When
travel-author and novelist Mary Morris debarked from the pygmy plane
at the Pullman-Moscow Airport one cold oyster-gray spring day in 1996,
ready to teach in the University of Idaho's Distinguished Visiting
Writers program for two weeks, she carried under her arm the March
issue of GQ with a dumb photo of a simpering David Schwimmer
sporting a lipstick smooch on his lower left cheek on the cover and
an even dumber article inside titled "A Journey to the Heart
of Whiteness" about what it called "Fascistville, Idaho."
The piece was obese with black-and-white photos of the jowly seventy-eight-year-old
Reverend Richard Butler giving a Hitler salute on the front steps
of his Church of Jesus Christ Christian near Hayden Lake, a biker
chick named Geo (as in short for "Georgia") blowing up a
condom like a balloon beside what looked like her bearded logger boyfriend
for laughs, and these Stepford-like tow-headed kids in white shirts
and black ties that were just way too creepily clean for their own
good, and it asserted things like "The lovely lake region of
northern Idaho is home to the Aryan Nations, Mark Fuhrman and a cracked
pot of other white supremacists united by hate. African-Americans,
Hispanics and Jews are not welcome here. It is, its residents boast,
what America used to be--and must be again."
You
get the picture. Mary Morris arrived thinking she had it all figured
out. She'd done her homework. Now all she had to do was cool her heels
in aloof, single-eyebrow-raised, cosmopolitan amusement of us back-country
folk, taking mental notes for some knee-slapping anecdotes she'd be
able to tell her buddies back in New York when she returned. You could
see it all over her face. She showed that issue to everyone she met
as if it were some sort of passport to the good life.
I
felt really embarrassed for her, especially with her being a pretty
well-known travel writer and all. What sort of homework was this?
So I determined to make it my overzealous business to show her she'd
been duped by a bad media construct in chic's clothing. Just as the
South has been metaphorized through beautifully gruesome novels like
James Dickey's Deliverance, which looks back to those by Faulkner,
which look back to Poe's stories, to stand in for our nation's collective
id, so too Idaho in particular and the Inland Northwest in general
have been metaphorized by CNN and its ratings-hoggish sound-byte clowder
to stand in for our nation's angry ignorant political extremism, for
life on the crazy brink. Idaho outside of Idaho is nothing more than
the blond leading the blond. It's nothing but a bunch of underwashed,
jowly, condom-inflating survivalists, supremacists, freemen, tax resisters,
home schoolers, militia members, right-to-lifers, libertarians, Christian
patriots, and O'Boise potato chips.
It
probably goes without saying that bromidic preconceptions die fairly
hard, particularly when there's some gnat's eyebrow of truth to them.
It took some industrial-strength effort on my part, not to mention
a visit to the town bar-cum-diner in Helmer, population way below
thirty, on the way to Bovill, and a four-wheel excursion over snowy
Mica Mountain with seven people from the University, one of them Steve
Banks, novelist Russell Banks' brother (Russell a good friend of Mary's),
and two weeks in a classroom full of sweet talented open-minded students,
to convince Mary I'd never seen any of the crack-potted above, not
a single one, during my eight years in this state, that I've heard
the Aryan compound north of Sandpoint boasts something like a majuscule
six families, and that I didn't behold my first potato till this spring,
when my artist wife Andi and I planted eighteen of them in our garden
just to suss out what they really looked like anyway, and discovered
they flourished in this soil and climate like weeds on a sunny summer
day along the Jersey Turnpike.
Mary
Morris's initial reaction, in all fairness, is easy enough to understand.
The fact is most people find it almost impossible to squint through
the televisual and journalistic pre-fab fog to the thing itself. Electronic
hype is heady stuff at this late date in the millennium. Plus most
people have virtually no clue where Idaho actually resides--except,
perhaps, as a vaguely disconcerting mis-manufactured state of mind.
My nephew Matt, for example, who lives in Austin, phoned recently
and offered to drive up and stop in a couple of days on his way to
college at the University of Chicago. I explained we'd be only too
happy to have him, but that he'd be detouring a few thousand miles
out of his way in the process. He explained, after a nonplused pause,
that he assumed since the first letter in our state's name was "I,"
it had to be somewhere in the Midwest, close to Iowa, Indiana, and
Illinois, where all such states resided by clear alphabetical decree.
Which is just a little strange, no doubt, but comprehensible given
Matt's junior age. What isn't comprehensible is how, when Andi and
I moved here from our jobs at the university in Lexington, Kentucky,
in the spring of 1990, our friends on the east coast stopped writing
and calling us. Living in Kentucky was bad enough, for goodness sakes,
their taciturnity seemed to say, but willfully setting down roots
in Idaho was like falling off the flat earth smack into dragon-ridden
oblivion. We assured them the postal service and phone lines extended
this far west, but they remained dubious for quite some while, reminding
us the adjective most frequently applied to the Northwest by non-Northwesterners
was "remote." When they finally relented, they began addressing
their letters through some eerie psychological dyslexia to Dreary,
ID, instead of Deary, where we happen to live. Which situation
is limpid as an unmuddied stream compared to the reaction of our friends
in Seattle, who still treat the world on the eastern side of the Cascades
as the American version of Conrad's Congo. I half suspect they expect
us to show up on their porches on our next visit in tribal headgear,
spears in hand.
I'm
probably beginning to sound a little like I'm cooling my heels
in aloof, single-eyebrow-raised, rural-wise amusement at them there
city folk, but I'm not, exactly. A part of me counts a part of me
among them. After all, I'm the guy who for the first six months on
our farm here carried the shotgun with me out to the barn to dump
garbage after dinner just in case a stray cougar should try anything
funny. And a corner of me deeply empathizes with my sister Marlette
and her husband Wayne who came up for a visit last summer. We took
them on a walk across our back eighty and I swear Marlette looked
clumsy as Neil Armstrong trying to navigate the lunar surface. I couldn't
help myself. After a while I asked her what the matter was. "The
concrete-to-green ratio is completely out of whack around here,"
she said, stepping gingerly. Which puts me in mind of our neighbor
Homer Ailor's story about the experientially challenged hunters from
out east who showed up at his doorstep one autumn to ask when the
deer turned into elk.
Why
shouldn't we go along with everyone else and imagine Idaho as the
end of the earth? It's the image our own media apparatus tries to
foist upon the rest of the country--Boise's very suburban, very tidy
middle-class presence to the contrary. Go to the County Courthouse
in Moscow and you'll find the corridors flagged with historical photos
that suggest a connection with the past that is, at best, tenuous
these days, at worst goofily idealized and mythologized. There's one
of Troy's wide main street, dubbed Huff's Gulch back then, and a gaggle
of cowboys on horseback wielding their six-shooters above their heads
as if prepping to mosey into a scene in a John Wayne film. The photo's
about ninety years old, as I remember, from an era when seventysomething
Homer Ailor can still recall the spring Indian migrations that skirted
his cattle ranch. What we like to recollect about our thirteenth-largest
state is that it holds the most wilderness of the lower forty-eight,
that it still houses a smidgen over a million people at a moment when
twenty-two-square-mile Manhattan is pushing nine million, nearly a
hundred years after the Lower East Side packed in nearly four hundred
thousand to its few blocks of tenements . . . that's ten feet per
person, roads and sidewalks included. But we're as content to forget
as the guy who wrote the GQ article is content to remember
that only 9,365 of those smidgen over a million are Asian, according
the 1990 census, only 3,370 black. We're nothing if not strangers
in a strange land.
Still,
some of us are all too happy to cash in on our bogusly-defined status
as foreigners in those metropolitan eyes of New York publishers, a
distant echo of those exotics brought back to Europe from The Dark
Continent in the sixteenth century to keep the Elizabethan court tickled.
Sometimes it seems to me no one can escape Idaho's fabled gravitational
force to tell its honest story to the outside world, and sometimes
it seems to me that's the way we Idahoans kind of like it. At the
end of the day, after all, we're the people who cherish the tradition
of Vardis Fisher's undercooked prose, stick-figure characters, creaky
plots, and muddy mind (there's even a room dedicated to the imminently
forgettable writer at the Log Cabin Literary Center in Boise) while
tending to overlook that Idaho is also responsible for producing or
nurturing some of the truly megalithic modern and postmodern writers
and artists . . . not only Papa Hemingway, our state's literary broken
record who with Gertrude Stein's help reinvent the sentence and our
twentieth-century existential sensibility, but also Ed Kienholz, simply
one of the most important, influential, and sui generis international
assemblage artists, who lived and died--mostly unacknowledged by Idahoans
while a star in every major city from L.A. to Berlin--in an artists'
compound he bought, built, and populated, up near Hope.
Emblematic
of such figures is, of course, Ezra Loomis Pound, the real pioneer
from this state. No one could argue anything other than that his politics
were as extreme, mean-spirited, and morally wrecked as Reverend Richard
Butler's. Set, game, match. But that comes dangerously close to being
beside the point, considering he almost single-handedly conjured up
literary modernism while living in London during this century's teens,
exerting terrific influence on Yeats, Eliot, William Carlos Williams,
Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Archibald MacLeish, and e. e. cummings,
while helping Joyce find a publisher for Ulysses, engineering
Robert Frost's leap into print, and encouraging D. H. Lawrence and
Ford Maddox Ford. All this, and yet the white-boarded, pared-down,
analog-for-an-Imagist-poem house in which he was born on October 30,
1885, in Hailey (the first house, by the by, to sport plastered walls
in the town) is unmarked, overgrown, unknown among many of the Hailey's
inhabitants, and almost impossible to find without the aid of Cort
Conley's careful directions in Idaho for the Curious.
Now
that should be genuine cause for state-wide mortification
if anything should, the University of Idaho's spectacular collection
of three-hundred-plus works related to Pound notwithstanding.
William
Douglas, the Fourth Duke of Queensberry, was entertaining once at
his villa in Richmond. The place flaunted a fabulous view of the Thames.
His guests couldn't get enough of it, and continued churning out compliment
after compliment about the river. After a while Old Q, as his friends
called him, had heard more than enough about matters other than himself.
He just couldn't contain his chagrin. "What is there to make
so much of in the Thames?" he burst out. "I am quite tired
of it. Flow, flow, flow, always the same." I'm sure there are
many inside and out of Idaho who feel similarly about our fluvial
state, given the simultaneously homogeneous and radically conflicted
image of it presented by internal and external essayists, reporters,
fiction writers, photographers, fanatics, travel writers, and so forth.
Only the reality remains, Old Q's claim to the contrary, that no two
rivers are the same, no two stretches of the same river, no one stretch
at different instants of the day or month or year. And every river
is nothing if not a manifestation of the myriad streams that nurse
it, each with its own distinct fluent genetic code.
I
came to consciousness in a jungle compound, a flat-roofed cement block
of a structure surrounded by twelve-foot-tall Cyclone fencing topped
with barbed wire, near the thick sluggish brown Amazon in Venezuela,
where my father helped launch an oil refinery. So much of me is in
that river, though I don't recall ever having seen it. What I do recall
is checking my shoes in the muggy mornings for scorpions, my bedding
in the muggy night for snakes, the crunch of crabs under our car tires
during the rainy season, the snort of a wild boar on the other side
of that fencing one afternoon, the downright military might of bugs
in the bush that once sprayed my father's face with acid as he macheted
his way through . . . and then, in a sort of phenomenological quantum
leap, a temporal white-water sinkhole, strolling along the weed-thick
banks of the sour-smelling Hackensack River in River Edge, New Jersey,
on my weekly walk to the hermetically sealed, climate controlled malls
where I grew up . . . and hurrying along the shore path of the electric-blue
confluence of streams and agricultural run-off called Lake Mendota
in Madison, Wisconsin, where I colleged, on my daily walk to class
on a campus where the Sixties didn't get around to giving up the ghost
till the late Seventies, and where tear-gas sometimes collected around
my ankles dense as nineteenth-century London smog in the mornings
. . . and hustling along the deceptively still Iowa River that always
pulled a few students into its malignant currents every year while
it apparently tortoised its course through Iowa City where I workshopped,
on my biweekly sojourn to the Student Union for a warm drink on a
forehead-searingly cold winter's day when there was nothing to do
except write . . . and then wading with my Andi beneath the
waterfall that abruptly erupted over smooth boulders in an unnamed
brook in the Shenandoah National Park outside of Charlottesville,
Virginia, in the Blue Ridge, where we knocked around on breaks from
work on my dissertation there . . . and, maybe most important, padding
with her along the concrete banks of the Thames itself, the wide silver
strip of foil winding through my favorite megalopolis, dropping and
rising by the height of a house from tide to tide, flowing a hundred-meters-per-minute,
during our frequent stays, proving every minute just how wrong poor
Old Q really was.
The
danger in talking about rivers, though, is that before too long you
find yourself kissing a mouthful of clichés. It's disconcertingly
easy to neglect Old Q's unintentional lesson and clay them all into
one great gray literary lump, or, worse, commence making symbols from
their physics, metaphors from their hydraulics. Rivers aren't Time,
however much poets and prophets wish they were, and they aren't Life,
and they aren't Memory, and they aren't The Great Feminine, and they
aren't Spiritual Sanctuary, and they aren't Nature Writ Large. They
are, well, rivers. They are lots of water and not just a few rocks.
Aesthetically gorgeous water and rocks, mind you, but water and rocks
nonetheless. I'm tempted to wax rhapsodic about my experiences among
the ones in Idaho-my first jaw-dropping rafting trip down The River
of No Return, say, understanding with the first splash and bump and
drop that existence would never much improve on this; or the way the
middle falls near Elk River sort of sneaks up on you as you hike toward
it . . . distant rumble, then subway thunder, then, whoosh,
trees parting and the expansive panorama of blue-greenly pined mountains
bobbing all the way to the horizon, the colorful mist of spring flowers
glissading down the slopes toward the black water forever turning
foam-white and launching. I'm tempted, but I won't. Why should I?
What's the point? I don't feel up to the job today, and I won't feel
up to the job tomorrow. I know the limits of my language: how do you
describe a July sunset around here without making it sound like one
of those velvet paintings sold along sidewalks in Venice Beach? And
I know how much more up to the job so many others who live in this
state are. Bill Studebaker, I'll be the first to admit, can kayak
me right under the waves. Bob Wrigley can name fifty birds before
I've spotted even one. Ron McFarland can fish me into trout-lush limbo.
I'm the kind of guy, for better or worse, who needs an experienced
guide to enter a small boat made of dark-blue rubber, who feels like
a cheat when applying some used human syllables to a circling hawk.
I'm the kind of guy who as a kid fished often, though never with a
hook; I took precautions so I might avoid the misfortune of actually
catching something.
If
the truth be known, I don't even know the name of the river I want
to write about in this essay. This isn't because I don't have one
in my head, I hasten to add, or haven't contemplated the topic a great
deal before sitting down at my word processor. It's because I conceive
of my project, right here, right now, as being a good deal more modest
than that. I don't feel tall enough to try to capture the Selway or
Payette in prose. Maybe someday I will, but I doubt it. For me Bear
Creek, the yard-wide stream that flows out of Mica Mountain, across
our back property for forty acres, and then off to the River Gods
know where, is more my size. That's my connection to the fluviatic
these days.
Andi
and I flew into the Pullman-Moscow Airport one oyster-gray April day
in 1990 in the same sort of pygmy plane Mary Morris would use six
years later. I'd gotten tired of my job in the teeth-grittingly conservative
English department at the university in Lexington, and decided to
toe the market to see just how cold it really was. It was plenty cold,
let me tell you. It was downright frigid. But one afternoon I happened
upon an ad for a position in creative writing and contemporary fiction
at the University of Idaho that looked a good deal like it had been
penned with me in mind. Before flying out for the on-campus interview
in late February, I'd never been to the Northwest. All I took with
me was an image of the dark green that shaded most of the state on
the map in my World Book encyclopedia, copyright 1966, and
a lovely description of the area authored by the former departmental
chair. I fell for the space of the place immediately, the sparse population,
the shocking sense for this New Jersey boy of being able to stand
in front of Bob Greene's BookPeople in Moscow and look north up Main
Street and see one end of town and the rolling hills of the Palouse
beginning to tumble away like some corner of Scotland, and look south
down Main Street and see the other end of town and the rolling hills
of the Palouse beginning to tumble away like some other corner of
Scotland, and I fell for the way there weren't any parking meters
to be found, and the way most people didn't lock their cars or houses,
and the way they stopped and talked to their acquaintances as they
walked along the brick-buildinged downtown on errands, and I found
the English department for the most part just as friendly, supportive,
almost weirdly receptive to my eccentric takes and tastes on eccentric
subjects ranging from cyberpunk to critical theory, narrative craft
to the advent of a then rough digital beast called hypertext. During
my short stay, I reported back to Andi from the front lines via phone
every three or four hours, trying out a whole bunch of those used
human syllables to capture the feel of this special district of the
imagination while intuiting all too palpably the weight of responsibility
that went along with such a task.
When
everything was said and done, however, we both knew we were home.
When we flew in on that oyster-gray April day in that pygmy plane,
it was to locate a place to live. Our hollow-cheeked finances being
what they were, we'd given ourselves exactly three days to execute
this chore. We arrived assuming we'd rent a modest apartment for a
year or two while in the meantime looking for something a little more
substantial some decompressive distance out of town. Instead, we ended
up teaming with a terrific realtor named Shelley Bennett who the next
day took us to view, among three or four less startling possibilities,
a small log house about twenty-five miles northeast of Moscow. It
had been built by the owner, Pat Tyndall, and had taken him a long
eleven years to finish. Pat worked for the phone company. Each time
he was paid he invested whatever money was left after all the uninteresting
disbursements into supplies. He constructed the place by hand, his
only helpers his two sons. Each weekend he'd drive out from Moscow,
where he lived in a duplex, to the pastures and pines that undulate
down to Bear Creek four miles southwest of Deary, a bantam town of
five-hundred (on a good day when everyone's home) founded in 1899
by an Irish-Canadian logger named Bill on the Joe Blailock homestead,
and cogitate and chop, saw and hammer.
The
result of his labors was a marvelous invention, upstairs a large sloped-ceiling
bedroom leading onto a large sloped-ceiling loft, on the ground floor
a room for writing, one for reading, a diminutive living room spilling
into a diminutive kitchen, all dominated by a hulking flat-black wood-burning
stove, the only source of heat in winter, and a stuffed black bear
perpetually rearing up in attack position (which Pat later gave us
as a house-warming present, before striking out for northwestern Montana)
he claimed to have shot himself because it was molesting cattle in
the neighborhood, but which, we later and less heroically learned,
had in actuality been baited by Pat and then shot by his unnerved
wife when he'd wandered into the woods to relieve himself. In the
unfinished basement was plenty of room for Andi's art studio. The
month Pat tacked the last trim to the sweet-smelling pine walls inside,
and finished the railing on the unassuming deck out back, his wife
filed for divorce, his first son entered the special forces, and his
second ran away.
And,
of course, we showed up with Shelley Bennett. The spring drizzle had
clouded over the Chinese hat of Potato Hill to the east and the swelling
spine of Mica Mountain to the north. Everything hovered in a smoke-blue
mist and the land appeared to flatten itself out. But Pat was undaunted.
He was intent on showing us the back property, and we were intent
on seeing it. We climbed into his banged-up lipstick-red Ford pickup
and, windshield wipers clacking, four-wheeled into the gully behind
his house and up across the soggy gray-green pasture and right to
the barbed-wire fence that divided it from the woods hilling down
to the creek. A couple of minutes, and we were pausing, hands in the
pockets of our down vests, among a stand of young Ponderosa beside
a large fallen spruce. Suddenly Pat couldn't help himself. His eyes
sparked and Shelley cringed. For some reason he had to show us the
spot where a hunter sat the season before to retie his left boot and
received a stray bullet smack in his surprised forehead. Some college
kids had been cruising in a pickup on a gravel road nearly half a
mile away when they'd spotted five deer foraging at the edge of the
woods in which we now stood. One kid got his rifle from the rack and
slid out and fired three times at the buck. Two of the bullets missed
the hunter, who proved to be a relative of Homer Ailor's, but the
third bit him. Hard. The kid hadn't been drinking. He was apparently
a good shot. Except somehow he'd forgotten about using a backdrop
when aiming, and this just impressed the hell out of Pat. He told
us the story twice, as if maybe we hadn't fully appreciated it the
first time. I remember how sweet everything smelled at that instant,
the moist air dense with humus and pine needles, and I remember looking
over Pat's shoulder down to Bear Creek as he began to tell the story
once more.
I
didn't know then that Bear Creek could, swollen with melting snow
from Mica Mountain, widen in the early spring from its current quiet
three-foot width into a rushing riverine forty, eighty, sometimes
even a hundred yards back there, filling the meadow between two hills
and, maybe a mile on, washing out the bridge that connected us with
the Troy Highway four or five times a season, shapeshifting the landscape
a little with each occasion, shipping off this downed tree, erasing
that small white-sand beach, nudging into being this other one. Nor
did I guess that, three years later, during the worst drought in decades,
it could evaporate completely, leaving a dry pebbly bed where you
could find, if you turned over some of the more rotund rocks, nests
of crawfish clustering together blindly. I didn't know we'd adopt
Daisy, either, the fawn Pat nursed back to health after a coyote ambush,
and Roxy, the raccoon Pat gave us as a baby after running over its
mother one night, or that Andi and I would hike down to Bear Creek
with them on warm summer days in some nigh-biblical procession and
take our boots off and soak our feet in the icy water and feed Daisy
the crackers and apples we'd brought with us while Roxy nosed around
along the grassy banks and picked up small unidentifiable things she
discovered in her tiny long-nailed human hands and gnawed at them,
investigating, head raised as if in contemplation. I didn't know that
three years later bark beetles would descend in another nigh-biblical
operation upon those woods and that to stop their progress we'd have
to cut down more than a hundred trees from which we'd take our five-cord
each summer to get us through each winter, or that Daisy, herself
having had two sets of twins, wouldn't make it through one of the
harshest winters, snow nearly six feet deep and night temperatures
thirty below, the only mode of transportation around the property
for us snowshoes and cross-country skis, and that another neighbor,
Danny Griffin, Homer's son-in-law, would find what was left of her
after spring thaw, or that Roxy, grown, would set off on her own two
years after that and then return nearly eighteen months later for
a visit in the middle of the night, fat as an ursine cub, minus a
toe, plus a brood of her own, or that Andi would slip on her skis
while trying to cross a frozen Bear Creek last winter and bruise her
shin bone so badly it would still reveal a lump to the touch in June,
or that we would picnic among thousands of wildflowers on the hillside
with my mother during her summer visits, unaware that cancer was already
growing inside her right breast and gliding in a malignant flotilla
through her system like autumn leaves on running water.
But
I knew enough. I made a point of learning what I needed to learn,
always making sure to save enough room in my consciousness for a good
swath of flat-out, wide-eyed, ever-delighting ignorance. I learned,
while Daisy was alive, how to post our road with no-hunting signs.
When the third tree I tried to cut creaked and sat back on my chainsaw,
bending the blade almost into a right-angled joke and sending the
thing up five or six feet into the air, I learned to talk to someone
in the Forestry department and find out how to do this loud business
right, and when in the first light snow of our first light winter
I decided to pass on buying studded tires and see how far I could
go without four-wheel drive, then skidded off the highway, barely
missing an oncoming logging truck, and rolled our Geo Tracker into
a ditch, Andi sitting beside me Viking-erect the whole interminable
time, I learned what it took to motor along safely out here during
the hardhearted months.
Yet
not a whit more. Not a mite. I've always reserved a table in the restaurant
of ignorance for me and mine. Why? Because there is ignorance, and
then there is ignorance. Because sometimes it's better, at least given
my hardwiring, to know less instead of more about certain subjects.
Because there's mean-spirited, closed-brained, unwholesome unenlightened
stuff, and then there's a certain frame of mien that allows us to
enjoy some events and things to a greater and greater extent the littler
and littler we know about them. Despite the fact I took piano lessons
for more years than I can tally, for instance, and despite the fact
I played keyboards in a bad rock'n'roll band in high school for two
years, dreaming of fame and fans, and can still bang out a belabored
rendition of "Crocodile Rock" with the best of them, I never
learned the particulars of music, never took the time and effort to
commit them to memory. I didn't want to take a chance on letting Bach's
Brandenburg Concertos, or the songs comprising the second side
of the first album I ever bought and ever truly loved, Sgt. Pepper,
sound anything other than the gates of heaven to me. To that extent,
my critical books aside, I'm not a scholar, and never will be. I prize
benightedness way too much for that.
Not
that I haven't tried. Once or twice a year our experientially rich
friends Phil Drucker and Jeannie Harvey come out for an evening, and
before long we find ourselves hiking down by Bear Creek. Phil, a guy
with a knock-you-down naturalist's eye and blow-you-over-with-a-feather
data base, points to this flower and that tree, naming them with an
adoration that rattles me so profoundly I always listen, repeat, and
file away the euphonic sonics with gentleness and deference . . .
and, with just as much gentleness and deference, forget them within
a week or two. I don't mean to. This isn't a malicious--or even conscious--choice.
It's just the way my internal systems operator does merchandising.
Someone once asked John Updike what he regretted most in life. He
told the interviewer his time as a student at Harvard. "Why?"
the interviewer asked, openly perplexed. "Because that's the
place that civilized me," Updike answered. As an undergraduate
at a much less refining institution, I took an introductory course
in theoretical physics that made my heart beat faster than almost
any other there except the one in twentieth-century fiction, which
I made a point of learning everything I could about. It was taught
by a big, bearded, bloated-bellied saint in a wide cowboy hat, cowboy
boots, and jeans named Robert March. He'd written the textbook for
the class as well, and I will never forget its last paragraph, which,
in pedagogically more optimistic, less chicly cynical, times, I used
to read to my students on the last day of every semester. "To
be human is to wonder," it begins. "Children wonder for
a while, before we teach them to be smug about the obvious and to
stop asking silly questions. It is easier to pay men to retain a little
of the child and do our wondering for us. . . . I, for one, refuse
to believe that nothing can be done about this empty place, or about
the more general disease of which it is but a minor symptom. But as
long as we are sundered so, let me remain one of the children and
wonder."
Wonder
is the flip side of ignorance. That, I suppose, is what draws me back
again and again to science--or, better, speculative--fiction as reader
and writer: not that it has all those neat high-tech gadgets and answers
in it, but that it is the only genre that can instill a true sense
of awe in us about the universe and our tiny blue address in it at
a cosmic level. All the rest strikes me as flat and faded beside it.
And that, I suppose, is also what draws me to rural living, to this
farm which Andi and I have taken to calling The Monastery behind closed
doors, to those grassy banks running beside Bear Creek. What in the
world can instill you with a true sense of awe along the cramped homogeneous
corridors of suburbia, or the cramped homogeneous corridors of domestic
fiction that reflects it? How many failing relationships and studies
in victimology can you read about in these days of whine and posers
before it's time to pick up another genre, a different, more startling
and encompassing vision? Cities, perhaps, are another story, except
even Lord Balfour of Burleigh knew back in 1944 that "London
is a splendid place to live for those who can get out of it."
Cities are fine to visit, but who in the world would want to reside
in one? It may be true, as Homer Ailor said of St. Louis before his
first trip to Missouri, that there are more than a million people
inhabiting it, but you don't see them all at once. It's equally true,
however, that the ozone in Washington, D. C., generated during a recent
heatwave through various industrial and auto emissions tangoing with
the incoming UV rays, drove the urban population indoors for a week
and damaged the lungs of those who were foolish enough not to heed
the media's warning for days afterward, and that the rain in L. A.
sometimes possesses the consistency of low-grade battery acid. Reviewers
sometimes complain about my novels' bleak outlook, but living a short
walk from Bear Creek--like reading the great dystopic speculative
fiction by Mary Shelley, Anthony Burgess, Philip K. Dick, Margaret
Atwood, and William Gibson--is a constant reminder of what's to lose
of ourselves and our planet if we're not careful.
It
just may be that besides--or perhaps precisely because of--their general
unpleasantness, cities are well on the road to becoming obsolete communal
constructs, pet rocks of the industrial revolution. Anyone with a
good modem, a fair computer, Web-access to Amazon.com books, subscriptions
to several newsgroups of choice, plus a satellite dish with some real
drawing power no longer needs them as the locus of culture, or even
of commerce and trade. It's not that our metropolitan selves are dissolving,
nor that we're simply and simplistically turning our backs on cities
like some parochialist-masquerading-as-regionalist like Thomas Hart
Benton, whose hyperbolic canvases sometimes appear as if they were
designed by Walt Disney on downers, who holed up in his bland birthland
of the rural Midwest most of his life because he was frightened by
the aesthete-minded homosexuals he discovered on his short forays
to Chicago, New York, and Paris, delighting in his bucolic comrades-in-pitchforks
because they were, as he said, "highly intolerant of aberration."
We're not reconstituting the droopy cellulite-ridden City-as-Sodom
myth again. Just the opposite. Our millennial selves are cleaving,
becoming multidimensional, as comfortable with the speed of the digital
beyond as with the early-fall Bear Creek, with tugging down Tokyo's
or London's newsfeeds from geosynchronous satellites to see what the
rest of the global village is up to as with tugging out thistles from
the garden, with channel surfing as a mode of consciousness as with
a porcupine's creep up a lodgepole. The real question at the launch
of the twenty-first century is this: why limit ourselves? Why restrict
who we are in terms of selfhood, literary genre, political correctness,
living locales, perspectives on the world or off it? Many short-sighted
critics, committed to short-term gain at the price of long-term loss,
believe the Pathfinder's crawl across Mars was really a wasteful expenditure
having to do with sniffing some funnily-named rocks. Nothing could
be farther from the truth. For the cost of making one awful action-adventure
like Waterworld, the Pathfinder's mission was all about the
most important query of the next hundred years.
When,
after decades of searching, you finally come across Bear Creek, or
its equivalent, your first instinct is to shut the figurative door
behind you. Who doesn't want to be the last person to locate the end
of the earth? Who doesn't want to keep the population low there? Almost
twenty years ago Mary Leakey discovered footprint remnants crossing
seventy-five feet of the arid Laetoli plain of Tanzania. They were
3.75 million years old. Three early members of the human family, three
little hominids, made their journey side by side. From the evidence
of their footprints, one paused and turned left briefly. He or she
was the first artist, checking out the road less traveled, and I presume--at
least in the topography of my own mythologization of the state--everyone
who moves to Idaho wants in some small way to be that personoid: the
one who does things just a little differently from most, the odd man
or woman out, the one who wants to live and let live in privacy with
a certain quiet generosity of spirit. I know, in any case, that I
do. I'm afraid I might come to take The Monastery for granted if there
are any more people to share it with me. I shudder every time I hear
Coeur D'Alene has spread a little farther around one of the most toxic
lakes in the country, and I'm beginning to understand my fellow citizens
of Deary who feel devastated because town population increased by
a cataclysmic fifty people in the ten years between censuses.
Down
deep, not only my numerical but also my spatial relationships have
modified since first standing on that hill with Pat Tyndall on that
drizzly afternoon and looking down at Bear Creek. Presently if I can
ferret out a single farm light at night burning half a mile or a mile
down the road from our digs (Andi and I keep ours turned off as a
neighborhood courtesy), I feel pinched. A suburban friend of ours
came to visit for a week not long ago, and experienced instantaneous
discomfort at how far away the next house was situated. What about
emergencies? What about social intercourse? She was dumbfounded when
I explained to her we've begun thinking of moving again because that
next house has come to feel so doggone close, and she found herself
at a loss for words when I then asked her how many of her neighbors
she actually knew, and of those how many she actually cared to know.
Sometimes I slip and surprise myself pitying those who pity what they
conceive as our solitude. With Bear Creek, a good imagination and
a new pen, a bookshelf and an e-mail account, a raspberry patch and
a vegetable garden, CNN and MTV, lots of snow to shovel in winter
and lots of wood and grass to cut in summer, those indescribable sunsets
and a cornucopia of movie channels, the spectacular show of the northern
lights and a pretty wide fire pit, the buzzing silence of the yard
broken only occasionally by a robust breeze or a birdsong, frequent
visits by friends and writerly acquaintances, a buffalo ranch down
the road in one direction and a cattle ranch and horse ranch the other,
and eighty acres inhabited at different times of year by more deer
than you can fit into the space of your mind's eye, coyote moms frisking
with their pups on spring afternoons in the meadow, foxes cantering
across snowy fields in January, raccoons, farm cats, skunks, owls,
and even the occasional thin-legged, freight-train-torsoed moose,
how could anyone possibly feel anything except continually surrounded
by excellent company?
Shortly
after we moved here, Andi and I hit upon the pure plain perfect final
touch: a free-standing hot tub. We bought a kit and I learned what
I needed to learn to pound together the cedar boards and barrel rings,
and sink the top-loading wood-burning stove. We situated the product
of my labors a couple hundred yards to the north of our house, in
a stand of tall grass and young Austrian pines, perhaps ten feet from
that garden I put in and fenced. It took quite a while to compose
because I had so much to reckon about what to do and how to do it.
You can imagine the sense of satisfaction coursing through me upon
completion. We bided our time the rest of that day, and fired up the
contraption around eight that night. By ten the water was amniotic
warm. We stripped down and shinned in and had a good laugh at our
good fortune . . . and then we looked up. It simply never occurred
to me that cities and suburbs had colonized the night, that the best
you could possibly get when arching your neck in London was a pink-gray
brume, in New York a starless black. Only here . . . here was an outrush
of stellar activity, and if you stared long enough you even began
to see pinprick satellites sliding across the star mist, and if you
waited long enough you even began to see meteors skid through the
atmosphere at a much greater rate than you ever supposed they could,
and I realized, as Andi and I sat side by side gazing toward the hazy
center of the Milky Way some twenty-seven thousand light years from
our silence, that that blurry band of light above us was the only
consequential river in Idaho, the night sky the ocean.
