so the good news is i got a great night's sleep last night!
the bad news is i missed my train...
the good news is i was a responsible kid and did not go out and get crazy because it was dark, i was alone, i didn't know where i was going and i wanted to be sure to wake up early and catch my train.
the bad news is i MISSED MY TRAIN ANYWAY, WTF IS WRONG WITH ME
ummm the good news is i get a little longer in new orleans!
but seeing as how i somehow thought that a single cell phone alarm set to vibrate would wake my tired ass up at 4 a.m, the bad news is that i'm an idiot!!
i've got a flight home tonight, using the voucher i got when continental screwed things up when i had to get a flight because north dakota flooded and blocked the train tracks. and now i'm screwing things up, and the train is running without me in it, and i suppose everything is running full circle. except the fact that i'm an idiot. that's just me on a straight line into idiotville.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Saturday, July 16, 2011
just breathe (a love story, a lung story)
So far we've had a robbery and a death. Who's ready for a love story?
First, the setting. We're not in the backwoods farms of Georgia anymore, or the wide plains of Canada and Montana. Instead, we start with young Mary Elizabeth in Knoxville, Tennesse, from a well-heeled and respected family - the Gleasons. Wealthy from a family beer distributorship and renowned for James A. Gleason's military success, the family lived in the lap of luxury. But Mary's home life was hardly idyllic. Her father was a strict taskmaster; he taught his children how to swim by throwing them into a pond and watching as they figured out how to save themselves. Mary's mother had died when she was young and her father, before he remarried, passed the care of his children on to his mother.
Because Mary's two brothers were quite the handful for their grandmother, Mary was sent away to boarding school to make life a little easier at home. To top it off, she'd always been a sickly child, always seeing doctors and at one point needing treatment from the Mayo Clinic. Half-orphaned and often ill, Mary nevertheless did very well at her boarding school, graduating with honors and excelling at the piano. She was a kind girl, soft-spoken and with the genteel southern manners expected of a young woman of her station. Devout, obedient and with a subdued, modest beauty, Mary had become the perfect Southern belle.
Meanwhile, six hundred miles away in Philadelphia, James Larkins was growing up in a working-class family. He, too, had lost a parent; in fact, he was an orphan, raised by a cousin's family. His relatives worked as horse colliers and trolley operators, and Jimmie was enrolled in professional schools before he could finish high school. He learned shorthand and mechanical drawing - skills that could make him useful at any jobsite. But before he could make a career for himself, James Larkins was stricken with tuberculosis - the dreaded disease once called consumption. At the time, the only recognized cure for TB was to move to an arid climate and follow a strict regimen of diet and rest. So James rode the train out to New Mexico and tried to heal a little.
Meanwhile, back in Knoxville, Mary's brother Bernard contracted TB. Mary herself was fine - no more sickly than usual - but since she'd graduated from the boarding school and wasn't yet married, it made sense for her to travel out west to care for her brother. After all, caring for men is what women did. But when the Gleasons arrived at the TB sanitorium, Mary - unsurprisingly, given her delicate constitution - caught TB and became the sickest of them all.
This is where James and Mary's paths crossed: a sanitorum in Silver Springs, New Mexico. They spent the most thrilling years of the Roaring Twenties far from the cities that were their homes, and along the way they found each other. Forced to stay outdoors for hours, lying down or engaging in leisurely activities, James and Mary spent day after day together in the sunshine. In normal society, a working-class Philadelphia boy and a genteel Knoxville belle would never have spent long days having heart to hearts, but the TB sanitorium was its own little world. The eyes of their families and the rules of East Coast society were a thousand miles away. He was tall, ambitious and a man of few, well-chosen words; she was charming and friendly and as sweet as iced tea. And they fell in love.
Eventually, they were both lucky enough to recover - and unlucky enough to have to head their separate ways. For four long years they stayed in touch through letters. He came through Knoxville once to see her, on his way from Philadelphia back out to the west - the dry, sun-soaked land where they'd met and fallen in love, the endless territory that had once been the wild frontier, and then the land of boundless opportunity. Now that the Great Depression had hit, the west seemed less like a dreamland and more like a desert, but James needed a job. And he found one, working at a desk running calculations for the men building Boulder Dam. After long years of illness and unemployment, he had his health, a home, and a job. There was just one thing missing, and toward the end of 1931 he sent a question back to his sweetheart in Knoxville, Tennessee. Mary had seen him only once in the last four years.
The last day of the year, Mary wired a telegram back. "HAPPY NEW YEAR DEAR WITH ME THAT IS YOUR ANSWER I BELIEVE IF YOU STILL FEEL STRONG ENOUGH." Mary's well-to-do family, of course, were not about to approve of a marriage to a penniless young man from a family they'd never met, particularly a marriage that sent her across the country into wild, unknown territory. So she didn't tell them: "FAMILY IN IGNORANCE," she informed James. "DETAILS FOLLOW LOVE MARY"
Mary made copies of their birth certificates and contacts out in Boulder City. She found a priest who would conduct a Catholic ceremony (although James was not a churchgoer, Mary had no intention of flagging in her faith). She packed a trunk full of clothes and provisions, and booked her train tickets. This time there'd be no brother - she would be a young woman crossing the country alone. Highly unusual at the time. Still surprises some people now, I'm qualified to say.
Boulder City, at the time Mary arrived, was not much of a city at all - more of a village of tents and makeshift roads. It was brought into existence to house the throngs of workers building the dam, and its accomodations were - well, "primitive" would be putting it kindly. Mary arrived in town on the night of the 22nd, and straightaway she could tell that her clothes weren't precisely suitable. She'd brought her finest shoes to wear at her wedding, but Boulder City was built on dust and dirt - no pavement to walk on. To save the satin for the ceremony, she walked barefoot and carried her shoes in her hand. Less than 24 hours after she arrived, James and Mary were wed in a temporary Catholic church - the first church wedding in Boulder City. Her parents found out by telegram... after the marriage was official.
In addition to being Boulder City's first church wedding, James and Mary were another first - the first owners fo a bathtub in town. Yep, she definitely wasn't in Knoxville anymore. And while she was adjusting to the change in environments, she also had to learn fast: she'd been raised in a boarding school, and had never learned to cook, clean or keep house. The first time she went to make an apple pie, she bought two apples. She was living in a world of rough-and-tumble men and faced a job she'd never been taught how to do. But she ordered a cookbook, asked for advice, and - just like she had at school - she proved to be a quick learner.
After the dam was finished, Mary followed James across the southwest as he found new employment - in Mexico, in the hills around Southern California, and finally in downtown L.A. They had two children - one named James and one named Mary. As an engineer, a hardware salesman and a contractor, James helped build the ever-expanding city of Los Angeles. He bought land in the desert, an area he loved, where they could build their dream home. Then Mary got asthma - bad asthma, that sent her to the hospital and sometimes kept her in her bed all day. The doctors said only thing might help: finding a climate that would be easier on her lungs.
So they tried. They took to the car, driving up to the mountains, out to the desert and down to the coast so Mary could test the air. James drove, Mary rode shotgun, and the kids fell asleep in the back. The desert, which had done so well by them in their youth, made it worse; the pollen of vegetated areas caused her agony. But the coast helped ease the painful sound of her struggling breaths, and a few specific spots, where the fog rolled in off the ocean, made her breathing almost clear. Every night they'd drive out to the ocean by Redondo Beach and sit, breathing together, as Mary's lungs struggled on.
So James sold the plot of land in the desert, where they'd hoped to build a home, and bought one in a patch of field by the beach. They were no longer moving to follow his jobs - they were just trying to save her health. On the new plot of land, James designed and built a house for Mary, where they lived for the rest of their lives
Today the house is gone - torn down to free up the prime real estate, now surrounded by mansions instead of fields. But as I stood where it once was I could taste the air - cool, clean, fresh. I tried to imagine harsh desert winds, or the stifling heat of Tennessee. I tried to think about finding a job in the Great Depression, or learning how to cook from a terse, unillustrated book. I worried about the audacity of turning lives into neatly packaged stories. But a new ocean breeze washed all those thoughts out of my mind as it brushed through the branches of the jacaranda trees. Instead I thought of a car, perched by the sand, and these winds rushing in off the ocean, as sweet and pure then as they are today. Don't think so much, don't worry, I told myself. Just breathe.
First, the setting. We're not in the backwoods farms of Georgia anymore, or the wide plains of Canada and Montana. Instead, we start with young Mary Elizabeth in Knoxville, Tennesse, from a well-heeled and respected family - the Gleasons. Wealthy from a family beer distributorship and renowned for James A. Gleason's military success, the family lived in the lap of luxury. But Mary's home life was hardly idyllic. Her father was a strict taskmaster; he taught his children how to swim by throwing them into a pond and watching as they figured out how to save themselves. Mary's mother had died when she was young and her father, before he remarried, passed the care of his children on to his mother.
Because Mary's two brothers were quite the handful for their grandmother, Mary was sent away to boarding school to make life a little easier at home. To top it off, she'd always been a sickly child, always seeing doctors and at one point needing treatment from the Mayo Clinic. Half-orphaned and often ill, Mary nevertheless did very well at her boarding school, graduating with honors and excelling at the piano. She was a kind girl, soft-spoken and with the genteel southern manners expected of a young woman of her station. Devout, obedient and with a subdued, modest beauty, Mary had become the perfect Southern belle.
Meanwhile, six hundred miles away in Philadelphia, James Larkins was growing up in a working-class family. He, too, had lost a parent; in fact, he was an orphan, raised by a cousin's family. His relatives worked as horse colliers and trolley operators, and Jimmie was enrolled in professional schools before he could finish high school. He learned shorthand and mechanical drawing - skills that could make him useful at any jobsite. But before he could make a career for himself, James Larkins was stricken with tuberculosis - the dreaded disease once called consumption. At the time, the only recognized cure for TB was to move to an arid climate and follow a strict regimen of diet and rest. So James rode the train out to New Mexico and tried to heal a little.
Meanwhile, back in Knoxville, Mary's brother Bernard contracted TB. Mary herself was fine - no more sickly than usual - but since she'd graduated from the boarding school and wasn't yet married, it made sense for her to travel out west to care for her brother. After all, caring for men is what women did. But when the Gleasons arrived at the TB sanitorium, Mary - unsurprisingly, given her delicate constitution - caught TB and became the sickest of them all.
This is where James and Mary's paths crossed: a sanitorum in Silver Springs, New Mexico. They spent the most thrilling years of the Roaring Twenties far from the cities that were their homes, and along the way they found each other. Forced to stay outdoors for hours, lying down or engaging in leisurely activities, James and Mary spent day after day together in the sunshine. In normal society, a working-class Philadelphia boy and a genteel Knoxville belle would never have spent long days having heart to hearts, but the TB sanitorium was its own little world. The eyes of their families and the rules of East Coast society were a thousand miles away. He was tall, ambitious and a man of few, well-chosen words; she was charming and friendly and as sweet as iced tea. And they fell in love.
Eventually, they were both lucky enough to recover - and unlucky enough to have to head their separate ways. For four long years they stayed in touch through letters. He came through Knoxville once to see her, on his way from Philadelphia back out to the west - the dry, sun-soaked land where they'd met and fallen in love, the endless territory that had once been the wild frontier, and then the land of boundless opportunity. Now that the Great Depression had hit, the west seemed less like a dreamland and more like a desert, but James needed a job. And he found one, working at a desk running calculations for the men building Boulder Dam. After long years of illness and unemployment, he had his health, a home, and a job. There was just one thing missing, and toward the end of 1931 he sent a question back to his sweetheart in Knoxville, Tennessee. Mary had seen him only once in the last four years.
The last day of the year, Mary wired a telegram back. "HAPPY NEW YEAR DEAR WITH ME THAT IS YOUR ANSWER I BELIEVE IF YOU STILL FEEL STRONG ENOUGH." Mary's well-to-do family, of course, were not about to approve of a marriage to a penniless young man from a family they'd never met, particularly a marriage that sent her across the country into wild, unknown territory. So she didn't tell them: "FAMILY IN IGNORANCE," she informed James. "DETAILS FOLLOW LOVE MARY"
Mary made copies of their birth certificates and contacts out in Boulder City. She found a priest who would conduct a Catholic ceremony (although James was not a churchgoer, Mary had no intention of flagging in her faith). She packed a trunk full of clothes and provisions, and booked her train tickets. This time there'd be no brother - she would be a young woman crossing the country alone. Highly unusual at the time. Still surprises some people now, I'm qualified to say.
Boulder City, at the time Mary arrived, was not much of a city at all - more of a village of tents and makeshift roads. It was brought into existence to house the throngs of workers building the dam, and its accomodations were - well, "primitive" would be putting it kindly. Mary arrived in town on the night of the 22nd, and straightaway she could tell that her clothes weren't precisely suitable. She'd brought her finest shoes to wear at her wedding, but Boulder City was built on dust and dirt - no pavement to walk on. To save the satin for the ceremony, she walked barefoot and carried her shoes in her hand. Less than 24 hours after she arrived, James and Mary were wed in a temporary Catholic church - the first church wedding in Boulder City. Her parents found out by telegram... after the marriage was official.
In addition to being Boulder City's first church wedding, James and Mary were another first - the first owners fo a bathtub in town. Yep, she definitely wasn't in Knoxville anymore. And while she was adjusting to the change in environments, she also had to learn fast: she'd been raised in a boarding school, and had never learned to cook, clean or keep house. The first time she went to make an apple pie, she bought two apples. She was living in a world of rough-and-tumble men and faced a job she'd never been taught how to do. But she ordered a cookbook, asked for advice, and - just like she had at school - she proved to be a quick learner.
After the dam was finished, Mary followed James across the southwest as he found new employment - in Mexico, in the hills around Southern California, and finally in downtown L.A. They had two children - one named James and one named Mary. As an engineer, a hardware salesman and a contractor, James helped build the ever-expanding city of Los Angeles. He bought land in the desert, an area he loved, where they could build their dream home. Then Mary got asthma - bad asthma, that sent her to the hospital and sometimes kept her in her bed all day. The doctors said only thing might help: finding a climate that would be easier on her lungs.
So they tried. They took to the car, driving up to the mountains, out to the desert and down to the coast so Mary could test the air. James drove, Mary rode shotgun, and the kids fell asleep in the back. The desert, which had done so well by them in their youth, made it worse; the pollen of vegetated areas caused her agony. But the coast helped ease the painful sound of her struggling breaths, and a few specific spots, where the fog rolled in off the ocean, made her breathing almost clear. Every night they'd drive out to the ocean by Redondo Beach and sit, breathing together, as Mary's lungs struggled on.
So James sold the plot of land in the desert, where they'd hoped to build a home, and bought one in a patch of field by the beach. They were no longer moving to follow his jobs - they were just trying to save her health. On the new plot of land, James designed and built a house for Mary, where they lived for the rest of their lives
Today the house is gone - torn down to free up the prime real estate, now surrounded by mansions instead of fields. But as I stood where it once was I could taste the air - cool, clean, fresh. I tried to imagine harsh desert winds, or the stifling heat of Tennessee. I tried to think about finding a job in the Great Depression, or learning how to cook from a terse, unillustrated book. I worried about the audacity of turning lives into neatly packaged stories. But a new ocean breeze washed all those thoughts out of my mind as it brushed through the branches of the jacaranda trees. Instead I thought of a car, perched by the sand, and these winds rushing in off the ocean, as sweet and pure then as they are today. Don't think so much, don't worry, I told myself. Just breathe.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
ARRRRGH, or On Writing On People
I am terrified of writing about people. Even in my journal, where I write without fear of being read - because, really, how many people can decipher my handwriting? - my descriptions of others are filled with scratched-out lines and (maybe?)s and (I think)s and the occasional despairing ARRRGGH!
More specifically, I am terrified of getting people wrong. Like the fear of dying, this is fear of a guaranteed fact - and therefore a fear both pointless and inescapable. Obviously I will get it wrong. Of course I will get it wrong. Writing about people, to use an overwrought simile, is like trying to make a sketch of the entire earth by jumping up really high and drawing while you're in the air. There's too much to cover in too little time, and you can never see nearly enough.
Or to put it another way: all I ever know about people is the tiny portion of themselves they show me, and even that is too much to write down. So I have to choose fragments of detail from a fragment of a self. It's like - here comes another simile - trying to write about the history of America when you only have information about the year 1823, and you can only write about people whose middle name begins with M, and you only have room to write two pages. Hopelessly limited, in other words.
So there's no way to get it right, and that's terrifying. These are real people with real feelings; I don't want to be wrong about them. It gets even worse when I write outside my journal, because I try to write as though the people I write about will read anything I post with a critical, mistrustful eye. I do this based on a thoroughly unpleasant experience, and one in which I had no intention whatsoever of being cruel or critical. Being wrong, however you're wrong, can be as bad as being mean. And I do hate being mean. And I know I'm going to be wrong.
It's just overall hopeless, in other words.
But say that I try... When you write you turn people into characters. And real people aren't characters any more than characters are real people. This act of alchemy carries an intimidating sense of responsibility. What kind of character do you turn them into? What details do you pick and what shape do you give their personality? How much room do you give them to breathe - how much do you let them speak for themselves, and how much do you let their bodies and their homes and their friends speak for them? When do you let them use their own words, and when do you dive into guessing at their emotions? If you can't get it right, how can you get it less wrong?
My great-great aunt drinks scotch and soda out of a Playboy glass. She walks slowly around her house, muttering "I'm getting so damned old," but you'd never guess her real age - almost 90. And, believe it or not, she still works full-time! "People tell me I should stop working, and they're probably right," she says in a slyly subversive voice. "But what would I do? I don't play golf. I don't play bridge. I suppose I could do volunteer work, but I say, why not get paid for it?" She cackles and drinks more scotch. Her niece told me that my great-great-aunt keeps her husband's ashes in a cabinet, so that when she gets angry at something she can open the door and yell at him, which makes her feel much better.
My great-great-aunt lives up a windy tree-lined road, on the edge of a golf course. Her house is large and breezy, a gentle green on the outside and pale beige on the inside. It's filled with Japanese paper screens and elegant artwork, plush pillows and soft colors and fresh flowers. In an old woman's wavery voice, says she probably spends more money on flowers than on food - she just doesn't feel right if she doesn't have flowers in the house. She walks slowly around her house, tidying up, arranging flowers and carefully slicing vegetables for dinner.
My great-great-aunt grew up herding cattle from a shetland pony, back when she was too small to ride a horse, in a windswept land where the winters dropped to thirty below. Headstrong and independent, she later followed her sister out to Seattle, and she hated it. "The weather was just awful," she said. "The first day I got there it was beautiful," she said in an expressive voice, "the sunlight shining silvery off of everything. And then I didn't see the sun for six months." It just wouldn't do, so without the slightest idea how she'd make a living, she moved down to California. Here the sun shines more often and the winters aren't so cold, and no cattle called her out into the cold. Here she stayed. As she walks slowly around her house, she looks out her wide windows at the blue sky and green grass, and she smiles, victorious.
My great-great-aunt goes to the farmer's market every friday morning for fresh local fruits and vegetables. She walks slowly around her kitchen gathering together ingredients, and when I offer to help her she laughs. For dinner she makes broiled fish, smashed potatoes, fresh asparagus and a salad, served in a wooden bowl. It's all very healthy, elegant, delicious, local. Very California.
My great-great-aunt's bookshelves are impressively well-stocked: the guest bedroom alone features well-read copies of almost everything Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote, a lot of Salman Rushdie's work, some Milan Kundera, some Italo Calvino, lots of Toni Morrison, some Nin, some Mailer, a little Pynchon, and all of the James Bond books. A massive dictionary sits on a stand near her reading chairs.
My great-great-aunt never went to college. She left her frontier hometown when she was young and went to work at the naval shipyards. Later she worked at a jeweler's shop, then ran a drive-in restaurant, and now - at the age of almost 90 - she still works full-time in retail. She's been a diligent, hard-working and focused woman all her life.
A raunchy spitfire? An elegant matriarch? A determined sun-lover? A California foodie? An intellectual? A dedicated worker?
All these things, maybe, or none of these things. And then I don't know a thing about her as a mother, as a wife, as a daughter, as a grandmother. I don't know what she was like when she was 15 or 50. I was with her for only half a day. And I am audacious enough to want to write about her?
Even after an attempt at thorough fairness, I'm left with an inevitable lie of omission - and a niggling doubt. What if these best-guesses, these attempts at accurate and generous and multi-layered portrayals, are just plain wrong?
It's terrifying. It's just terrifying.
More specifically, I am terrified of getting people wrong. Like the fear of dying, this is fear of a guaranteed fact - and therefore a fear both pointless and inescapable. Obviously I will get it wrong. Of course I will get it wrong. Writing about people, to use an overwrought simile, is like trying to make a sketch of the entire earth by jumping up really high and drawing while you're in the air. There's too much to cover in too little time, and you can never see nearly enough.
Or to put it another way: all I ever know about people is the tiny portion of themselves they show me, and even that is too much to write down. So I have to choose fragments of detail from a fragment of a self. It's like - here comes another simile - trying to write about the history of America when you only have information about the year 1823, and you can only write about people whose middle name begins with M, and you only have room to write two pages. Hopelessly limited, in other words.
So there's no way to get it right, and that's terrifying. These are real people with real feelings; I don't want to be wrong about them. It gets even worse when I write outside my journal, because I try to write as though the people I write about will read anything I post with a critical, mistrustful eye. I do this based on a thoroughly unpleasant experience, and one in which I had no intention whatsoever of being cruel or critical. Being wrong, however you're wrong, can be as bad as being mean. And I do hate being mean. And I know I'm going to be wrong.
It's just overall hopeless, in other words.
But say that I try... When you write you turn people into characters. And real people aren't characters any more than characters are real people. This act of alchemy carries an intimidating sense of responsibility. What kind of character do you turn them into? What details do you pick and what shape do you give their personality? How much room do you give them to breathe - how much do you let them speak for themselves, and how much do you let their bodies and their homes and their friends speak for them? When do you let them use their own words, and when do you dive into guessing at their emotions? If you can't get it right, how can you get it less wrong?
My great-great aunt drinks scotch and soda out of a Playboy glass. She walks slowly around her house, muttering "I'm getting so damned old," but you'd never guess her real age - almost 90. And, believe it or not, she still works full-time! "People tell me I should stop working, and they're probably right," she says in a slyly subversive voice. "But what would I do? I don't play golf. I don't play bridge. I suppose I could do volunteer work, but I say, why not get paid for it?" She cackles and drinks more scotch. Her niece told me that my great-great-aunt keeps her husband's ashes in a cabinet, so that when she gets angry at something she can open the door and yell at him, which makes her feel much better.
My great-great-aunt lives up a windy tree-lined road, on the edge of a golf course. Her house is large and breezy, a gentle green on the outside and pale beige on the inside. It's filled with Japanese paper screens and elegant artwork, plush pillows and soft colors and fresh flowers. In an old woman's wavery voice, says she probably spends more money on flowers than on food - she just doesn't feel right if she doesn't have flowers in the house. She walks slowly around her house, tidying up, arranging flowers and carefully slicing vegetables for dinner.
My great-great-aunt grew up herding cattle from a shetland pony, back when she was too small to ride a horse, in a windswept land where the winters dropped to thirty below. Headstrong and independent, she later followed her sister out to Seattle, and she hated it. "The weather was just awful," she said. "The first day I got there it was beautiful," she said in an expressive voice, "the sunlight shining silvery off of everything. And then I didn't see the sun for six months." It just wouldn't do, so without the slightest idea how she'd make a living, she moved down to California. Here the sun shines more often and the winters aren't so cold, and no cattle called her out into the cold. Here she stayed. As she walks slowly around her house, she looks out her wide windows at the blue sky and green grass, and she smiles, victorious.
My great-great-aunt goes to the farmer's market every friday morning for fresh local fruits and vegetables. She walks slowly around her kitchen gathering together ingredients, and when I offer to help her she laughs. For dinner she makes broiled fish, smashed potatoes, fresh asparagus and a salad, served in a wooden bowl. It's all very healthy, elegant, delicious, local. Very California.
My great-great-aunt's bookshelves are impressively well-stocked: the guest bedroom alone features well-read copies of almost everything Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote, a lot of Salman Rushdie's work, some Milan Kundera, some Italo Calvino, lots of Toni Morrison, some Nin, some Mailer, a little Pynchon, and all of the James Bond books. A massive dictionary sits on a stand near her reading chairs.
My great-great-aunt never went to college. She left her frontier hometown when she was young and went to work at the naval shipyards. Later she worked at a jeweler's shop, then ran a drive-in restaurant, and now - at the age of almost 90 - she still works full-time in retail. She's been a diligent, hard-working and focused woman all her life.
A raunchy spitfire? An elegant matriarch? A determined sun-lover? A California foodie? An intellectual? A dedicated worker?
All these things, maybe, or none of these things. And then I don't know a thing about her as a mother, as a wife, as a daughter, as a grandmother. I don't know what she was like when she was 15 or 50. I was with her for only half a day. And I am audacious enough to want to write about her?
Even after an attempt at thorough fairness, I'm left with an inevitable lie of omission - and a niggling doubt. What if these best-guesses, these attempts at accurate and generous and multi-layered portrayals, are just plain wrong?
It's terrifying. It's just terrifying.
Saturday, July 9, 2011
A question
"Do you believe in God?"
It was a gut-clenchingly direct question, a kind that I wasn't really used to. I suppose for believers of any kind this is an entirely familiar question, one asked and answered on a regular basis, the affirmation a matter of habit: the Shahada, the Nicene creed, the Shema... devout atheists, too, have a ready answer.
But for me it was entirely unusual and unexpected and alarming. I had to scout around for an answer. "Yes" didn't feel true. "No" didn't feel honest. "I don't know" seemed inadequate, even lazy. "That's a difficult question" felt too evasive. "None of your business" was combative.
And he wasn't be rude or aggressive, this young man with the carefully sideswept hair and the gentle, limpid eyes. Just very direct. Avoiding the issue wasn't really an option. We were in the middle of a busy intersection on the island of Puerto Princesa, I was perched on the back of his scooter, and he was looking straight at me like we weren't moving until I answered.
"Sometimes," I said. I'm not sure if it was an accurate answer. I don't go around gauging my belief in God like diabetics measure their blood sugar, and I suspect that if I did, results would generally be negative. But it felt like a good answer to give him. And it wasn't entirely untrue - there have been times in my life when I thought I believed in God. That all those moments were years ago felt, in the tropical sunlight and the softness of his gaze, rather beside the point.
Tha was almost exactly a year ago. It was the last time, I believe, anybody has asked me in so many words where I sit with God. But in trying to explore my family's history, God - like poverty, like wealth, like racism, like violence, like love and deception - is woven deep into the fabric of the story. I have seen miracles of human impulse that have given me a deep respect for the power of money and hatred and passion and lies; the power of faith is a mystery to me. So the question sits, not like an accusation, but like a test.
"Do you go to church?" A second cousin in Georgia, smiling warmly, opening her house in hospitality. The same question came from almost every relative I met in the Philippines. Maybe that's one point where my grandparents' very different backgrounds converged - they came from worlds of deep devotion.
To this question, a more common and more manageable one than I'd faced on the back of that scooter, I had the same answer as always: "Um, well, not really." Very eloquent, I am.
"Well, what matters is your relationship with God. I'm not going to preach, I'm just saying." Briskly she changes the topic without asking, and I breathe out a sigh I hadn't known I'd been holding.
"I'm going to skip church and go out to breakfast with you," another Southern relative says generously. I stutter. Now my irreligious presence is disrupting the faith of others. Do I respond with guilt or with gratitude? Somehow I need to figure out how to write about these communities. But for them belief in God and sin and hell is the solid fertile ground beneath their feet. For me, it's like their humidity, invisible but oppressive. I'm afraid that I'm entirely the wrong storyteller for this family.
On the other hand, there's my Montana family, who weren't the same kind of religious. I only heard one story about churches; the little fact that my Montanan great-grandfather went sometimes to his mother's church, where they preached in German. He did not, as far as anyone can tell, speak German. What does that mean? Can I try to understand that fact without understanding faith - can I see it as an act of familial devotion, or of habit? Or do I need to try to know what it would mean to believe in words you cannot understand?
But for the most part, it seems, my Montana ancestors did not wrap their lives around religion. Aside from my great-great-grandmother's immigrant congregation, churches appear very rarely in their narratives. They put their faith in their mules, in their labor, in the curing power of kerosene. When the rains stopped they turned to gambling or the Communist party, not to prayer.
But I am hesitant to say I understand this. Perhaps their lives were built on a belief in God so basic, so foundational, so taken for granted, that it needed no discussion or sermons or prayers. What matters, as my relatives have told me, is your relationship to God. And since I can't ask them what they thought about God, I can't assume that their churchlessness was anything like mine.
What I know, I can't understand; what I think I can understand, I can't know.
(There's another answer)
It was a gut-clenchingly direct question, a kind that I wasn't really used to. I suppose for believers of any kind this is an entirely familiar question, one asked and answered on a regular basis, the affirmation a matter of habit: the Shahada, the Nicene creed, the Shema... devout atheists, too, have a ready answer.
But for me it was entirely unusual and unexpected and alarming. I had to scout around for an answer. "Yes" didn't feel true. "No" didn't feel honest. "I don't know" seemed inadequate, even lazy. "That's a difficult question" felt too evasive. "None of your business" was combative.
And he wasn't be rude or aggressive, this young man with the carefully sideswept hair and the gentle, limpid eyes. Just very direct. Avoiding the issue wasn't really an option. We were in the middle of a busy intersection on the island of Puerto Princesa, I was perched on the back of his scooter, and he was looking straight at me like we weren't moving until I answered.
"Sometimes," I said. I'm not sure if it was an accurate answer. I don't go around gauging my belief in God like diabetics measure their blood sugar, and I suspect that if I did, results would generally be negative. But it felt like a good answer to give him. And it wasn't entirely untrue - there have been times in my life when I thought I believed in God. That all those moments were years ago felt, in the tropical sunlight and the softness of his gaze, rather beside the point.
Tha was almost exactly a year ago. It was the last time, I believe, anybody has asked me in so many words where I sit with God. But in trying to explore my family's history, God - like poverty, like wealth, like racism, like violence, like love and deception - is woven deep into the fabric of the story. I have seen miracles of human impulse that have given me a deep respect for the power of money and hatred and passion and lies; the power of faith is a mystery to me. So the question sits, not like an accusation, but like a test.
"Do you go to church?" A second cousin in Georgia, smiling warmly, opening her house in hospitality. The same question came from almost every relative I met in the Philippines. Maybe that's one point where my grandparents' very different backgrounds converged - they came from worlds of deep devotion.
To this question, a more common and more manageable one than I'd faced on the back of that scooter, I had the same answer as always: "Um, well, not really." Very eloquent, I am.
"Well, what matters is your relationship with God. I'm not going to preach, I'm just saying." Briskly she changes the topic without asking, and I breathe out a sigh I hadn't known I'd been holding.
"I'm going to skip church and go out to breakfast with you," another Southern relative says generously. I stutter. Now my irreligious presence is disrupting the faith of others. Do I respond with guilt or with gratitude? Somehow I need to figure out how to write about these communities. But for them belief in God and sin and hell is the solid fertile ground beneath their feet. For me, it's like their humidity, invisible but oppressive. I'm afraid that I'm entirely the wrong storyteller for this family.
On the other hand, there's my Montana family, who weren't the same kind of religious. I only heard one story about churches; the little fact that my Montanan great-grandfather went sometimes to his mother's church, where they preached in German. He did not, as far as anyone can tell, speak German. What does that mean? Can I try to understand that fact without understanding faith - can I see it as an act of familial devotion, or of habit? Or do I need to try to know what it would mean to believe in words you cannot understand?
But for the most part, it seems, my Montana ancestors did not wrap their lives around religion. Aside from my great-great-grandmother's immigrant congregation, churches appear very rarely in their narratives. They put their faith in their mules, in their labor, in the curing power of kerosene. When the rains stopped they turned to gambling or the Communist party, not to prayer.
But I am hesitant to say I understand this. Perhaps their lives were built on a belief in God so basic, so foundational, so taken for granted, that it needed no discussion or sermons or prayers. What matters, as my relatives have told me, is your relationship to God. And since I can't ask them what they thought about God, I can't assume that their churchlessness was anything like mine.
What I know, I can't understand; what I think I can understand, I can't know.
(There's another answer)
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
One story
You need to start somewhere. Why not with Adam?
There's only one picture of my great-great-great-grandfather Adam Huffman, a slim and handsome man with a tidy moustache. And there's only one story about him: the story of how he died so young,
They say he died of cancer. And back at the turn of the century, cancer was a word spoken in whispers, a disease too terrible to think about, something to be treated like leprosy, or the plague. Who knew how you could catch it? So when he was sick, he lived in a hut behind his family's house in what we now call Saskatchewan, Canada. A diseased man, dying alone, his wife took him meals three times a day - and aside from that, he saw no one. And then he was dead. And since then, in every generation, the youngest of each family's children has been struck with cancer before their time. Many of them, like him, died before they ever saw their grandchildren. It's a toxic inheritance and even now -
But no. That's not right. It wasn't cancer that he died of. That's something they said to keep face. It was the alcohol. He was uncommonly sensitive to alcohol. Allergic to it, they think. And he had a little too much alcohol and it poisoned him -
But no, that's not right. He wasn't allergic. That's something they said to keep face. He was an alcoholic, through and through, and he drank himself to death. And left her, just like that, with two kids to raise. And ever since then the Huffman children have had this weakness, just like he did - they've taken a little strong to the drink. But Minerva Huffman, who was Adam's wife, she made her son Harry promise her he wouldn't drink, because of how his father had gone. She made him promise it before she'd let him have the land she'd homesteaded. And he promised, and since then he never drank. Oh, he'd have a drink, but that was it - he never drank like his father did, who drank himself to -
But no, that's not right. It wasn't drinking that Harry promised to swear off. It was the gambling. So maybe it was the cancer that killed his father after all. See, at 17 Harry was already a gambler, and his mother sensed trouble. So she made him promise to stop gambling, and he promised, but he didn't stop - just traveled farther away to do it. He stopped gambling in Montana, went all the way to Minneapolis for the sake of his mother's peace of mind. And then when he saved his sister's farm with his poker winnings, she gave up fighting, and let him gamble closer to home -
But no, that's not right. Harry'd always gambled in town. He dealt cards in Plentywood, he got into scrapes in Dooley. So he couldn't have promised his mother he wouldn't gamble, because he never stopped at all - and nobody's called Harry a liar. And he rarely lost, either, so why would she complain in the first place? So it must have been the drinking he swore off, because it's true he never was a drunk. And so it must have been his father was a drinker. Unless -
Oh, who's to say. Great-great-great-great-grandpa Huffman died youn. Maybe of cancer. Maybe of the drink.
Nobody knows for sure.
End of story?
There's only one picture of my great-great-great-grandfather Adam Huffman, a slim and handsome man with a tidy moustache. And there's only one story about him: the story of how he died so young,
They say he died of cancer. And back at the turn of the century, cancer was a word spoken in whispers, a disease too terrible to think about, something to be treated like leprosy, or the plague. Who knew how you could catch it? So when he was sick, he lived in a hut behind his family's house in what we now call Saskatchewan, Canada. A diseased man, dying alone, his wife took him meals three times a day - and aside from that, he saw no one. And then he was dead. And since then, in every generation, the youngest of each family's children has been struck with cancer before their time. Many of them, like him, died before they ever saw their grandchildren. It's a toxic inheritance and even now -
But no. That's not right. It wasn't cancer that he died of. That's something they said to keep face. It was the alcohol. He was uncommonly sensitive to alcohol. Allergic to it, they think. And he had a little too much alcohol and it poisoned him -
But no, that's not right. He wasn't allergic. That's something they said to keep face. He was an alcoholic, through and through, and he drank himself to death. And left her, just like that, with two kids to raise. And ever since then the Huffman children have had this weakness, just like he did - they've taken a little strong to the drink. But Minerva Huffman, who was Adam's wife, she made her son Harry promise her he wouldn't drink, because of how his father had gone. She made him promise it before she'd let him have the land she'd homesteaded. And he promised, and since then he never drank. Oh, he'd have a drink, but that was it - he never drank like his father did, who drank himself to -
But no, that's not right. It wasn't drinking that Harry promised to swear off. It was the gambling. So maybe it was the cancer that killed his father after all. See, at 17 Harry was already a gambler, and his mother sensed trouble. So she made him promise to stop gambling, and he promised, but he didn't stop - just traveled farther away to do it. He stopped gambling in Montana, went all the way to Minneapolis for the sake of his mother's peace of mind. And then when he saved his sister's farm with his poker winnings, she gave up fighting, and let him gamble closer to home -
But no, that's not right. Harry'd always gambled in town. He dealt cards in Plentywood, he got into scrapes in Dooley. So he couldn't have promised his mother he wouldn't gamble, because he never stopped at all - and nobody's called Harry a liar. And he rarely lost, either, so why would she complain in the first place? So it must have been the drinking he swore off, because it's true he never was a drunk. And so it must have been his father was a drinker. Unless -
Oh, who's to say. Great-great-great-great-grandpa Huffman died youn. Maybe of cancer. Maybe of the drink.
Nobody knows for sure.
End of story?
those were the days...
The stories I'm collecting are set in a time without cars, jet airplanes, odwalla bars or lazy quests for a wifi signal. They feature horses and mules and trolley cars, hand-plucked chickens and penny candy, hand-written letters and congratulatory telegraphs. All of this seems wonderfully romantic. I have to stop and forcibly remind myself that this was not a misty-edged technicolor past of soft sighs and swelling piano music; it was all probably rather awful.
To make things harder, everyone keeps insisting that I'm wrong. Things weren't terrible at all. "I don't remember it being cold," says a relative who grew up in a land where winters were thirty below. "We had to scrape together pennies to survive, but you know, we all worked together," says another, wistfully. "It was a hard life, but it was a good life," says just about everybody - and that, in itself, sounds so romantic, with its promise of hard-earned exhaustion and quiet satisfaction, that once again I have to fight to quell a surge of absurd nostalgia.
Outhouses, I tell myself. Droughts. Milking cows at 5 a.m. Laundry taking all day. What's so great about riding behind a team of mules?
(wistful sigh...)
To make things harder, everyone keeps insisting that I'm wrong. Things weren't terrible at all. "I don't remember it being cold," says a relative who grew up in a land where winters were thirty below. "We had to scrape together pennies to survive, but you know, we all worked together," says another, wistfully. "It was a hard life, but it was a good life," says just about everybody - and that, in itself, sounds so romantic, with its promise of hard-earned exhaustion and quiet satisfaction, that once again I have to fight to quell a surge of absurd nostalgia.
Outhouses, I tell myself. Droughts. Milking cows at 5 a.m. Laundry taking all day. What's so great about riding behind a team of mules?
(wistful sigh...)
Monday, July 4, 2011
Snapshots
In the observation car, ringed by picture windows, an Indian couple sits leaning forward like they're ready devour the mountainsides. The woman, in an orange sari that brings a bit of color to the train's blue and white retro aesthetic, holds a video camera at chest level. Every now and again they look down to make sure the camera is pointed in generally the right direction, and then they stare forward again, back out of the windows, camera rolling and entirely disregarded.
I think about the sunset I saw while heading west on the Empire Builder. Swirling clouds, the roiling pinks and yellows, the reflection in a perfectly smooth pool - you know the type. I whipped out a camera and snapped one shot, two, three, messing with the settings to try to get one striking one - and then I turned the camera off and set my forehead against the window. The photos never turn out well with the glass in the way.
Who knows why we take these pictures? To prove we were here, to make our friends and family jealous, to remind ourselves later? We record these visions like its an obligation, something to get out of the way before we get back to the real work of staring. And staring. And staring.
We won't print these pictures out and put them on our wall. We won't turn to them in times of trouble or nostalgia. We'll pack them away, and barely ever look at them again. The photos are like stones we drop to mark our way - someday in the future, if we need to retrace our steps, these small and otherwise worthless artifacts will be there to show the path we followed. For now we take snapshots, Hansel with a digital camera - snap, snap, snap, here's where we went - but keep our eyes, restless, on the tracks before us.
I think about the sunset I saw while heading west on the Empire Builder. Swirling clouds, the roiling pinks and yellows, the reflection in a perfectly smooth pool - you know the type. I whipped out a camera and snapped one shot, two, three, messing with the settings to try to get one striking one - and then I turned the camera off and set my forehead against the window. The photos never turn out well with the glass in the way.
Who knows why we take these pictures? To prove we were here, to make our friends and family jealous, to remind ourselves later? We record these visions like its an obligation, something to get out of the way before we get back to the real work of staring. And staring. And staring.
We won't print these pictures out and put them on our wall. We won't turn to them in times of trouble or nostalgia. We'll pack them away, and barely ever look at them again. The photos are like stones we drop to mark our way - someday in the future, if we need to retrace our steps, these small and otherwise worthless artifacts will be there to show the path we followed. For now we take snapshots, Hansel with a digital camera - snap, snap, snap, here's where we went - but keep our eyes, restless, on the tracks before us.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Views Re-Viewed
It's true that it's almost impossible to say anything new about these landscapes. The trees are green, the lakes are blue, the mountains are high. You've seen the pictures, watched the movies, hiked these peaks or flown over top of them or seen them in Google Maps' satellite view. There really aren't any surprises here. Sunlight and blue skies are lovely, stormy cloud masses are imposing, riding by a sawmill really spoils the view.
You've seen it all before, but that doesn't mean you stop looking. The views are unsurprising but - somehow - still astonishing. It's a reminder that novelty does not run the world. Seeing some things once just isn't enough; you can't check a beautiful view off your bucket list.
The shaking, whirring mechanism of the train propels us forward in time, leaving monotony on the tracks behind us, and we get sucked into a pattern of endless appreciation that doesn't feel repetitive. I think I could run this route on a loop and never get bored. I've seen the crew gaze out at the mountain range with the same slack-faced calm as the rest of us.
Why are we fascinated by these well-known views? Is this E.O. Wilson's biophilia? I don't know. All I know is that it's kind of irrelevant that there's nothing new to say about these mountains. After all, it's not something new we're chasing with our eager gazing - it's something very, very old. And it may not be novel, but that doesn't mean it's always the same.
The same green, the same blue, the same tall peaks, same white clouds, yes. But the light changes as the sun sets lower. The rolling range fades away into temporary flatlands and then an ice-topped volcanic mountain rises from the earth. It's the same view, but everytime you look, it seems to have gained a shadow or lost a curve. Who needs a new horizon when the old one is so teasingly out of reach, so temptingly shifting?
You've seen it all before, but that doesn't mean you stop looking. The views are unsurprising but - somehow - still astonishing. It's a reminder that novelty does not run the world. Seeing some things once just isn't enough; you can't check a beautiful view off your bucket list.
The shaking, whirring mechanism of the train propels us forward in time, leaving monotony on the tracks behind us, and we get sucked into a pattern of endless appreciation that doesn't feel repetitive. I think I could run this route on a loop and never get bored. I've seen the crew gaze out at the mountain range with the same slack-faced calm as the rest of us.
Why are we fascinated by these well-known views? Is this E.O. Wilson's biophilia? I don't know. All I know is that it's kind of irrelevant that there's nothing new to say about these mountains. After all, it's not something new we're chasing with our eager gazing - it's something very, very old. And it may not be novel, but that doesn't mean it's always the same.
The same green, the same blue, the same tall peaks, same white clouds, yes. But the light changes as the sun sets lower. The rolling range fades away into temporary flatlands and then an ice-topped volcanic mountain rises from the earth. It's the same view, but everytime you look, it seems to have gained a shadow or lost a curve. Who needs a new horizon when the old one is so teasingly out of reach, so temptingly shifting?
Cascades of Green
Climbing in the Cascades, the train plunges into disorienting darkness and emerges back into mountains again and again and again. Between tunnels, the view shifts by the second. The peaks are layered like theater sets, stacked on top of each other and sliding across the horizon at different speeds, like they are pulled by husky stagehands with enormous ropes.
The distance must be an illusion. How could there be this much wilderness left? We're connecting major cities here - how could it be possible to look in either direction and see endless, uninterrupted woodland? Our steel-and-glass presence is the only disruption to the pine forests and the curving, tree-topped mountains. And that seems peculiar.
"The Cascades" is a good name for them. They tumble over each other, flowing like waves, layered like sheets of water, like tiers of tumbling ivy. They look softer than they are, with the fierce pointy edges of the Rockies traded for the deceptively alluring curves of a waterfall. Then a dormant volcano soars to the sky, a rock amidst the green waters. I have approximately a lifetime's worth of transcription to work on, but it sits in my lap almost untouched.
I read somewhere that the human eye can discern more variations in the color green than any other color, which is why night-vision goggles show the world in tints of green. Possibly a trick evolutionarily acquired to help tell plants apart more and separate poison from food. Maybe, I think as I stare out the window, I'm practicing. I'm training my eyes to tell these leaves apart, burning the slight changes in color deep into my retinas. The dark green of old hemlock needles, the toxic-bright green of new ones; the yellow-green of maple leaves, the silver-green of spruces, the blue-green off old pines, the brown-green of maples. The gray-green, the black-green, the cold-green, the warm-green, the gold-sunlit-green, the burnt-shadowed-green of the distant mountains. The orange-green of moss. The burning green of what might be poplar leaves.
And then the sudden black of another tunnel. A flash of bright light, new colors of green, rock walls and then, for three seconds, a waterfall. Thin and white, it splashes so clearly that I imagine I can hear it over the quiet rumbling of the train, although I'm sure that's not really possible. Another instant and the last glimpse of white is visible through sturdy pine trunks. Then it's gone, and we're in another tunnel. I gaze deep into the dark, and it seems to carry fleeting hints of green.
The distance must be an illusion. How could there be this much wilderness left? We're connecting major cities here - how could it be possible to look in either direction and see endless, uninterrupted woodland? Our steel-and-glass presence is the only disruption to the pine forests and the curving, tree-topped mountains. And that seems peculiar.
"The Cascades" is a good name for them. They tumble over each other, flowing like waves, layered like sheets of water, like tiers of tumbling ivy. They look softer than they are, with the fierce pointy edges of the Rockies traded for the deceptively alluring curves of a waterfall. Then a dormant volcano soars to the sky, a rock amidst the green waters. I have approximately a lifetime's worth of transcription to work on, but it sits in my lap almost untouched.
I read somewhere that the human eye can discern more variations in the color green than any other color, which is why night-vision goggles show the world in tints of green. Possibly a trick evolutionarily acquired to help tell plants apart more and separate poison from food. Maybe, I think as I stare out the window, I'm practicing. I'm training my eyes to tell these leaves apart, burning the slight changes in color deep into my retinas. The dark green of old hemlock needles, the toxic-bright green of new ones; the yellow-green of maple leaves, the silver-green of spruces, the blue-green off old pines, the brown-green of maples. The gray-green, the black-green, the cold-green, the warm-green, the gold-sunlit-green, the burnt-shadowed-green of the distant mountains. The orange-green of moss. The burning green of what might be poplar leaves.
And then the sudden black of another tunnel. A flash of bright light, new colors of green, rock walls and then, for three seconds, a waterfall. Thin and white, it splashes so clearly that I imagine I can hear it over the quiet rumbling of the train, although I'm sure that's not really possible. Another instant and the last glimpse of white is visible through sturdy pine trunks. Then it's gone, and we're in another tunnel. I gaze deep into the dark, and it seems to carry fleeting hints of green.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Freight and Passengers
 |
| A freight train stops the traffic in Jakin, GA. "The traffic" = me. |
When I was first planning this trip and decided that I wanted to travel around by train, I thought that there was a connection, if somewhat tenuous, between my subject matter and my method of transportation. Trains, after all, used to be the primary form of long-distance transportation. It seemed reasonable that, as I tried to think about family history and the importance of place, trains would feature prominantly as a way to get to those places that became home.
To a certain degree that's true, and more recently than I had expected - my great-grandfather rode the rails during the Great Depression, and during WWII my grandfather and great-aunt rode trains back to Montana, for instance.
But that's mostly irrelevant. I had it all wrong. Trains weren't important because they were methods of transportation. People got around however they could - mule, horse and wagon, car, truck, bus, hitch-hiking, trains, boats, walking... Trains made certain parts of the country easier to get to, but so did roads and canals. New forms of transportation didn't really revolutionize the art of getting around. There was always first class and coach, always some ways that were quicker and some that were slower, some that were cheaper and some that were more expensive, some people who could afford to travel and lots who couldn't.
Trains are important to my family history because trains brought money. I was thinking about passenger trains; I should have thought freight.
When the railroad came to southwest Georgia, my great-great-grandfather, Bill Regan (the stingy one) convinced the company to build an extension of the tracks that reached onto his property. He could shear his sheep and load the wool directly onto freight cars. Having his own railroad tracks brought him lots of money and proved that he was a big-time businessman. Meanwhile the presence of the main railroad allowed the creation of the sawmills, which turned acres of virgin timber into cash and provided jobs to the local young men. What had been subsistence farming communities were suddenly swimming in cash.
I don't have any evidence that my great-great-grandmother Ida Huffman (a Montana farmer) ever rode a train. But she would drive a team of mules, carrying a wagon full of wheat, to the Dooley grain elevators and turn that wheat into money. As time went on the farm bought tractors and trucks, and four wheels and gasoline became their primary form of transportation. Trains stopped passing through Dooley and the grain elevators moved to other tracks. But the grain still went onto trains - and today, the massive farms of that region still make money by transmuting streams of golden wheat into dollar bills by way of a freight car.
I'm headed for California now, the end of the push for western expansion, and the end of the line for that first transcontinental railroad. And I bet there, too, what mattered about trains wasn't that people had the freedom to carry themselves to California in a matter of days - it was that freight could make it back to the East Coast quick enough for the fruit to stay fresh and cheaply enough for everybody to turn a profit. It wasn't that it made it easier to get to California, it's that it gave people a reason to go. Profit whispers more loudly than the call of adventure.
Money, money, money. Follow the money. Follow the train tracks.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Ruminations on Ruins
Looking at the ruins of a Chinese city, Paul Thereux wrote: "Nothing puts human effort into better perspective than a ruined city... It is very thrilling for an American to consider such a place, because we don't yet have anything that qualifies - only ghost towns and fairly insignificant small cities, but nothing like the monumental corpses of once-great cities that are known in the rest of the world. Probably American optimism arises from the fact that we don't have any devastated cities." (239)
I have to agree with him, partly. Stepping through the dusty remains of Dooley is not like looking at the ruins of a dead city, or fallen statues of a once-great civilization. It doesn't inspire any mournful thoughts about the futility of human effort - quite the opposite. It puts human effort into an entirely different perspective.
The last human inhabitant of Dooley left twenty years ago, and for thirty years before that the town was essentially abandoned. Fifty short years were all it took for the prairie to reclaim what once was a town. And in that time a thousand towns continued on, hunkered down in this windswept land, waiting out each freezing winter and holding their houses up against the snow, thunderstorms and floods. Dooley is what happens when everybody moves out. Dooley is what would happen if the people who lived in this prairie gave up and stopped trying. Dooley is proof that human willpower and constant work holds towns together - not masonry and certainly not inertia. Human hands are the only reason every town in Montana doesn't look like Dooley.
The Crow Indians lived off this land for five thousand years. Without stone foundations, their abandoned settlements must have vanished even more quickly and more surely than Dooley. Their homes would have blown away in a year if not for human hands constantly fixing rips, rebuilding fires, gathering more wood, killing more buffalo, curing more skins, making more shelters - the constant labor to hang on to the ground more fiercely than the wind could blow. Build a home, keep it warm, keep it stocked with food, survive. And then the Europeans came, bringing with them broken promises and slaughter. The Crow were torn away from their land by guns stronger than the winds had been, and the U.S. government opened up these lands for homesteaders. Once again, small settlements were waiting out storms and fighting to hold on to their lives. Families built small houses and kept them together, kept them warm, kept them stocked with food. A hundred years later people are still doing the same.
The earth can reclaim its territory quickly, at least in this part of the world, where the freezing winters crack wood and stone and the winds rip trees and houses straight off from the ground. Everything we've built would crumble into dust if not for our constant effort. Does that make human lives seem small and meaningless, or admirably powerful?
(Or pernicious, like a parasite? Where are the woolly mammoths, the herds of wild buffalo, the endless prairie like an ocean? Our houses might vanish but some damage can't be wiped away by time. There are many ways to put human effort into perspective - as easily indelibly catastrophic as doomed in its glory or noble in its determination.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)