My Few Experiences of Mountains

… The most powerful human emotion is fear, which is what I felt tightening inside of me from the base of my spine to the roots of my teeth as I drove …

          I know I shouldn’t count driving through mountains because that’s not really experiencing them, at least not in that feet-on-the-ground, nose-to-the-wind kind of way, but years ago those wild Kerouacian embers of cross-country road-trips were still glimmering like poetry in my brain. I was driving west on I-84 through the Columbia River Gorge toward Portland to visit a relocated friend—all my cool Louisville friends were moving to Portland back then for its music scene—and I think I had what you’d call a real experience of the mountains in my old-but-new-to-me Volvo station wagon. I don’t remember where exactly on 84 we were—my then-girlfriend Tara was dozing beside me in the passenger seat—but I do recall a steep, winding ascent from the oranges and browns of the high desert and the equally steep descent into the lusty green of the Oregon rainforest.

          I think I’m making some of this up, or my memory has smoothed out the edges, as memory tends to do. It’s not like you’re in the desert and then BOOM! you’re in the rainforest. Or maybe it is like that. It’s been awhile. And I haven’t been back since.

           The experience I had wasn’t of the mountains themselves. It was inside me. (But then, where do we experience experiences if not inside ourselves?) I’ve heard some otherwise intelligent people claim that love is the most powerful human emotion, but that’s a bunch of sentimental nonsense. The most powerful human emotion is fear, which is what I felt tightening inside of me from the base of my spine to the roots of my teeth as I drove through these mountains, where the North American Plate meets the Pacific and Juan de Fuca Plates. These were the Cascades. What a lovely name for mountains, derived (ultimately) from the Latin cadere: to fall. And that’s what I feared, falling, and dying, as I climbed and climbed and climbed. My bad dreams have always involved falling from some height, veering off into a black void, losing my grip, plummeting. It’s a beautiful kind of fear, though. Maybe back then it was akin to the still-fierce grip of love I had for Tara. Maybe love compelled me to face my fear in the first place, bid me drive on, go west, young man! be on the road in love! Maybe love is more powerful than fear. 

          You think about mountains and you see a single thing in your mind, a discrete unit called “mountain.” This is how you learn what a mountain is. You draw a triangle with a zig-zag line near the tip to represent the snow line. You think Everest. You think Vesuvius and Rainier, both of which are volcanoes, too, but that’s a different drawing. You think a mountain is like a volcano without a hole in the top. You draw some puffy clouds and a few birds, maybe a semi-circle sun in the corner with straight-line rays beaming down. You think you have a handle on what a mountain is, but you don’t—any more than you have a handle on what love is by drawing hearts.

          I thought I understood something about Pine Mountain from the stories my grandpa would tell of growing up in Jenkins, Kentucky, a dusty little former coal-camp town on the Virginia border. Pine Mountain was where people hid their moonshine stills. Pine Mountain was where the outlaw-hero Devil John Wright lived. Pine Mountain was where my grandpa went as a kid to teach himself to play guitar, like some Pentecostal mountaintop guru communing with the God of the Lonesome Pine. Pine Mountain was also the location of Raven Rock, a locally famous overlook point, where you could take in all of Jenkins below. I’ve only been to Jenkins a handful of times. A few years ago I went there to have an authentic experience of Pine Mountain so that I could write about that experience and then possibly publish what I’d written. But that kind of thing hardly ever works out. Or you end up writing fiction or poetry and wishing it was what you’d actually experienced.

          I’d seen pictures from the 1920s of men gathered on Raven Rock smoking pipes in their Sunday best and posing for group portraits, and I’d read so many references to it in the town library’s archive. I knew it was a single thing, a distinct place called “Raven Rock.” You could plant a flag and point to it and say you were there. But when I stumbled through the trees onto what I assumed was Raven Rock, I wasn’t sure. The view was breathtaking, but not in a beautiful way. From this rock ledge you could see the long narrow valley that was Jenkins, Elkhorn Lake to the southwest, the new golf course to the north, but you could also see all the strip-mining going on around you, what some call “mountaintop removal.” You could see big patches of white and brown where there should be green, and plumes of gray smoke rising in every direction, like a bunch of little bomb sites, which they are in a way. 

        Raven Rock is what you’d call a “crag.” I’ve always loved that word. I’m not sure if it’s an actual geological term because I associate it with Romantic poetry. Like Wordsworth’s “narrow girdle of rough stones and crags” or Byron’s “crag-cover’d wild” or Keats’ “Crag jutting forth to crag, and rocks that seem’d / Ever as if just rising from a sleep.” It’s a rigid and insistent word. It sounds like one of those nonsense rhymes you invent as a kid while running through the alphabet: vag, spag, frag, crag. The word “crag,” and not crags themselves, may be one of the reasons I became a poet. I like Williams’ famous axiom, “No ideas but in things,” but for me it’s “No ideas and no things but in words.” Or even, “No ideas, no things, no words but in sounds.”

         I scooted to the edge of this crag, this Raven Rock, and peered down the side at the tops of trees. That old familiar fear tickled inside. I stood there alone with my fear for a few moments. If I fell, no one would know, no one could help me, and I’d probably die, so I backed off and sat cross-legged to smoke a cigarette. I wasn’t having the experience I’d hoped for. For one, I was hungry and felt stupid for not eating lunch. It was already late in the afternoon, and I was running on coffee and cigarettes. I was also not dressed for any kind of climbing or hiking in my dress shoes and khaki pants and camelhair sports coat. I was supposed to have interviewed the mayor earlier in the day about the history of Jenkins for my writing project, but he wasn’t in, so I stupidly went tramping up some old logging road toward what I hoped would be Raven Rock and a real experience of Pine Mountain. But now I couldn’t tell where Raven Rock began and where it ended. The ledge, the crag, just kept going in either direction. Here I am sitting in the “crag-cover’d wild,” not sure if it’s the right crag or some other crag, and all I can think is how much I’d like a grilled cheese sandwich with a pickle. All I can think is, “Jesus, these shoes. These shoes are absolutely ridiculous.”

          I wished I could look around me and name the names of all the plants and geological formations around me. I’d write a poem. I’d savor words like escarpment, chokecherry, kudzu, white pine. That would’ve given me some comfort, I think. I followed the crag southwest looking for its end, but Raven Rock just kept going. I backtracked and followed it northeast, but it still kept going. Sometimes I had to leap across gaps in the crag. Sometimes I had to duck back into the trees—were they white pines?—before I emerged again onto the rock. Eventually I found a shallow cave, but it wasn’t what you think of when you say “cave.” I want to call it a gully, but that’s not right. And neither is gulch, but both are good-sounding words. The cave was a big black V etched into the side of the mountain, a pitched rift in the rock that I had to clamber down about twenty feet to enter. I was surprised not to find trash or graffiti or a blackened circle of ash from an old campfire because you always find that kind of thing in caves like this. It was a perfect place for teenagers to get drunk or high or have sex. But all I found there was a big sleeping box turtle. Had I been on some kind of vision quest, or if I were the kind of person who looked for omens or signs from above, I might have attached some kind of personal significance to the turtle, but it was just a turtle. I patted the turtle shell, and it didn’t do anything. That was good enough for me.

          Not surprisingly, I almost fell while climbing up out of the cave. There was a moment when I knew I would have to let go of one hold to lunge at the roots of a bush—maybe it was a chokecherry?—so I could pull myself up. I thought about that line in The Dharma Bums when the narrator realizes that “it’s impossible to fall off mountains.” I beg to differ. It may have been like cool wild jazz or an angelheaded epiphany for Kerouac bounding down some mountain or other in the Sierra Nevada. But neither jazz nor epiphanies will keep you from smashing your skull on the rocks below, or breaking your leg at least. And then what? Then you’re helpless and hungry with only this completely indifferent turtle to keep you company as you writhe in pain and die alone. I became seized with a quick terror, clinging desperate and frozen to the rock. Maybe all my dreams of falling had been prophetic after all. I was experiencing what you would call “panic,” another lovely word, meaning “pertaining to Pan,” the Greek god of, among other things, mountain wilds. What broke the panic was my own sudden, uncontrollable, and ridiculous laughter. Then Pan loosened his grip inside me, I let go, lunged, and pulled myself up, skull intact. For the Greeks, Pan may have been the erotic half-man-half-goat god of mountain wilds blowing on his pipes. But to me Pan is cool indifference. He’s all turtle.

          Here’s the thing. I didn’t have an epiphany on Pine Mountain, and the experience hardly qualifies me as a naturalist or outdoorsman, much less a “nature writer,” whatever that means. As much as I might admire them, I’m no Barry Lopez, I’m no Aldo Leopold, I’m not even Bear Grylls. I’m too much in my head all the time, thinking, wanting to know the names of things, what they mean, and what might rhyme with kudzu. What I did come to understand, at last, up there on the mountain was that there’s really no such thing as “Raven Rock” because it goes on and on and on, one long crag of cresting and receding limestone that runs the length of the entire mountain. Maybe it juts out more or less here or there. Maybe it disappears into the earth in one place before popping back out in the other. But Raven Rock is Pine Mountain. And Pine Mountain is the Appalachians. And the Appalachians are…Well, you get the point.

          I’ve spent time among other mountains: the Devil’s Path range in the Catskills, some of the Adirondacks, the Berkshires, the Endless Mountains in northeast Pennsylvania. And I could imagine them connected to Raven Rock. But now I live far from the promise of foothill and crag in the vast windy recline of northeast Iowa, in what Michael Martone calls “the flatness,” or more familiarly “the flyover.” People back east ask me how I like it here, and I say it’s all corn and soy and pigs, but it’s also an easy place to live, by which I mean the cost of living, the friendliness of the people, its relatively progressive politics, and other “quality of life” indicators. I think I also mean that Iowa isn’t a fearful place. Sure, we have blizzard, drought, tornado, flood, but there’s no place to fall from, no place to lose your grip, not really. We see things coming, we brace ourselves, we get ready. Iowa is a place untroubled by mountain wilds, where no one seems to panic and it’s easy to be in love, where the deep quiet at night is only matched by how calm and far away the horizon convenes with its sky.

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J.D. Schraffenberger is the assistant editor of the North American Review and the author of a book of poems, Saint Joe’s Passion (Etruscan 2008). His other work appears in Best Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa and is currently at work on a book-length study of the Iowa farmer-poet James Hearst.

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The Litchfields – Lynda Barreto

A Note from the CNF editor on March-April contributions:

     This edition of Ragazine features the work of poet and ecocritic J.D. Scraffenberger, whose piece “My Few Experiences of Mountains” reflects upon the different psychological states conjured by different geographies, and the way those geographies reflect our relationships and life patterns.  For Schraffenberger, a mountain is a vertiginous place that reminds us of our own precarious positionalities, the fragile surfaces of our lives that can turn and dash us down at any moment, a place of extremes that invokes the similar possibilities of our emotional makeups.  Getting older, now settling in with his own family, he finds the rolling plains of Iowa a better fit, where “we see things coming, we brace ourselves, we get ready. Iowa is a place untroubled by mountain wilds, where no one seems to panic and it’s easy to be in love, where the deep quiet at night is only matched by how calm and far away the horizon convenes with its sky.”

     In “The Wrong Season for Survival,” Mark Montgomery, a poet and creative non-fiction writer, similarly explores the emotional extremes of place with a tale of his survivalist father, who drags his children and friends into the California wilds on a he-man quest of self-reliance in the 1970s, inspired by Euell Gibbons and the later twentieth-century version of environmentalism.  In his story we see the limits of a quixotic quest for self-reliance, and an eerie foreshadowing of some of the struggles that await us if the dovetailing crises of climate catastrophe and peak oil manage to topple our twenty-first century technological prowess and send us all “into the wild” without a Walmart in sight.  Taken together, Schraffenberger and Montgomery provide a reflection on landscapes that terrify, inspire, and sustain us, leaving each to calculate and settle in to his or her own circadian and other kinds of rhythms with an ear always turned toward whatever blindsiding changes might come.

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A Note from the CNF editor on January’s contributions:

A native of the Southwest, Jose Rodriguez’s “Burning Garbage” explores the theme of American consumerism from the outside—the perspective of a young child born in what in a material sense would be construed as poverty in Mexico, but whose migration to Texas brings a sense of deprivation of another sort.   The categorical arrangement of people according to status, with distinct valuation being assigned according to what one has or doesn’t have, is bewildering to Rodriguez’s amazing narrator, who nonetheless appreciates whatever small beauty comes his way.  Finding pleasure in a toy car wheel he plucks from a heap of burning garbage, lyrically reflecting on the existence of spaces like garages and furniture like sofas, the story provides a whole new perspective on what most of us take to be commonplace.

Reflecting on our situatedness  in relation to the natural world in a different way, James Guignard’s “What Would Rachel Carson Do?” takes place during a long bike ride in which the narrator imaginatively converses with Carson and David Gessner, author of Sick of Nature and Return of the Osprey.  Guignard uses his response to the nature around him and his imagined conversation with these two luminaries of environmentalism to try to figure out what his position as an English professor who teaches environmental literature might really mean and what its possibilities are.  The dialogue vividly articulates some of the current themes of and stereotypes about what it means to be an environmentalist and have a relationship to nature in the twenty-first century, presenting these ideas with rare humor and verve.  Taken together, Rodriguez’s and Guignard’s stories allow us to think about place, our location in the world and our responses to that world, in highly original ways.  Enjoy!

The Wrong Season for Survival

home movies

Greg Roberts stands behind me with the barrel of his Winchester prodding me forward. He leads me into a hollow before a lava-tube cave[1] where I join my cousins, who are being held there. Standing before the mouth of the cave, we look like prisoners of some giant sea conch, captive adolescent boys armed with high-caliber rifles, assembled here to carry out its evil plan. Dave Borup appears in the entrance, at the edge of the camera’s lens. He stands taller than the rest of us. He has a thick chest for his age and a quarterback’s jaw, so he’s in charge. I am being led here for questioning. Things will get ugly. Borup takes me by the collar and jerks me toward him, where he mouths angry questions down at me. I play tough. He’ll never get a word out of me. I’ve been through this before. Do what you will. I won’t crack. Besides, I know my gang lies in waiting. What follows is a bloodbath.

 “captain I don’t want to kill another man. he ain’t done nothing to me…”[2]

Such scenes, common in my childhood, appeal to what some adolescent psychologists — at least the one who my 14-year old son visited — claim is an “intrinsic fascination for violence and conflict” present in adolescent males. Prior to having children, I would have – quite often did — dispute such gender distinctions. One boy and two girls later, I’m more in agreement. However, more than my predictable acceptance that boys will be boys, I’m struck by our paradoxical relationship to violence. What I know of violence, really know, I learned the day I had to slaughter a steer named Moonshine. I say “had to,” but that’s not really true. The whole thing left me sick, but the part that’s really hard to stomach is that I think I really wanted to do it, wanted the act to validate me, serve as a kind of rite of passage, i.e., killing will make me a man.  So, if that’s true, who taught me this? I could say television or my father or the movies etcetera, but that would only partly be true. So what, then? Why did I kill if I really didn’t want to?

 Growing up with hunting dogs, I‘ve often wondered about the relationship between hunters and their dogs. Some of the most passionate dog-lovers I know are hunters. So, how is it they come to make killing other animals a similar passion? Conversely, how is it that my own son, who backs away the moment a dog bounds toward him—pockets his hands rather than reach to stroke its muzzle — finds the thought of hunting/killing another animal totally repulsive?[3] How is it that when I was 12 I begged my mom to let me sleep in the garage with our Brittany Spaniel, Mando, who had her litter out there, yet in the same year wanted nothing more than to kill a deer, skin and tan its hide, then have my grandmother fashion a hunting vest out of it ?

To expand, how is it that in the 6^th grade I’m moved to tears at the sight of the new kid sitting alone in the cafeteria eating his sad hamburger, but won’t think twice about killing a fellow creature for meat?[4] What kind of species is this — capable of such grotesque contradictions? Naturally, great thinkers have explored these questions for centuries, so my asking it probably seems tired. Then again, second-rate minds don’t have as many answers, so I’ll keep asking.  

suburban arms race

In 1973, my father — already well equipped to hunt anything from small birds to hoofed game — begins collecting a serious cache of weapons. His goal, he claims, is to arm his family — or at least his three boys and maybe a handful of neighborhood kids — and train them to survive in the wild. He brings home handguns and shotguns and high-powered rifles; He buys gun-cases and displays his revolvers and carbines, bolt and lever-action rifles, automatics, pumps, over-and-under barrel shotguns, even a muzzle-loader. He brings home a thirty-ought-six for Robert since, at 15, he is the oldest and can handle its kick.[5]

He brings home twin 30-30 Winchesters for my brother Boz and me. They may not be as powerful as my brother Robert’s gun, but Pop says they’re still big enough to drop a running mule deer at 250 yards. I pick mine up and try to shoulder it. It’s too heavy. I can only hold the barrel up for a few seconds before it dips toward the ground. Pop tells me not to worry, that I’ll grow into it, so I try again. I press the buttstock to my shoulder, hold it steady this time, but I still can’t reach the trigger.

Boxes of ammunition follow. Then scopes and straps and rifle bags. He sets up reloading equipment in the garage — boxes of empty cartridges and primers, bench-top presses, heaps of buckshot and gunpowder stocked in tubes of canvas like sandbags. We look like a regiment of the National Guard, preparing to shore up the flooded levees and hold off looters in the bargain. When asked where it all comes from, Pop tells us he has a “private dealer,” which we’ve learned  means “out of some guy’s trunk in West Oakland.” [6]

Next comes the fishing gear and the endless supplies of canned and dried foods, and gallon jugs of water, bags of oats and flashlight batteries. When my mother asks him what on earth he’s planning, he sums it up in a word: “Survival.” 

survival

Inspired by the naturalist author Euell Gibbons and that famous Grape Nuts commercial, in which he asks, “Ever eat a pine tree?”, my father buys the author’s best-selling Stalking the Wild Asparagus, from which he memorizes the recipes for dozens of edible species. His final inspiration from all this is to take his three sons, my Uncle Rich and his two boys, plus a handful of neighborhood kids into the wilderness for two weeks—without food or their mothers—and teach them to live off the land. He believes it’s his mission in life to expose kids to the wilderness. He says, “Most kids these days don’t get out of their living rooms, away from the boob-tube long enough to even know where their food comes from. Kids today think their food comes out of a can or a box. Now, that’s just nuts.” He begins making this speech regularly at house parties and little-league games. Whenever possible, the talk turns to survival and his planned adventure.

target practice

My brothers and I stand next to the outdoor grill on our backyard patio holding shotguns. Pop has us stand in a straight row, like a firing squad, and take turns shooting at anything that flies. Earlier, he loaded “dummy” rounds for us to shoot, so they won’t travel too far, make much noise, or actually hit anything. Robert shoots first. His gun goes pop when he jerks the trigger, and a fuzzy wad flies and then falls well short of a fluttering bluejay.  We take turns shooting and reloading for a half hour. When there isn’t anything flying, we just raise our barrels and fire into the open sky. Pop says we need to get the feel of our guns. He walks around us adjusting our stances and hand positions. He doesn’t say a lot. He watches us the way someone assessing thoroughbreds might. But if such a drill being performed next to a backyard basketball hoop makes my father out to be a kind of Great-Santini hardass, I’ve mislead you. Pop is most often described by my 5^th-grade friends as “totally mellow,” which is true. He’s not at all the strict, ex-marine type. He had been in the service, the Canadian Air Force allegedly, [7] but he rarely spoke of it. The only evidence of his service was a framed photo of him in a sort of air-force cap that my mom kept on her nightstand. That said, Pop’s calm direction is more like that of a yoga instructor adjusting postures than that of a drill sergeant.

transpeninsular

This isn’t the first wilderness trip we’ve taken. There have been several others, the grandest being our off-road trip across the Baja Peninsula. On that trip, there were 14 of us (4 adults, 10 kids) stuffed into a VW bus, a Willys jeep trailing 3 motorcycles, and a Ford Bronco towing a dune buggy. “Baja,” my father explained at the time, “is the last frontier. It’s like the Wild West was 100 years ago. And we’re going to travel the full 1000 miles without once touching blacktop!”[8]

Today, I would never allow my son to go on any of my father’s adventures. Back then I lived for them. 1974 was a more relaxed time, to be sure. That was before child carseats and bike helmets, when our pregnant mothers drank martinis and chain-smoked Virginia Slims, but I’m still amazed that people who were little more than neighborhood or little-league acquaintances let their kids go with us.   Pop’s ability to make people quickly trust him was his gift.  I’m still not sure what his motive was. Maybe he really did fear that our friends suffered from some form of what today would be diagnosed as Nature-Deficit Disorder. But, the cynic in me doesn’t completely quite buy this.  Pop was too busy running a business and planning trips or taking up hang-gliding or racing hydroplane boats to seriously concern himself with parenting.

Near the beginning of our Baja trip, we spent three days broken down in the border town of Mexicali after the clutch went out in our souped-up VW Microbus. My Uncle Rich and Pop both ran transmission shops, so they could fix anything, anywhere — provided they had the parts, or something out of which to fashion them.[9] Being pre-NAFTA Mexicali, and with no Napa Auto Parts chain in sight, these parts would be a few days. During the three-day waiting period before they arrived, the men, who were busy “fixing” the bus, were rarely seen. The rest of us spent our time either watching Spanish-dubbed episodes of “Kung-Fu” or “Happy Days” in our motel’s lobby, in the bathrooms of our rooms dealing with “Montezuma’s Revenge,” or simply wandering the streets of Mexicali. For some, this was the most memorable part of the trip. And why wouldn’t it be? A Mexican border town in the 70s ranks pretty high on the scale of exotica. To begin with, you could buy anything—fireworks, switchblades, Chinese fighting stars, all sorts of handmade toys and puppets. And food — sweets galore, and chicle, and tamales, roasted fish on a stick. Mike Higgins, who was 15, walked right into a bar and bought a six-pack of Dos Equis, which he drank with Robert. After sharing the beer, they got mugged while trying to buy something (they wouldn’t tell). They lost all their money and the new pair of platform shoes my brother had just bought. Two kids ended up in the emergency room getting stitched up after falling into a construction ditch — or so they claimed. My cousin, Joe (13), spent a night in a holding-cell for stealing a golfcart.

So while the men took their food, drink, and entertainment down at the Mexicali Rose Cantina, where they caught whopping hangovers and god knows what else, we ate all our meals from street-vendors — which left most of us sick for the rest of the trip — and nearly lost fingers playing with our freshly-purchased switchblades and blowing off cherry-bombs. I don’t know if it was a conscious parental strategy or neglect. I suspect the latter, though it taught me a thing or two. I learned how to swing nunchucks like Bruce Lee, and why it’s sometimes important to boil water.

After three days, the men emerged from the cantinas and fixed the clutch. Then they paid the doctors’ bills, bailed out my cousin, and bought us all half-gallon jugs of Milk of Magnesia.

survival preparations

I pull open the top drawer of the tool box and fish out the ratchet. Then I find the socket, snap it on the end of the tool and hand it to Pop. “I don’t understand,” I ask. “Why don’t they join the Boy Scouts then? They do wilderness stuff.”

 I’m helping Pop put air shocks on the van and complaining about his inviting half the neighborhood to come with us on our survival trip.

“It’s not the same.”

“Why not?”

“The Scouts are okay, but they don’t really fend for themselves,” he says. “Everything’s done for them, you know, and everything’s prepared—food, campsite, firewood. Nothing’s at stake.” He removes the bolt from the upper shock mount and sets it in a red cloth rag.

“Pop?”

“Yeah?”

“Could we really starve to death out there?”

“Naw, we’ll be alright?

“But we could?”

“I suppose. Look, sometimes you need to test your limits, that’s all. This is one of those times. We’re going into the wilderness to test our limits, find out if we can survive.”

I stare up at the van’s undercarriage and think of all the ways I’d rather not be tested, how it might be nice to camp out like the Boy scouts, build fires with twigs and flint, roast marshmallows, sing songs.

“What would that be like?” I say.

“What would what be like?”

“You know, to not have food — to go a long time without it?”

“You mean to starve to death? How should I know?”

“Have you ever been hungry before — I mean starving hungry?”

He takes a slow drag of his Marlboro and looks at me. He doesn’t usually stop in the middle of doing something. He doesn’t usually stop to look at me. It’s awkward, but I like it.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve been real hungry before.”

“But you didn’t starve?”

“I’m here aren’t I? Now quit being morbid. Give me that.” I roll that floor-jack over to him, and he pushes it under the bumper. “We’re going to pump this thing up.”

I watch him. He places the jack’s lift plate under the van’s frame and steadies it with one hand. His other hand reaches for the handle of the jack. He begins to pump. All the while he whistles through his teeth. The vehicle rises effortlessly, I think, with such ease.

departure. reno

On the night of our departure, Pop gathers us together to explain our plan. It’s pretty straightforward. We trek into the Modoc wilderness without store-bought food.[10] We’ll be equipped only with camp-gear, guns and ammunition, fishing rigs and the basic cooking utensils. We’ll also each be allowed one canteen of fresh water and a bag of sunflower seeds. We’d load everything into and on top of our modified 1971 VW Campervan; then, we drive to the edge of the wilderness, as far as the dirt roads would take us; from there, we hike deep into this remote area and camp for 10 days; once our vehicle crosses from asphalt to dirt, we will not be allowed to eat or drink anything that we don’t personally gather, pick, trap or kill.  

Our California/Nevada wilderness trips always began with a stop in Reno. This trip is no different. In Reno, the men would stuff us with all-you-can-eat buffet food; then leave us parked in the van to sleep it off while they hit the casinos. As soon as the men were out of sight, we’d emerge from the van, head for the streets of Reno and, basically, relive Mexicali. Of course, Reno has casinos, so we run in and out of them sneaking coins in slot machines and finishing half-drunk cocktails. After harassing waitresses and getting chased by casino security guards for a few hours, we’d return to the van and crash as though nothing happened.

I’m awake and sitting in the driver’s seat when the men return from the casino. We are in the parking garage of Harrah’s. My Uncle’s watch, which is always slow, reads 4:00 am. He and my father support the large frame of our neighbor, Mr. Roberts, who is stumbling drunk. He is drunk and he isn’t wearing his glasses. I’ve never before seen him without his glasses. They swing open the van’s double doors and push him in. Sleeping boys groan and wiggle as he clambers over their ankles and slumps his enormous body down, closes his eyes and groans.

My father sits in the driver’s seat and eyes me in the rear view mirror. “You awake, Kid?” I nod.  “Get up here, then.” He pats the top of the cooler that rides between the van’s bucket seats. I tiptoe over the sleeping bodies and position myself in front, between my father and uncle.

“Tell us one of your stories, Nephew,” my uncle says. He reaches under his seat for the thermos. “We could use some entertainment to keep us awake.” He twists open the lid of the thermos and fills its handled cup. “Make some noise for us. C’mon.” He takes a sip and grimaces. Then he gives it to me to pass to my father. “Alright, start talking.”

For the next several hours, I stare at the lights cutting through the darkness and, in between fetching fresh beers from the cooler, I talk. I tell them about a dream in which I fall asleep near a river and am swallowed by a snake. At the end of the dream I’m transformed into “my spirit animal,” the snake.

My uncle turns toward me and laughs. “Spirit animal? Is that what you said? How much of that beer you been drinking, Nephew? Give that to me.” He jerks the can from my hand and shakes it to check its weight. “A snake, huh? Is that what they call a wet dream these days?” He laughs again, but I don’t get it. He takes a long drink and empties his can. “So is that like your Indian name, Nephew? What do we call you, Slippery Snake? How about just Snake, Snake-in-the-Grass.”

Pop always drives on these trips cause he doesn’t sleep much. He says that the late-late night hours are special. “It’s when you get to experience what no one else is willing to wait for. That’s when the best discoveries are made,” he says. So I stay up too. I don’t know if I’ve made any discoveries yet, not like a pot of gold or anything, but I like how the road looks in the darkness, how it grows narrow and the terrain more flat and desert-like. Occasionally a pygmy rabbit darts across the blacktop. I count them. It feels like time is standing still, and I don’t want it to start up again. I worry about time passing, the world moving along without me. I feel that I belong here with the men, and want to stay up late with them every night, so I won’t miss out on this. The road seems to form itself before us as we drive, as if our headlights are the source of the land’s formation. Everything beyond our vision is just dead space, frozen time, waiting for our illumination to give it its shape.

setting out

Near dawn, we pull onto a dirt road and rattle over a cattle guard. My father pulls the van onto a turnout and shuts down the engine. My uncle snores with his head against his folded hands on the passenger window. Pop tells me to climb in the back and get some shuteye. “We set out in two hours,” he says. “We’ll need a little rest. And take down one of those blankets. It’s getting cold. Look.” He points to the windshield on which fall the first flakes of pre-dawn snow.

A few hours later, Pop’s voice cries out to wake us. I’m shivering. I tried to find a blanket, but with everyone stuffed together and sleeping, I couldn’t get to them. Several of the boys are huddled tight against the carpeted floor trying to get warm. Mr. Roberts lies on his back with his arms spread wide. His large body has forced most of us to seek out the corners of the van. He snores on, while the gangly boys unfold their limbs and stretch themselves awake. When Pop swings the van doors open, they are bolted to life by the image of the land before them—a white open valley blanketed with fresh-fallen snow.

When it comes to smuggled food Pop means business. He makes us unload all the gear, and he gathers the boys in a line with our backpacks and sleeping bags. “Okay,” he says, rubbing his hands together, “Before we set out, we need to check the weight on those packs. No extra crap, got it?” The boys look at each other and smile. Pop starts with my brother Robert’s pack and finds a trove of Lipton’s Instant Soup and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which Pop dumps in a brown paper bag. My brother eyes me like the snitch I am.

“Now, the sleeping bag and tents,” he says. “Unroll and unpack. Real light and tight. Nothing dangling. We’ll be crossing creeks, and the last thing you’ll want is a wet bag, trust me.”  The search of my brother’s sleeping bag elicits dozens of candy bars, a bag of licorice ropes and two canisters of Pringles. By the time he finishes his inspection of our gear, he fills four bags with enough canned and snack food to supply the small, shiftless army we are. None of the other boys will talk to me for the rest of the day.  Free of such contraband myself, I stand in a smug posture during Pop’s search of my gear—a search he made only to show that out in the wild there is no such thing as a favorite.

After several failed attempts to wake the sleeping Tom Roberts, he finally succumbs to our badgering and the cold air. He exits the van and wobbles. “Whoa,” he says. “I think I’m still loaded. Are we here or what?” We laugh at him. He then hurries to the other side of the van where he spends several minutes on his knees throwing up on a bush. His sons search for a camera, also laughing. When he finishes, he looks much better, a little cheerful even. “I’m ready,” he says. “If I can survive Reno, I can survive anything. Let’s go!” He puts on his pack, but refuses to carry a gun. Everyone else carries either a rifle or a shotgun. Pop shoulders his deer rifle, a Weatherby 270 Magnum with a power scope. He also wears a belt with a holster that carries a Smith and Wesson 38 Special. After weeks of pestering, Pop has agreed to let me carry the 30-30, even though I can still hardly raise the barrel to shoot. My gun, like those of our entire band of boys, is fully loaded.

jeremiah johnson made his way into the mountains

As a boy I idolize two people: my father and Jeremiah Johnson. In a way, both are characters loosely based on real people — Robert Redford’s Jeremiah is inspired by the legendary mountain man/Crow killer, Liver-Eating Johnson[11]; Pop is a sort of composite character built from an assortment of Hemingway heroes crossed with Steve McQueen. I see them as one in the same, and I even have a poster of Redford’s character in my bedroom. When Jeremiah builds a log cabin with his bare hands, I asked my mother if I can cut down her pine tree in the backyard to build a fort. When he hunts down and kills the Crows who murdered his family, I scan the picket fences of our neighbors’ yards in pursuit of their buck-skin faces. When he makes love to the beautiful Indian squaw after they present one another with fresh kills, I spend a week bent over in the deep grass of the surrounding fields stalking quail with a slingshot.

Ironically, when I stare at my own face in the mirror I ignore its Indian features—the dark skin and eyes, those high-set cheekbones—and search instead for signs of my father’s, Jeremiah’s. 15 years later I will hike the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico and stare in fascination at all of the faces that resemble mine, faces that will stare back, or so it seems, in a kind of distant recognition. As a boy, I don’t acknowledge the similarities between my face and the faces of those phantom Indian warriors who I dream, like the movie Jeremiah, of retributively slaughtering.

modoc county national forest

Modoc County is a high-desert wilderness tucked in the northeast corner of California and bordered by Nevada to the east and Oregon to the north. The lowlands are strewn with the aforementioned lava beds, rough grasses and sage meadows. Encircling the rolling sagebrush are pine-covered mountain bluffs with thick groves of aspen and juniper. The high-bluff mesas reach 10,000 feet in elevation, while lowland meadows rest at roughly 4,500. It is vast country, a place whose county motto reads, “Where the West Still Lives.” A place where the Indian wars raged, and where the kind of blood I dream of spilling did just that. The famous Modoc chief, Captain Jack,[12] held up there. Of course, we don’t know any of this as we hike over those same lava plains in the early morning. We are too busy trying to keep up with Pop, who leads the way, searching for an enclave of our own, a place to bed down his grumbling band of men and boys.

I follow close behind Pop all through the hike.  I always hike near the front, next to my father who always leads. My uncle walks at the rear of the pack and takes movies with the Super 8. He keeps the boys’ spirits up telling jokes and making fun of my father. He has a paradoxical relationship with Pop. He both follows and criticizes everything he does. My uncle is the only one in our family from the east coast — New Jersey. He has an accent that I imagine to be the same as those Bowery Boys in the movies ’cause he has that same smart-ass way of talking to people. The other kids follow his lead, but they make fun of me instead — make fun of how I follow Pop, try to be the little man. “Look, he’s a little Lee,” they say, pointing and laughing, “only dark brown.” 

Hibernation

No one expected winter. The snow, beautiful at first, quickly loses its luster after slogging through it all morning. We follow Pop who is deaf to our complaints. He shoulders his rifle and trudges ahead purposefully. I follow him as close as I can but it’s a struggle. The snow turns to freezing rain, then to heavy rain by mid day, which turns everything to muck. It’s like walking through pancake batter in snow shoes. We slip and fall, covering our clothes with thick streaks of lava-red mud till we look like we’ve been war-painted. By the time we find a suitable camp, a well-sheltered place next to a running stream, we’re exhausted, shivering and in a foul mood. Aside from some deer droppings and the crows, there are few signs of life. Nothing moves beyond the shimmering Aspen. Modoc County may be “Where the West still lives,” but apparently little else does.

“We’ve picked a bad time to survive, boys,” my Uncle Rich says, and as much as I hate to agree with him, he’s right. It’s still winter here. It may be warm and Spring-like in the Bay Area, but in Modoc it’s freezing cold and snowing and NOTHING IS GROWING! Pop’s diligent plan — namely stockpiling — overlooked the obvious: it’s the wrong season for survival. We are apparently the only life forms inhabiting Modoc County. “It’s like the place is hibernating,” Robert says. “What are we going to eat?”

hunger pains

            “I’m hungry,” Everyone seems to say at once.  Day three of our survival trip begins the same as the previous two — with empty stomachs. Before the rest of us got up, Pop ventured out and found a patch of mustard greens and shot two grey squirrels. So our breakfast this morning is a kind of squirrel stew with greens and instant rice that Pop cooks over the fire in a pressure-cooker. I’m the only kid who will eat it. After yesterday’s lunch of fried catfish and wild mushrooms — a lunch my brother Boz threw up after eating — the others settle for their sunflower seeds, or rip open the linings of their jackets for the last of the candy bars their mothers have sewn into them.

            Pop gathers us around the fire and tells us to pair up and search the surrounding area for edible food. He shows us photos from the Gibbon’s book of some plants and berries and mushrooms to look for. “The mushrooms are real good at hiding, so you have to look close for them,” he tells us. “If you see any fallen trees or stumps, look on the backsides of them. Don’t eat anything until you bring it back here and let me see it, alright?”

“Right. like stuff can actually grow out here,” Robert says.

            “There’s food out here.” Pop tells him. “You just have to look. Brush away the snow and look beyond the surface.” He pointed to both his temples. “Think like a plant.”

At this statement, my uncle hands me a folded G.I. shovel and tells me to go dig for something to eat. Then he turns to Pop, “Go easy on the Flower-Power, Grover.[13] Save it for Snake, here. He’ll tune in to that plant energy, won’t you, Snake in the Grass?” I grab the shovel from him and promise myself never to tell my uncle another story. “Okay, everyone,” my uncle continues, “our wilderness leader wants us to gather some flowers. Better get moving before we starve.”

Robert

Thinking back on it — it wasn’t really planned well. People who do that stuff —stay out in the wilderness — don’t go out there with no food at all. They’d bring corn or something, some sort of staple, right? He brought a bag of sunflower seeds and a box of mashed potatoes for like 11 people! Maybe if you’re in the military, the Special Forces, you’d train for it, go see if you can survive in the wilderness, but we were like the Lost Boys. I wasn’t even driving yet. I couldn’t have been more than 13, maybe 14. You were what, nine years old? But he was always doing stuff like that. He had so much confidence in our ability to  survive anything. Remember Baja? Think about it. He took a bunch of neighborhood kids on this like 2500 mile journey across Baja in what, 1975? That was like the wild west back then. I mean, you’ll never see Baja like that again. We had that dune buggy and the jeep and those dirt bikes, and it was all fair game. Whoever felt like driving just got behind the wheel.  You weren’t even tall enough to reach the foot pegs on the Kawasaki. We used to hold you upright and just have you gas it. I would never let my kids go on a trip like that.  And that survival trip when he handed everyone a loaded gun? We talk about that all the time. We can’t believe we’re still alive. It wasn’t the wilderness; it’s a miracle we survived each other.

great-white hunter

“Well, I guess we were wrong about him. That Snake, he sure does know his way around the mountains. Why, just look at the size of the rack on that buck! We have him to thank for our bounty tonight, boys! Let’s hear it for The Kid, shall we?” They repeat their praises as they pass thick slices of the roasted venison I’ve provided.

In my mind, this is how I replay the scene. It is our sixth night surviving. Everyone is cold and hungry and wants to leave. I do too, but I won’t admit it.  I lie awake, the bottom of my sleeping bag resting in a pool of water, and I imagine this scene. In my fantasy, I have saved everyone from starvation by killing a big buck.

The next morning, I wake before dawn, get my rifle and set out. Pop says that the bucks like to bed down in the aspen groves, so I hike in their direction. It’s light by the time I reach them. Their long, beech-white trunks are spotted with black flecks. They remind me of the gangly legs of a foal I once saw being born — the trunks disproportionately long compared to their leafy tops, which sit umbrella-like on their bases. The leaves, mustard yellow, flicker like fishing lures. I stand looking at them when something flashes in the corner of my eye. It is white, whatever it is, and has moved into a copse of scrub oaks. I’m pretty sure it’s a white-tail deer. Approaching the trees I spot him, a buck? Maybe, though he blends into the trees, so I’m not sure if I’m seeing horns or tree limbs. My heart pounds. Then I see it move again, deeper into the forest. The closer I get, the faster he moves, until he just stops, freezes like a backyard target-deer. I plant my feet and slowly raise my rifle.

buck fever

I try to set the buck’s shoulder in the front sight of my gun, but I’m shaking. He keeps bobbing in and out of my line of fire. Pop says to go for the shoulder. The neck is better, he told me, but it’s a riskier shot. “Whatever you do,” I hear him saying to me, “Don’t gut-shoot him. A gut-shot and he’s gone. You’ll never see him again. Wastes everything.”

I take a deep breath and hold it, but my head swims till I have to sit down. I feel like everything is closing in around me, like the time Robert locked me in a closet and I panicked, nearly breaking the door down before he let me out. I place my head between my legs, breath slowly, curse myself for wasting a good kill. When I stand up, I see that the buck is still there, just browsing as though nothing’s happened. I shoulder my rifle, steady my hands till the buck comes into my sights and stays put. I reach out as far as I can until my finger finds the trigger.

Ten minutes later, I’m still watching the buck. I raise and lower my rifle. Raise it. Lower it. The third time I do this, I hear a shot. I look around but don’t see anyone. I turn back toward the buck. He’s still there, browsing. If he fears a predator in the wild, it is someone other than me. Just then, I hear three successive shots fired a ways off. I know it is Pop, signaling for me to get my ass back to camp. I know he’ll be mad as hell, give me a lecture, tell me how I screwed up big time, and put our survival at risk. He’ll be right. When I turn back the buck is gone, off into the thicket of trees and out of sight.

Absorbed in thoughts of self-loathing for not being able to pull the trigger, I don’t pay attention to my path and get lost while hiking back to camp. Somehow I’ve walked in circles for like two hours. Nothing looks familiar. Pop says that if we get lost, stay put. I don’t want to stay put. I feel like I should keep moving or I’ll never get back. I don’t want to be out here anymore.  Not lost in the wilderness, not out here trying to survive, not eating squirrel meat and weeds. I want to be home and warm.

 When I am afraid, I sleep. So that’s what I do. I walk to the base of an oak tree, curl up, go to sleep gripping my rifle. My hope is that I can sleep away the time while the others look for me, and when I wake up, everything will be okay. Sure, Pop will be mad, but then he’ll tell me how relieved he is, how frightened he was when he discovered I was lost and alone out here.

Pop wakes me without a word. Robert is with him. He looks at me with disgust. Pop doesn’t say a word beyond “get up, let’s go.” We hike back to camp in a whimper.

home movies 2

The shooting begins. Bodies succumb to their wounds, fall and then quietly lift themselves back to life. We are like Terminator Boys, whose wounds heal themselves. Our deaths, transient — we grasp chests, necks, stomachs, we die —then we get back up and start shooting again. My brother, Boz, takes a bullet in the gut and crumbles like a sack. He mouths, “You got me!” Incredulous. How has it come to this?  He lies still, no sound.  We watch him. It is eerily quiet — not even a projector’ s whir. Our expelled breaths the only soundtrack.[14]

mudhens[15]

We hike across meadows and through lava-crested hills until we reach Blue Lake. We stand on the marshy shores and unpack the fishing gear. Another problem with surviving here has been all the rain. Rains have left the streams muddied, and the water rushes thick, like rivers of creamed blood. Bad for fishing, worse for drinking. From the shore, some of the boys cast lines out anyway. Greg Roberts and I collect cattails, apparently edible.

My uncle takes a few shots at some geese flying overhead, but they are well out of range and he knows it. Desperate, he and my father start shooting mud hens. These birds mostly just sit out in the water, like black decoys. Occasionally they will dive below the surface. When one is shot, the flock-mates (if that’s what they are called), rather than flying off, dive to the bottom only to resurface half a minute later to be shot themselves. They are like those ducks in an arcade shooting-gallery. In the end, Uncle Rich and Pop kill seven, but without a dog we have no way to retrieve them. Not wanting to get soaked, Pop has us throw rocks out beyond the floating birds until they bob to shore.

robert

I remember the preparations for the trip. That guy, Euell Gibbons, was a big thing and Pop had that book — How to Eat Wild Dandelions or something like that. He was always into that stuff anyway, trying to survive off the land and all that. When I was packing, well, I knew I was going to starve to death. He actually went through our backpacks to make sure we didn’t sneak in any food, but I snuck a bunch of Cup-of-Soups in my mess-kit. That one night—I think it was like the sixth night there — he came to me and asked me for my mess-kit. He knew that I had snuck it in. I figured you had told him cause you were so gung-ho and all, his little big man.  But then he took it and put it into the stew with those ducks he shot and the food Uncle Rich snuck. I mean, at that point, he knew he needed to feed us something. The kids were really starting to complain a lot. Some were pretty sick.  Tom Roberts had passed out some candy to the kids that afternoon that his wife had sewed into the lining of his jacket. Thank God for that food we snuck. That’s all I can say.

We all had our fishing poles, but the river was a mess if you remember. We couldn’t fish, so we had nothing. It looked like the Muddy Mississippi. That’s what everyone kept saying.  We had no food. The first night we ate those squirrels. Well some of us did. A few of the kids wouldn’t touch ‘em. After that, we had those fucking dandelions and that sour duck he shot, but that was a total disaster.

So, that last night, he put the ducks and potatoes and my Cup-of-Soups in that big pressure cooker (you remember that one he always used?) right on the open fire, to make a stew out of it. We were all just starving at that point. We joked about how we were going to cut up our boots and cook the leather to eat. So that duck and soup was smelling real good. And then the pressure cooker started whistling, like a teapot, so we knew it had to be close.  We all had our bowls held out just waiting.

Then it blew up! Everything. Sky high. Blew the lid clean off the pot. The relief valve was bad or something, so there went our precious stew flying into the trees. I don’t think it was going to go far enough around to begin with, but when that happened, I remember everyone holding there bowls out trying to catch whatever dripped down from the limbs. It was pretty pathetic. Some of the kids just laughed, but it wasn’t really the funny kind of laugh. I sure didn’t think it was funny. There was still some left in the pot, some scraps of meat and broth, but I was fed up. I just threw my bowl down and went to bed.

It was a miserable night. It rained so hard. The men went to the big tent to drink and sleep, but we had those one-man pup tents that you couldn’t quite fit into. We pretty much slept in standing water. I actually slept pretty good because I think Steve and I had gotten new sleeping bags, so we were dry and warm compared to some of you guys. You must have been pretty miserable.

father, hunger

From inside their tent, the men laugh about it, but they have their wine to warm their bellies. I have nothing, just an empty bowl and a wet bed to turn to. I stand next to the dying embers of the fire, looking up into the trees, where scraps of meat and broth still hang from wet limbs. A pathetic survivor, I hold my bowl upward imagining some scrap of meat or bone will fall down to fill me up. The voices of the men lift into the darkness in a drone, like one long laugh-track. I think of those Boy Scouts Pop scoffs about, and wonder what they’re eating on this night, if they’re roasting hotdogs or marshmallows, if they’re all together—scouts and leaders, boys and their fathers—singing camp-songs around the fire. Wherever they are, I imagine their bellies are warm, their bowls filled to the brim.

leaving the wilderness

The following morning Pop tells us we are breaking camp and heading out. I act like I’m really upset about it, but no one buys it. They know I’m as miserable as everyone else. Even though I feel guilty, like my getting lost is the reason we have to quit, I want it to be over like everyone else. Well, everyone but Pop.

We hike out and reach the bus at about noon. It’s still raining hard. Everything is caked with red lava mud — our shoes weigh a ton, and our pant legs and jackets are soaked and covered with streaks of mud where we’ve slid face down under strands of barbed wire or fallen during the hike back. Our packs, tents and sleeping bags are like everything else about us — heavy.

We climb in the van and over each other and fall in a messy heap wherever we can.  Our biggest worry now is that our confiscated food will be ruined. “If it is soaked,” Greg Roberts said, “I’m going break into the first store we get to and steal every bag of chips in the place. I’ll stuff my pockets and run.” Everyone adds their own story of desperation, the lengths to which they’ll go to steal and gorge on food. My uncle yells, “Take it easy boys. Tonight we’re going to eat steak dinner. We’ll eat like kings.” Pop starts the van and jambs it into gear. At last we are leaving the wilderness.

            Within a half a mile, however, the trouble starts. The road, caked with the same thick red mud that clings to us, is like a sheet of ice. We lose traction on the first hill we attempt. Less than halfway up, we stall.

Every groaned.

Pop attempts to rock it back and forth, and to regain momentum, but it’s no use. We are stuck.  “Bail out everyone. We need to push!” he yells.

“I can’t believe this,” my brother said. “It’s like survival takes forever.”

It takes nearly an hour, but eventually we get unstuck. When we reach the paved road it’s nearly dark. From there, we drive until we come to a little gas station where we all jump out and buy loads of candy and chips and soda. We stuff our faces, so by the time we get to a restaurant, most of the kids are nauseous. Our stomachs are shocked by the food, the rush of salt and sugar.  After that, we drive up to this reservoir near Truckee and camp a few miles from the highway. By now, we have stores of food. We have big Styrofoam coolers iced down and filled with eggs and bacon and beer and soda. We eat greasy fried breakfasts, fat cheeseburgers and baked potatoes for dinner.

Home

When we get home a few days later, the moms have this grand feast waiting for us. They expect us to be these walking skeletons. We are far from starving by that point. We sit at the table and stare at the kind of spread we’d all fantasized about just a few days before: pot roast, broiled pork chops, chicken and dumplings, real mashed potatoes and gravy, artichoke casseroles. There are a lot of leftovers that night — more than enough to survive two weeks in the wilderness.

[2] Dave Simonett, Trampled by Turtles, “When I Come Back Again,” Songs from a Ghost Town.

[3] It is.

[4] Not sure if it was the boy or the burger that saddened me.

[5] The first time my brother fires the weapon, the recoil leaves a dark bruise on his shoulder and a half-moon scar on the bridge of his nose where the scope whacked him. Truth is, most of his memories of shooting/hunting with my father are troubling. At ten, he witnessed a friend of Pop’s accidently shoot and kill his (the friend’s) Brittany Spaniel while hunting pheasant. The following year, also while pheasant hunting, a shotgun blast fired too close to my brother’s head left him with a deafening ring. The incessant noise lasted for months.  Years later, he claims to at times still hear it and to suffer from a 70% hearing loss.

[6]Don’t really want to engage in the whole Truth-in-Memoir debate here, but I’m pretty sure that my brothers and I knew nothing then of black-market arms dealers. We’d learn about that soon enough. At the time, Robert probably responded with a roll of his eyes, which I likely interpreted to mean, “holy smokes!” I was the youngest and Pop’s staunchest follower, not yet capable of my brother’s cynicism.  

[7] I only recently found out that Pop served in the Canadian Air Force, rather than the U.S. Air Force as we had believed for like 40 years.

[8] Our planned route was the same as the one blazed by racers in the Baja 1000, the famous 1000-mile off-road race.  Due to difficulties (car repairs, illnesses/injuries, loss of direction, etc.) we were often forced back on to paved roads.  Although, nothing in 1974, mid-peninsular Baja could really be called paved.

[9] While on a four-wheel drive expedition through the Rubicon in Desolation Valley, my father used the belt from his pants to secure a broken leaf spring. Later, on the same trip, he removed the engine hood, so my uncle could sit on the front fender and manually work the carburetor’s linkage (essentially, work the gas) after breaking the throttle cable. We traveled over 60 miles off road in this fashion. There are more—too many—similar episodes I could relate.

[10] We later find out Pop brings powdered milk instant rice, “Just for flavor.” The men also had liquor, wine and at least two cartons of  Marlboros.

[11] A year earlier, Pop killed a big buck while hunting in Modoc. While field-dressing it, he removed the liver and held it in his cupped hands as though it were a rare stone, then handed it to me as an offering. “That’s what we’ll be eating tonight,” he told me. I gulped.

 [12] Captain Jack, along with 55 Modoc warriors, held off 500 U.S. army soldiers, fortressing themselves in the famous lava tubes that blanket the plains. It took a siege of over 1000 soldiers to force the Modocs, weakened by starvation, to surrender. Captain Jack was later tried and sentenced to death by the US Government for the murder of General Canby. He was hanged on October 3 rd 1873. His head was later shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution where it remained until 1984 when decedents of Captain Jack removed it from the desk of an unnamed scientist who was using the skull as a paperweight.

[13] Pop’s legal first name.  My Uncle rich is the only one who ever calls him this. To everyone else he’s “Lee,” his middle name.

[14] Robert has all the old Super 8 movies of our trips transferred to videotape in 1999.

[15] Also known as coots, mud hens are mostly black (thus their name) birds that inhabit swamps and marshes. They have short wings, long legs, and big feet which make them poor flyers and easy targets. They are not generally eaten — on a culinary par with the squirrel.

___________________________________

Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Mark Montgomery now lives in Central New York , where he teaches in the English Department at Cayuga Community College.  He has a Ph.D. in English from SUNY-Binghamton.  This work is part of his forthcoming memoir, which explores the complex relationships between fathers and sons, particularly the challenges faced when dealing with his son, who has Tourette’s syndrome.

What Would Rachel Do?

I wonder how Rachel Carson would look in lycra.

These are the kinds of thoughts I have when out on a ride in the north Pennsylvania hills where I live and teach. Usually, such thoughts occur near the top of a tough climb, when the oxygen goes to my legs instead of my brain.

Today, I’m heading west on Cherry Flats Road, mashing the pedals of my steel and carbon fiber road bike up a steep grade, sucking wind, and marveling at the lime green leaves emerging from the hardwoods scattered on the north-central Pennsylvania hills. It’s been a long winter, and I’m enjoying riding my bike without multiple layers and freezing digits. After the climb, my breathing slows and I’m settling into a moderate pace when my gaze is jerked upward by splash of black against the sky. I see a raptor—an osprey, I think—winging toward me about 70’ above a small pond. I watch, transfixed, as the bird wheels 180 degrees, rises slightly, and plunges toward the water. As the osprey dives, I hear myself saying “oh, oh, oh,” then “boom!” when the bird hits the water. I realize that my hands are above my head, as if I have just won a stage of the Tour de France, while the raptor rises out of the water and wings south. I turn my head to follow its path and see water streaming off its wings. Too surprised to think about stopping, I face forward again and find that I’ve veered toward the yellow lines. No big deal. No cars anywhere nearby. Grabbing the bars, I steer toward the edge of the road as I replay what I saw in my mind. The glance, the focus, the turn, the plunge—I was shocked and awed, though probably not as much as the fish that nearly got nicked.

I’m fortunate that I live and work in this part of Pennsylvania. Though I don’t see ospreys fishing on every bike ride, I see animals and birds in greater numbers than I’ve seen elsewhere. I see deer, beavers, groundhogs, bobcats, turkeys, hawks, bald eagles, barn swallows, cedar waxwings, red-winged blackbirds, bobolinks, and killdeer. One recent ride, I saw the youngest fawn I had ever seen trot across the road in front of me. I’m always wowed by these encounters, and they have become a welcome aspect of my rides, in part because they remind me that there’s so much life out there.

I also ride my bike because it gives me space to think about teaching. I teach composition and environmental literature at Mansfield University, a small public university a few miles north of where I saw the osprey. And one of the things I ponder most as I ride are ways of capitalizing on this “wow” factor in my class on environmental literature (comp, too, to a lesser extent). For environmental literature, I assign Thoreau, Susan Fennimore Cooper, Leopold, Beston, Carson, Abbey, Hogan, Gessner—the usual suspects (well, except maybe for Gessner, but I’ve got a weak spot for essays about pissing outside). There are always a few of my students, usually from the sciences or English, who devour the texts and write essays that reflect awe and understanding when looking at nature. They get the “wow” factor—in the texts and outside of them—and it changes the way they think. These students get the idea that we need to care for the places where we live, and we need to do it now. But there are many more that don’t appear to care, and those are the ones that I carry with me most on my rides. It’s not that they don’t think there are problems with our treatment of and attitudes toward the environment. They do. And it’s not from a lack of contact with nature. Tioga County is rural. Local schools close on the opening day of deer season, farms dot the hillsides and valleys, and bears wander through campus during exam week. Many students eat off the farm. Many are intimate with land and animals in ways I never have been. But they don’t seem overly concerned about environmental problems. They just want to become better writers—at least, that’s what they say in my class anyway—and they want a degree and a job.

  Enroll these students in a small university working to distinguish itself as Pennsylvania’s public liberal arts school, and the pedagogical issues get interesting. How does an English professor teach these students the value of a liberal education and the need to think critically and draw on multiple disciplines to solve problems like global warming? As I mull that question, the first thought that comes to mind is: I don’t. That’s a huge burden to put on one class, and the best I can do is help students find their own way into this perspective. These are students who, like me, didn’t grow up questioning authority as much as acquiescing to it, taking the written or spoken word at face value. A liberal education, however, asks students to look for ways to ask hard questions of one’s self and the public, and it insists that we discuss environmental concerns and the need for public action. But this is a difficult thing to do when you’re worried about passing your classes and making it to your job on time. My students want good jobs close to home, and they want to start families. The environment can take care of itself. So, I’m always wondering about ways to get them to buy into the idea that education is about more than getting a job, more than going through the motions and walking across the stage. I spend a lot of time on my bike thinking about this issue, and I have two main questions. One: How do I get students who grow up in families that are not predisposed toward liberal education (or any education, really) to understand the all-encompassing importance of it? Two: How can I stop being so damn serious about it? If I were one of those students and I heard me babbling about the importance of liberal education, caring for self by caring for the public, blah, blah, I’d run straight toward the nearest bar.

  “Damn straight,” a voice blurts behind me, and I turn to see David Gessner pedaling up beside me on an old Cannondale while Rachel Carson slides her Raleigh into our draft.  

“Do you always talk to yourself when you ride?” he pants.

Gessner wears a beer jersey and baggy shorts, his hair unruly in the wind. Sweat drips off his nose. Carson wears a wool jersey and shorts and a slight smile. In contrast to Gessner’s, her hair ripples calmly.

“Now, David, don’t get into one of your moods.” Carson says. “Don’t you want to help this young man answer his questions?”

We ride by the spring where I often stop for water. Maybe that climb was steeper than I thought. The road rises slightly and my breathing deepens. So does Gessner’s. Tucked in behind us, Carson appears to be riding effortlessly. It doesn’t hurt that she probably weighs thirty or forty pounds less. But I’m willing to trade a draft for some answers.

The road levels and Carson pulls between us. Gessner and I catch our breath.

“OK,” I ask, “what do y’all think?”

“About what?” Gessner replies. Carson begins to speak, but Gessner continues. “Being earnest is a buzz kill. Relax. Have fun. Beware serious conferences, serious people, and serious talks about nature.”

“But I enjoy those serious conferences and serious people and serious talks about nature,” I reply, while Carson nods in agreement. “I can’t help but be serious when I think about the way that my university sells itself as this public liberal arts school when the students who come here have no idea what the liberal arts are all about. They grow up in families like mine—working class, little understanding of the way colleges work. They sense education is important—at least, some do—but they have no idea what it means to make education and learning a part of every single facet of your life.” Gessner starts to speak, but I raise my hand. “I know, I know, that sounded serious. Earnest even. Ugh.” I look up the road, a bit frustrated because I can’t even articulate clearly what I’m trying to say.

“There’s you answer,” Carson offers and points to the white back of a bobolink zooming low over a field. We all look, freewheels ticking, as the R2D2-like bloops and burbles cascade over our eardrums. The bird swoops left in a low arc and settles on a stalk of hay. It’s one of those “wow” moments.

“But that’s so cliché,” Gessner responds. “Cool, but cliché.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “I love seeing those things myself, but I’m not sure that showing my students bobolinks will in any way help them grasp what I want them to. Nor do I think it will help my administration understand just what we are trying to do. Jesus, I sound gloomy. Maybe even whiny.”

“Definitely whiny,” Gessner says.

“Definitely whiny,” I say back.

“You know when I wrote Silent Spring,” Carson begins, “I wasn’t really looking to create that kind of hoopla, but I felt the story had to get out. I had suspected that pesticides were a problem and followed the research, and eventually our carelessness and ignorance just got to be too much. We were not using pesticides well, and those actions masked a deeper problem concerning the way humans viewed the world. That bothered me and motivated me. But there was another motivation, one that might help you here.”

“What’s that?”

Carson looks at me, then away, in time to flick her bike around a chipmunk carcass. She says: “The sense of wonder. The ‘wow’ moment, one might say. I wrote about this, too, a long time ago. I believed then, and still do, that it’s best to enable students, kids, anyone to feel nature, to experience it on a visceral level. That’s probably more important than knowing whether you’ve seen a bobolink or a robin. So the question of how to teach one’s students to appreciate the wow moment is answered in part by getting them outside. And the potential for change there is much greater.”

“Change, smange,” Gessner grumbles. “We’re writers and Jimmy here is a teacher. We don’t have that much of an impact on how kids view nature. We’d have more effect swinging these bicycles at them than showing them bobolinks.”

“I’m not swinging my bike at anybody,” I say. “I don’t want to hurt it.”

“David,” Carson says, “ask yourself how many times someone has taken students outside and given them permission to look and time to do it. You won’t reach everyone. I surely didn’t. But some will enjoy it. They will rekindle an emotional attachment already present or they may being to develop one. The key is to help them feel their connection in the pit of their stomach.”

“This is all well and good, Rachel—it’s ok if I call you Rachel, isn’t it? This is my bike ride and my essay, after all. Anyway, I’m picking up what you are putting down, and I’m liking the way this conversation is justifying the way I teach my environmental lit class by focusing on the different perspectives of nature as presented by the writers. Oddly enough, you and Gessner provoke the most reactions in class. Students get fired up when reading Silent Spring, and I once spent a large portion of class listening to my students wax eloquently about the pleasures of pissing and shitting in the woods after reading ‘Marking My Territory.’ But, and this is a big but, I’m not sure that’s enough. Are you saying I should take my students outside? They’ll love that, I’ll get the rep as the easy prof on campus—you know, we look at trees, that kind of thing—and I’m afraid my students won’t learn anything about the importance of educating themselves. Because, with all due respect, they need knowledge to go along with those feelings. I’d argue that many of my students come from families who make many decisions based on feelings and little knowledge. Pardon me, but that’s fucked. That’s the same kind of mentality you ran up against when Silent Spring was released. I mean, that book is not about the ‘wow.’ It’s about the need for education. Because of that book, I hold you up as the prime example of what a liberal arts education put into action can do.”

We drift downhill toward the town of Cherry Flats, moving single file to let a rattly Ford pickup pass. Gessner and Carson resume their spots beside me. I take a swig from my water bottle and notice that Gessner and Carson don’t have any. Weird.

Carson’s voice breaks through the hum of our tires: “Do you believe what you are doing is important and that your perspective matters?”

I nod.

“Then why the doubt?” The question hangs in the air. I glance at Gessner, hoping for a comment about how things are getting too serious. No such luck. He looks out over the field to our left and fidgets on his saddle like his ass hurts. Pansy, I think. We’ve only ridden about three miles together. I know I’m stalling, knowing that I don’t have a good answer, and knowing that I’m a better doubter than cyclist.

“That’s a good question that I can’t fully answer. I feel it often, even after a good class. I think part of it stems from the fact that I’m not even convinced that my students need to be bothered with tales of terror about the environment. They need jobs. People have been hammered in this part of the country. Hell, I’m part of the economic elite, and I’m an English prof, for God’s sake. How are my students supposed to care for the environment if they can’t keep a roof over their heads? Part of it stems from the fact that I never feel like I’m doing enough, either professionally or personally. I give talks on campus about caring for the environment and make students laugh—I can be funny, David. A lot of students show up, too—more than faculty—which is cool. I push our administration to make changes to the campus that would show us taking responsibility for our impact on the environment. Let’s see, ummm, that’s about it.”

“So, you’re doing what you can do,” Carson says. “That’s a start. I don’t have much to offer, except that you need to live your convictions and continue doing what you are doing. It’s fine not to be yukking it up all the time. Just be sure it’s not gloom and doubt making you serious, but hope and purpose. Oh, and be sure to relish your “wow” moments. They will keep you charged up for facing a room full of students who are perhaps not as passionate about this world as you are. David, would you like to add anything?”

Gessner squints thoughtfully. “Yeah, I’ve got to piss.”

Carson slows and I ride on, figuring the pair will catch me before I turn onto Arnot Road. They don’t though. Maybe Gessner blew a tire. I think about turning around in case he needs my pump. But if he isn’t smart enough to bring water, then why should I baby him?  

James Guignard is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Composition at Mansfield University, where he teaches composition, advanced and professional writing, composition theory, and environmental literature. He is the co-editor of Literature, Writing, and the Natural World (Cambridge, 2009), and has published essays in Liberal Education, Elsewhere: A Journal for the Literature of Place, and Virginia English Bulletin.  Currently, he is researching the rhetoric of the natural gas industry in northcentral Pennsylvania.

Excerpts from the Memoir
of Jose Antonio Rodriguez 

Burning Garbage

Cada quince días, says Amá when I ask her how often we burn our garbage.  The cloud rises and covers some of the cacti in soot.  But the cacti are very hardy and they never burn.  They keep swaying slowly even in smoke.  Clorox bottles take the longest to burn and it’s dangerous to get the burning plastic on your skin because it becomes gooey and it sticks and you won’t be able to take it off and it’ll burn like nothing you’ve ever felt before.  But the leftovers of our burning aren’t interesting; we already know what was in there.

The neighbor’s, though, that’s fun.  They live in a pretty yellow house with potted plants in front, flowering plants at that, and toys strewn in the front yard, like the kids don’t even like them that much.  Sometimes I wonder if they’ve completely forgotten them, if the toys have become unwanted, unclaimed.  But Amá says you can’t just go around picking up someone else’s things.  The garbage they burn, though, that’s clearly unwanted stuff.  So when the fire is done, my sister Morayma and I go and sift through the ashes, look for things we can save.  Sometimes there’s nothing but the remains of Clorox bottles or half burnt cardboard boxes.  If the boxes were whole you could use them to fan yourself or to fold into something, but because they’re made of the same thing as paper, the fire eats them up before anything else.  And we come and ask Amá to rinse our feet that are the color of a cloudy sky.  And she gets angry sometimes, but just a little.

 Today though Morayma finds a coffee cup and I find a toy car wheel and a wooden block with a letter on it and those things we save, bring inside.  Morayma feels the smooth surface of painted clay, beige with little orange flowers that would form a circle if the cup was complete, and I spin the one tire from the wire axle like a top.  Then I place the tire on the ground and imagine the entire car.  It would be a truck actually, one of those yellow ones and the truck would be so complete, so like the real thing, that I would never get bored running it along the ground or just holding it.  I could place the wooden block with its perfect sides on the box.  It could even hold Morayma’s cup.

 When we’re done, we place the things in a corner.  Amá says we’re just collecting junk but she doesn’t throw it away.

 At the end of the day with the sky almost orange again, little black flakes start to fall from the sky, like singed leaves of grass, black and light as a baby chick’s feathers.  They feel like paper, like the paper of the big dolls hanging from shops in the city.  The frills in all sorts of bright colors adorn the large dolls everywhere and beautiful because the paper is thin and the light shines through.  Amá says the dolls are called piñatas but when I ask her what they are for, she keeps quiet.  Yes, this is what they look like but black.

¿Qué es?

Caña, alguien está quemando caña, says Amá.

Somewhere far away someone is doing something, burning sugarcane, and something other than smoke has risen to the sky.  It has traveled from far away because fire leaves only the light part of things.  The heavy part disappears.  The little flakes are falling over me and it makes the evening magical.  Now I know why we can burn garbage in the back of our house, why the neighbors can do it, and never run out of space, because the wind takes away the ashes, carries them and lets them fall far away.

Beans

After a long time of running around chasing after lizards I get a headache and go sit by Amá who’s kneeling outside in the shade by the house.

Te va a salir sangre de la nariz, she warns.

I stare at the pot of beans because it seems it should fall, tip over, as it sits all shaky on the grill that looks really similar to the corner of the box spring of a bed.  The coils are rusted.  They give under the weight of the pot.  Amá keeps adding water to the pot.  Next to the pot is a comal where she lays each tortilla that she makes perfectly circular with the tortillera.

Tengo hambre, I say and she takes a tortilla, adds a pinch of salt, and rolls it up into a perfect little flute for me.

I smell the tortilla first.  I love the aroma, but I’m scared of the fire pit in the ground.  The flames are always kicking up and the heat flashes out from the tips like sheets of hot wind against your cheek.  You have to stay away a little.  Also, the burning wood smokes up and leaves a layer of soot all over your face if you sit there long enough.  Amá always looks a little gray, her eyes watery, unless the day is windy.  If it is windy, having a fire outside is dangerous and so she has to use the stove inside, and that uses gas from a tank.

I wait until the beans are ready and she serves me a few in a plastic cup and I spoon them out and take bites from a tortilla.  And then I run off to chase after lizards, the only animals out in the noonday sun.  All the other animals stay under the shade in the hottest part of the day.  We don’t have any horses or cows but I see them sometimes by the side of the road when I have to go run an errand.  And if it’s very hot, they’re always resting under a tree.  I should learn from that but I don’t.

A little bit later I’m in bed with a nose bleed, pinching my nose to coagulate the blood that just pours out.  Amá is angry because she told me this would happen from running around all day under the sun in the heat and I didn’t listen.  I wonder if all the kids I see from far away under the sun are also bleeding now in their houses.  She says sometimes talking to me is like talking to a dog but who would talk to dog?  That’s just silly.

I can feel the blood running down my throat as I swallow but I don’t taste it.  And I think myself lucky that I don’t have to taste blood.  Then I must have slept because when I get up, the house is noisy with the voices of my brothers and sisters who are back from school or work.  I get up and go to the kitchen.  Amá is ironing, which means I have to be careful around the iron because once, it tripped over and the hot part of it landed on my foot and it hurt worse than a headache.  I was also running then.  She stops for a second, takes a wet rag and wipes my hands which are splotchy with dried blood and my face which I figure must also be splotchy.  I walk outside, play marbles with Juan.  It’s not a lot of fun because we only have a few marbles and so the game is over right away.  The best part is making the little hole in the ground for the marbles to land in because the dirt is cool just a little under the surface and it feels good on the fingertips.  Lizards skitter by but I don’t chase after them. 

Vengan a cenar, we hear.

There’s only like three chairs in the kitchen so most everybody stands.  She places a plate of beans before me, refried and the hint of lard grease makes my mouth water.  I take a piece of tortilla and scoop up a mouthful of beans, always careful to stay on one end of the plate because the other end has a hole in it and we shouldn’t be wasting food by letting it squish through the plate.  When I am done, I have another glass of water, then I sit under the door frame that faces the sun that is leaving.  The sky is turning shades of orange and pink and blue.  The weeds and the trees are already ringing with the songs of cicadas and the early chirping of crickets.  A goat is bleating but the sound is soft, like it is hiding behind all the other sounds.  It must be somewhere down the road in some other house.  Maybe it’s tied to a tree or sitting inside a pen.  When goats bleat up close it’s really loud.  I used to think they bleated because they were tied up or trapped in a pen but no, they’re always bleating, even when they’re out grazing on anything they can find.  Even when they are not tied or inside a pen.  Still, it always sounds sad, like they’re crying out for something.  And I wish I could ask them, but they wouldn’t understand me.

I tell Amá I need to go to the bathroom.  I’m scared of the dark so she tells my sister Aleida to go with me.  We go out behind the house, close to the ebony tree.  I pull down my shorts and squat.  Aleida stands a few feet from me.  We say nothing.  When I’m done I grab a corn cob within reach and wipe myself. 

I go back to the door frame.  Just as everything is becoming darkness, somebody nudges my shoulder and leads me to bed.

Chickens are Nosy

 I hate it when the chickens come around because they’re hungry too.  The tank for the stove is out of gas and so my sister Mari cooks potatoes out of a dirt-filled barrel outside.  It’s different to eat outside, exciting.  The kindling is mostly little sticks and torn pages from my older brother’s comic books, pages with so many big-chested women and angry-looking men lying in bed together and kissing but not how relatives kiss us when they come visit.  Amá is not here, she’s on the other side visiting Apá, who’s working hard.  The potatoes are half raw because we’ve run out of kindling or because my sister got tired of stirring.  I don’t know, but I don’t say anything.  I just keep eating.  The chicken’s run out of worms, I guess, and comes around wanting food, sneaking out from under the cactus bush.  Its white feathers look so pretty against the pale gray green of the cactus bush.  They ask with their beady yellow eyes, I know the look.  It remains just a little longer than usual on the thing it wants.  Then it moves on to other things, the look, but the chicken sticks around, walking in circles, pretending, like we’re not going to figure it out.  They walk but never leave, hoping for something to fall from our hands, slip out of our potato tacos.  I don’t think they like potatoes but they’re hoping they might.  The chicken zig-zags.  My brother Juan hits it with a stick, too hard, the chicken wobbles.

¿Juan, qué hiciste? shrieks Mari.

Nada.  No’más quería asustarla.

And it’s true he only wanted to scare it away.  I can tell he feels bad because his head hangs down a little and he eats more slowly.  We’ll have to nurse the chicken back to health or kill it.  And we don’t want to kill it, it’s too young, mostly bones, not enough meat.  That afternoon the chicken is still kind of wobbly, slow.  Mari crushes a mejoral in a spoon and dilutes it in a cup of water.  I wish the mejoral was for me because when Amá gives us one when something hurts, she mixes the crushed mejoral with a little bit of sugar.  It tastes a little mediciny but still kind of like candy.

Mari lifts the chicken from the ground and it doesn’t even flap its wings.  Mari dips its beak in the water.  I hold the cup but it’s not really drinking.  It doesn’t know the water has medicine that will make it better.  I wonder if the mejoral would help it anyway.  It helps me sometimes when I get headaches, like something is pressing against the inside of my head.  Amá says it’s because I’m too much out in the sun like a lizard, that I have to come in and be in the shade once in a while.  And I try to remember this but I always forget.  I think the chicken’s going to die because she hasn’t clucked very much today and she’s got sleepy eyes.  I think we’re gonna have soup, but not a lot.

  At the end of the day the train makes a stop and whistles loudly.  It always hurts my ears but it also means Amá may be coming so I run to the side of the road, wait for her.  The train is the only way in and out of this place where we live if you don’t have a car.  And very few people have a car.  When one of us is very sick and has to go to the doctor in the city, Apá has to find a ride.  Or he used to.  I haven’t seen him in a while.

Amá walks up the pathway with several fat bags.  She stops and hands me a little wind-up monkey playing a drum.  It’s ugly.  And it doesn’t matter that this is the first new toy I’ve ever gotten.  It’s still ugly.  She can tell I don’t like it.  She’s upset like ahh, forget it.  She walks past me, goes inside, lays the packages on the table in the kitchen and sits, slumps on a chair.

She says we’ll be leaving soon, far away to the other side, to a place called the United States.  I don’t know why it is the other side.  I imagine it’s somewhere on the other side of the canal that runs close to the houses around here.  But I’ve seen the other side of that canal and it looks the same as this side, with little houses and little potted plants and swings made of car tires. 

¿Y Apá? I ask.

Bien.

¿Lo vio?

Sí.

¿Dónde?

En el puente.

¿El puente que crusa el canal?

No, otro puente.

¿Cuál?

Uno lejos.

I’ve never seen any bridge other than the one that crosses over the canal.  But Apá is across another bridge, one that is far away.  Far away.

When you stand on the railroad tracks and look down at a wooden plank and then the next one and the next one, it gets so that you can’t count anymore and the planks keep going away from you in a straight line.  Then you just end up looking at the sky because far away it looks like it touches the tracks, the clouds not above anymore, just down there with the tracks.  I wonder if where Apá is he can see the clouds around him, he can touch the sky.

Mapas

I look at the sheets, see the splotches of dried urine, my urine, the edges always threatening to seep further across until they cover the entire surface of the bed.  Zorrillo, Amá calls me like joking but also a little angry or tired.  It’s hard to tell.  She says the sheets are covered in maps.  This means she has to clean the sheets more often, which is more work and she’s always cooking or washing, cooking or washing, cooking or washing.

I run outside because I don’t want to look at those maps anymore.  I’m not sure what maps are, but I seem to make them.  I run to the tall mesquite and climb it.  Then when I get bored of that, I go stare at the flowers of the cactus, one layer of yellow petals, simple flower, like the simple cactus that looks like huge thick leaves growing out of each other.  No trunk, no branches, but still managing to work their way off of the ground into pretty patterns.  Sometimes my sisters take the insides of the flowers and press them to their ears like earrings, but if I do that they get angry.  After that I go to the pig pen where a pig rolls in the mud.  I wish I could roll in the mud but Amá would get very angry cause I’d have dirtied my shorts.

After a while I get tired and go sit indoors.  Sometimes Amá bathes me – I stand on a rock outside and she pours water over me and it feels cool – but not always.  Sometimes she just looks at me, looks down at the dirt caked around my ankles humid from the sweat that trickles down my legs making odd shapes as it works itself over and around the layer of dirt that coats everything, everything that moves and everything that doesn’t.

Más mapas, says Amá and she means my body.

It Happened Again

She said it again, ya no te quiero.  I don’t know how it happened that I forgot that she could stop loving me.  But there it is, she’s said it.  I’ve really ruined everything now.  How could I be so stupid?  How could I forget to behave?  The dirt, the dirt everywhere is hard and oily from all the bare feet.  There is a hole in the ground in the corner of the room and a little snake pokes its head through.  It looks at me, sticks its tongue out and then dips below and disappears.

She comes around this time, bends down to me.  Anda, sí te quiero, she says in a soft voice.  And I am happy again.  But around her face everything seems a little out of place. The walls seem crooked, the sky peeking in through the door is not the right blue.  The chicken walking around stares at me too long, one leg suspended off the ground.  It should be looking at the ground for kernels of corn or rice or worms.  But it keeps looking at me.  Amá took pity on me, sure.  That’s why she said she loved me again.  But I don’t know if she really does anymore.  She confuses me with her threats, her words that change, her face soft one minute and hard the next.  She loves me though.  She loves me.  She loves me.

I run out and there on the ground is a lizard the color of dust.  Its neck expands and contracts.  It is breathing and its glossy eyes see me.  But it does not know where I have been.  It knows nothing, only that it runs and hides.  I tell myself, remember to listen, remember always to listen and obey.  Then I run away, climb the large mesquite tree behind the outhouse.  I hold one to a branch and close my eyes.  The tough bark scratches my thighs, irritates my palms, but right now I am only the swaying branch, like a lizard, green this time.

Refrigerator

One night I was in the house in my usual bed and the next I was here, in this house that must be what a palace looks like.  Amá says some friends crossed us over in the night, me, Morayma, Juan, Aleida and Mirella, that we were sleeping and so don’t remember.  And Apá is here and I can hardly believe it.  He carries me and kisses me and it is like he never left.  I feel bad though that I never got to see the bridge, the one Apá crossed, the one he never crossed back. 

I’d never seen Tía Ninfa before but Amá says she is her sister and so I have to be respectful.  She’s rich.  Her house has so many rooms I can’t count them.  We sleep in what Tía Ninfa calls the garage, which is supposed to be a room for cars.  Why would cars need a room? Why would they even need a roof?  The only concrete floor I’d seen up until now was in one little store on the other side and in the city of Río Bravo.  But here this house has concrete everywhere.  Amá and Apá sleep on a bed, and the rest of us sleep on the floor.  We sleep on sheets of foam with blankets but it’s still hard.  It’s like sleeping right on the concrete, which is way harder than sleeping on dirt.  But it doesn’t matter because it’s only at night and the garage is warmer than the house on the other side.  The coldest part of winter is leaving but it’s still cold outside.

The house has three rooms with beds and little rooms in them called closets.  A separate room for clothes.  Again, why would clothes need a room to themselves?  My tíos’ bedroom has the largest bed I’ve ever seen.  It’s gigantic, so big their bodies could move around all night and never touch.  My boy cousin has his own room too and my two girl cousins share another room.  There’s a large area at the center called a living room and it seems larger than our entire house on the other side.  Next to it is the largest table I’ve ever seen.  It has eight chairs around it.  And I count only five people in Tía Ninfa’s family and I don’t know why they have so many extra chairs.  And there are glass doors that slide open leading into what Tía calls the backyard.  The sliding doors though, I’ve never seen those, not even in Río Bravo.  You can see outside, see the sunlight, but you don’t feel a thing.

The strangest and best thing is that I’m not cold when I’m inside the house.  It smells great too, like perfumed because it smells different than outside and I’ve never been in a house that had a different smell then outside, except maybe for a kitchen or the doctor’s office.  This is where we’re staying now.  This is where, until we find a place to live here on the other side.  That’s what Amá said before she gave me the big speech about not being a pest, not hanging around the kitchen, saying no thank you if I am offered food, not playing with anything that is not mine, not touching anything, not asking for anything.

Why can’t we hang around the kitchen?  Because it’s not our kitchen, she said.  And we need to be nice and behave.  I asked her if I could ask for water.  And she said yes, you can ask for water, and I felt better.  That’s how it was, then she had to leave for something and we all stayed behind.

All the objects in Tía Ninfa’s house sparkle like they belong in a store, like I’m in a store.  A hissing noise comes on and off during the day and I know not to ask what it is.  These things called lamps sit by small tables next to a long chair for several people that has big soft cushions.  It reminds me of the long chairs at the doctor’s office in Río Bravo.  My cousins call it a sofa.  They have a television set in every room.  I don’t know why that is, why they need more than one television set and if the same show can be seen in all televisions.  The kitchen has a faucet with running water, indoor water.  I guess they don’t need a well.  The kitchen also has rows of little doors up high where I can’t reach and down close to the floor where I can but I don’t know what’s behind the doors or why they have so many of them.  It’s beautiful, though, like a little fort.

The refrigerator is huge and it has doors side by side.  I know what that is because I’ve seen something similar in the store on the other side, where they kept Cokes and chilled treats.  It is beautiful, white and tall with smooth rounded corners.  My cousin Criselda opens the thinner door and it is filled with boxes of treats and ice cream.  They’re practically falling out of little white wire baskets, even more treats than in the store on the other side.  And packets of frozen stuff that looks like meat.  She opens a box and pulls out a little plastic wrapped thing.  She asks me if I want one like she’d be happy to give me one, and I’m not sure what it is but I say no, thank you.  Okay, she says, then she open the package and reveals an ice cream popsicle shaped like a round face with big dark brown round ears.  I don’t know why but the face looks familiar.  The face is vanilla and the eyes and smile are chocolate and the ears are covered in a hard chocolate film.  She holds it from a smooth even little stick.  When she bites an ear I see the inside of the ears are chocolate too.  The dark chocolate film crackles between her teeth.  And she’s licking and biting and the popsicle is really thick and it seems like it’s too much ice cream for her.  It begins to melt down her hand, around each knuckle.  I think of telling her that it’s dripping but I don’t because I shouldn’t be staring.  That’s another thing I’m not supposed to do.

When she’s done, she licks the stick clean and the stick was smooth all the way up, rounded at the edges, no sharp corners.  She throws it away in the waste basket and walks away down the hall.  The refrigerator is silent.  No, the refrigerator is humming.  There is a motor of sorts, like the ones that make cars run, and it is keeping everything cold and everything else frozen.  It does not move.  I think of opening the thin door, taking an ice cream popsicle.  But I can’t, she offered and I said no and the offer is gone.  She should have insisted.  I’ve seen grown ups insist to each other.  Maybe if she would have insisted, I would have said yes, not knowing what I was saying yes to and thrilled to discover the surprise.  But Amá said nothing about people insisting and what to do in that situation.  And it doesn’t matter anymore, except that the door is there and it is not locked and not heavy to open.  I can reach the handle because it runs all the way down the edge of the door so grown ups and kids can open it, I guess.  And I am standing before it.  And it hums and on the other side of the door is something soft and sweet and cold.  And I start to pout and I don’t know why I’m pouting because nobody is laughing at me, nobody is making fun of me, nobody is chasing me with stones in their hands.  Still, my lips tighten and stick out and I’m glad nobody is watching me.  I walk outside, out back.  A chain link fence encircles the backyard, and I know not to ask why the house has to be fenced.

José Antonio Rodríguez is a graduate student in the English and Creative Writing program at SUNY- Binghamton and editor of the literary journal Harpur Palate.  He is the recipient of the 2009 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award.  His work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Cream City Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Connecticut Review and elsewhere.

Becoming All Animal

“But she didn’t entirely forget. We are always in both worlds, because they aren’t really two.”

—from The Woman Who Married A Bear by Gary Snyder

            You study the sky, hesitant to have left shelter. Wind pushes clouds over the granite ridgelines like predator and prey, the white ones seemingly chased by darker ones. But for now the sun is warm on your hair. You have time and needs to meet. Something in your bones surges and you feel your feet make the decision to proceed. Your load is winter-ponderous, not the light lift of warm weather, but your back revels in being useful, capable. As you move, your breasts, fuller at this time in your cycle, amplify the sway of your body over land. Your haunches rally as you step up rocks; shoulders, hips, and ankles balance-dance as beneath your feet the granite shifts color, clouds still dashing across blue plains above.

            This is not just another solo backpack trip. I am on a mission, sent by that inner voice that, when I hear it, I cannot disobey. Though the forecasters call for the first winter storm of the season, and though I’m used to the milder climate and terrain of the southern Appalachians, I doggedly stuffed one more warm shirt under the top pouch of my pack this morning, and drove an hour-and-a-half to South Lake Tahoe to get my permit. There is irony in having to gain society’s permission to escape it. The ranger wrote out the parking pass and hunted down change. That’s what I was hunting too, in another fashion, and I was glad the ranger was female when she asked, “How many?”

            “One.”

            “Any dogs?”

            “No.”

            Locking my car, I pause before hefting the pack, always unreasonably heavy when I go alone. If I were a werewolf, or the bear husband of the old stories, this is when the hair would quickly grow in across my cheeks and shoulders, the claws emerge and back hunch. People watching would know then. But here in this parking lot, a family walks by and looks only at my pack and pony-tail. They have no idea the changes going on inside me as I attempt my first shape-shift. As I deliberately become all animal.

   You are away at college and have gotten up the nerve to kayak. Bobbing with what comes, hips starting to react on their own, you follow the experienced paddlers. At the end of the drop the back wave catches your edge and you’re underwater. So slow and dark and cold. And then you’re up, shaking your head like a spaniel. Such a different world beyond the familiar surface — now you know. This is what you came for. To belong somewhere like a frog or heron.  Like the people cheering you who belong on the river — so beautiful and strong and free — so unlike the people you grew up around. Laughing, you peel off wet clothes by the side of the road, not caring who sees. Later, in front of your mirror, you stare at your body, neck twisted, watching your back, flexing both arms at once. There, between your shoulder blades, new ridges. The beginning of wings.

            Of course I know and you know that we are animals. But like the phrase “Boys will be boys,” the fact that we’re animals is treated as something we can’t help, rather than something to be proud of, to cultivate. I don’t remember when it first occurred to me that by inhabiting my animal nature more I might find a way around my fears, which had grown rather than shrunk over the years of traveling, hiking, and backpacking alone. Fears of meeting human males in the wild; of being told, if I made it out of a bad situation, that I should have known better; of believing all the voices out there that say it’s a woman’s fault for going anywhere — but especially into the wilderness — alone. Maybe it was when I read about grizzly sows having to avoid and ward off attacks from the large males. They can’t hide away all the time and they don’t look for an even larger male to protect them. They adapt. They use their senses to discover if a male is around. If so, the sow tries not to feed in the prime areas when the male is likely to feed. But if she or her cub is charged and the sow must fight, she fights tremendously. And who of us would suggest if she fails and is killed, or her cub is killed, that she asked for it?

            At the trailhead I check the map for distances. A man with a toddler is ahead of me.

            “How far you going in?” he asks.

            “Don’t know yet.” I evade the question. Though my instincts say he is harmless, I won’t give my destination. Smiling, I leave them behind. My goal this trip is not to act as a female grizzly would, or any particular animal, though I often think about what I know of animal behavior. I want to become my own animal. To do this I must shut off the cultural white noise and remember what it is to think with my body. My cerebral cortex has been thoroughly colonized, but my haunches are still pretty pre-cultural. My hands and feet are quick to solve problems when I trust them to.

            I approach two middle-aged women at the top of a long stair-like climb. They’ve been resting and watching my small steps and deliberate foot placements.

            “How much does that pack weigh?” one asks in fatigued awe.

            “I have no idea,” I say with a breathless laugh. “Never weigh your pack. You want to believe it’s lighter than it is when you start out, and to brag it was heavier than it was when you get home.”

            This attitude is more self-preservation than suicidal tendency or ego. If the pack is too heavy, my back will tell me (I try it on at home). But put a number to it and my brain will convince my body it’s too heavy regardless. Or worse, if I’m having a bad day, I don’t want to know the pack is plenty light and should be no problem. Animals don’t weigh loads, and I know that when I’m out on my own my body amazes me. What seems heavy in the driveway seems infinitely doable on the leaf-strewn trail.

            You are thirteen, swinging down from the cherry tree by your window. It is quiet except for the sounds of cars nearby and your mother’s voice in your ear: not after dark . . . never alone. . . don’t you read the papers?  No one understands your restlessness. The suburbs suck. Your brothers get to go where they want, even at night. You get to go to your room. Because there’s nothing else to do you walk the black edge of the road, with each step daydreaming of woods, dogs that come every time you call, and strong, kind boys. A half moon winks through the trees. Then someone whistles. “Hey baby, you don’t have to walk.” You remember where you are. Stuck. The car doesn’t stop. What if I want to walk, you think. What then?

            Like many female adventurers, I’ve had to learn the hard way and I break society’s rules. I’ve struggled free from some of the traps western culture has set out to extirpate my instincts, and I feel lucky not to have lost a limb so far. Although a mouthy child, always be polite, was firmly ingrained by the time I became an adult. Attached to that was don’t make a scene. Following these rules makes it almost impossible for the civilized female to prevent a threatening encounter with a male, so caught up is she in giving him the benefit of the doubt until he has his hands on her, is forcing her into the car or on the ground.

            I laugh at the centuries-old message that civilization is created for and maintained by women. Civilization — that place with walls where humans deceive themselves about the extent of their control and buy into the myth of security. The only place, we’re told, where women can be safe. I am not less safe in the wild. Statistics show I’m at greater risk of attack in my house or on a city street, where unethical men may prowl the night, than I am miles away from a trailhead or parking lot. I don’t trust what civilization and culture tell me anymore. I trust my gut. Out alone, I look everyone in the eye once and then avert my gaze (but never, ever look down). I turn to face anyone coming up the trail from behind. I can look ornery and unapproachable in seconds. I don’t wear the shroud of fear and vulnerability I’m told is attractive, is feminine. I bare my aggression, like teeth. If a man does not understand how to respect my privacy — a kind of territory — then he deserves whatever growls he’s given.

            Two young women day-hiking ahead. One steps aside and as I pass, whispers: courageous.

            It breaks my heart.

             Someone rounds the turn below you. Something about his size, or that he’s alone, or the way he cocks his head sends a tremor up your back. There is a large boulder and you slip behind it. What about this person makes your ruff go up, makes you not even want to sniff out his intentions? It doesn’t matter. There are no walls here and disappearing is not hard. As he reaches the boulder and moves past, you’re crouched, ready to pretend you were peeing if he looks. He doesn’t look. Why would he? No one expects you to be here. A little amazed, you watch him march uphill, oblivious. A wren perched without moving in the bushes nearby meets your gaze.

            Men are animals. This is what I’ve been told countless times before driving cross-country or going camping by myself. Most often it’s male friends who have drummed this into my skull. I understand them to mean that men are driven by their dicks which pulse with instinct, not reason. They mean that men can act badly. Well, women are animals too — treated like such is the way many feel. And animals are animals. I leave civilization to be with animals and to be an animal, and surely I can allow men inside this definition in the same, less derogatory way I’m including myself. Most animals, especially the best killers, the blood-thirstiest, have ingrained inhibitions — both social and genetic — that keep deadly conflicts among members of a species to a minimum. Especially prevalent are the inhibitions males of these species (most birds and mammals) have that keep them from physically attacking a female. It seems our culture evolved too fast; our hereditary inhibitions couldn’t keep up.

            Or maybe the messages given females are social inhibitions devised by patriarchal culture rather than biological evolution. The messages: “You’re putting yourself in danger!” — as if women should never take risks or don’t want to; “You’re asking for it!”— the ”it” presumably the same as in “doing it”; and “Take someone with you!”— an especially problematic message for single women since more than 80% of sexual crimes are committed by someone we know.

            Women are domesticated through fear. We’re taught that we need — no, deserve —protection. A privilege that we enjoy like poodles who’re primped, dressed in bows, and carried around. I don’t want to be a decoration or a pet who waits for her husband to come home. My husband and I do things together — climb, hike, kayak, bike, read, debate. But we also do things separately. And when I go into the woods alone he has to defend both my decision and his to others (not to stay, but presumably to have let me go).

            Even in other primates, possibly the most social of animals, members take time by themselves. For some people, being alone in a crowded city street or bar is enough, or having the whole house to oneself. I need the woods, mountains, and rivers which remind me dirt and sweat aren’t undesirable, that I have muscles for a purpose. I need places without mirrors. In all their good intentions, people who’ve tried to keep me safe have helped keep me from discovering myself and exploring my creativity, my body, and the land. A room of one’s own? Yes, but an isolated canyon, peak, or valley occasionally is just as necessary. Let me go, I begged my mother. Let me go, I begged the voices in my head. I never would’ve married a man I had to beg this way.

            When you reach the lake it’s still sunny. You hurry, hoping to get in a quick dip while the sun is full-force. After scouting out a place in the steep granite walls that will let you camp above, unseen from the banks, you reclaim your pack and huff it up manzanita and scree to the flat. The wind, as if it’d been waiting, surges as you pitch the tent. You check from below to make sure it’s hidden. Once it’s weighted down with rocks in each corner and over the stakes, you explore the shoreline. All the hikers have left. Each time the sun’s consumed by a cloud you wonder, Is this it? Kingfishers rattle. You strain to hear the sounds of conversation carried a long way, relax when you determine it’s the wind-thrown water hitting logs and rocks. As a stellar jay cries and heads for the lone Jeffrey Pine, you settle in to listen to the voices.

            Even with everyone gone, I have to concentrate on the sounds around me, make them familiar, before I can completely relax. The animals that live here know these sounds, but I’m new to this habitat. I’m used to rustling leaves and eastern rivers, not the irregular slapping of lake water on a rugged shore. Sun heats my face and I begin to strip, hoping it will hang around long enough for me to run into the cold, clear water. Then a cloud shoulders the warmth aside and, reluctantly, I pull my shirts back on. Am I being wise or wimpy, I wonder. Skinny dipping is an obsession of mine, even when it’s too cold to really swim. Immersing myself in natural waters is a conscious reminder that I don’t have control over things like temperature, depth, or what’s on the bottom. It’s a reverse-baptism, one that celebrates my body and mortality by baring myself to this beautiful, relentless creation. Two mallards come right up to where I’m filtering water, and I enviously lose myself in their antics and the iridescent blue, green and purple feathers up close. As they paddle away I screw the lid on my bottle.

            “Is that water potable?” I spin. The man has stopped a respectful distance away.

            “No, that’s why I have a filter,” I fumble. I didn’t hear him. I hadn’t heard him.

At first this is all I can think, but as a woman catches up with him I realize this time it’s okay. Maybe animals stalked from downwind feel this way when they finally get a sniff of a too-close stranger.

            “Sorry if I startled you. I didn’t expect to see anyone out here,” he’s saying. “You know there’s a winter storm watch. . .”

            I nod. I’ve categorized him as one of my kind — pleasant outdoor enthusiast who appreciates solitude. “The weather report called for snow down to 7,000 ft. That’s why I didn’t go any further in.”

            “5,500 is what I heard.”

            We all look toward the lake, imagine snow covering the shore, pines, and granite ledges. The hush of the next morning.

            After they leave I feel truly alone. It’s wonderful. The wind has picked up and I’ve started the stove even though I ate my sandwich only two hours ago. Like the other animals, I must scurry for food before the storm hits. In my case, hot food. The temperature is dropping fast. As creamy garlic pasta burps in the pot, I squat on a boulder to get a better view. Like an animal, I stayed when people fled to their cars. Like an animal, I’m not uneasy that a storm is coming. Perhaps, as for the other animals, this can be a kind of home. At least I feel at home, the way when the curtains are pulled you can walk around in your underwear, not caring if your hair’s combed or teeth brushed. Here, on this ridge, I’ve escaped society’s gaze.

            The steep scree and aspen slopes rise above on three sides. Could the black bears around here scramble up them? It’s hard to imagine. I stare at the nooks in the rock walls as I eat way more than I need, trying to hoard all the fat against a cold night. I compare each gust with the last and each one’s stronger. No bears pass through. The barometric lows before a major storm make animals lethargic, I recall. That and my full belly has me thinking it’s time to den.

            A few drops of rain convince you to take a last pee in the half-light. Something moves, a dark head bobs in and out of the tall manzanita. Your heart stops. They’ve come for you. More follow the first, but they’re in baseball caps. You look back and the bear becomes a guy whose navy sweatshirt hood is pulled tight around his head. You’re disappointed.

            And nervous. They came from another direction, off-trail, and head toward the high point of nearby rocks. They didn’t see me but can’t help but notice the tent from where they’re going. My brain says to zip up tight, avoid contact, but my body wants to stand ground. They know where I am; I want to see where they are, where they go, and when they leave. Can they tell I’m female? Probably not in my shell and hat. But if they come closer. . .?

            They’re not dressed for the weather that’s coming. They don’t even carry daypacks. What brings them out here? To my place? I remember how ethologists say an animal will be the most aggressive toward others of its species in familiar territory. The fact that I’ve settled in may be why I’m not interested in retreating. It doesn’t take long for them to wander out the back way they came, and I consider how I’d feel if I were holed up in the tent now. I wouldn’t know they were gone. Even if I peeked out and didn’t see them, I’d wonder if they were hidden. I’d worry all night. My body made the right decision.

            It’s started raining and I consider keeping the food bag in my tent. What animal will be out in this?  Or I could just stash it in the crook of a small tree. I mean, there aren’t many tall enough and all the lower branches on the pines are broken off so that . . . but my body is not listening.

            My hands grab the unwieldy clothesline and double-bagged food, while my feet and eyes hunt for a suitable spot. There is really only one option. The pine is on a steep, scrubby slope which makes it difficult to get into good position for an underhand throw. I didn’t often have to hang food where I’m from, but after a couple tries I lob the rock over the branch and the tied rope follows. Now I stand amidst juniper and rock. It’s only me, with no reinforcements, and I’m enough.

            Finally in the tent, wet gear off to the side, I think about how I came to doubt myself. Was it that I was born with a suburban spoon in my mouth which fed me all those white middle-class fairy tales about how great it is to have men do everything for you? Was it that in the seventies and eighties females were working hard to prove their competence in the male world of commerce, emphasizing their minds and masking their bodies? Was it that no women I knew sought solitude outdoors? In the metropolitan area of my youth, the wild was something only men were supposed to crave, and then only a few weekends a year when they tested their brawn against their pin-striped brains.

            You are five, racing around the front lawn behind your older brothers on the first really warm spring day. Your mother calls you aside and hands you a shirt. You start to cry and point at your brothers. “Little girls are different,” she says. “Little girls wear shirts.” But you cry harder and beg for one day more, one day, and she relents. No longer sure what the game is, you roll down the hill again and again. Grass sticks to your back and belly. Climbing the magnolia you pay special attention to how smooth the bark is as you hold the trunk. Your brothers go inside. It’s getting cool. Under the wisteria you tuck your knees to your bare chest for warmth, afraid to go indoors. Afraid of never being let out.

            With short hair and a penchant for dirt, I was always mistaken for a boy when little. I prided myself on being a tomboy and wore my brothers’ hand-me-downs until puberty dropped me into a vat of pink-glitter lip gloss. Luckily, once at college, the hippies got me comfortable with a clean face again, and the rednecks reminded me that flannel could be flattering.

            Today I’m still caught off guard by the people — both males and females — who describe me as butch. When single, I learned it was easier to move around in social circles if I grew my hair long. A man I’d been working with for over a year and whom I admired, asked if I knew how much taking up knitting had changed my image (why do people assume lesbians don’t knit?). This man and I took high schoolers on hikes and longer trips. In the woods I felt no qualms about spitting if I had to, competed in belching contests, and — like the male leaders — didn’t suppress any gastric emissions caused by the rice and bean diet. Not my behavior in a restaurant, but they didn’t necessarily know that. It now occurs to me that those actions construed as manly are really me at my most animal.

            How did it happen that men get the freedom to act as animals? Do we really think they can’t help it, or, rather, that we can help it more than they can? Maybe it’s feared that women who let themselves be a little wild will, like the woman who married a bear in Northwest Indian tales, choose not to turn back. I don’t know if that’s still a possibility anywhere in the world, but it’s not one I’d choose. Still, I’ll claw and kick for the chance to temporarily drop as far out of human society as possible. And to spit when I need to.

         The wind is crazy now, pushing your tent’s dome from all sides, bending the poles concave at times. You hear each gust gather in another valley and grow to the great growl of Urset that charges over the ridge and shakes your den. Maybe you are trespassing. Your full bladder whines insistently so you slip out of your bag and into rain gear. Outside it’s dark, as if the earth rolled into a cave. The cold rain stings your butt with its quills. Shadows everywhere shift and settle. Remember what the elders say: if you meet a bear, open your coat and show that you’re a woman.

            Back in my sleeping bag trying to warm up, I wallow in memories of sun on my skin: hiking the Cumberland Island beaches on my first backpack trip, all of us naked except for what we carried; stripping my shirt off every lunch stop during desert day hikes; standing nude, shin deep in the Colorado River, admiring the rich colors of the Grand Canyon while a breeze slips between my legs; celebrating Independence Day by skinny dipping solo in the Rio Grande, stroking back and forth from America to Mexico.

            I’ve always wanted to get rid of barriers between me and the earth, but it wasn’t until my freshman year in college that I finally returned to the outdoors as the little girl I was before impending breasts and periods separated me from boys and nature. I remember nervously approaching the reservoir’s edge with others for a dip to wash off all the grease and stress of the restaurant’s late shift. I said I’d go but wouldn’t strip. No one cared. When I’d almost reached the water, others were just starting to splash into the shallows. The dark swallowed the details and suddenly I felt more self-conscious in underwear. The next instant I was wading to where the black water could slide over my chest.

            What do we lose when we become afraid to ever bare ourselves, emotionally or physically? When we’re uncomfortable being naked except to make love or wash? The distrust of our bodies is crippling. As girls, we’re told they beguile ceaselessly and cruelly, so we clothe ourselves to hide or accent them. We’re told they’re weak and can’t protect us, so we cower. Then, sometime when we’re older, we hear from women who’ve found their voices, who have begun to expose these lies. They tell us together we can fight to make the world safe someday. I know their work has made it easier for me to shape my life, and I’m grateful. But I don’t believe the world will ever be completely safe for anyone. And I’m glad because a safe world has no room for wildness.

            At midnight the rain slaps the nylon even harder, unlikely to ever gentle into snow. Can this cheap tent hold up for six or seven more hours of this? I feel certain a pole will snap or nylon tear. As it is I’m riding on the raft of my Thermarest, the decomposed granite outside unable to absorb this much water. It’s pooled underneath my groundcloth and the tent floats between where the corners are staked. The fly doesn’t even cover the back of the tent where the full force of the storm has soaked the wall. I imagine trying to hike the steepness in these gusts with a full pack in the dark. I don’t think I could get down the manzanita slope, let alone keep from getting blown off the narrow cliff-edged trail. For a few minutes I stare anxiously at the nylon sides pressing in on me. Then I remember why I’m here. No animal would stay awake worrying about what might happen. It’d just react if something did. Abruptly I release the tension in my body. The reality is I don’t want to have to deal with a busted tent or stashing my pack so I can get to the car in the dark, but I know I could. Now I concentrate on the noise and let it drown out the cultural messages my brain tries to send. The storm distracts me from pointless human worry, and I welcome it.         

           You’re on the borderline between awake and asleep, afloat in a deep pool of belonging. Your heart reaches out to other creatures burrowed in this place, enduring the same forces. To creatures nested in places you’ll never know, living lives you can’t imagine. In their world the expectations are simple. You sense that their world is your world but without the lies. You release those lies, which turn into ravens calling and winging above the dark valley. You have not taken back the night.

            Better, you are sharing it.

The Litchfields, Lynda Barreto

 

  

 

Machine

      My cousin asks about the ride I just did in New York City.  I tell him it was great.  I take a sip of beer, “70 miles and I got to bike through the Lincoln Tunnel and over the George Washington Bridge.  The tunnel was the best part, all the yellow lights spaced 6 feet from one another.  Everyone was surrounded by a web of their own shadows, all we heard were the echoes of other cyclists screaming; I cawed like a crow.  I would’ve liked the bridge more if a razor blade hadn’t found its way into my rear wheel, but that’s New York for you.” 

Condensation slides down the bottle and drips off my fingers; I make patterns on the orange tiles poolside.  “There were a few professional riders there.”  He nods but looks a little distracted.  “I kept up with them for the first 30 miles, was even in front at one point.”  I don’t mention that it didn’t last.  The winds on the Westside Highway were crazy; I felt like I was going backwards.  With all the people passing me, it probably looked that way too.

My cousin, the state trooper, seems hesitant but curious.  “Let me ask you something.”  He looks around to see if anyone else can hear, as if I’m about to tell him something secret.  “Why are all these cyclists doping?” 

I laugh then shrug; the answer I don’t give him is that they take drugs for the same reason I stopped. 

It’s just after 10 p.m.  I come home from work angry, frustrated or disgusted; I heat a frozen pizza and smoke a bowl.  My friends are either out of town or occupied for the night.  I sit and think about the store and the customers; I wish I had a new job, but I’d settle for a punching bag.  My mind recycles the day’s stupid questions, stupid answers – the annoyances of a meaningless job.  I smoke another bowl then decide to go for a walk.

Outside, the air is cool and heavy and damp.  It recently stopped raining and I like the sheen of the wet roads under moonlight.  I look at my bike, chained and waiting to take me to work the next day.  I grimace in disgust and decide not to go for the walk; I decide to take the bike somewhere other than work.

I go up Hamilton Street and find myself out of breath at the top of the hill.  For some reason, instead of coasting down the other side I get out of the saddle, stand on my pedals and kick each leg down.  I push harder with each stroke, trying to build instead of maintain momentum.  At the corner of George Street I take a left and ride through the College Avenue campus: buildings I studied in, a spot where I used to sit and read; I ride past 4 different apartments and dorms I lived in and dozens that friends have moved out of.  I find the entrance to a walkway along the Route 18 Bridge and ride to Busch Campus, past classrooms I failed out of, more familiar dorms. 

I feel sweat, cool in a dark breeze – it clings to my hair, it slides along my jawbone and drips from my chin to my shirt.  I feel free, like a little kid riding to his friend’s house. 

The streetlights bounce off the road.  No cars in sight.  I ride through the nature preserve and a family of deer runs parallel to me, 20 feet off my side.  They pass a small trail I turn onto.  It leads down to some park I don’t know about.  It’s flooded from the rain, sunk under the muck of the Raritan.  I stop where the path slips into the water.  Across river, the lights of New Brunswick fill houses and flood the streets.  From a distance they seem less offensive, less like crack houses and roads full of balled up underwear, banana peals, and torn bits of paper.

I’m curious to find out what I can make my body do.  I’ve been riding daily; I don’t get tired from 12 miles so I decide to push up to thirty.  There is no way I would’ve thought about doing this a month ago.  

Early morning I take to the street with three liters of water on my back and an empty stomach.  I’ve never ridden this far, but I think food might cause me to cramp up.  88 degrees, 15 mph; I’m sweating, but not as much as I need to.  20 miles into the ride I run out of water; I stop to refill my CamelBak at a water fountain.  I start cramping up on my way back home and finish off the 30 coasting at five mph

I pull up in front of my apartment and climb off my bike.  My knees weak, but not quite buckling.  I wonder if I should’ve stopped at the 20 mile mark or at 25 when my legs went numb.  I lift the bike onto my shoulder and walk up the stairs to the door of my apartment building.  My arms are shaking.  The key is in my hand but I can’t get it into the lock.  I put the bike down, hold my right arm with my left and thread the key.  I struggle to turn the lock, but eventually pry the door open. 

With the bike back on my shoulder, I climb 3 flights of stairs.  In my apartment I throw some mac and cheese in the microwave and get into the shower with my clothes on.  I hang the wet clothes on the shower rod and towel off.  I can’t believe how hungry I am. 

A shaking finger pops open the microwave and I grab a fork.  One bite and I’m in the bathroom.  Four liters of water spill out my mouth.  At the time I think I just pushed my body too far too soon, that it’s overexertion, that my legs are being vindictive, my body pulled thin.  My stomach locks. 

I leave the bowl of food beside my bed and pass out for two hours.  Dehydration is dangerous; over hydrating is a different kind of terrible.  Water intoxication, (hyponatremia) looks like dehydration and comes with the confusion, nausea, and fatigue.  An excessive amount of water floods the body, dilutes a person’s salt content.  The blood contains fewer minerals; eventually muscles, the brain, the heart, everything weakens.  Some get sick, some shift into a coma, some die. 

After the 30 mile ride I wonder what was worse for me, the extra 18 miles or the four liters of water.  I assume it was the water, choosing stupidity over lack of ability; after all, I want to ride further, I don’t care if I drink that much again. 

 “You really could’ve fucked yourself like that.”  I’m at a party talking to a friend about what happened; he laughs at me.  The loud music, our conversation, the sweat packed bodies – it seems like we should be talking about liquor instead of water.  I ask him some questions about bikes, long rides and repair.  He doesn’t know anything either, “But someone was telling me about a bike library over near Commercial Avenue.” 

The Bike Library is more of a bicycle graveyard.  It’s raining the first time I see it.  Dozens of bike frames, random parts and several piles of tires and inner tubes.  Nobody is there so I try again the next week; my rear wheel is bent so it rubs against my break pads with every rotation; it’s making my rides a lot harder, at least my legs are getting built up. 

 “That’s not safe,” this is a kid named Ryan talking to me.  I’m immediately skeptical of anyone who shares my name.  He’s got a thin red beard that works down to the middle of his chest; he’s got a canteen hanging by his side and clipped to it is a set of camping utensils.  The knife and spork bang together as he diagnoses my bike. 

“You broke a few spokes.” He illustrates this by prying several of them away from the wheel.  He also points to a dent in the frame, “Hit by a car?”  I tell him I bought the bike used, I’m not sure.  I find out that aluminum is unsafe if there’s a breach in the integrity of the frame.  He tells me that it’ll probably be fine to ride for a while, but there’s no way to know when it’s going to split open.  I imagine riding downhill and hearing a snap, seeing the ground come closer and my face sliding down the street.  Helmets can only do so much. 

I spend the afternoon scavenging the piles for the right size wheel, a tube that will hold air, and a new tire since mine was ruined from a blowout.  Ryan shows me how to true a wheel and I spend the better part of an hour twisting the spokes of my new wheel with a wrench; finally the rim is straight, or straight enough.  I put a new tube and tire on the wheel; it takes another hour.  He helps me adjust my front and rear derailleur so my chain can shift gears smoothly on the new set of cogs. 

When I’m about to leave I ask if I’ve done everything properly.  Kevin shrugs, “If you put the tube on wrong it’ll blow in a block or two.”  Feeling uneasy I take the first few streets slowly.  Despite the fear of an exploding tire, I can’t help but smile.  I understand more about my bike; it’s less foreign and more a part of me. 

I start to read a book on bicycle repair and buy a spoke wrench and some other tools.  I wonder how far I could go by bike.  It’s going to be another month before I start to hear back from graduate schools.  I’ve made a short list of things I want to do or attempt and fail.  I think about cycling, what to attempt that sounds crazy, that I wouldn’t have dreamed of last week, or last month.  I think of On the Road and want it to be better, closer to the asphalt.  I convince myself that I can cross the country on my own if I ride every day for the next year.  I think of after school specials about bulimia and how the girls say they felt powerless in their lives, that they just wanted to control their bodies. 

On the phone, I’m telling a friend about the idea of riding to California.  He says, “I know a guy who’s doing that right now.”  Before I know anything about Bill Garrett, he’s already my hero.  “He’s been gone for less than a week.” And I’m told that he’s already gone from New Jersey, through Pennsylvania, up to New York and then come back through Pennsylvania.  Not only is he biking to the west coast, but he’s going out of his way to see friends and family.  Knowing that a person is already riding my impossible trip makes me want to go even more.  Bill sends daily emails from his tent; my friend forwards them all to me.  In one of the first messages I read, Bill says, “I got up during the night to go to the bathroom and was astounded by the sky.  Clear, dark, and spectacular.  The stars were so clear and bright.  The big dipper was right in front of me, almost on the horizon.  Back in NJ I’ve never seen it that low.”  Jealous, I start training constantly.

On a day off of work I get back from a long ride; I shower then eat and drink continually.  The Giants/Eagles game is on.  A player is down on the field; he tries to get up, but his right leg buckles.  They show the sidelines and the teammate who just ran back a punt is taking oxygen.  They fade to a commercial break and I flip around and find that the Tour De France is on. Nobody knows that this year’s winner will have his jersey taken away for doping.  Right now I’m wondering if someday all cyclists will ride wearing oxygen masks.  I take a bite of my sandwich, my ride dwarfed by the screen.  As I’m watching the cyclists, the injured player is taken off the football field.

Between plays, I watch the race.  At the final sprint, the riders shake their bikes from side to side to maximize the pressure of each pedal stroke.  For the final mile they push harder than the 120 that precede it.  Tomorrow they’ll do it again; tomorrow I’ll put 30 miles in after work.  This is less inspiring than crushing. 

Rather than watch the day’s highlights, I turn back to football, a sport I have no intentions of playing.  The Giants are on defense and one of the players has sacked the Eagles quarterback.  It’s the guy who was carted off the field earlier; the pain and inflammation had been too much, but with the help of a cortisone shot he came back to the game. 

I don’t get tired after biking anymore, but I vary my week with short and long rides.  The longer ones are around 30 miles.  I push myself, but remember to keep the rest of the ride in mind.  I make sure to pace my water intake.  My shorter rides are still between 10 and 15 miles.  They’re heart choking sprints with no breaks in a lungless body numbing motion.  The former is for endurance, the latter for speed.  I’ve gone from 12 miles to 30, from 10 mph to 15.  At first the speed and endurance grew rapidly, then I leveled off.  After a few weeks on this plateau I’m frustrated.  I start to rotate days off into my schedule.  Even with the rest, my legs don’t push my numbers any higher.  I wonder what I can do to push my body further. 

One day I get back from a sprint.  My lungs burn, my throat is raw, fingertips numb.  I make a quesadilla; I sit on my bed eating, drinking Kool-aid and smoking a bowl.  I think about my lungs, my distance rides, my speed.  I decide to start eating better.  More fruit, less of cookies, chips and ice cream.  More cooked meals, fewer boxes.  I email my friend from college and tell her I’m going to stop smoking pot so I can ride further faster. 

The next day I get home from work and open the drawer that contains my pot, pipes and lighters.  I remember my flat speed.  I close the drawer and grab my bike for a 12 miles sprint.  A few hours after I get back I forget, go to the drawer and end up back on my bike.  I have the following day off and end up in the park at least 6 different times.  A week later I’ve forgotten about the drawer but I keep up the pace.  Two weeks later I average a steady 17.  At the end of the month I’m over 18.

The numbers keep me going.  In fact, I’ve been writing 4000 on my left hand with a marker, rewriting it a few times a week when the ink fades.  4000 is roughly the number of miles I’ll need to ride to get to California.  4000 is what I look at when I’m daydreaming at work or on my rides. 

20 miles into the day I think, “This is half a percent of my way across the country.”  I find this more motivating than discouraging.  I’ve saved my right hand for hills.  No numbers, but I have an arrow drawn on it.  The arrow aims straight ahead, always aligned with my body the same way regardless of whether I’m going up hills, down them or coasting on flats.  I follow the arrow and ignore elevation; it’s all just in front of me, waiting to be pushed into the past. 

With my new passion for ignoring hills I decide to visit my parents’ place for the weekend.  There’s a highway near their house that is cycling friendly.  9W runs right to the George Washington Bridge.  There are no flats; at the top of every hill you see the top of another one in front of you; every turn leads to a steady drop or a sharp climb.  More impressive than the hills are the bikes.  A friend from New Brunswick tells me, “Hot shot Wall Street bankers ride there.” 

I pass a group of Sunday cyclists, some bike club’s weekend ride.  Three people have the same $1600 Specialized, one guy has a $3000 Cannondale.  My CamelBak is leaking water or I actually drool when I see a black on black Trek listed at $6000.  My bike has at least 16 years on all of them.  Raleigh Technium 440; unfortunately age doesn’t mean experience.  My rusty chain alerts them of my presence and I pass them, eyeing their bikes as we climb a hill.

Another rise, another turn.  The riders behind me are gone, but there are two others ahead of me.  A turn later I’m close enough to read their cross bars.  A Trek 1000 and, “Holy shit, that’s a nice bike.”  He smiles back at me, “Thanks.”  It’s a vintage Pinarello aluminum frame, sexy yellow paint job and at least $2000 of high end components.  He even took out the aluminum fork and replaced it with carbon fiber.  The handlebars have carbon SRAM gear shifters infinitely more expensive than my whole bike. 

I pass the pair and a few more cyclists before I hit the 20 mile mark.  I look at my hand and think, if I could do that 199 more times, I’d be across the country. 

I turn around and make my way back home.  I’m amazed at how many hills I still have to climb.  It felt like the ride out had been all uphill, but unless the topography changed things were split pretty evenly.  I follow my arrow through another hill and think of Bill out west, going up a mountain pass.

I get home from work; 9:45.  Still 15 minutes till my sister is on the phone with her boyfriend.  I call her and she tells me that she’s worrying about our parents’ health.  I check to see if any schools have posted a decision yet, one has.  She asks if I got in, but the page is still loading. 

“Well?”  I’m silent long enough for her to know. When I finally speak, I just tell her I have to go.  I know one place I won’t be next year. 

I change, attach some lights to my wheels and carry the bike down the stairs.  I ride to the park.  It’s too dark to use the paths so I just circle around the perimeter, front wheel spinning red, rear wheel spinning blue.  I wait for my legs to burn, my lungs to claw at my chest.  I find silence.  I can’t see my hand, but I know the number is there.  Bill’s latest email came right before he went to sleep, “The tent is set up.  I’m overlooking tree-covered ridges and have birds singing around me.  I will sleep well tonight.” 

I take a long breath in through my nose, hold it two seconds, out through my mouth, wait two seconds and repeat.  The pauses, the pattern, they slow down my heart; I speak and my body listens. 

It’s dark even on the roads around the park.  I’m blind to my cyclometer, but can feel the pace in my chest slow as the wind comes faster.  I pretend to hear the birds outside my tent.    

My body tells me that I’ve improved as a cyclist.  My thighs are thicker and more toned each month; I breathe easily even though my rides are longer and my speed is faster.  But faster than what?  Further than what?  I don’t know if my improvement has moved me from bad to good, bad to okay, or bad to less bad.  When I see a flyer for an organized ride in Lambertville, I send in my registration.  It’s 40 miles of “rolling hills” and it starts and ends at a brewery.  Lambertville is only 33 miles from New Brunswick; I went there and rode home on a day off a few weeks earlier.  I get excited because for the first time I won’t be riding in a vacuum, I’ll have other riders to help gauge my abilities.

Check in at seven; the ride starts at eight; everyone clips into their pedals and we begin. I’m in the middle of the group looking at 60 sets of bike shorts; this in itself is motivation to move up. 

I work my way towards the front of the pack by the end of the second mile.  Six riders with matching jerseys are directly in front of me, drafting off of one another.  At the fifth mile they shuffle positions.  I keep my distance; I say that drafting is a cop out.  You can go the same speed with nearly half the energy.  Of course, I’d probably do it if I weren’t afraid of crashing into someone when they stop short. 

At mile 10 we round a corner, “No fucking way,” I’m looking up the steepest climb I’ve ever faced.  Already defeated, I shift into the second lowest gear leaving myself one last resort that isn’t walking my bike up the hill.  The peloton ahead of me shatters; they’re all out of their saddles, pushing their bodies, piston legs and heaving chests; slowly, we grind our way up the hill.  At the half way point the grade gets steeper, I pass everyone, not going faster, just less slowly. 

“On your left.”  I go to look over my shoulder, but before I get my head around- red spandex flies past me at a speed my body can’t fathom.

Purple face, shaking hands, pounding chest; frustrated, I get to the top of the hill in time to see the red jersey disappear around a corner about half a mile down the country road.  I shame myself.  This is a hill; I’ll need to climb mountains when I go cross country.  Bill just crossed the Cascades, three passes in one day.  I gear up, rise out of my seat and give my pedals three hard strokes before coasting for a tenth of a mile. 

Disappointed in my early fatigue, I reach for my water bottle.  My legs and lungs savor the rest and resume their cadence when my odometer clicks .1. 

The next 5 miles I’m alone aside from the cows I pass.  Nobody in front, nobody behind.  It’s not until I’m in the midst of some of those rolling hills that I hear, “to your left”. 

All black outfit, shining Cannondale, Oakleys and a friendly smile.  “Are you in front?”  I tell him that there’s one more person ahead of us.  “What’s your name?”  He’s Paul.  This rider, obscured by glasses and a helmet; in my mind, he looks like my old boss, same name so they share a face.  This is my first high speed conversation.

We turn onto a small country highway.  He asks why I’m riding and laughs when I say, “for the crotch numbing fun of it”.  His longest ride was a metric century and his favorite stat is top speed; he hit 53 on a nearby highway.  I’ve only gotten up to 37.  He checks his left shoulder, “Car back.” He drops behind me until a Civic passes us.  Paul pulls back beside me, “37?  There’s a hill coming up in a little while, you should be able to get 40.”  I hit 43; the hill did most of the work.  I felt better going 6 on that first climb.

I want to ask Paul about the other hills when he says “Big car back.”  I look over my shoulder and see an 18 wheeler.  Paul goes in front of me.  As the truck is beside us he points his right hand to the ground and shakes it so I know that loose gravel is coming up.  Just after the truck passes us I stare at the trailer and all I can think of is currents of air, we could probably get into the 30s drafting behind it.  Instead I squeeze my breaks until the gravel is behind me, then I shift into a higher gear to catch up with Paul.  I look over my shoulder; no cars coming up so I pull beside him.  He asks when I last saw the rider in front.  I check my odometer and I’ve been lagging for ten miles.  What makes my body incapable of doing what the red cyclist did?

Paul takes his hands off the handlebars and reaches into the back pocket of his jersey.  I see him take out an energy shot, a mixture of caffeine, protein and herbs that looks like thick fruit punch.  He downs it and puts the packet back into the pocket.  

Everything is hidden but his mouth, he’s grinning when he asks if I feel like catching the guy.  We don’t talk for the next five miles to save our oxygen for the ride. 

We lean into a turn; on the other side we see the jersey at the same time.  There’s a long hill in front of us, not as steep as the first, but roughly the same vertical gain.  Paul is a faster climber than I am, but I refuse to give in to my legs.  I keep my bike in the highest gear I can manage and follow Paul to the top.  A mile down the road we take a left and pull beside the man in red, Mike. 

“How the hell did you take that first hill so fast?”  He lives in the area, “I can’t leave my driveway without climbing a hill.”  I think of my rides in New Brunswick, long and flat.  I might be jealous. 

At the next rest stop, Paul and Mike refill their bottles.  I still have a liter so I keep going, “I’ll see you guys in a few miles.”  I figure they’ll probably chase me down sooner than that, but they never do.  I ride the last 15 miles with phantoms right behind me.  My cyclometer keeps telling me to go faster.  I follow the arrow on my right hand but every hill slows down my speed on the flats: this is unacceptable.  I think about cycling cross country, I think about breathing, I look at the 4000, ignore my legs and the number on my handlebar approves.

When I finish the ride, there’s a celebratory picnic and I’m told to help myself.  “You’re the first one back; how do you feel?”  I’m happy I don’t have to wait in line for food. 

Midway through my second plate of grilled chicken, Paul and Mike sit next to me.  “We got lost, ended up riding an extra 5 miles.”  And I’d been thinking my endurance overcame speed.  We eat and talk about the ride; we watch the line grow longer.  This wasn’t a race, but neither is chasing down a car or a person riding in the distance.  I’ve never known a cyclist to be content behind someone else. 

I point to the line and say, “That guy is my idol.”  Sideburns so grizzly they can only be called muttonchops, cigarette in hand, oil-stained t-shirt underneath a leather vest and jean shorts so jagged I’m not sure if they were cut or worn until the bottom half fell off.  Paul tells me, “I saw him smoking on the ride.” 

I wonder how he made it up the first hill.  For the most part, everyone here is in skintight spandex; they cut down drag, but I think that near-naked shame factors in to the increase of speed.  No one can see your face if you go fast enough.

I wonder if Muttonchops cares that he could’ve gone faster with the absurd attire, without the cigarettes.  I saw some people riding mountain bikes and wonder if they tell themselves, “I’d be in the front if I had thin, no tread tires, if I had rams-head handlebars, if my fork were carbon fiber.”  If someone on $4000 carbon bike passes me, I can’t help but to ask myself if it’s the rider or his bike that’s faster.

Half my transition from 10 mph to 20 mph and 10 miles to 50 was eating better, riding several times a day and giving my resin coated lungs a well earned break from smoke.  The other half was equipment. 

Riding a bike in flip-flops has liberating feel – hovering over the ground practically barefoot, surrounded by the wind, images rushing to be blurred in peripherals.  When I bought cycling cleats, there was a strange transition.  The shoes have a metal plate at the bottom that locks into the pedal.  Aside from providing the opportunity to break one’s ankle in a bike crash, they give you the ability to pull up on the pedals in addition to pushing down. 

After I bought the shoes I went home and changed the pedals on my bike and went for my daily ride.  My liberated feet were now locked down; very physically, I had become a moving piece of the bike; every pedal stroke made me think of the churning pistons powering an engine.  My average mph was 1.2 faster than normal. 

A fear of the inevitable collapse of my aluminum frame got me thinking about buying a new bike, when I realized that if I rode cross country I needed a touring bike to carry my gear, I made the purchase.  It looks like a racing bike, but it’s built with heavier metal so it’s more for reliability than speed.  Steel over carbon fiber and aluminum; but the 20 years of technology that separate my old and new road bike more than compensate for the additional eight pounds. Gear shifters that are built into the break levers and a more efficient drive train give me an extra two mph on my rides.  

Then there’s the spandex.  The wind is worse than hills are, less tangible, less visible, less predictable.  No evidence of what you struggled against.  When I’ve worn loose t-shirts and baggy shorts they fill with the rushing air.  I become more of a wheel-bound sailboat and less of a blade slipping through the wind.  The cycling clothes help with the wind, but place any pit stops or errands out of the realm of public decency. 

By far the most important piece of equipment I own is my cyclometer.  A magnet on the wheel, a sensor, and a computer the size of a wrist watch that straps onto my handlebars.  I don’t know how fast I went before I owned this little device, but the day I bought it was the same day I started taking cycling seriously.  The numbers push me when nobody is riding in the park.  They tell me I’ve gone faster before; they say I should be going that speed now.  Most of my riding is a struggle to go further, to go faster, but I’m left to wonder, how much of my success is because of my body, and how much is because of my gear. 

I want to ask Mike if he had to buy a new bike to ride the local hills or if he already had one.  I think of Muttonchops and wonder what he’d do on my bike.  The sky is getting cloudy so I say goodbye to my new friends; they ask why I’m putting my helmet back on.  I don’t own a car. 

I find the phone pole I left my bike lock on.  The 10 pounds of steel chain links get draped over my shoulder and I start my post-ride ride back to the house I stayed at last night. 

I’m more confident that I could make it to the west coast if I keep pushing myself.  I get distracted imagining the scenery Bill describes, “lots of farm country — fields of corn and soybeans.  Saw one field of small sunflowers.”  I wonder if I’ll be paying attention to the fields or if my body will be too tired, my mind too set on the road ahead of me. 

From the side of the highway I see a familiar bike on a car roof.  With the down grade, I’m going 27 mph, but the car is doubling my speed, I feel sluggish.  I wonder how much I’d slow down if I had a car and didn’t ride several times a day.  Traveling 30 miles to see friends, getting groceries, going to work, my everyday life is conditioning.  To get food to eat I need to practice. 

I’m on French Street and the right half of the road is bordered by parked cars; I take the lane.  It’s narrow so I’m centered between the yellow line and the row of cars.  The last thing I want is a door to swing open and clothesline me. 

A horn blares.  Over my shoulder I see a mini-van; inside, the driver is thrashing his arms around.  I pass a sign, speed limit 25, I’m at 23.  Screw him.  The horn comes again.  He must’ve rolled down his window, “…off the road.” 

A few blocks away, the metered parking stops, there are no cars.  I wait until this area to ride closer to the curb; the mini-van rides his horn the whole way.  As soon as I’m leaning to the right I hear his engine rev; I barely have time to get out of the way before he’s beside me.  Inside the van, he’s fidgeting with some buttons on his door and the passenger window comes down.  With the wind in my face I hear, “Hey Lance Armstrong, get the fuck off the road.”  I could tell this man that roads were first paved for bicyclists but I don’t think he’d care.  He’s streaming profanity, occasionally interjecting sentence fragments, “…hit you with my car.” 

I’m still riding beside the van when I ask the driver of this two-ton weapon, “Have you ever gotten your ass kicked by a man in spandex?”  He looks blank, curses a little more and speeds ahead to a red light.  I pull beside him with a smile that says fuck you. 

I watch the light for the side street: it turns yellow, no cars coming; I take off a few seconds before he gets the green.  The slope of the road gets steeper; I gear up and kick my pedals past 30, till I can’t keep up with the hill. 

I pull up in front of my apartment; my legs and hands are shaking.  My body, stoked with adrenaline.  I barely think about going inside to sit down.  With my cyclometer reset, I ride to the park and put in another 20 miles.  My legs don’t tire, my lungs don’t ache.  When I return, I write down my average mph and it’s 1.5 over normal.  I laugh when I read Bill’s message, “Roads are not busy.  Most everybody waves as they pass.  Farmers out working always wave.” 

I see the same faces on my rides.  Some stick to mornings, others come after work, but most people ride on Sundays.  I pick out distant objects, the cyclists.  I check the minutes and seconds on my cyclometer and pick a time to pass the person by.  I never know how long the person has been here, what mile they’re on.  It’s not a race with the person, just a question as to whether or not I can pass an object. 

One day I’m riding back through the park after a campus loop.  I decide to get ten more miles out of the park.  I see a member of the Rutgers cycling team in the parking lot.  His bike is flipped over and he’s changing a tire.  When I double back for the last three miles I can see him pulling onto the road.  He’s a few hundred feet away when I decide to chase him down.  I pace myself at first, creeping up slowly.  When I’m 20 feet back I check my speedometer, 18 flickering up to 18.5.  I’ve been riding a little over 90 minutes.  I have another mile of road left in the park.  I gear up and push myself up to 19; I’m grinding my teeth as I pass him.  I push harder but hover at 19.  With the corner of my eye I check my shoulder and I don’t see the kid.  I ease back down to 18.  He swerves to my left and blows past.  I don’t bother chasing, my legs are shot.  I turn onto the street and speed past the cars at red lights. 

I check my email and read the final forwarded message from Bill, “I have reached the Pacific Ocean.  I wish I could say I had profound thoughts at the time, that I could write something that will be remembered, but I can’t.  It just happened.”  Rereading the message, I peel a clementine and eat the sections one at a time.  Daydreams come of long empty roads cutting through cornfields and rain coming down mountain passes. I wonder if I’ll think of anything when my feet touch the Pacific and I feel the salty breeze, when I hear birds calling one another as they scatter across the setting sun.

The Coal Spur Kid

Prologue

Conrail—Johnson City, NY

            The first house I ever knew as home is less than a hundred yards from an old rail line that once hauled freight and passengers on a track that snaked along the northern edge of the Chenango River.  Now it exists for no other reason than to haul in carloads of coal from the rich anthracite fields in places like Inez, Kentucky, to the local power plant that still eats up metric tons of the black stuff every day.  I was only two years old when my parents bought that house and my childhood is rooted there.  Nearly three decades later, I guess I’m one of those people who can say they’ve grown up around trains. 

But then again, people like that always seemed to me—and still do—rougher, more hardened, and intimate with labor around big machines than I imagine myself ever being.  They’re the ones who mean they’ve worked with trains, because their fathers and their fathers’ fathers did.  Their histories are, in a lot of ways, more honest; so are their “growing up around trains” assertions.  My father was a firefighter, and his was a beer-truck driver, and the only manual labor I’ve known has been delivering newspapers and hauling firewood on a beat-up Radio Flyer wagon with a rusty axel.

So I suppose a more truthful, or at least accurate, description of my coal-dusted childhood would be to say I grew up near trains, or, rather, near train tracks since the appearance of an actual line of lumbering cars was, at best, an every-other-day event.  Even then, when I’d hear the low rumble of the engines and the metal-on-metal squeal from the hundred wheels, the real attraction to the slow-rolling monster had less (if any) to do with the actual locomotives and cars—those things that workers or camera-clad railfans would focus on—and far more with what that train could do to the things you left on the tracks. 

There are the ubiquitous pennies, of course, but you should see what happens to firecrackers or beer cans, or melted plastic action figures, or some unfortunate kid’s plastic retainer, and even once the bloated corpse of a recently-deceased opossum.  Anything that would crush or squish was fair game.  Even then, I had heard enough derailment stories to leave the ballast rocks for throwing—which was both the ritual that grew out of frustration at the lack of anything to set on the trembling rails, and my own little futile protest against the noisy beast whose wheels screamed and whose giant steel couplers smashed and banged like gunshots too early on the mornings when I was sent out to roam but too tired to really go anywhere.

But then there were always the rails, train or not.  Those actual ribbons of metal that were so hard and so straight in their silence that I’d walk on them like balance beams and never think about all the things I’d left on them to be flattened or severed.  They were just there to sit on in the hot middle of a long day in July with the trees on either side of the line shading me from the sun and from the prying gaze of parents or all those other authority figures who loomed always somewhere too close.  They felt like they were all mine.

And would it be too hokey or too American to say that one day I saw how these same rails stretched into the setting sun beyond the trestle, toward a point on the horizon that I could now and then glimpse between the valley’s slanting sides that had gathered and held me, my family—two, three generations deep—next to the river running along its green floor?  Is it overly romantic to tell you that, on at least one occasion, it’s very likely that I wondered where those rails went, how far they could go if I followed them for a few hours or a few days? 

After all, isn’t that how the railroad and its trains have made their way into our imaginations?  Some kid somewhere dreaming of just where those tracks can lead, who he could meet—the loners, the outlaws, the thousand archetypes of independence—along that right-of-way, or all the hidden things that are ignored by the highway and completely obliterated from an airplane seat. They’re freedom and adventure all balled up together—or at least the twinkling possibility of these things.  Hell, the railroad is possibility. 

And if thinking of miles upon miles of steel and wood this way is too hokey, too sentimental, or (and this may sound like the worst of all to anyone who’s never had to wonder about these things) too hopeful, then I guess I’m stuck.  Because, even if I didn’t know it when I was a bored kid on summer break just looking for rocks to throw and pennies to smash flat, that’s the stuff living next to the old Conrail coal spur taught me.

When I actually—finally—started following these tracks, walking them just to see where they went, every step down the line took me deeper into what third-generation railroader Russell Butler has called the endless love-hate affair with an ineffable, intangible beast.  I found myself wandering farther and farther just to see what I could find out there.  Even if it turned out to be just another long pair of rails that merged somewhere too far away, I had seen something that was new and foreign to me, something that held the fascination that everything foreign holds.  And, despite every attempt to be satisfied with what I had come upon in the miles and miles of walking, it was never enough.  I knew there was more to be seen, that there were more places and vistas that were yet undiscovered—undiscovered by me, at least—and I wanted, I needed to find them.  But as is the case with any dysfunctional relationship, one partner will always hold a certain sway over the other for reasons that are so often terribly obvious to anyone removed enough to look at that relationship with vision that isn’t clouded by the storms of fascination and obsession.

The sway that the railroad lines had over me—that they still have over me—is, in all honesty, hopelessly wistful and nostalgic.  There is a long history behind and a wealth of promise ahead when you stand on any stretch of the more than 170,000 miles of track braided and woven throughout the country.  There is an entire world of senses: grime and grease, the smell of oil and creosote-soaked ties, walls of rusty steel, and polished steel where the wheels meet the rails, the seemingly immovable tons that can suddenly lurch into a smooth, determined roll. 

The railroad has in it a song to sing to anyone who is willing to listen, one especially melodic to all of us who grew up in those once-impressive factory and industrial towns that are scattered all across the wide table of the nation like so many handfuls of rusty crumbs.  For those of us whose parents pushed us away from home as soon as we could fend for ourselves—not because we were talking up space but because, and I heard it enough myself, “There’s nothing worth sticking around here for”—the most important thing was, no, is the idea that someplace out there is bigger, more exciting, more…everything that isn’t here: that America that all the old travel posters told us to see from the observation cars on The California Zephyr and The Empire Builder and The Starlight Express, the America seen from an open boxcar door. 

Whether or not I could ever get to that other place wasn’t (isn’t) really the question—just knowing, or at least believing, that there was someplace beyond the little sphere of my world was enough.  And all those trains that run on all the hundreds and hundreds of lines, from big yards and stations, through small, lonely towns and back, they’re a physical connection to all the people who have stories to tell and all those places that are just waiting to be seen.  Any little thing that can remind me of this is like a message in a bottle washing up from out of that great sea of the nation.

One

Conrail / Norfolk Southern—Allentown, PA

I didn’t know who “Steam Train Maury” was, but I did know he was dead after nearly ninety years.  And while I suppose there was an obituary written for him in some newspaper somewhere, knowledge of this unknown man’s death came to me in the blustery cold of late November on the dusty yellow side of a train car.  The little remembrance was a simple one—his name, birth and death dates, and a solemn “R.I.P.”—written in a quick-yet-deliberate script next to a sketch of a flapping swallow-tail flag with a diamond holding an eponymous capital letter V in its center. 

It was easily the tenth one of these simple monuments I’d seen on different cars of this train parked on a service spur running under a rusty hundred-year-old trestle that carried the Conrail and Norfolk Southern mainlines over the Lehigh River into Allentown, Pennsylvania.  This was the train and trestle I had walked five west-bound miles of track to photograph with their respective bulk and lacey nineteenth-century girders lit by the orange of a setting sun against the grey of a departing cold front.

            And it was really no surprise to see something written on the train.  Spray paint on the freights is really just a descendent of the New York City subway graffiti movement that exploded in the early-1970s and was snuffed out less than 30 years later in defense of the mostly symbolic “quality of life” ideal that it supposedly attacked.  But it makes perfect sense that graffiti writers would want to paint on trains—the New York subway outlaws got their work to run through all the boroughs; this latest version could get it out to the whole continent. 

Still, that image I had always thought of, like a lot of people, was of vibrant aerosol paintings.  This memorial to Steam Train was as far from a swirl of transformed letters and numbers as it got; this was just a quick little thing, maybe a few inches square, like something you’d absent-mindedly doodle while talking on the phone.  Only, it was on the side of a train and was repeated exactly, specifically, again and again on the cars.  They were all alike and freshly-made and said he had died today.  I had no idea who the man memorialized was, but such repetition on so many cars that came from so many different places made me realize that this drawing must have been made by someone next to this very train, someone who could be as close to it as I now was, and my mind wandered.

A vision of a craggy old hobo tramping sadly along this same worn path, mulling over the death of his long-time hobo-buddy—good old Steam Train—with a bandana pouch tied to the end of an old walking stick he’d slung over his curved shoulder and (why not?) a dusty fedora perched on the back of his greasy-haired head.  Some grey beard who’d been riding the rails for years, marking the cars he’d hopped with a hunk of paint stick he’d likely picked up off the ground in some yard somewhere or from a maintenance shed way down the line.  He would’ve been just like the old hoboes back in the day when hopping an interstate train wasn’t considered neither atypical nor federal offense. 

And my mind jumped to a middle-school English class where I had given a terrible, thrown-together book report on Jack London and only talked about his train-hopping days.  The only thing I could recall about the story was how he had dubbed himself “Skysail Jack” and carved his moniker into water towers, shed walls, and bridge supports along his routes to let everyone know he’d been there; and how his tramp compatriots had an entire pictorial language they’d perfected and learned.  A whole list of symbols that told others fresh off the train what the new town had to offer them: where a friendly woman lived, a place for clean water, whether the local law was vicious or lenient, and a hundred other things that any weary, dirty traveler would want to know.  It was a complete network of silent, secret communication solely for those in the know. 

But now I knew that was more than a century dead and gone and I kept coming back to this drawing and my imaginary artist because they were both right here, in front of me.  The drawing gave birth to the artist, and I could see for myself the little details that spoke of this human presence.  There was one line that was supposed to meet up with another but stopped short; and then there were the cracks in the car’s surface that a fluid drawing hand had gotten caught on. I could even drag my finger down the drawing’s edge and smudge the paint that was still a little wet. I felt connected to the train, to the drawing, and, suddenly, to whatever hand had put it here. 

I’d seen sketches like this before and never thought much about them.  Really, they’re not much to think of—all but invisible when the train is roaring past and then dwarfed by those big, more ostentatious spray painted graffiti they exist among.  The ones I had seen before weren’t so different from this, either.  Sure, the motif would change and the dates, if there were any, would differ, but I had always chalked them up to some drunken kid’s need to do something while hiding out along the tracks somewhere.  I mean, that’s what I figured because it’s exactly what I would’ve done. Or I just supposed some transient, some homeless down-on-his-luck guy, was lurking around looking for some secluded spot to sleep in.

            I snapped a photo of the little thing.  I don’t know why.  No, I do.  It had something to do with the hopeless sincerity I saw in it.  The act of any public memorial is only half-selfish—it’s something mollifying for the one doing the memorializing, yes, but its whole intention is to be seen.  Whatever we get from seeing that memorial is innately and tightly bound-up in the re-acknowledgment of mortality that always seems to fall onto us like epiphany, as if we had somehow forgotten that we can’t be here forever.  But even in out own worn-out, selfish denial, we can be altruistic as well.

This artist surely knew, or I suppose hoped, there would be at least one other witness, one more person to stop, maybe for just a glance, but still stop and think about this dead man who meant enough to someone to be remembered, even if it was in this unconventional way.  When I took that photo, Steam Train, whoever he may have been, along with his memory, continued on, off in another direction.  The drawn-on train carried him down the line to who-knows-where, but the image written onto the film in my camera would now part from the train, become something else even.  Instead of just riding that steel route, I carried it to the photo lab and then, eventually, back into my own home days, weeks after it was penned onto that dusty car.  The memory of a man I didn’t know would now live with me.  Even in death, he kept right on going. 

And doesn’t everyone want to believe that there’s someone out there who’ll care enough to leave a little remembrance of each of us when we’re gone.  Just a little something that maybe someone else might see so, in our sad absences, we can keep on going, even if it’s just as so many quiet reminders that we really were once here.  The littlest memorial, even if we make it ourselves, will quietly say to everything that gets left behind, I mattered in some small way. 

Standing there with the sun setting and the November wind rustling the few stubborn remaining leaves, I thought about Jack London and how the ninety-odd years he’d been dead was just about the same number of years Steam Train Maury had been alive.  I thought about who they both must have left behind and figured it was about time to go.

            It was already getting dark and I hadn’t even started the five-mile hike home back up the tracks.  The thin chill that had been dancing around all day slumped right down into a heavy cold so I decided to walk the long trestle into the city and get something warm to drink.  It wasn’t the safest route in, but most large trestles like this have an open grate catwalk down the middle or on one side for workers to use.  This one had a wide center walk and, more importantly, I knew that any train crossing it in the dark would have its lights on and be visible from a good half-mile away.  In the worst-case scenario of two trains crossing at once—one bound north, the other south—with me somewhere in the middle, I could lie facedown on the catwalk and have at least a few feet of clearance as the cars rumbled by above my head.  And while this was an unlikely situation, I still hurried across in a half-jog once I managed to climb the rocky embankment that led up from the maintenance line below.

            My head tucked down and into the stiffening wind, I watched the river rush by and listened to the hollow thump, thunk-thump of an uprooted tree trunk caught in the eddying current against a massive granite support some twenty feet below.  The sound of the wind and watery trunk in my ears left me all but unable to hear any train that might roll onto the trestle, so every ten seconds I’d toss a quick glance back over my shoulder and then ahead into the dark looking for only the bright headlight of an oncoming locomotive. 

Walk, walk, walk, look.  Walk, walk, walk, look.  I knew you can never be too careful.  I’d heard the stories: veterans who’d worked twenty, thirty years on the railroad were killed everyday.  Like the maintenance worker who bled to death after a chemical tanker’s brakes failed.  The runaway car rolled silently down the line he was repairing, picking up speed the whole way, and cut him clean in half across his midsection.  Or that one about the engineer whose locomotive backed into a line of parked service vehicles and crushed three guys between the bumpers.  These were the professionals with hardhats and work boots and high-visibility safety vests.  Where that left me, in my worn sneakers and baseball hat, was something I never wanted to think too much about, and by the time I was finally across I was shivering and needed to catch my breath.

*

            I still try to figure out where he came from.  Was he there the whole time watching me come across?  Or just ahead of me on the trestle? Did he climb up from the riverbank underneath the last stretch?  Was he behind me and I just didn’t realize it?  Whatever it was that happened to get him there, he was no more than ten feet away when I noticed him on the other side of the tracks blowing warming breaths into his gloved hands.  With the sun not completely gone down behind him, I could still make out his dirty jeans, a backpack, a heavy black garage jacket bundled against the cold, and the worn bill of a baseball hat peeking out from under a hood.  I figured he was just one of the city’s many homeless up here to drink or piss or sleep. He seemed oblivious to my presence, but I still wanted to get out of there.  A couple hundred dollars-worth of camera equipment was reason enough to not stick around.  Staring back across the trestle, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other as if impatient for something to arrive, and when my shoes slid on the loose ballast, he looked my way with a slow, unsure turn that said he was as surprised as I was to come across someone else up here.

            In the long seconds that passed we surely sized one another up, or at least that’s what I did.  I wondered if I could fight if I had to and thought I might get a good quick shot in, unless he had a knife, or a gun, or anything.  I tried to gauge how far away the street lights on the busy main road were and wondered how long it had been since I’d actually had to run from anything, or to anything for that matter.  In my mind I practiced what I’d say when he asked me for a cigarette, or my money, or my camera.  All the things I’d learned from TV told me to just give them what they want and stay alive.

            When he blew into his fists again, still looking at me, I was ready to do whatever I had to: run, fight, hand over everything valuable I had and head to the police station to file a report if I could still move.  But something drew his glance back down the tracks again and he took a second to look, never moving his hands away from his mouth, before turning back to me, opening one fist into a casual spread-finger wave, and then pointing down to the trestle to where a blinding yellow light said a locomotive was just beginning to rumble its way in our direction from across the darkening bridge.

            It tore between us, southbound, with all the noise and terror that is a fully-loaded freight train pushing toward high speed—a high-priority “hotshot” of double-stacked shipping containers that probably wouldn’t be stopping or even slowing down until it reached its destination.  In the spaces between the cars flashing by, I would catch moments of him watching them.  Like single frames cut from a boring film, I could see him frozen in random poses: standing there looking down the length of the train with a hand on his head to hold his hat down against the wind; facing the cars but watching their path with his hands in his pockets; again blowing into his fists or shrugging his hood back up around his neck.  

            Then it was past as quickly as it had come upon us.  And he still stood there, hands deep in his coat pockets, watching the flashing red light on the rear of last car disappear around the bend.  When the world was again enveloped in the eerie quiet that arrives in the wake of a passing train, he looked over his shoulder toward the bridge and back again to the bend ahead, hopped over one rail then the other in a few light steps, and made a casual bee-line toward me.

            I had run into plenty of people in the time I’d spent along the tracks—spend enough time anywhere and you’re bound to meet someone.  Most were older men; some retired rail workers or train engineers who simply couldn’t stay away, others were just guys who’d fallen in love with the idea of the railroad as kids but never really saw it as a career option.  They both always seemed to have at least one camera with them and they always talked openly about a basement dedicated to model trains. And, depending on where you were, there were usually a few dog walkers or drunks wandering a stretch of track.  Of course the few times I had to give identification to security guards or railroad cops and talk my way out of a trespassing ticket were always in the back of my mind, too.  But all my encounters had been in the light of day—mornings, afternoons—making them, at best, friendly, or, at worst, barely genial.  In the dark, away from the security of passing cars and pedestrians, on your own, even a guy who has just waved and warned you of an on-coming train is suspicious. 

The uneasiness that had been relieved by that wave he’d given me suddenly returned, and I thought again of running, worried that he’d be right on my heels if I did.  I made a fist around the keys in my pocket and waited.

            The first words were his and, to my surprise, my anxiety faded almost as soon as he spoke. He said there was a fox carrying its little kits one by one across the tracks seconds before the train screamed through—that’s what he was pointing at—and the whole time he thought we were going to helplessly watch her get hit. The relief he felt at the fox’s survival came through in the timbre of his low soft voice. 

            He was taller than he looked from across the tracks—as tall as me—and when he stuck out his hand to shake hello, the wrists that poked out between the too-short cuffs of his jacket and the bottoms of his cloth gloves told me we had a similar build as well.  Short hair peeked from under the sides of his hat and faded into scruffy week-old stubble on his cheeks and chin that only half-hid a clearly boyish face.  I couldn’t tell how old he was, maybe somewhere in his mid-twenties, but he asked the stock railroad questions that always come up—Was I waiting for a train?  Did I see the one laid-up back on that maintenance line?  Were there any cops around?  I knew these questions were a way to gauge my reasons for being around trains without coming off like an interrogator or nutjob. They worked as sort of code that told him as much about me as they told me about him.  I answered each in turn and, through his eager additions of his own information, learned that we were both on the long list of those who found themselves fascinated by the train.

He said he had made his way from the same direction I had to also take photos, and he showed me his pack that was loaded with equipment and film while telling me how surprised he was to find someone else who came to this out-of-the-way spot.  He described a long line of new chrome auto carriers that was stuck waiting on the trestle an hour or so earlier and how the sun was reflecting off the river so that it was like the cars were lit from below and netted with shadows from above.  Since then he’d just been hanging around, waiting to see if any other trains would roll through and was, it sounded, relieved that I didn’t seem like someone who was going to rob or kill him, or even hit him up for a cigarette.

            We talked about the train that just came through and about this spot and how it looked at different times of the day and year.  He knew all about the big Norfolk Southern yard that was less than a mile from the trestle and, through this intimate knowledge, hinted at ways to get into it without too much risk.  When he asked what I thought about graffiti—another stock question that can often reveal more than any other when it comes to trains—I told him the truth, that I liked it and was happy to shoot it and had even done some back when I was a kid living in New York.  He smiled and gave a little chuckle at this and I noticed two deep dimples appear on either side of his mouth when he nodded in what I took to be agreement.  He wanted to know if I ever saw so-and-so painted on the trains around here and when I said I had—had, in fact just taken a photo of a bright green-and-blue one the day before—he gave that same little nod and chuckle.  I added that I had just seen something odd on the maintenance spur train back across the river and wondered if he knew who this Steam Train Maury guy was.

*

Together, walking the short half-mile to a 7-11 in town, I learned that, in addition to a physiology, we shared a first name as well.  Still, he insisted that he usually went by his surname, Vauxhall, even if people usually screwed up the pronunciation of it—ending it with a hard x.  In his soft voice that teetered on a mumble, he said, as if in passing, to just call him V; it was easier and that’s what he went by on the trains, most of the time anyway.  And then, perking up, he told me all about Maury Graham, a five-time “king of the hoboes” and “official grand patriarch” of rail riders, who had suffered a stroke just a few days prior and was found dead this morning.  But it was OK.  The old guy had been sick for a while, lived a good life, and a lot of people will remember him.

And right then I felt a rock of disheartened recognition appear in my stomach.  As soon as I made the connection he had implied—the one-letter nickname “on the trains,” all that Steam Train Maury information right at hand—I saw that this guy, the one who walked the tracks, hung out on trestles, lugged camera equipment on his back for miles, who was, for all intents and purposes, no different than me, had been the one memorializing the dead man on the cars.  It wasn’t some old hobo sentimentally remembering his friend.  V admitted that, while he never met the man or even knew anyone who had, he still felt it was important to get the word out that the old tramp had “caught the westbound.”  And I felt like I’d been cheated, like someone who suddenly realizes they’re the butt of a joke everyone else (even just one other person) was in on all along.

            As we left the store, coffees in-hand for the long walk we both had ahead of us, I wanted to be away from and done with him.  I felt an odd sense of betrayal at his not being my idealized and romantic vision of a lamenting hobo-artist, so I lied and said I had to go over to the photo store to drop off some film and then meet my wife for dinner in a little while.  Whether or not he believed me, I still don’t know, but he gave a nod that I took to say OK.  I half-heartedly suggested we go out and shoot together before the snow started falling and I momentarily brightened at the memory of his hints at knowing a way into the big NS yard. 

He took off his backpack and rummaged around in it for a minute before coming out with a pen and a torn sheet of notebook paper.  On it he told me to write my e-mail address or phone number and said he’d give me a call next time he was going to go out.  I wrote both down so he wouldn’t think I was just trying to get rid of him and said to call whenever, that there were a lot of places I wanted to check out.  He stuffed it into his coat pocket and nodded in agreement giving me a quick “see you later” while heading down the sidewalk before disappearing into the dark weeds that backed the scrubby woods bordering the tracks.  I still had his pen.

Two

Norfolk Southern—Allentown, PA

On an unexpectedly warm Tuesday morning in December, I got a terse message from V asking if I wanted to come to one of his favorite “benching spots”—someplace to take a look at trains and shoot some photos—a classification yard near Allentown where Norfolk Southern would sort and arrange cars based on destination and assemble them into full trains, “manifests,” that would eventually take those cars to wherever they needed to go.  I knew from looking at atlases and online maps that this spot he was talking about sat right on the edge of the large NS holding yard V had hinted at getting into when we first met.

            He mentioned that he usually liked to go alone, but for whatever reason—I never got around to asking—he had decided to bring me along.  The message explained how it was only about two miles from his apartment and we could follow an old canal towpath all the way there.  Outside, it was warm enough to recall the easy weather I had been resigned to not see for months and, in my haste to be out in it, I had already forgotten the wet rag of disappointment and frustration that had flopped down when I found out who V actually was.  I thought a nice walk near some water would afford some time to get reacquainted with him, to get a meaningful conversation going on the “deeper issues” the railroad couldn’t help but dredge up.

            So I agreed to go and fifteen minutes later we were walking along the gravelly path with the sharp-angled sun on our jacketed backs and a crisp breeze in our faces.  The shallow canal that used to ferry boatloads of anthracite coal between Mauch Chunk and Easton predated the railroad that followed it.  But this was the case for countless lines, especially in the waterway-laced northeast.  A trail would grow up along a riverbank and become a major transportation route; a canal is cut around those impassible spots or, like the one we were following, it was dug as glassy-smooth answer to the churning turbulent eddies of the wide Lehigh.  Eventually, the rails are laid along the same general route and that’s that. Now, the slow flowing ribbon of water carried only small sheets of ice that had broken off from the larger cracking masses along its edges.  There were crows in the trees and the low rumble of idling locomotives rolled between their sharp calls.

            V didn’t say much, despite my attempts at engagement, and the first twenty minutes of our walk passed painfully with me trying to lead him into what I imagined would be an enlightening discourse on the meaning of his fascination with trains—and writing on them.

            Attempt number one went something like: “Being out here by yourself probably gives you a lot of time to think…. I always end up making lists of stuff I have to do or remembering something I didn’t.”

            A nod.

A few minutes went by.

            Number two: “I never really got into it, but you probably know other people who write….”

“Not really.”

The frustration I met months ago, when I first understood that V was just some guy like me and not a wild artist-hobo packed full with stories of love and loss and adventure collected from a life spent on the rails, had returned.  I felt sure he was going out of his way to avoid talking about something that, I thought, should matter to him.

            So a third to truly test the unresponsive waters: “Can you get arrested for something like this? For drawing on cars?  Because I’ve had to deal with cops for just being too close to an engine.  I mean, given the rail companies’ histories of protecting their stock at all costs, I’d imagine they don’t look too kindly on people ruining expensive equipment…”

            Silence and a look in the direction of a hidden cardinal’s cry.

            His gait wasn’t fast, but the stride was long—his frame, like my own, borders on lankiness—but somehow it carried him a full step ahead of me, and more than once I found myself working to catch up after slowing to look back down the path. V didn’t look back—not at the path or at me.

            Halfway to our destination he slowed a little, turned his head slightly, and shot his first full sentence of the trip over his shoulder at me: “Don’t fuck around when we’re in the yard.”  At which I give a half-chuckle that could easily have been read as dismissive—mostly because it was—and he just went on walking at the familiar pace.

            Only I got to thinking about his advice, no, his order, and I really began to take offense.  How could he have forgotten that I wasn’t some stupid kid looking for a new party spot where I could spray-paint the names of my favorite heavy metal band or brand of cheap beer?  He had to have known that I had years of experience and was serious about trains; and the more I thought about it, the more I began to resent his bald-faced assumption of my naïveté and general lack of common sense.  So I quietly fumed over it for another hundred yards down the canal.

            And then he began to say more.  He enumerated all the rules and precautions that had taken him a lot longer than this walk to internalize as second nature; the ones that, as he began to break them down in a matter-of-fact way that sounded like it was straight out of an instruction manual, I saw had kept him out of jail and, more importantly, in one piece:

1)      Don’t walk between the rails; stay on the ballast.  That old image of “walking the line” on the crossties or on the rail itself, as if it was a just a shiny steel balance beam, is just stupid.  For all of their ridiculous weight and size, trains can be dead quiet when they roll and will sneak right up on you.  By then you’ll be able to feel the rails’ camber bend, but it’ll be too late to do anything but get flattened.  A train doesn’t care if you’re in its way.  This fact is paramount.

2)      When you cross an empty line, look both ways twice and move across the track diagonally in four steps.  This is the minimum number anyone needs to move with any measure of safety: one step outside the rail on a secure tie, two between, and a fourth onto a tie on the other side.  You do this because no one wants to carry you and your broken ankle home.

3)      Respect the cars at all cost; they are not your personal jungle gym.  Never, ever go under a car. When you must climb over one, use the grab irons and ladders and always maintain three points of contact with the car.  Get up, across, and off as quickly, but as safely, as possible.  If you can go around the train to get to the other side, do it.  Climb only when necessary.

4)      Most importantly, always be aware of your surroundings.  Never wholly lose yourself in anything you’re doing.  Know at least two ways to get out of wherever you are and don’t hesitate to use one if you need to.  Safety has many meanings in a yard.

Within thirty minutes of the end of V’s lecture, we had crossed a narrow pedestrian bridge over the canal, moved through a muddy stretch of bare trees, and climbed a shallow rise.  Stopping at the top, V finally looked back with a half-chuckle and his creased brow unfurrowed in what I could only read as something that was at once relief and, at the same time, measured calm. A few short feet below us sat at least ten full lines of cars, their rust-mottled roofs stretching uninterrupted a good half-mile in either direction through the deserted yard.

V loped down the muddy bank toward the trains and held up a finger to silently say Wait here a minute. He looked both ways, twice; crossed, in four sure steps, the only empty line; stood with his face to a gleaming sun-yellow boxcar and looked around once more before waving me into the quiet yard.

            There’s a quick moment in Style Wars—Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant’s 1983 documentary on New York City subway graffiti culture—when one prolific artist, Donald “Dondi” White, attempts to describe the near-transcendental feeling that accompanies a visit to a train yard.  He says, “It’s like you’re in a yard of metal giants….  You’re, like, a little dude in the midst of all this metal and you’re here to produce something.”

            And while that specific reference point may have been located somewhere in one of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s subway storage yards, it’s a point that I came to see is mirrored in every train yard.  It’s a point where I found my tiny, squishy, breakable mortal body forced—or, actually, placed—in direct contact with countless tons of unfeeling metal that could, without any goading or even on a cold whim a mile down the track, squish and break that tiny body a hundred times over and never look back.  Fear can do a lot for reverence.  That’s why there was a definite reverential lilt to Dondi’s voice in the film and it’s the exact same reason for the little moth of anxiety that was fluttering its sturdy wings in the dip of my throat when V seemingly evaporated into the steely air of the yard.

I lost him after stopping to run my hand over the clean berry pink and apple green lines of some intricate piece of graffiti that, from a distance, proclaimed someone’s pseudonym, but from here just dissolved into looping swirls of color.  Or, he lost me. V was stopped looking closely at a drawing two cars in front of me just seconds before and then he was gone—that quickly, that quietly—and a chill of panic instantly rolled through me and left its ghost to shudder up and down my sweaty back.

I suddenly felt incredibly and utterly alone. I’d been around trains more than enough times, and had always thought it would be incredible to explore an entire yard overflowing with cars.  And it had been.  Here, standing quietly, were cars I had only seen in a blur as they passed at a crossing, cars from long-defunct railroads that were now called, honorifically, “fallen flags.”  I could touch their rusty sides and be connected with every place they’d been; I could read the penciled work orders some repairman had made—“doors lubed 10/89”—and wonder who had worked on it since.  And there were all the other things written or scratched or painted on the cars—nicknames, messages, political rants, a tic-tac-toe game started but never finished—that told me, reassuringly, that I wasn’t the first one to be next to this car. 

In fact, in the fifteen minutes we had been walking up and down the lines, I had finished an entire roll of film, reloaded, and was half way through a second.  Snapping photos of the cars’ details out on a line somewhere, even a secluded stretch of track, was one thing; but when there are suddenly cars all around, they close in and become something entirely different.

 The air in the interior of the yard, between the closely-laid lines, was colder than it had been on the outside and sunlight struggled to make its way even halfway down the cars’ sides.  I became desperately aware of the walls of metal that had been around me this whole time, the ones I hadn’t been paying attention to for want of capturing all the new angles and details being this deep into the yard afforded.  I didn’t even know where we were in the yard or how far down the lines we had gone before V disappeared; I was just following his casual footfalls, craning my neck like a tourist.

  I thought back to our first meeting and grew positive that he’d abandoned me with a spiteful laugh.  That he lured me out here as some sort of retribution for ditching him after the trestle those weeks ago.  I wondered if someone could be that spiteful.  Or maybe it was that he saw someone—a worker or a cop—and ran, got away, left me to be caught.  Maybe he even tried to signal me, say Quick, let’s get out of here! with some specific hand gesture that I never noticed. 

It was the same panic that accompanies the moment you understand you’re lost deep in the woods or in some city you’ve never been to before.  That separation from everything familiar and known.  I wanted to yell out, call to him in both anger and fear, and let him know that I knew he was still out there and that he was an asshole for taking off on me.  But as I took in the air to shout, I realized that if there was a worker or a cop somewhere nearby they’d surely know the layout of the yard better than I and catch me once they heard the false anger crack a little and echo around all the lifeless metal. 

So I did nothing but stand stock still.  The crows had flown from the trees and the sun had gone behind one of those thick winter clouds and made the growing shadows kick up the wind into sudden gusts strong enough to rattle the dangling metal security tags on the cars’ doors and make them sound like someone’s jingling keys. 

When the temperature rises or drops suddenly—in the bright early morning or when that brightness is quickly snuffed out—the very physical shape of the cars changes just a little. Their riveted and welded seams expand or contract by mere hundredths of a millimeter and send out high staccatos of discordant pings or low aching groans that, as I stood there wide-eyed and alert to every slightest noise or motion within ten feet, frightened me enough to push the pulse in my wrists to a pounding I could feel as those eerie songs careened around me.  But up ahead, beyond the fat belly of a black acid-etched tanker, or maybe a little behind me, on a line, or maybe two over, the rolling grumble of footsteps on ballast began to drown out every other sound. 

I invented arrest scenarios and figured out what I could sell to raise bail money.  I told myself I would be a first-time offender and would get by just fine as long as they didn’t make an example out of me.  But if they did?  In the hyper-cautious post-9/11 world, being too close to any large machine, if you didn’t belong there, was automatically suspicious; and I had read about overzealous railroads pushing for felony convictions of trespassers.  The fears of a terrorist derailing a few hundred cars were, surely, a bit reactionary; but when those cars could be holding millions of gallons of toxic chemicals, maybe there was something to worry about.

As quickly as I could, I dropped down onto my haunches, as if dodging something swung at my head, into what was little more than a standing fetal position, and peered under the cars to see where the sound was coming from.  This, V had told me, was the safest way to look around.  Hopping onto a ladder or platform or coupler on the end of a car wasn’t worth the risk and only added more obstacles if you did need to get out of there in a hurry.  Crouched with my hands on the large loose rocks, I was stable enough to scan the low horizon and swiveled my head as far at it would go, first right, toward what I remembered to be the yard’s entrance, and then left into its depths.  I found no one.

I stood like that for what felt like too long just trying to figure out what to do, whether or not I should just pick a direction and head that way in a straight line, hopping between cars until I got to the edge of the yard.  Once there I could follow the access road back, I figured. 

And then I was struck with the gleaming realization that I could get out. These weren’t impenetrable walls, I told myself; they only held me there as long as I let them. And when I again stood and looked around at the high metal sides of the cars, at the grimy old grey hoppers filled with barley or kitty litter or flour, at the freshly-painted boxcars that carried I didn’t know what, I felt a change, a new sense of security in their silent weight surrounding me. There, buttressed by so much potential energy, I began to see the odd calm and peace that is hidden in the train.  It was, I now realize, not unlike the serenity that accompanies a day-long hike, miles-long bike ride, or anything that pushes the body to a confrontation with what its owner thought were its limits, physical or mental.

All around me were the real things I had been photographing and idealizing.  They were hard and dangerous and covered in the dirt of labor, yes, but they were also dotted, more often than not, with paintings and drawings done by people who were not me, but who were like me, more like me than I had thought.  And all the places that they hadn’t written or painted on held the same potential for communication and contact. 

I took comfort in this and by the time I noticed that the footsteps had stopped and that the sun was beginning to crawl back out from behind the heavy clouds, the weight of panic had already fluttered away leaving me free to stroll down the line, deeper into the yard.  I raised my camera to my eye far less but saw more—the marks some worker’s boots had made on the rungs of the ladder; a handprint in the dust of a door; a sketch, like V’s, only much older and faded into the very paint of the car, that said “Water Bed Lou’s in Love.”

It wasn’t until my second lap of the innermost line that I finally saw the greasy cuffs and trail boots moving down the other side of the car next to me, trolling slowly back toward the far end of the train.  Their familiar long stride told me V was right there, that he had been no more than a couple lines away.

And, as if out of the air, the lightest sting of disappointment and loss appeared.  The feeling of being utterly alone, within tilted metal walls in what amounted to little more than a mile-long hallway barely three feet wide, evaporated entirely.  I’d had the opportunity to get out of there or to continue on, taking photos and exploring the foreign world for as long as I wanted by myself, and I embraced it.  Now with the appearance of another body, it was no longer me focused solely on myself.  Even though I had known that V was somewhere out there, his actual presence was only an idea.  He was no different from the boot marks or handprints I’d seen; he was no different than anything anyone—including him—may have written on the trains. 

This connection reached me as he did, with a half-chuckle that asked Where’ve you been this whole time?

Three

Delaware & Hudson—Binghamton, NY

            Even months later, after I had moved from Pennsylvania back to my old hometown in upstate New York, that double sense of being found and of finding something lingered on.  This was due, I’m sure, in no small part to the increasing frequency V and I had spent lurking around together before I finally left.  Each time we went to a new spot, or even one we were familiar with—like the old trestle or, what would be come to be called in the parlance of the railroad, the “hump” yard in Allentown—I’d felt more sure and aware of everything around me. It’s not that I had stopped looking at the larger train; the massive engines and long snakes of manifest cars still made my mind wander and heart jump a little.  But now, when I would walk next to the laid-up trains or even circle around a lone car left on its own, I looked more closely.

In New York, alone, in the deep cold of early March, I still went—in what came to be the shorthand for any activity around them—“down to the trains” on a near-daily basis.  I had done my homework, too.  Downloading satellite images from the internet and digging through street and surveyors’ maps had given a virtual guided tour of all the regional yards and trackage.  In no time I found that the old Delaware & Hudson yard—where long lines of cars would sit unattended waiting for locomotives to reassemble them or pick them up and move them to one of the four other yards around town—was just a short walk from my front door. 

And I would follow tracks for miles, walking their straight and snaking lines, only half expecting to find any cars and not minding too much if they never appeared.  The long walks down any newly-uncovered stretch—fourteen miles one day, ten another—took me into spaces that would have been mundane from the front seat of a car but, on foot, became new and foreign.  They were the lesser-seen pieces of the more familiar towns and cities that fell within an ever-widening circle of exploration.  Small, innocuous places like Sanitaria Springs and the epic-sounding (but diminutive) Steel City that I had hardly even heard of—barely dots on the map—suddenly took on an importance that, had I not marked them as reference points and mileposts on one long journey or another, would have, as far as I knew, remained invisible forever.

            There is something about coming across some forgotten or neglected thing, about finding a new town or field or burnt-out industrial area—any one of the thousand things that train tracks go past or through or near or around—that I can only describe as an odd mingling of trepidation and delight.  With every next step farther down the line into an unfamiliar space, I would feel an inherent loss of control that bred a certain fear and, at the same time, fostered it.  But my surprise that would manifest as open-air exclamations of “Where’d this come from?!” and “Who knew this was here?!” acted as a buffer to that fear and, more often than not, was a warm hand on my back that kept urging me on: just fifteen more minutes and then I’ll turn around, just to that next bend in the track, just to the other side of the bridge.  There is always just one more step and I’d usually have to force myself not to take it and head home.

            I figured out that I could go to the D&H yard in the morning after my wife had gone to work and walk up and down the lines with abandon, distracted only by the occasional shunting of a manifest or the windy rumble of a hotshot roaring westbound on the Canadian Pacific mainline that edged (and officially owned) the yard.  Through the winter, it served as the more-than-apt replacement for the busy Norfolk Southern one V and I had grown intimately familiar with.  New to me, though, was the snow that laid itself down on Binghamton nearly every night and how it would blanket the footprints I had made between the lines the day before; and mine were the only ones to disturb the whiteness that appeared that much more brilliant with the light sprinkling of anthracite dust that fell, itself like snow, from the hopper doors of the mile-long coal trains that trundled their way east throughout the cold months.  But any journey into the D&H yard had taken on a second purpose. 

            While there was always at least one scenic photo to take of the scrub- or wood- or wastelands that pop up around trains, there were dozens, sometime hundreds more to take of the train, of what was written on it.  The time (and miles) I had spent with V in the months prior to my prodigal return had quietly turned my lens more and more toward the drawings he was doing and the ones that had been done long before his.  I began to know the images and monikers—Bozo Texino, Herby, Colossus of Roads, The Rambler, Smokin’ Joe, The Solo Artist, and hundreds more—that began to pop up everywhere once they were pointed out to me. 

            I learned that some who drew these little icons were graffiti artists looking to broaden their media horizons; others were actual hoboes who still rode the rails as a way of life; and still others, most in fact, were just rail workers who could take advantage of their free time and access to train cars.  Looking closely, looking for them, really, revealed, in many cases that there were people all over the continent producing a wealth of these little things.  “New York Slim” was obvious; “The Rambler” was from Port Beaumont, Texas; “The Kodak Kidd” frequented northeast Pennsylvania; “Ozone” and “The Raven” were from Roseville, California; “Chad the Dogcatcher” worked in Enola, Pennsylvania; and “Virginia Zeke” spent a lot of his time in Richmond.

            Many of the cars that would run on Norfolk Southern trackage would end up riding the Canadian Pacific north and it was likely that V and I, although hundreds of miles apart now, saw many of the same cars in our yards.  So I began to notice V’s flapping flag design appearing more frequently, too.  Older ones that had faded and weathered sometimes looked like they’d melted into the very metal of the car; others had been covered by indifferent graffiti writers or repairmen who had to put a new company logo or tracking number over them.  The new ones he had been brazenly applying when we went out shone bright white or deep black—he used only these two colors—on dark- or light-colored cars.

            When I asked him why he used this specific design, he explained that the flag itself was an old logo for the Lehigh Valley Railroad—a local favorite—but co-opted and made personal with a lone V instead of the original L.V. in the diamond.  He said that there were probably thousands of these little flags flying on cars and that he had found out through online photo sharing sites that a few had even made it all the way out to California, Texas, and British Columbia, places he himself had never been to and likely never would.

            I’d seen it plenty of times.  The actual drawing took only a few seconds, but each one was neatly crafted; the speed came from repetition, not a disregard for precision.  Every line was of equal importance—from the circle that would become the ball on the top of the flagpole to the symmetrical diamond in the center of the flag—and there was an undeniable craftsmanship in V’s method of first sharpening the paint stick with a pocket knife before standing mere inches away with his left hand on the car and drawing the image at eye-level. 

            I stood close a few times and saw the soft pigment of the crayon melt on sun-warmed paint of the car and his hand adapt to the effects of the heat by twisting as he drew, like an architect or draftsman spins a pencil to always keep it sharp. And when V tossed half a broken paint stick to me and lifted his chin in the direction of a hulking white refrigerator car, I didn’t know what I was supposed to write.  Bands I liked flashed through my head, as did brands of beer and the initials of a girl I loved, lists of vulgarities, political views, and the image of a goofy-looking dog I used to draw on my notebooks in fourth grade—none of which felt like they were the right thing to put on the side of a train.  There is a temptation that accompanies every blank space and I felt the urge to fill this blank space with an image that meant something to me, something that could be, like all the names I’d seen often enough to feel like I knew them personally, a moniker, an alter-ego of some kind.

Winding my way among the cars in the snow-coated yard, I would often stop to look back down the lines just to see the prints I had made and wonder what someone coming across them would think.  Would they see the back-and-forth zigzags and assume some brakeman was just doing his job, walking the lengths of the trains to inspect the cars?  Would they think it was some kids from the working-class neighborhood that abutted the yard playing around on their own industrial jungle gym? 

If I could choose, I would want them to follow my tracks, putting a foot first in one then the next, taking a few slow steps next to a train then crossing to another to stand — like I did — and face the car.  If they looked up from the prints they were following they would see my quick sketch of a pompadoured guy with Xs for eyes and a pair of crossed train tracks behind him drawn by someone called The Coal Spur Kid. 

Then maybe they would conjure up a story for that guy they’d seen on the side of the car and, in telling it, carry him on to someplace new.

* * *

Selected Works Consulted

 Abel, Allen. “The Art of Vandalism.” Saturday Night magazine (n.d.), archived on North Bank Fred: Freighthopping, Hoboes, Boxcar Art <http://www.northbankfred.com/canada>

Butler, Russell. “Steel Road, Evanescent Route: My Life on the Line—the Railroad Line” (n.d.), archived on Michael Poulin’s BoxcarArt.com <http://www.geocities.com/boxcarart101/colossusinterview.html>

Cooper, Bruce C.  Riding the Transcontinental Rails: Overland Travel on the Pacific Railroad 1865­-1881.  Philadelphia: Polyglot Press, 2004.

Daniel, Bill.  “Monikers and the like.” Personal email, 2 Feb. 2005.

————.  Who is Bozo Texino?  Dir. Bill Daniel, Prod. Bill Daniel. DVD. 2005.

Gastman, Roger, Darin Rowland, and Ian Sattler. Freight Train Graffiti. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006.

 Hultrans, Andrew. “The Mark of Bozo.” Stim magazine, vol. 1, no. 2 (June 1996), archived on Stim Online <http://www.stim.com/stim-x/0696june/features/hobo.html>

 Kaplan, Eben.  “Rail Security and the Terrorist Threat.” Backgrounder.  Council on Foreign Relations online, 3-12-07 <http://www.cfr.org/publication/12800/rail_security_and_the_terrorist_threat.html>

Kerlansky, Mervyn, and Jon Narr with text by Norman Mailer. The Faith of Graffiti. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974.

 London, Jack. The Road. Archived on the Jack London Online Collection <http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/TheRoad/>

 McKay, J.R. “Bozo Texino.” On Mainline Mac’s Homepage <http://www.geocities.com/lokomac8/bozo.htm>

Parlsen, David. “Art or vandalism, railcar graffiti roll across the land.” Wausau (WI) Daily Herald, 6 Jan, 2004, p. 1A.

Poulin, Michael. “Beer and Boxcars: An Interview with Hollywood and Rum Runner” (n.d.), archived on Michael Poulin’s BoxcarArt.com <http://www.geocities.com/boxcarart101/colossusinterview.html>

 Silver, Tony, and Henry Chalfant. Style Wars. Dir. Tony Silver, Prod. Silver and Chalfant. DVD. Plexifilm 2003.

Trackside, Mick. “Freights & Chalk.” Personal email, 31 Jan. 2005.

Appendix

Bozo Texino, no date

The Kodak Kidd, Trackside, September 2001

Colossus of Roads, VTV=OS, not dated

Smokin' Joe, #13,975, January 1996

Herby, January 25, 1977

The Rambler, August 18, 1993

V -- Steam Train Maury Tribute, November 18, 2006

About CNF

In relation to the natural world …

Editor’s Statement

Ragazine’s inaugural creative non-fiction section brings together the kind of writing I would most like to see:  grounded, compelling first-person narration set in a concrete time and place that reflects thematically some way on the human relation to the natural world and the ways we’ve transformed that world, and in the process, transformed ourselves.  Creative non-fiction is an expansive genre that spans narrative history, literary journalism, narrative non-fiction, the personal essay, memoir, and probably many other sub-categories I’m forgetting, but the kind of writing I welcome you to submit to Ragazine should focus on the previously mentioned themes in some broad sense. 

 The writers in this issue, Burns, Guignard, and Beckman, all write about limit experiences:  those times, and places, where they step outside their mundane realities and become something else, something wonderful, pulsing, more fully alive.  From the intense drive of the bicyclist using heart, lungs, and thighs to push himself one more mile to the woman hiking into the wild alone to weather the coming storm as an animal would, to the train yard haunter who has finally made it into the inner circle of the graffiti artists whose canvases are the trains, these pieces are an excursion outside of our daily lives, a trip to different edges where all roads lead back to lives more deeply examined and fully lived.  They are perfect to inaugurate the creative non-fiction section of Ragazine, and stand as the kind of art so many of us would like to live, and write. 

 The editor, Leslie Heywood, is the author of Pretty Good for a Girl:  A Memoir (The Free Press/Simon & Schuster), Natural Selection:  Poems  (Louisiana Literature Press); The Proving Grounds:  Poems (Red Hen Press), and many shorter works of creative non-fiction as well as academic writing.  She is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Binghamton University, and has particular interests in nature and science writing.  She is working on High Wolf Content, a book of creative non-fiction about a woman at a crossroads who travels the country with her wolf to make a choice, writing that includes personal narrative as well as an account of the history of the human/wolf relationship and the theory of human/wolf co-evolution. 

Submissions and Questions:  ragazine.cnf@gmail.com, or leslie.heywood@gmail.com