amount nestled my brothers and I—all of us of danger we faced, even as I shake my under the age of 5—into the crotch of a head, confused. Danger? What danger? nearby tree and shouted insults at the Now that I am a parent, I can list so animal until it finally sensed we weren’t many things we’ve done with our own quite the mate it had been hoping for and kids that aren’t socially responsible acts, left. at least according to the rules of parenting I don’t remember this incident. I in the 21st century. I have had neighbors must have been in diapers still, or the scorn me for allowing my 10-year-old SPRING/SUMMER 2014

139

E S S A Y daughter to walk the ¼-mile manmade trail between our neighborhood and the school; I thought it would be safer than having her walk the rural road, where there is no sidewalk and you can hear the dump trucks push the 45 mph speed limit even through the dense woods. Regardless, I let both of my kids walk to school; in fact, I require it. Rain or shine. It’s exercise, it makes them endure the elements and it builds character. And what about all the times I let my kids walk into town (about a mile away and very suburban, with sidewalks and stores and schools and the library dotting the way) or to their friends’ houses, less than a mile away but not inside our subdivision? Most other parents drive them, frown at me for my carelessness. Fear—of car accidents, child abductions, sexual assaults, flashers, bullies, even bad weather—permeates their lives. My youngest daughter tells me she loves to walk in the rain. My oldest daughter, now of driving age, tells me that when they go into the city (commuting by foot from the ferry into Seattle), the other kids won’t tell their parents they are taking cabs to Seattle Center because their parents would never let them go back to the city again. Cabs are dangerous!, they are told, and the fact they are walking around downtown Seattle is already pushing the envelope. The cab? It was my suggestion. There are lots of hills in downtown Seattle, and the walk can be miserable in blustery cold rain without an umbrella. So far, I haven’t been reported to any social service organization for child endangerment, which is miraculous. Imagine, then, what would have happened to my parents, had they raised us like they did in the 1970s, but in the 21st century? While navigating the intricate stream network back, we came upon the centuries-old Douglas fir grove. To our

140

unspoken relief, Dad found his bearings and we retook Andrews Meadow, stomachs growling, eyes adjusting to early nightfall. And just in time. The herd was grazing. It was feeding time for them as well. We didn’t pause long. Dad grew concerned about the crossing. In darkness, an errant slip in the river could be especially devastating. We made noise at the gatepost to alert the herd, and then cautiously took the trail, passing within feet of the lingering animals. That was the second earthquake I’d ever felt. I moved quickly among them, terrified I would be trampled by hooves as large as my head. But they shifted calmly, as if they could read my concern, and together, all of us performed a kind of dual dance: a large company of muscular waltzers weaving among a handful of diminutive ballerinas who reached desperately for the barre, still navigating their first feet en pointe. Our families parted ways at the woods. I heard them snapping through the undergrowth long after we’d lost sight of them, and that gave me comfort somehow. A cougar wouldn’t bother coming nearer. We forded the Queets without incident after that. The dusky sky grew obfuscated by the low-flung smoke of campfires. Once on the other side, we waded Sam’s Fork (perhaps it is still the world’s best place to corral tadpoles) and scaled the embankment marking the end of Queets River Road, the site where the south access to Andrews Meadow once connected. It washed away decades ago at the urging of the meandering river during one especially ample snowmelt, leaving a raw edge of eroded asphalt to remind humanity of its boundaries. Rangers placed a four-foot-thick blow-

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

down there to prevent people from driving off the edge of the bank by mistake, unaware. We sat there, legs dangling over the roundness of the thick old-growth trunk, taking turns using the forest service outhouse since we were still a good walk away from the campground. I stared out into the valley, my tired eyes uncertain whether what I saw was real. There, a movement! Could it be the cougar, still in pursuit? The thought that we’d been tracked all this time sent a chill coursing through me. “Dad?” I pointed. Instead, a herd emerged, picking its way gingerly across the gravel bar. To say hello, my dad cupped his hands and rendered an elk’s whistle just like he’d taught us every night around the fire. We followed suit, opening and shutting the valves of our hands and blowing hard enough to strain the capillaries in our cheeks and eyes. I’m sure the rush of the river and the several hundred yards between the animals and us made it impossible for the

sound we made to carry that far. But in that moment, did I see the bull elk raise his head to acknowledge us? The funny thing about memory is that it serves as an intersection: between what we experience, what we believe, what we are told, and what we desire. The truth is simple: they were common deer, not elk, that we saw grazing at the river’s edge as we sat at the end of the road, the full moon rising to glorify the valley with its light. My memory paints, in clarity, something else entirely: the remarkable image of a gentle leviathan mantled in olivecolored moss, and the song it sounded in reply: a dark, rich chord older than the homesteader Andrews, the advent of the fishing rod and FDR, older than America proper—a chord as old as the ancient trees that can still be found in the nooks and crannies of the Olympics’ untamed wilderness. I am flush with it even now, more than 30 years later and 200 miles away—the music of deep and fearless memory, what we can only hear in our bones.

Tamara Kaye Sellman has published short fiction, articles, blogs, poetry and essays. She is the founding editor of the web anthology Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism (1998-2007) and the director of Writer's Rainbow Literary Services (2006-2011). Currently, she is focusing on the genres of speculative fiction, paranormal mystery, food writing, and blogging. Nick Felkey

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

141

E S S A Y

Jessica Marie Jackson

Fire-Watch

Christin Lambert

An ominous fire cloud grows over the hills of San Timoteo Canyon from the east side of the ranch. Redlands, CA, 2005

hen television news coverage of the latest out-ofcontrol brushfire to ravage the mountains and canyons of Southern California dominates the airwaves, it is not uncommon for me to be glued to the screen, compulsively watching with that particular degree of morbid excitement which awe and fear typically engender. As I have many times faced the threat of evacuation, those images on the TV screen bring back not only memories, but the heady rush of exhilaration only an adrenalin junkie can appreciate. There is something about fire that transcends all one’s preconceptions, a fascination one does not expect to so completely spellbind and

confound one’s sense. In a media-driven society that traffics in fear, it is not unreasonable for the rational person to shrug off such images as having been deliberately sensationalized for the sole purpose of feeding the hysteria that surrounds California’s fire culture. Such footage is, without a doubt, sensationalized. But as one who has experienced the power of fire firsthand, I can say that what they put up on the screen is no exaggeration. At the time, I lived in one of the many residential suburbs at the base of the mountains that separate the Los Angeles Basin from the Mojave and the Colorado Deserts, but due to the inhospitable eye with which rurality

is viewed in the burbs, I boarded my Fire-watch usually begins at home, two horses with my friends Kyle and with the perpetual, spring-loaded state Beth, who lived on a small ranch in a of alertness which has become second foothill canyon not far from my house. nature after years of combating the In the wake of the increasing sprawl same seasonal disaster. My sensitivof urbanization, and the reluctance of ity to fire season is so instinctual I can suburbanites to share their modern subswitch from everyday complacency to divisions with livestock, neighborhoods full-out evacuation-mode without missthat were once horse-tolerant were ing a beat. I sometimes feel as though I rezoned to disallow have undergone years any animal larger than of Special Forces a dog, forcing many training—and I supCanyon winds are the most rural communities, pose, to a certain exranchers, and people tent, I have. I cannot fearsome element of wildfires, seeking escape from go outside anytime as they are uncontrollable urban centers farther during the summer and unpredictable and make and farther into the (or any other time of undeveloped foothill year, really) without the fire behave so as well, canyons, where the scanning the horizon and can cause a flagging, chaparral burns every for plumes of smoke, reasonably contained brushfire or double-checking year. These canyons twist and turn over any patch of thick to rage into an unstoppable a rambling course of haze in the sky which conflagration in seconds. The fifteen to twenty or might be smoke. And only thing one can do under so miles, so when the smoke is always the canyon is blazing at telltale sign of a fire. such conditions is to stand one end, it is entirely The smell of a neighback and watch. feasible that the fire bor’s barbeque or the will not reach you at sound of an airtanker the other. But the one overhead are reliable implacable rule I have learned over panic triggers that are easily enough the years is that fire can go wherever it subdued if there is no smoke on the howants. I have seen fire jump a six-lane rizon. Smoke is also the only indication freeway without even scorching the as to where a fire is burning, and it is a median strip, and race across a field so finely honed skill to accurately discern fast the topmost chaparral is burnt to the general location of a fire from a a grey-ashen crisp while the ground mere wisp on the horizon. The instant I underneath is left unscathed. Canyon see smoke, the process begins of accesswinds are the most fearsome element ing where the fire is burning and how of wildfires, as they are uncontrollable close it is, or might potentially come, to and unpredictable and make the fire my horses. Fires have come so close as behave so as well, and can cause a flagto measure their distance by the yard, ging, reasonably contained brushfire to and though I can count the number of rage into an unstoppable conflagration actual evacuations I have experienced in seconds. The only thing one can do on one finger, I have sat fire-watch inunder such conditions is to stand back numerable times. Every fire carries with and watch. it the possible necessity of evacuation;

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

143

E S S A Y

This hold is all-consuming and millennia old, forged when early hominids encamped around a watch fire, a small pinprick of light to stave off the suffocating blackness of night on the African plain, staring into the leaping tongues of flame as predatory eyes danced blue and green and yellow in the darkness just beyond the circle of light.

the only way to tell for certain is to go out to the ranch and wait to see how close it comes. Ironically, however, fire-watch is a time of high socialization: everyone with horses at the ranch comes out to watch the fire, to be ready in case evacuation becomes necessary. The excitement and expectation in the air creates a perverse kind of carnival atmosphere, as those of us present congregate around the locations on the ranch which afford the best view: the hill behind the barn; out in front along the road; perched high atop horse trailers and roofs. Firefights are more of a spectacle during the day, with airtankers quelling flare-ups in a single drop of phoschek and water-dropping helicopters flying so low overhead the spray from the hoses rains down on you as they make pass after pass. A small pond about a mile from the ranch is used by the California Department of Forestry to draw water, their helicopters resembling dragon flies as they sit on the surface of the pond filling their tanks. Night blazes are especially enthralling. When the world is dark, the fire 144

rages in an otherworldly glow which casts a ghastly sanguine pall upon the darkness, an ocular pheromone of the fire’s ferocity. Watching a fire burn is utterly mesmerizing; its erotic dance seduces all who see it, entrancing observers in the spell of its violent and ravaging power. This hold is allconsuming and millennia old, forged when early hominids encamped around a watch fire, a small pinprick of light to stave off the suffocating blackness of night on the African plain, staring into the leaping tongues of flame as predatory eyes danced blue and green and yellow in the darkness just beyond the circle of light. Maybe this is why fires are always more fearsome at night. Not because most air support takes to the ground and firefighters are left to battle over a rugged terrain they do not even have the benefit of seeing, but rather, at night, fire serves to remind us that we are not so very far evolved from those small hominids as we would like to think: their fears are still our fears, and something as simple as a spark on dry grass instantly places us right back on that dark plain, huddled and filled with awe. Is it any wonder that so many Californians hold their breath with the advent of summer? Similar to how the Oklahoman feels when the sky turns dark and the air becomes still and heavy, or the Floridian when the barometric pressure falls, I cringe with the knowledge of what is to come every time the temperature rises, the humidity drops, and the winds pick up in the east. I have even been known to throw pillows at the TV as the weatherman pronounces a high fire danger, which subsequently alerts all amateur arsonists and fire-bugs that it is a good time to go out and strike up their matches. Woodhouse is the fire that finally reached me. Named for the dirt road

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

near which it started, it burned for two days and consumed over sixty-four hundred acres, closing the 60 freeway in the process. Though over one hundred structures were threatened, none were lost thanks to the efforts of six hundred firefighters, utilizing sixty engines, seven bulldozers, four airtankers, and six helicopters. Its cause has never been determined. I was still in school then, and on my way to a four o’clock class, when I first saw its black plume of smoke rising into the sky precariously close to the point on the horizon that marked the general location of the ranch. As it was the first class of the quarter, however, I ignored my instinct to head out there and see what was going on. When I finally got out of class around seven p.m., the smell hit me first. There is something about the smell of wildfire, so different from your average fireplace, firepit, or barbeque, which triggers that all too familiar sick clench in my stomach: something feral, a predacious pungency that the hunted instantly recognize and fear. I did not need to see the black smoke mushrooming out over the hills in massive billows and waves to know it was bad, yet I knew it was worse the moment I saw it. Whether white and wispy, or black and cumulous, one can always read the character of a fire by the appearance of its smoke, and this one was very angry. My mother was in her car by the front of the school waiting for me, my boots and sweatshirt in the backseat. I was unsurprised to see her. She had spent the preceding hour and a half fighting with California Highway Patrol officials in trying to make her way to the ranch, and was quite overwrought at the frustration of having been repeatedly turned away by officers indifferent to her need to cross the roadblock. California law authorizes SPRING/SUMMER 2014

law enforcement officers to restrict access to any area where a threat to public safety exists, and thus CHP had blocked all access points to our part of San Timoteo Canyon, but with no screening criteria on the books to determine who has a legitimate right to enter the restricted space, it was not letting anyone through: horse trailers were not allowed in to evacuate horses and livestock; residents were not allowed in to their homes. Kyle, who lives on the ranch, was stopped at a roadblock, and though he showed the officer the address on his driver’s license and pleaded that his wife and fourteen-year-old daughter were alone on the ranch with six horses to move, California’s finest was implacable. It mattered little that no evacuation orders, either voluntary or mandatory, had been issued—although mandatory is a rather nebulous term, as no law enforcement agency has the authority to forcibly remove a resident from his home in response to a disaster. So I cannot help but wonder: if I have the legal right to stay and protect my home, should I not also have the legal right to access and protect my home? I wonder in vain, though, for there is, as yet, no answer that I have heard.

I did not need to see the black smoke mushrooming out over the hills in massive billows and waves to know it was bad, yet I knew it was worse the moment I saw it. Whether white and wispy, or black and cumulous, one can always read the character of a fire by the appearance of its smoke, and this one was very angry.

145

E S S A Y The sun had not yet set, but as my veil of gray. Even the double yellow mother drove toward the fire, the sky and white road lines were obscured. As grew increasingly darker; a blanket of ash swarmed in our headlights, locust smoke was covering the land, and we from some Greek underworld, the stark were crawling under it. Like standing reality of the situation was overwhelmunder the shadow of a cloud, everying, and I desperately wanted to turn thing was dark and the air was thick around and go home. with haze and ash, yet on just the other The smoke smothered all light edge of the smoke was light and sunsave the orange glow it reflected from shine, and I could look out toward the the fire, the brightest concentration of west and see the bright which seemed to be setting sun. pulsating right behind I had it in my mind The sun had not yet set, but as the barn—yet wheththat trying to get er the fire was just my mother drove toward the past the roadblocks over the nearest hill, would be the toughest fire, the sky grew increasingly or a half-dozen hills impediment we would darker; a blanket of smoke was away, was impossible have to surmount. The to determine. When covering the land, and we first roadblock was we finally pulled up were crawling under it. Like circumvented easily the driveway, Kyle enough, by turning and Beth, and everystanding under the shadow of along a grid of back one else who lived a cloud, everything was dark roads that happened on the ranch, were and the air was thick with haze gathered outside with not to be blocked; the second, my mother their heads craned and ash, yet on just the other simply talked our way toward the glow, but edge of the smoke was light through, to an underthere was no carniand sunshine, and I could look val atmosphere that standing officer who told us it was our lives out toward the west and see night. This air was we were risking and charged with excitethe bright setting sun. waved us on. I had not ment, but it was the given a single thought excitation of panic: beyond just getting a dull, adrenalineto the ranch. Driving along that dark induced panic that compelled action, and deserted road, my only thought even of the chicken-with-its-head-cutwas that maybe this wasn’t such a good off variety. I suppose it was the fightidea. The canyon was utterly desoor-flight impulse, but I did not stop lated, the vibrant, sun-drenched colors long enough to question it. I had to do I knew so well—the tan brown of the something. I couldn’t just stand around chaparral, green of the pepper trees, the and watch. sharp contrast of blue sky against the The difficulty with evacuating any hills, the black asphalt and the white kind of livestock is twofold. First, is just fencing – were completely washed getting the animals away from the fire away as smoke obliterated the sky threat, which is much easier if you have and ash swathed the landscape in its a trailer than if you do not. We fell into post-apocalyptic pallor: the edge of the this latter category. As such, we first road melded into dirt and then brush had to secure some means of getting all indistinguishably beneath the opaque eight horses off the property, so we all 146

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

Christin Lambert

Flames leave their mark within fifty yards of the barn. Redlands, CA, 2005

started making phone calls to friends and people we knew—anyone with a horse trailer—to ask if they could come move our horses. Only when the animals are removed from the immediate fire threat, does the second problem present itself: where do you take them? Beth’s sister, who lives in the hills east of San Diego, had to tether her horses to a chain-link fence outside a grocery store during the 2003 Firestorm until the Cedar fire was out because she had no place to take them. I seriously did not want to go there. Fortunately, both issues were resolved in one simple stroke: a good friend of ours owns a breeding facility at the far end of the canyon, and she offered not only to send us her six-horse and her two-horse trailers, but the use of a small barn on the back of her property for as long as we needed. There was nothing more to do but watch and wait, but waiting was, SPRING/SUMMER 2014

perhaps, the hardest part of the entire ordeal. Even now, I fail to remember clearly what I spent the intervening one and one-half hours doing. What I do remember—and vividly—is sitting in the car at the mouth of the driveway, to signal the trailers as to where along the darkened road to turn, and watching the fire pulsing red in the rearview mirror. That was when I was most scared: sitting alone in the dark, an angry, vibrant red backlighting the hills, as though any minute it would crest the closest ridge and come sweeping through our little valley, bathing the entire ranch in its hue. The air was eerily still, heavy and muffled, smoke smothering all ambient sound save for the faint crackling of burning brush and the occasional whoosh of a truckand-trailer as it raced down the road to some other ranch and other evacuees. When the trailers at last arrived, a little before nine thirty, the fire, in true 147

E S S A Y irony, was the most subdued it had the entire foothill range in a blaze of been all night, the glow not much more orange. The fire did crest the ridge than a dull, pale orange. Though, debehind the ranch, and a wall of flame spite rumblings that maybe we did not came sweeping down the hill within really need to evacuate, we proceeded fifty yards of where the barn is nestled. as planned. Horses are highly sensitive The photos are incredible. to the emotional state of their people, I had never been so happy to leave and it is often the extreme ends of one’s a place in my life, and the giddy relief mood swing that one’s horse picks up I felt in following the trailer away from on—most especially panic. As prey Woodhouse, my horses inside and animals, horses are safe, was unlike any particularly vulnerable feeling I had ever to panic, and are fast experienced. All the That was when I was most to reflect that emofear and anxiety that scared: sitting alone in the tion if they sense it in the fire engendered their person, making was behind me—litdark, an angry, vibrant red a bad situation even erally—and I was backlighting the hills, as more dangerous. With able to walk away, to though any minute it would the smoke distorting kick the ash from my every sense my horse sandals, so to speak, crest the closest ridge and could rely on, his sole come sweeping through our and not look back. measure of the situaI still do look tion was me, so it was little valley, bathing the entire back, though, and ofcrucial that I appeared ranch in its hue. The air was ten. Every time I hear calm. And in forcing eerily still, heavy and muffled, news of wildfires, myself to appear so, or see fire coverage smoke smothering all ambient I actually started to on TV, it all comes feel calm. As I led him sound save for the faint rushing back: the out of his stall, he was crackling of burning brush adrenaline, the awe. agitated, to be sure, The red glow behind and the occasional whoosh of and hyperaware of the hill, the smoke every little twig snap, stinging my eyes. a truck-and-trailer as it raced but he was composed The compulsive need down the road to some other and responsive, and to watch fire coverwalked into the trailer ranch and other evacuees. age, and the quasi without a moment’s longing (jonesing, hesitation. The interior even?) to experience trailer lights were not working, and afit again. The realization of how fortuter our horses were loaded, I moved the nate we were, and the knowledge that car so that the headlights shone into the increasingly too many others are not. trailer, but my mother loaded her horse, The suburban neighborhoods that once and I loaded mine, in darkness. pushed us out into the foothill canyons It was a very good thing we got the are now themselves urban sprawling horses off the ranch when we did. The into the same canyons, blocking firefire flared up again shortly after we thoroughfares and burn-paths, so that left, and our drive home, exhausted where there were only isolated rural and bleary-eyed at two a.m., revealed communities under fire threat, there are

148

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

now entire subdivisions burning to the ground. Unrestrained building practices are putting these neighborhoods directly in the fire’s path (housing regulation, anyone?), yet the people who live in these neighborhoods, seemingly safe in their urban cloister of concrete sidewalks and Marathon Sod lawns, are entirely ill-prepared for the realities of where they live. We ruralists have accepted the conditions of fire danger by purposefully choosing to live in undeveloped areas, but these suburbanites often do not realize the danger of living in nature until it melts their patio furniture and clogs their pool filters with ash. When I returned to class with my newly minted war-story, a classmate commented that it sounded just like the movies. I suppose what happened is the stuff plots are made of, with last minute rescues and harrowing escapes—albeit, without the dashing, leading-man hero, but I’m not complaining—but it was so much more than that. Movies,

for all their verisimilitude, are only simulations of reality. Woodhouse was all reality, and one ill-timed shift of the winds, or a CHP officer more committed to keeping people out than determining which people should be let in, could have drastically altered the ending. The politics of fire-culture can very easily become heated as law enforcement agencies seek to balance a resident’s inherent right to protect his or her property with the state’s need to maintain public safety, and all too often it is the resident with everything to lose who has to sit back and give way to the demands of the machine. But until some standardized disaster management and evacuation protocols are set in place to differentiate the people who have a legitimate right to fire-watch from those just looking for a cheap thrill, the politics really matter little, because nothing matters when fire is burning. There is only fire. And as our climate continues to heat up, there will only be more fire —and more people with everything to lose.

Jessica Marie Jackson graduated from the University of California, Riverside, with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and is currently at work on a Master of Fine Arts in the same discipline. She writes and edits freelance, and lives in inland southern California with two horses, four dogs, and a collection of barn cats. Peter Jackson

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

149

P O E T R Y

C. R. Resetarits

Hewn My highway hearth, full spectrum vexed by this our long-laid crag impasse, these seasons gone, these seasons since our molten rift. These searing days sight prism prone by fog-lit range, my Catskill years. The comfort thing that stone-faced range. But then to find a passage made, to find a cleave just nature hewn as branches break from April snow. Crossing Hudson, prime chiseler here, who captures, spins, makes old anew but new as old as pressed coal vein. Rust, cream, red and greening set my mind to drops of counterpanes as sweetgum ghosts transfixed by sky set rising walls for poster bed, their seedballs trim like cotton puffs which once edged curtains billowing. Blue burnt grasslands shimmer gold. West is world away from Eastern tribes but I’m wind and piss and headed home.

The Florida Center for Instructional Technology

Looking West Earlier, so very early, we wait for day, the coffee shop owner and I. He yak-yaks: “Told the wife . . . what the hell . . . I hear yah, kid.” At first, as he opens up, we stand aside— our feedbag-faces dull, heavy. It’s not lack of sleep. Not only. Doubt maybe. What if his talky charm, his barker’s lure, escapes him, forsakes him, as I am convinced— this morning more than most—I’ve nothing left worth saying, worth staring through panes, worth rising so early day after day, year after year. The owner tries his best stand-up routine corporate morons, Middle East fix. Heard it before and I, as always, watch for some sweet, singular bird in my window seat sky and I must stay as all bust balloons caught by twigs must stay stuck, left to kite calls and vulture spins left to high plains blue taunt skies, a curious hue, which ages to pale as the sun threatens noon, stirring cerulean wisps like my old bedroom curtains when fluttering, threadbare in lye-wash, sun, dust and sage, same as bedspread and pillow and the color of dreams, when the world could hang hush on a white-winged coo from a pecan out my window, when— there, proof, mettle, linger— morning’s sweet errant bird.

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

151

P O E T R Y

Everett Ruess Promise boy, vagabond in search of beauty, in beauty’s thrall a sketch pad stuffed in saddlebag, a block print ink of cypress grove, a book, a burro, a deck of cards. King, Queen, Knave, the Ace of faith, though Ace to Ace goes either way whether quest Big Sur or Escalante: same saddlebag, same deck of cards, same boy neglect at marking trail. Burro, Nemo get left behind but Everett Ruess is Red Rock bound down hole, down day, down forking stream a dropless flow, a moonbeam sea, Narcissus lost to canyon keeps.

C. R. Resetarits’ most recent poetry appears in Women’s Quarterly Review (The Safe Issue), Ruminate, Watershed and Solo Novo: 122 Days. Her essay on Emerson in Paris has recently appeared in Paris in American Literature: On Distance as a Literary Resource, ed. Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Vamsi K. Koneru (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2013). She also recently edited An Anthology of NineteenthCentury American Science Writing for Anthem Press (2012).

152

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

T S E W E H DING T

REA

read-ing [from ME reden, to explain, hence to read] – vt. 1 to get the meaning of; 2 to understand the nature, significance, or thinking of; 3 to interpret or understand; 4 to apply oneself to; study.

THE DUSTY WEST Increasingly, researchers are trying to understand the dust problem in the West. Dust is periodic and difficult to measure. However, researchers urge that monitoring the dust may help us understand its effect on human health and the consequences in a hotter, drier future as result of global warming. In the nineteenth century, the high deserts west and south of the Rockies became a famed destination for respiratory sufferers. Places like Indian Hot Springs in Arizona and Colorado Springs in Colorado became popular destinations for “health seekers.” Doc Holliday famously died at a sanitarium in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. However, even then the air quality was being compromised by the tens of thousands of cattle and sheep which were loosening once stable soils on the Colorado Plateau. Vegetation is the most important factor in protecting soil surfaces. The type and amount of plant cover can affect the severity of wind erosion. Nowadays it is mostly off-road vehicle use, drought, and mineral extraction processes which are denuding the soil and stirring up the dust. Utah is one area of the West in which rates of asthma are increasing. For example, in the rural southeast corner of the state, a particularly dusty zone, 13.6 percent of the adult residents suffer from asthma, compared with about 7.5 percent nationally. According to Utah’s Public Health Data Resource center, asthma is a serious personal and public health issue that has far reaching medical, economic, and psychosocial implications. The burden of asthma can be seen in the number of asthma related medical events, including emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and deaths.

Source: http://ibis.health.utah.gov/indicator/view/AsthAdltPrev.LHD.html. See also Aeolian research in southeastern Utah, 2014-2012 as reported in Science Direct: http://ibis.health.utah.gov/indicator/view/AsthAdltPrev.LHD.html

R E A D I N G

T H E

W E S T

DUST-ON-SNOW The Center for Snow & Avalanche Studies monitors the presence/absence of dust layers at eleven mountain pass locations throughout Colorado. The effort is to determine how likely dust-on-snow is to influence snowmelt time and rates during the snowmelt runoff season. According to the January 2014 report, this is the first season since 2005 that the passes have not yet received any Colorado Plateau dust in early winter storms.

Source: http://snowstudies.org/dust/20140102.html

UTAH AIR QUALITY

The Florida Center for Instructional Technology

In 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency tightened its air quality standards. Primary standards set limits to protect public health, including the health of “sensitive” populations such as asthmatics, children, and the elderly. Secondary standards set limits to protect public welfare, including protection against decreased visibility, damage to animals, crops, vegetation, and buildings. In 2012, the EPA again revised the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for fine particulate matter (PM2.5). According to the 2012 annual report of the Utah Division of Air Quality, there are no areas within the state that would be out of compliance with this new standard.

154

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

In 2013, the levels of PM2.5 were high enough to make the corridor from Weber County to Salt Lake County the sixth worst in the nation, according to the American Lung Association. However, that organization also noted that Utah air is cleaner than the first “State of the Air” report 14 years ago. According to Glenn Lanham, Executive Director at the American Lung Association, in Utah: Even though Salt Lake City has experienced increases in unhealthy days of shortterm particle pollution, the air quality is still better compared to a decade ago, but we must set stronger health standards for pollutants and cleanup sources of pollution in Salt Lake City to protect the health of our citizens. Sources: Utah Division of Air Quality 2012 Annual Report, http://www.airquality.utah.gov/Public-Interest/annualreport/.pdf/2012Annual%20Report.pdf. See also: “What are the Air Quality Standards for PM?” http://www.epa.gov/ region1/airquality/pm-aq-standards.html; Judy Fahys, “Air Pollution in Utah gets “F” Grades from American Lung Association,” The Salt Lake Tribune, 24 April 2013, http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/56208839-78/pollution-utahassociation-lung.html

POLLUTION HITTING NORTHERN UTAH HARD THIS YEAR • When PM 2.5 particulate levels hit 15 micrograms per cubic meter of air, officials issue a “yellow” or voluntary air-action day, urging Utahns to drive less and take other pollutionreducing measures • At 25 micrograms per cubic meter of air, officials issue a “red” or mandatory advisory outlawing wood burning • At 35 micrograms per cubic meter of air, the level of pollution exceeds national health standards

Judy Fahys, “No Sure Solution in sight for Utah’s Air Pollution,” The Salt Lake Tribune, 25 January 2013, http://www. sltrib.com/sltrib/news/55695303-78/pollution-utah-cubic-micrograms.html.csp

SPRING/SUMMER 2014

155

WINTER INVERSIONS The Utah Department of Air-Quality has 26 monitoring stations located along the Wasatch Front and in southeastern Utah. During winter inversions, the air over Salt Lake, Cache, and Utah valleys often exceed federal standards for ambient levels of fine particulate. As the department explains: Surface temperature inversions play a major role in air quality, especially during the winter when these inversions are the strongest. The warm air above cooler air acts like a lid, suppressing vertical mixing and trapping the cooler air at the surface. As pollutants from vehicles, fireplaces, and industry are emitted into the air, the inversion traps these pollutants near the ground, leading to poor air quality. Source: http://www.airquality.utah.gov/Public-Interest/about_pollutants/Graphs/Inversion_popup.htm

POLLUTION PUZZLE Scientists and regulators have yet to gain a firm grasp on where particulate pollution comes from and how to reduce it. In a December 2013 article in The Salt Lake Tribune, Brian Maffly reported: Tailpipes, smoke stacks and wood stoves inject particulate straight into air. But most of the PM2.5 contributing to our pollution crisis is emitted in the form of “precursor” gases, such as nitrous oxides and volatile organic compounds (VOC), which react in the atmosphere to form particles. Inversions, by concentrating these gasses, also abet the reactions that create particulate, making the problem even worse. Conventional wisdom says more than half the fine particulate comes from vehicle exhaust. That’s according to the state’s “emissions inventories,” estimates of how much PM2.5 and its precursors are emitted by various sources. But most of the PM2.5 in the air is not emitted—it’s created by the interaction of the precursor chemicals. And it’s unclear which precursors from what sources are the most responsible.

This question of “source apportionment” is the subject of research underway at Brigham Young University and the University of Utah’s Program for Air Quality, Health, and Society.

Source: Brian Maffly, “Scientists tackle Utah’s particulate pollution puzzle,” The Salt Lake Tribune, 22 December 2013, http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/57159228-90/utah-quality-pollution-lake.html.csp?page=1

EDITORIAL MATTER

ISSN 0891-8899 —Weber is published biannually by The College of Arts & Humanities at Weber State University, Ogden, Utah 84408-1405. Full text of this issue and historical archives are available in electronic edition at https://www.weber.edu/weberjournal Indexed in: Abstracts of English Studies, Humanities International Complete, Index of American Periodical Verse, MLA International Bibliography, and Sociological Abstracts. Member, Council of Learned Journals. Subscription Costs: Individuals $20 (outside U.S., $30), institutions $30 (outside U.S., $40). Back issues $10 subject to availability. Multi-year and group subscriptions also available. Submissions and Correspondence: Editor, | Weber State University 1405 University Circle, Ogden, UT 84408-1405. 801-626-6473 | weberjournal@weber.edu Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University. All rights reserved. Copyright reverts to authors and artists after publication. Statements of fact or opinion are those of contributing authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or the sponsoring institution.

ANNOUNCING the 2014 Dr. Sherwin W. Howard Poetry Award

to Michael Johnson

for “The Salmon Word for Home,” and other poems. in the Fall 2013 issue The Dr. Sherwin W. Howard Award of $500 is presented annually to the author of the best poetry published in Weber during the previous year. Funding for this award is generously provided by the Howard family.

Dr. Howard (1936-2001) was former President of Deep Springs College, Dean of the College of Arts & Humanities at Weber State University, editor of Weber Studies, and an accomplished playwright and poet.

©Jon Williams

ANNOUNCING the 2014 Dr. Neila C. Seshachari Fiction Award

to Frances Washburn

for “Scenic Fourth of July—1967,” in the Spring/Summer 2013 issue The Dr. Neila C. Seshachari Award of $500 is presented annually to the author of the best fiction published in Weber during the previous year. Funding for this award is generously provided by the Seshachari family.

Dr. Neila C. Seshachari (1934-2002) was a much respected advocate for the arts and humanities. Professor of English at Weber State University for 29 years, committed teacher, accomplished scholar, critic, and fiction writer, Neila was editor of Weber Studies for 12 years.

Nonprofit Org U.S. POSTAGE Weber State University PAID 1395 Edvalson Street, Dept. RMIT No. 151 GDEN, UTAH Ogden UT 84408-1405

Nonprofit Org U.S. POSTAGE PAID PERMIT No. 151 OGDEN, UTAH

1405

www.weber.edu/weberjournal Return Service Requested

Spotlighting personal narrative, commentary, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that speaks to the environment and culture of the American West and beyond. SPRING/SUMMER 2014—VOL. 30, NO2—U.S. $10

CONVERSATIONS..........

ESSAYS..........

Rick Atkinson and Pam Houston

Anna Flügge, Don Lago,

Maple Andrew Taylor, Tamara Sellman, and Jessica Jackson

FICTION..........

Cheryl Diane Kidder, Susan DeFreitas, Phillip Parotti, and Richard Dokey

POETRY.......... Rose Postma, Michael Bazzett, Doug Ramspeck, Ciara Shuttleworth, C. R. Resetarits, and Tim Bellows

ART.......... Motoi Yamamoto

https://www.facebook.com/weberjournal

http://www.weber.edu/CAH