The Secret Lives of a Fallow Farm

We don’t have big, long-maned, heritage workhorses to shake their harnesses in the barn.  We don’t have horses at all.  We don’t have dairy cows in the old milking shed along the back of the tall barn, nor goats in the area behind the workbench and tack stalls, where the pigpen used to be. Chickens are all the rage among urban backyarders and back-to-the-farmers. Sometimes when Harry comes for a drink and dinner, or to consult about something, he brings a dozen eggs.  They are lovely; not brown and not white but blue, and pale aquamarine, and a greenish-pastel, and the yokes are a dense, supersaturated yellow.  Sometimes they taste, faintly, of coffee grounds or even melon; the chickens have broken into the garbage again, or the peacocks did, or the coyotes, and the chickens finished the job.

We aren’t growing organic kale or arugula or squash or sweet corn.  When they come into season we stop at Gill’s on 209 on our way into Kingston to get the oil changed or pick up primer at the Home Depot or make a party run at the discount liquor store. Cindy Gill stands at the counter, a flowered apron over her blouse and shorts, and rings up the pile of eggplants and peppers and squashes and beets and the corn and maybe we’ll be eating a roast ear we took from the Igloo that serves now not as a cooler but as a keep-warm and a steam-finisher for the ears that came out of the roaster.  That’s on Fridays and Saturdays and especially Sundays, when the weekenders make it worth their while to fire up the roaster, and the parking lot is full of Audis and Mercedes Benzes and BMWs and Priuses and upscale SUVS, and Cindy looks sympathetically over the heads of those stocking up for a week back in the city, as their children, already restless and viscerally anticipating the long, dreadful traffic jam that is the Thruway down to the Palisades Parkway and the GW Bridge, or to 17 and, eventually, the Holland Tunnel, misbehave in ways that remind you of the travail of parents not quite wealthy enough to have au pairs or nannies from Ireland, but too immersed in their own lives and the life of the City to have yet learned that it is their responsibility to control their children in places where heirloom tomatoes fall easily onto the concrete floor or, if their children commit such indiscretions, that they are responsible for apologizing, for making at least an effort to clean up, for paying for what exploded rich and red or yellow, sweet with juice no one will now revel in, onto the rough stained floor. We look back at Cindy with equal sympathy, and we sometimes break our own rules and get the paper towels from the rack by the onions and mop up the lost treasure and put it in the trash can behind the cash register.

Here’s what we do have. We have a hayfield.  In the late spring and early summer, close to a hundred redwing blackbirds will make their nests there, and they will perch, watchfully, prepared to mob the hawk should it try for the nestlings.  We have the hawk, a redtail, and his partner, whom we see less often, for she, too, is nesting just into the woodlot that separates our land and Harry’s. We have acres of milkweed dense along the edges of the hayfield, and many more individuals interspersed in the tall grasses at the middle, where the slight rise separates one spring flood-stream from the next. We have a snapping turtle who has laid her eggs in the remnants of the old woodpile, where the branches collected each spring after the winter blizzards, and every fall after the hurricane season, pile each year, providing kindling for the fireplaces and, every few years, the necessity of a burn pile, when the county lifts its moratorium, and the volunteer firemen are sure they won’t be overwhelmed by calls from those who can’t seem to understand that a burn should be far from the house and the garage, without dry hayfield surrounding the pile, waiting to carry the flames to woodlot or chicken coop.

We have seasonal visitors, we have sojourners, we have seasonal guests and fulltime residents. In the early spring, the sky darkens with waves of geese moving north. A pair of mergansers nests in the still pool where the creek has moved after the last big hurricane redirected its flow, carved out the swimming hole, and sent chunks of someone’s toolshed to rest atop the rusted remnants of a Model A Ford pickup truck and the inner drum of an old washing machine, back where the skunk cabbage and the ferns and the wild raspberry and rose hide things till the late fall and the scouring of life that leaves only the hulks and hulls and memories of things that come and go or perch or die here with us.

We have fish in the creek, so Harry assures us, though I’ve never seen one.  What I have seen are the crayfish, who explode from their muddy camouflage when your shadow crosses their habitat. Once a man came around the back and I heard the hollow knock and rattle of the unlatched screen from up the barn, as older neighbors say it, and I came down to see what he might want.  Georgie was still alive then, though old, and her barking had only a shadow of its old ferocity.  He had netted crayfish with his stepfather down there, and it had good memories for him.  Something he said, about learning to trust the new man and his slow, near-silent ways.  Now he had his daughter just on weekends; would we consider letting him bring her down there some Saturday or Sunday to see the place he and her grandpa had come to know, and to know each other?  Of course, I said, and you should bring your net if you’ve got one.  We don’t catch them ourselves; you would be welcome.  It was more than a couple of months, but one late-August afternoon I saw him skirting the house, following the line where cut grass met hayfield, a young girl, maybe eleven or twelve, striding in his footsteps, down to the creek, a net, the sort you might buy in a Walmart or a Dollar Store, in her hayfield-side hand. That was years ago; sometimes we see his truck parked on the side of the road, on the triangle of property the other side of the bridge, orphan land that should by rights be part of Harry’s clover field, but is ours because the properties were platted back in 1780 and the creek ran straighter, its boundary-banks a hundred yards the other side of where we are now. Once, not long ago, I went out to warn them of the poison ivy pressing up against the shoulder of the road, and I saw a teenage girl, tall and shy, sitting in the driver’s seat of the truck now rusted out below the door panels, her father a passenger, holding the nets across his lap.  I walked past without speaking to them; it was a moment close to holy and I wasn’t going to break its spell.

Harm hays the field once a summer, sometimes twice if the later season has good rain and sun.  He could do the first haying early, and be assured of two cuts, but we and he have decided it’s better to let the nestlings have full term to leave, and to allow the other nests and secrets to be undisturbed. The milkweeds in midfield, too, can shelter early Monarchs, leaving greater area for the brilliant yellow and black to flash in the evening light.

Dragonflies and dumb wasps who come into the studio and pound their lives out against the screens until I give up, leave the keyboard or set the guitar back in its case, and go out back to loosen the screen and free the desperate grotesque to fly, dazed and disoriented, out into the hayfield or over to the milkweed patch that crowds the edge of the milkpail room where her studio stands orderly and still. Barn swallows who swoop, dive and disappear into the eaves. Snakes under the barn, under the kitchen, under the library, writhing quickly back into the field from the cut grass where they’ve been sunning themselves on the flat edge of the glacial bedrock that emerges, here and there, across the property. A blue heron who comes and goes.  A bald eagle whose nest is down at Harry’s other farm, above the place where our creek emerges from Pompey’s cave, meanders down the other side of Lucas Turnpike, and loses itself in the Rondout; he comes when Harm is haying, leaving the redtails wary and then if nothing large enough to interest him has emerged from behind the haymow, tenders the field back to the hawks and, a day or so later, the turkey vultures in for the dead snakes and the voles and fieldmice cut, bled and dead at the hands of farm machinery. Their doubly hostile names notwithstanding, they are beautiful in the air, their descents languid and geometric, though once they land their ugliness is quickly apparent to the weekenders who stop along the road above to photograph the rustic scene, Harm’s ancient tractors and the baler still boasting the name of a company long bankrupt, its brand not even valuable enough to merit purchase by some Chinese manufacturer who has taken over the business of making things that are used to make things.

Groundhogs, lumbering, insulted, into the dense growth on this side of the creek down past the Purple Martin house and the new river birches just now establishing themselves. A mink, last year; we thought he was an otter but he was too small, too quick, too inquisitive. That blue heron who takes up for a time, awakening me of mornings with his fatalistic, disgruntled cries as he arises from the nesting area to head for the Rondout where the better fish are found. Gnats, swarms of them, vibrating in the hot air below the eaves of the barn. White butterflies that float and flit above the mulch when she has been watering, or in the well beneath the newly planted river birch that replaces the willow downed in the great storm. Viceroys, miniature versions of the Monarchs. 

Ours is not a farm, though we call it that. We have no fantasies of a hardy, self-reliant life, in which we might reclaim some romance-novel picture of a homesteader or pioneer, tanning the hides of the cows too old to offer milk, cutting patches for the old shoes or panels to be sewn into capes and pantaloons. Our lives are devoted to the opposite of self-reliance, to mutual dependency, to trading and buying, to diversity and a healthy respect for the specialties and vocations of others.  Cindy Gill and her family, and the Davenports closer in to town, and the Sheehans, and little Amy with her organic stand selling just three or four things:  these are the people who provide us the greens and the squashes and the corn too sweet to be tender, requiring that we find the toothpicks after the last ear is done and the cobs are in the bag to be tossed with the other cuttings and leavings, down in the growth by the little willow, at the creek’s edge. Young Bush, Wayne Junior, hunts our property in the season, and sometime in late fall he brings us venison cut and wrapped in butcher paper, the contents scripted in wide magic marker:  Stew Meat. Steak. Burger. Charles Noble has 70 head of cattle who migrate across the open meadows of the wealthy weekenders, people from the city, in financial, who are charmed by the lowing and the sight of the small herd seen on a Saturday morning from the back porch. To get from one pasturage to another, he has arranged to cross our hayfield, and the herd stays overnight down in the lower reaches, where Harm doesn’t hay.  In the spring, after the slaughter, he or Francesca stop by with the charmingly packaged cuts, vacuum-packed and frozen, their brand, Moveable Beast, perfect for sale in the Manhattan farmers’ markets where they make their money, and the locavore restaurants down in Red Hook and Brooklyn and up in Harlem, where the population’s hip enough, and rich enough, for their particular culinary braggadocio.

What do we offer in return?  Buffer, recompense, reparation, even penance. Across the Rondout, on the Schoonmaker’s farm, the cropduster whines and roars; to make its runs, it must return across the edge of our woodlot, where, each first time of the season, we are sure it is too low and will clip the tall oak and crash. That sweet corn is better than the ears we get, or at least more tender, if a bit less sweet.  Like Charles’s tenderloin and Amy’s organic arugula and the Davenport’s tiny, misshapen eggplants of brilliant and unexpected hues and patterns like snake-skin or butterfly wing, like the Gills’ heirloom tomatoes and Peter Lundgren’s honey, these crops will make their way down to the city to feed the fashionable and the fickle. The big farms have sequestered areas for organic growing, and they are far more careful with what they spray, and where, and when, on the rest.  But this is still farm country, where ploughing edge-to-edge, where draining a wetland, where growing to the demands of market and not the ideals of diversity can be the difference between an economy-class winter cruise to the Caribbean and a bankruptcy sale in the equipment shed by the highway.

Five years ago, the barn was filled with bats.  In the twilight, they would emerge, black clouds against the deep azure of the near-dark sky, racing along the grass and above the meadow and down by the creek, erasing the air of mosquitos. They are all gone, now. Three years ago at this time, the milkweed patches were thick with Monarchs; yesterday I saw my second of the season, or perhaps the third.  Each year we look, a bit fearfully, for the ungainly first landing of the heron, listen pointedly each morning for the drumroll made by the pileated woodpecker on the hollow of the dead tree where our woodlot meets Harry’s.

The bees are back; Peter Lundgren is secretive and a bit smug about his cure for Colony Collapse Disorder; he should be, since in this scarcity economy he can charge goldbug prices for his wild honey. Our clover, our wildflowers, cacophonies of color down at the edge of the wetlands, are noisy with his bees on the right afternoon, in the right month or week.  He brings us a tub of honey when he comes by to argue Puritan theology with me after the harvest season has begun to wind down and before the deer hunting season has begun.  There’s a few weeks in the late fall when he comes by not often, but more often, the old pickup packed with beekeeper’s equipage piled disorderly from bounding around in the fields between hives and colonies, pulled into the driveway, while he waits to see if I will emerge from the house or studio, having time to talk of theological precisions few others could tolerate.  I was at one time a scholar of the Mathers and the Winthrops and the others who defined a steely intrepid way of conceiving human life, in New England.  A boy of ten, I received my own Bible from Reverend North in the nave of the First Congregational Church in Guilford, Connecticut, the prize for memorizing all the books of the Bible, plus two long passages, one from the Old, one from the New Testament, and reciting to the Sunday School class four separate Psalms, one each Sunday for a month, assigned to me by the assistant minister, a theology student at Yale who came out to train and who, while kind, remained unmemorable.  His name is lost to me, but Reverend North’s is not, for he preached the old Puritan way: uncompromising, with no effort at rhetoric, building his sermons on a logic so clear and so unyielding that all of my writing since has been made to construct its opposites.  I write not like the iron law of the Heavens but like the unruly vines that keep the dog from marching unimpeded through the undergrowth down to the fast and dangerous part of the creek. 

Peter’s bent is different; he came here from Minot, North Dakota to train as a poet at the college, and somewhere the language of the Bible possessed him fully; now he is the rebbe of a tiny congregation replicating the church of the first years after Christ’s death. He accuses me of Antinomianism or, worse, pantheism; I suggest certain fallacies in his doctrine; we talk of our grown or near-grown children and the perils they will face. Then he starts the old black Dakota, and all the tools, the hoods, the gloves, the boots, and the spare screens and the roll of wirenet and the pruning shears rattle and shake in the back till the carburetor steps back from the precipice of vapor-lock and the engine steadies, and he lets in the clutch and heads for home.

The bees are back, but the bats are not, and each year the Monarchs have shown fewer and fewer.  We are, I said, recompense and reparation; not just us, but many others up here, for whom the land is not a picturesque escape or a romantic folly-in-the-making or simply scenery to be photographed from the side of our road, Harm’s old tractor on one side of the frame, balanced on the other by the loom of our tall, asymmetrical barn and, beyond it, the low outlines of the old house with its red metal roof an appropriate contrast to the deep blue of the summer sky. Paul and Sarah at the top of the ridge, his hammer echoing across the valley as he repairs the ancient barn, her screen door slamming as she goes out to dump the garbage in the composter; Harry with his vineyards and his clover fields, great swaths of his property  left to scrub or meadow, slow-emerging woodlot and untouched riverbanks unvisited by the dangerous unpredictability of human tourism. The bald eagle is back, after forty years. The mink is perhaps a harbinger.

I don’t know what it is I do here.  I have little to show, if wild honey or the venison or the eggplant are the particularities against which I must measure what I make.  Perhaps it is enough to witness; perhaps it is enough to listen hard and stare relentlessly and seek faithfully to do honor to the waves of wind across the hayfield, the bowl of the night sky and the torn curtain of the stars. It’s all I have, and so I offer it.  

Good Guys, Bad Guys, and Loss of American Mission

I have been very busy this last couple of weeks at my new job as an American hero.  Last night, in the midst of a desperate firefight involving violent jihadists attempting to take over an abandoned Soviet missile site that was, CIA informed the SEAL commander, still weaponized, I carried a wounded medic on my shoulders, fording an icy stream while my colleagues provided cover with AR-15s and an RPG-launcher.  It was nighttime and my night-vision goggles turned the scene an eerie pixilated monochromatic green. Earlier, I had been heli-dropped into a Middle Eastern desert city—I was just a soldier:  they didn’t tell me what city, or even what country it was, just that we were going in after some bad guys.  With my radio picking up the chatter of my fellow grunts, I went house-to-house trying not to engage innocent civilians, though it seemed there weren’t any—even the young women hid machine pistols under their flowing robes.

When the Newtown, Connecticut elementary school shooting occurred a few weeks ago, there was a brief silence from the shill-organization for the major weapons industry.  Most Americans have heard, though far fewer believe it, that the National Rifle Association is actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of the major American arms manufacturers.  That interruption in shrill declarations of a constitutional apocalypse soon to come from jackbooted federal gun-confiscators was a dead give-away to the power behind the organization.  No genuine American sodality could have remained quiet in the face of such horror; corporations, however, are not human and so they operate under the rules of efficiency found in algorithms and statistics about the depth and longevity of citizen response to actionable tragedy, and unrecorded phone conversations with the congressmen and senators they have bought and paid for.

For nearly twenty years, I directed and served as a principal faculty member for an international institute on American culture and life.  It was a vocation I happened upon, and it took a little time for me to realize just what was entailed.  Every summer, 30 or so teachers, teacher-trainers, university faculty members and education-ministry specialists would arrive for six weeks of intensive training on the current state of the study of the United States.  Early on, I and my colleagues thought it was our mission to provide high-order scholarly briefs on new trends in scholarship here in America.  What we learned was that this was not even remotely the job that needed to be done. As my friend and fellow faculty member Christian Messenger (great name for an Americanist!) declared, it was “our privilege to explain America to the world.” But even that wasn’t right.  We learned that the subject, the verb and the predicate of that statement were all laughably imprecise. We didn’t know America, at least not the America that came to be the subject of the Institute.  And so “explaining” was not a responsible activity.  Moreover, the world that sat around us in the blandly efficient classroom wasn’t a monolith, and it certainly wasn’t going to sit still and drink in our wisdom.

 

Our constituency arrived, over the life of the Institute, from almost every country on the globe.  We despaired of ever getting a Cuban, till one day Frank arrived;  not only that, but his cousin ran an excellent Cuban restaurant in Chicago, and Frank had already mapped out an itinerary for himself with the help of the surreptitious extended network of Cuban-Americans in the area. Was it Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan or Turkmenistan from which tiny Yana arrived, with only a pair of high-heeled slippers (despite our instructions to all to pack “sturdy walking and hiking shoes”) with which she hiked the Petroglyph Trail at Mesa Verde National Monument and managed to get herself left behind accidentally-on-purpose in a truck stop outside Gallup, New Mexico, where she was surrounded by handsome, cowboy-booted truck drivers with whom she demurely flirted while showing them pictures of her home country?

There were America-loving Provencal teachers and America-hating Egyptian school principals, and we quickly found ourselves baffled by the Americas of both.  They didn’t resemble in any way the worlds within which we lived—and we were a pretty motley crew of Americans:  a guitar-playing country boy with a Ph.D. from Austin, Texas, and a Peace Corps alumnus from New England via Ethiopia, and a political scientist who’d grown up in the high-rise projects in Chicago and was, with his wife and his mother and a few sisters, still fostering an average of ten kids at a time.  There was a lesbian economist and a neoconservative historian and a libertarian specialist on architecture and the city. Why the Department of State kept funding us, year after year, seemed a strange miracle to us.  We thrived under the first George H.W. Bush administration, and we thrived in the Clinton years and we thrived under George W. Bush and we thrived in the first Obama administration.  The Great Recession finally killed us off—we couldn’t build a program in Chicago that could compete with isolated state-college campuses in places we didn’t even consider for our road trips.  We had a good run of it.  We put the documents in front of our participants-- Dred Scott and The Declaration of  Independence and The Plow that Broke The Plains and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and The Great Gatsby and The Statistical Atlas of the United States.  We took them to black gospel churches and 4th of July picnics and corporate law offices.  They listened to Navajo hat'aali and James Brown and Los Lobos and Dwight Yoakam, whose Guitars, Cadillacs and Hillbilly Music was a favorite of the woman from Senegal who won our "how many languages do you speak" that year-- 1987, with a still-unmatched record of 27-- not counting a few dialects here and there. She was the first person to click Xhosa to me-- a language my daughter now speaks with some imprecision.

One of my jobs as Director was to serve as the teaching faculty member during the two-plus week tours of the U.S.A. that culminated each program.  Though there was a running joke that a lecture by me on the subject of the changing vertical ecosystems of the Rocky Mountain Plateau after a big Southwestern tamale lunch at a diner on the Res was the best way to guarantee a long nap, I grew to love the work of close observation as we passed through small towns and big cities, ranchlands and industrial parks, weaving together the fabric that was this country to which I had devoted my intellectual and creative life.  After it was over, the alumni of those Institutes that had developed close-knit and continuing virtual Institutes via Facebook and websites extracted from me a promise to continue my tourbus lectures. 

That was what began this series of essays.  I warned those alumni that I wasn’t going to go political on them.  That I would remain what I had always sought to be—a quizzical observer, pointing out the hidden significance of the details of everyday American life. 

When the National Rifle Association’s shill, a man named Wayne LaPierre, gave his stump-speech after the Newtown murders of small schoolchildren by an automatic-weapon-toting young man, I struggled to keep my promise. 

I am going to skirt as close as I can to the edge;  I’m going to use a deeply personal voice to keep from seeming to throw some academic weight to what follows. 

I was raised in the woods and farmlands of Connecticut.  My father came from Mormon rancher stock, from the foothill communities outside of Salt Lake City.  My mother’s family came from Mille Lac, Minnesota.  Every one of them owned guns, hunted deer and turkey with them, shot snakes and coyotes when necessary.  My grandfather’s World War I service revolver was in a canvas bag in the attic of my house.  My father’s service weapon turned out to be up there too—we found it when going through his boxes after he died.  I had a bb gun, then a pellet gun, then a .22 rifle.  My Boy Scout troop master taught me to target shoot, and I once won a turkey in a turkey shoot in North Guilford, Connecticut.  I was probably 13. The Bushes, Wayne and Wayne Jr., hunt deer on our farm, and we get a portion of the venison in return.  We are glad to see the overpopulation of deer, who infect the dogs and the people with Lyme Disease and wander into the road to cause bad crashes and who die of starvation or parasites:  we are glad to see it diminished, though not enough, by the New York State hunting season. 

Some years ago, a dear friend who is a bit of a gun nut took me to a range to shoot, after an interval of two or more decades of increasing rustiness at the task.  We were shooting at targets with pistols, and it was fun—a sport requiring precision and strength and intense concentration and an affinity between self and machine that’s not dissimilar to road cycling, though less demanding and less thrilling, by my lights.

But what struck me that day, and the days after that at the range, was that there seemed an inordinate number of fellow range-users who had what can most charitably be called paranoid ideation.  They were convinced the economic apocalypse was upon us and only a hoard of heavy weaponry would protect them.  They believed that jackbooted federal officials were conspiring to take not just their weaponry but their houses, their trucks, their children. They believed that crazy-haired black teen thugs were at any moment going to drive out of the city to rape their daughters.

All of them had very specific accounts of people very close to them who had been attacked in some way and saved from death or worse only by brandishing or actually shooting their weapons at shadowy marauders.  None of them could tell me just who it was this had happened to.  If they claimed it had happened to them, they couldn’t tell me when, or where, and when I asked, in what I thought was a tone that mixed curiosity and naivete, they became increasingly agitated and threatening. 

There are many documented cases where this scenario either took place, or was alleged to have taken place.  One site, gunssavelives.net has recorded over a thousand reports involving homeowners, residents, shopkeepers, carjack victims and vigilant citizens whose weapons killed, wounded, caused to surrender, or scared away bad guys.

But the count reaches back more than a year and a half. In 19 months, across the entire U.S. guns have purportedly beaten back the bad guys just over a thousand times. Around fifty a month.

There are two glaring problems with this statistic.  There are close to 115 million households in the U.S. Just in sheer numbers, guns have saved .00096% of households over an 18 month period. As important, the number of households saved is just about 20% fewer than the number of households in which a member was accidentally killed by a gun in the house.

There’s more to this.  If you read the stories in gunssavelives.net, you notice pretty quickly that the notion of salvation by guns is pretty flexible.  One homeowner shot a man whom he reported was attempting to break into his house;  he killed him after, he reported, the man refused to leave despite repeated warnings.  But an onlooker who had noticed the man earlier looking into parked cars and come out with a baseball bat to scare him away decided it wasn’t an issue-- the man was talking to his hand and yelling incoherently.  The onlooker then watched as the man approached and began banging on doors;  the last one he banged on was the one with the armed family protector on the other side. 

In report after report, home protectors provided the reports, often with no corroborating evidence.  Many of the cases read disconcertingly like that of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager who was talking to his girlfriend on the cell phone inside the gated community where he was living, and was shot in what a community-protector called self-defense. 

This is the issue of disproportionality:  most of the cases I’ve read in a random sampling of those on gunssavelives.net involved unarmed “home invaders”—read, burglars, breakin-thieves, or smash-and-grabbers—shot and often killed by multiple gunshots. 

And it is the reason, I think, that Wayne Lapierre, mouthpiece of the gun industry, broke the silence of the N.R.A. with a statement crafted entirely around the concept of “bad guys” and “good guys.”  The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, Lapierre declared.  The disproportionality of gun use—unarmed, nonviolent criminals or even noncriminals mistaken for criminals and shot—cannot be allowed to stand.  The moral argument evens the score:  one bad guy/one good guy.

In fact, many of the stories on gunssavelives.net concern lone individuals heroically holding off more than one bad guy.  This is also very useful as arguments go.  It sets the shooter as the victim of disproportionality.  It defines the gun as the great equalizer, as it’s often called by gun advocates.  And it links often-sordid, trivial confrontations of today within the context of America’s long mythos of the Western.  Each one of these home protectors carries the mantle of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and Gary Cooper.

Wayne Lapierre’s diatribe about the Newtown shootings focused on violent video games and movies that, he said, emboldened and incited bad guys to action.  I’m ready to grant that premise, on one condition—that Wayne Lapierre concede the corollary—that the shootings of unarmed people in the names of home-defense, that the accidental deaths and injuries of gun-household children,  that the numerous self-inflicted injuries by incompetent or inexperienced gun users, and the violent deaths of partners, spouses, friends and houseguests by gunowners: all be placed at the feet of the American mythos of the Western. 

Let’s return to that other, brushed-aside circumstance:  killings of family members by family members.  I don’t have good statistics on this at the moment.  What I do have dates back to 1995, when just around 1,500 households saw one adult member kill another.  As far as I can tell, about ¼ of these deaths were by firearm.  I don’t have statistics on the number of children killed by adults in their household.  I don’t have statistics on the number of forcible rapes by gun-owning family members occurred, either.  Or the number of children killed by other children in the house by a gun left there conveniently close in case of home invaders-- loaded and ready, in the bedside table drawer, or under the mattress or pillow, or on top of the dresser.

. 

What has emerged from my recent obsession with gun-violence data in the United States, is this.  There seem to be three broad categories of gun owner in America.  By far the largest consists of people like me, and like my neighbors:  gun owners whose guns are used for the purposes of hunting or, in some cases, recreational shooting—from target practice to skeet  to the annual Thanksgiving Turkey Shoot.  At the opposite extreme is a smaller but much noisier group of people who see the world as a place out to get them or theirs, and who view guns—big guns—as their only recourse.  This group believes itself to comprise the good guys.  What’s disturbing is that increasingly they are pushing those who don't embrace their vision into that other role:  bad guys. In their eyes, I'm a bad guy. I threaten them.  I need to be protected against.  Maybe, soon, I and mine need to be taken out.

But I'm not worried.  After all, there is my own recent change of identity, from bad guy to good guy.  I’ve achieved this magical conversion by shooting down dangerous foreigners, murderous children (Arabs, so it’s ok), bomb-wielding women (Muslim), and, most recently (in Call of Duty: Black Ops) buffoonishly incompetent African Negro rebels and marauders whose faces seem drawn from Amos and Andy as much as from Muammar Gaddafi or Idi Amin Dada. Playing those games, I appear to be embracing their strange, paranoid vision, in which Americans are always good guys and everyone else... well...

I do not see in these digital bad guy  faces any resemblance to my friends the world over—to Assam, to Yana, or Hiram, or Mohammed or Mamadou—men and women who teach small children and sullen teenagers and overly-materialistic university students and overly-obtuse graduate students, men and women who look at America as a place of failing promise, and who worry about us. 

Consider that, Wayne Lapierre.  All over the world, good-hearted people who love this nation and its heritage and promise are worrying about us.  They aren’t worried that we’re not fighting enough wars, or that our drones aren’t killing enough bad guys or that we aren’t going to enter a small, insecure nation and attempt to eradicate its questionable nuclear capability, or threaten and bully another much like it until it starves its people to death and decides to nuke Japan.  They aren't worried that we're losing our masculinity as a nation.  They don't think that, without our rocket propelled grenades in their nation's capital all will fail.

They're worried we've lost our way. They are worried that we’re caricaturing our own Constitution and trivializing its humanity-uplifting propositions while celebrating its long-outmoded trivial features. They’re worried that American toleration of rage and intolerance and paranoia inside our border is undercutting the very doctrine of skeptical tolerance at the heart of the American Experiment.

They're worried that it's not just a small marginal minority that has abandoned evidence-based thinking or critical thinking in the name of bizarre, Judeo-Christian-seeming  jihadist fundamentalisms, whether in Kiryas Joel, New York or Waco, Texas.  They fear our increasingly paranoid behavior at home and abroad has already destroyed our ability to set an example in the world for fairness, kindness, generosity, hope, opportunity, tolerance and welcome. They worry we have lost our way and they wonder how any other nation or civilization can take our place.

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.  The eyes of all people are upon us.  So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world… We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till be be consumed out of the good land…

Therefore let us choose life

That we and our seed may live…

John Winthrop, aboard the Massachusetts Bay Colony ship Arbella, on the way to America, 1630

Finding the Tea Party at Bulgers Hollow-Thompson Campground, Iowa

Bulgers Hollow-Thompson Campground, Army Corps of Engineers, NNE of Clinton, Iowa, May, 2012

We crossed the Mississippi into Clinton, Iowa, on US Highway 30.  Leaving Chicago on a temperate spring day, we’d driven a continuous sequence of memorials to Republican presidents.  I-290 is the Eisenhower Expressway; it was on-and-off congested, in pockets interspersed with open areas where the more reckless and the more harried raced it up to 80 and 85, hitting the brakes hard when the next jam appeared.  The Ike runs through some tough spots—the West Side of Chicago is still a landscape devastated by the King assassination riots;  the burned-out blocks are full of junk: old cars, some without doors, some burned out, piles of tires, the usual. What geographers and planners call the housing stock is a mixture of worker bungalows and greystones; some of the greystones were once substantial, even opulent single-family houses for the managers and owners of the factories and businesses employing those workers.  Going west, you’re traveling through legendary bad neighborhoods, with names that resonate the way the South Bronx does to a New Yorker:  East Garfield Park, West Garfield Park, Lawndale, South Austin.  Some of the people are racing past you because this is their world;  some of them are racing past you because they’re terrified of some legendary catastrophe—four cars boxing them in and taking them out; the breakdown that leaves the car stripped in minutes and the occupants terrorized or dead.  Chicago doesn’t have a New York Post to provide the detailed myths that intensify racial fear until the skin tingles and the smell of it comes off your shirt.  It hasn’t ever needed one. The white drivers moving fast in their SUVs navigate this angry, smashed-out ring of black rage and despair every working day, on their way in to the air-conditioned downtown garage or out to their near-perfect white-edge suburban cul-de-sacs.

  After the Ike, there’s I-88, the Ronald Reagan Memorial Highway. That intersection is about where things change, where the racial turnover of the working-class suburbs like Maywood (1960, 80% white; 1990, 12% white; 2000, 9.7% white) has reached its outer limit, and the new edge cities, with their sanitized townhouse communities and gated subdivisions and huge office campuses loom— communities like  Oakbrook, with its Butler National Country Club, for decades home of the Western Open, Downers Grove, and Naperville (2010:  76% white, 15% Asian). Soon thereafter, you’re in the orderly grids of flat plains farmland—corn and soybeans, soybeans and corn.  I-88 passes De Kalb, where much of the engineered corn hybrids were developed—the company’s now a division of Monsanto, but you can still see the metal signs with the bright yellow and deep green silkscreened logo on many of the cornfields on either side of the Reagan.

When you exit at US 30, you’ve effectively moved back in time by a half-century.  US 30 is the Lincoln Highway—another Republican president—and it was perhaps the earliest transcontinental auto route, linking New York to California in 1913. The topography is still relatively flat— from west of Rock Falls, this is entirely alluvial floodplain of the Mississippi, which accounts for the original richness of the soil, now long-replaced by mountains of chemical fertilizers, high-grade pesticides, and complex farm machinery to enable the massive mono- or bi-crop agribusiness that dominates the region. The farms aren’t particularly picturesque and they don’t inspire nostalgia.  They’re dominated by grain silos, huge parking areas for the combines, the big tractors, and the other farm equipment;  the old barns are usually long gone, replaced by prefab metal warehouse buildings.  The old farmhouses have mostly disappeared, as well—in their place, there’s a double-wide or a prefab or, if the conversion was a bit earlier, a raised ranch or a split-level, with a bay window aimed at the equipment yard or the road. 

The Lincoln Highway crosses the Mississippi River in three stages. First there’s a bridge over the east branch;  then you’re over a string of three lush mid-river islands—the sort that Huck and Jim hid out in, before they began their raft-trip. Then there’s the last stretch of river. It’s a little disappointing if you’re seeing the Mississippi for the first time, as she was—the scale of it is broken up sufficiently that you don’t sense its power as perhaps the most important feature of the American landscape.

I’d anticipated this.  We were traveling, after all, specifically to give her an opportunity to see this bifurcation of the continent, this icon of the Midwest, before we moved, permanently, back to the landscape that formed us. I was due in Dubuque that Sunday afternoon, to talk about two paintings by American landscapist Thomas Moran that had recently come under the museum’s purview.  We could have driven straight across Illinois, stopped at the picturesque tourist town of Galena, stayed at a b&b, crossed over to Dubuque, and been done with it.  But the Clinton crossing is just below a spot where the river widens dramatically, a sort of aneurism in the narrower, more winding character of the river above Cairo, where the Ohio River converges, and where Huck and Jim had hoped to make Jim a freed slave rather than a fugitive.

Google Maps is a deceptive guide.  Along the west side of the Mississippi, it seemed there were a number of roads leading off US 67 and down to the river.  As we came out of Clinton, the flatlands of ancient Mississippi mud split on either side of the road:  to the left, farms and meadows, and to the right, dense woodlands, punctuated sometimes by croplands.  At Bulger Hollow Road, I turned us to the right, expecting a nicely paved route down to the edge of the river.  Instead, we were plunging down a washboarded dirt road, pressed on either side by trees that arched over the car and made the mood dark and even a little forbidding.  Soon the road was snaking between short bluffs, and then we reached the bottom.  There was the railroad track—the one that used to take hoboes and itinerant musicians from Mississippi to Minnesota, the one Robert Johnson wrote about, and Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan.  

Google Maps hadn’t shown a campground there—just an open area right at the river.  But the Army Corps of Engineers had erected a small park around a boat ramp meant to accommodate those metal boats with the outboard motors you see on the Bassmasters show on Saturday cable. We pulled to the left along the road, and parked in an empty campsite.  Behind us was a cinderblock privy with a corrugated metal roof.  The rest of the campground was staked out already.  Ahead of us was a rusting-out monster truck—the type with the big tires and the high suspension—next to a camper-trailer, the sort with pullouts on either side so that, settled onsite, it could serve as the equivalent of a three-room shanty.  There was a propane tank next to it, with a beatup gas grille attached. There was also a small Honda emergency generator, with a string of extension cords running from it.  It wasn’t turned on. 

As we opened the back doors of the Jetta wagon to let the old dog out, a man came around the rear of the truck carrying something, and watching us with evident suspicion.  He was moving quickly, jerkily;  at moments he seemed to be heading toward us, then he’d shift direction, ending up over by the generator, where he bent down and then settled on his haunches, leaning on the side of the generator, watching us, doing something with his hands. Another man came out of the camper-trailer; well, he didn’t exactly come out—he opened the half-screen door and put one foot down on the top step.  After a moment, he said something to the other man, but we were far enough away that I couldn’t hear what he said, or the tone of his voice.  I noticed, then, that the tires on the camper-trailer were flat, and there was a good deal of stuff clumsily wrapped in blue plastic tarp stored underneath it.

When we brought the dog around to the back of the car, I saw the campsite on the other side of us; it was an RV, one of the smaller ones, from the ‘70s—maybe a Fleetwood Jamboree or a GMC Birchaven. The paint was faded, and there was plywood replacing one side of the split windshield.  There were lawn chairs, four of them, around the firepit, and there was what looked like a Barcalounger, one of the big leather ones, partly covered with a plastic drop cloth. 

Around the edges of the firepit, enclosing the area and perhaps shielding it from the wind, a semicircle of yard signs: two of them showed a coiled and hissing snake above the words Don’t Tread On Me, and another a stylized American flag attached to the V of Vote Freedom First; above www.NRAILA.org. 

We walked down toward the river.  There were a few boats in a sheltered area close to the banks, but between the river’s edge and the campsites, tall grasses and weeds had grown up, interrupted by passages of mud and puddles, some of them iridescent with the surface sheen of motor oil or gasoline.  At the farm, Lyme’s Disease is commonplace—I’ve had to take the antibiotic regimen once already—so we didn’t venture far from the car.  When we turned back, a man was walking along the track from the far campsites, heading for the chemical toilets.  He was wearing a pair of boxer shorts above a huge thump-hard belly tanned dark, and he was carrying a can of Busch. As he walked, he stared at us frankly and directly; when he came past the monster truck, he said something to the two men, and all three of them laughed. 

We got the dog back into the car; she wasn’t spooked, and didn’t want to return to her makeshift bed in the back seat.  I ended up lifting her in, and she looked at me reprovingly as she settled in and the car began to move. We took the road down to the end of the campground;  every site was filled, and almost all of them by encampments of people who had been there for a while and were planning to be there a while longer. There were Sarah Palin campaign signs, and down at the end there was a  wire between trees that served as a clothes-line.  It was late afternoon, and a few people had already lit their grills.  The women were dressed in Kmart sweats and the men, mostly, in jeans and workshirts.  

  As we rounded the curve toward the exit, the man with the Busch can came back out of the toilet, and he waved at us. Up closer, he looked friendly, and he was wearing flip-flops and his boxer shorts had Bart Simpson in a mask and cape, his cartoon balloon read Watch It, Man. 

Past him, we could see the other side of that ‘70s RV as we bumped past.  Facing the entrance to the campground, another sign, handmade, pushed into the hard ground by the empty parking space with an oil stain in the dirt, said Campground Supervisor.  Now we could see that this side of the RV was covered by a large American flag tied to the roof rack, front and rear, with the sort of bright blue plastic roping you buy at Uhaul or Budget Rental when you’re picking up the moving truck—not the 50-star flag, but the Betsy Ross version with the circle of thirteen stars in a square of blue. We turned to jostle over the railroad tracks, and headed back up toward the highway.

The Bulgers Hollow-Thompson Park campground is about midway between Clinton and Bellevue.  In Bellevue, the highway runs right along the river past Corps of Engineers Lock and Dam Number 12.  We turned left onto the side streets, where the town is—mostly bungalows and ‘20s-era Midwestern stuccos, many of them Sears houses.  There were some For Sale signs, and on those lawns, and others in front of houses evidently empty, the grass was high.  The yards weren’t trash-filled; there wasn’t graffiti or even board-up plywood, as there is off the Eisenhower in West Garfield Park and Lawndale back in Chicago.  But you could tell.  Back on 52, we passed a 10-unit condo development on the river side, nearly completed but evidently abandoned, a foreclosure auction sign in front of it.  The front courtyard, flanked on either side by two-car garages, was a morass of clay mud, with puddles extending into the garages, over the concrete pads. The views of the Mississippi from the river side were probably magnificent; the auction sign said the project was completed in 2006. 

City people don’t really understand the Tea Party world.  Mostly, it looks like relatively well-dressed, middle-class people, the sort you see when you’re traveling in the summer, at the RV parks and the Country Buffets.  It’s hard to see what they’re so adamant about:  most of them are beneficiaries of some government program—if they’re older, Social Security and Medicare; if younger, the highways they drive in their SUVs to and from work, the subsidized student loans that got them through college, the mortgage home interest deduction. Their pleasant, middle-class demeanors don’t match the signs they’re carrying, or the rhetoric of the professional politicians and pundits up on the speaker’s stage.  Watching them on the tv news, you might think:  they should be at a swap meet or a classic car show. What have they got at stake?

The people living at the Bulgers Hollow-Thompson Park campgrounds are also the beneficiaries of the government’s largesse.  The campground’s free; every couple of weeks, the honey wagon lumbers off US 52, down that dirt road, over the tracks, to pump out the toilets.  While the pump is going, the driver sluices out the bathrooms with disinfectant and replaces the toilet paper.  All winter, the Corps ploughs the road, and in the spring a crew regrades the gravel and lays fill to level the section leading up to the concrete boatlaunch pad.  Somebody plants the grass, and someone mows it, even if not all the way down to the river’s edge, as we’d hoped.

These are the new Okies.  They’re living down there because they were evicted from houses foreclosed upon, or they simply went around to the bank and gave the loan officer the keys before heading down here.  Before 2006, their lives were different.  They came down here to fish in their bass boats.  They’d bought that monster truck, that travel trailer, that RV back when they were making good money and it was going to last.  The C&W they listened to back then was pretty much rock and roll with pickup trucks and telecasters and big voices with Southern accents, praising American pride, American domination, American resilience, hope, expectation. Those songs knit together a mythic past with a promised future.

It was a powerful force, that music.  I know:  Back then, driving back and forth across the country, I sang along in the car, tears in my eyes, sometimes, and sometimes choking up with the power of that communal emotion, the force of that promise. Now I hear those songs on the country oldies station, and they are different.  The emotions they wring out of me are marked by regret.  

What do you do when you’ve lost it all—not just the physical things, the house, the good car, job, bikes for the kids and vacation places, but the myths and beliefs that gave meaning to the smallest and most mundane details of an everyday life?  What do you do when you are living on food stamps and temp work and short hours at the Walmart, driving a car that may or may not start up tomorrow when you have to get to work, coming home to your uncle’s old ‘70s RV, the one he’d parked in the back behind the grain silos when it was too much trouble and expense to fix up, cooking on a gas grille or a two-burner propane campstove, running the Honda generator a few hours a day to get the portable fridge cold enough to keep the beer chilled and the food from spoiling?  What myths, what beliefs, what community, will you take to take the place of what is lost?

Looking to find a vantage point from which to take in the great mythic expanse of the Mississippi River, we had come upon an Okie encampment:  people evicted from their land, ditched, stalled and stranded, as Dorothea Lange's Okie farmer coined his circumstances, and the phrase became the title of her 1935 photograph of him.  I wish that Okie’s declaration might have found a new audience in the people down in Bulgers Hollow Campground. But the signs down there were of a different sort. 

 Don’t Tread On Me:  that’s a manufactured slogan by a professional political organization underwritten by billionaires, machine-printed on mass-produced yard signs and political rally signs and banners, unfurled as part of a Republican Party campaign to retake the Senate and the Presidency by redirecting the frustration and impotence of Americans whose mythology has been stripped from them by adversity. But Don’t Tread On Me has another inflection:  it implores the powerful, acknowledging weakness, subjugation.  The coiled rattlesnake beneath the words in that sign at Bulgers Hollow campground isn’t really the threat it’s meant to be;  it’s the comforting dream of power and assurance that has long since leaked out of lives, as the air in the tires of the camper-trailer and the Fleetwood Jamboree.  

Up past Bellevue, close to Dubuque, there’s Mines of Spain State Park, where Catfish Creek spills into the Mississippi.  I’d planned it so we’d turn off 52 and get down to the river at dusk.  But it was cloudy and grey by then; the dog was restless and there was nothing on the radio we particularly wanted to listen to. All Things Considered  seemed arch, trivial;  the big-conglomerate C&W station was playing string after string of Saturday-night-bar-fight anthems.  We turned off the radio and concentrated on the detour from 52 to US 61, the Blues Highway.  I was driving with one hand, the other reached back to rest on the dog’s soft flank.  From the passenger seat, she was doing the same, and for a moment, our hands touched, and we wove our fingers together, resting them lightly on the old dog, now settled back down and sleeping, each breath a sigh.

Listening to Limbaugh on the Long Drive

AM780 Your all-News Station! Traffic and Weather Together on the ‘8’s!

Situation:  dire.  Traffic: a rollover semi- on 80-94 blocked all lanes and traffic was at a dead stop from the Indiana Tollway to the city. 90 minute delays at O’Hare.  Lake Shore Drive a mess both directions from Hyde Park to Hollywood.  Weather:  wind gusts to 55 miles an hour out of the northeast:  waves topping the seawalls and spume making visibility bad on Lake Shore; gusts from all directions toppling the double- and triple-trailers carrying some of the early Christmas packages from Amazon and REI and the just-in-time inventory to Macy’s and Nordstrom The Rack.

Fourteen hours of driving straight through yesterday:  tired to the bone in the way that constant tension and no movement for many hours leaves you.  Also cranky, grumpy, short-tempered from the persistent necessity for compromise:  music or silence; stadium-anthem country or bad oldies. As the road darkened, the rain started, and the driving got harder. The news, usually a respite, was full of self-important commentaries on the Egyptian election, a subject long past its allegorical value, and discussions of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, subjects years out of date.  Rush Limbaugh was even hawking Cyber Monday on his radio show, pushing a Two-If-By-Tea mugset with the promotion code cybermon, though he’d gotten it wrong for the first half of the show.  When he began baiting an Occupy Wall Street caller--  of course corporations are people:  the Supreme Court said so!; of course money is speech: haven’t you ever heard the phrase “money talks?”—the level of demagoguery, normally interesting, had both of us reaching to turn the radio off.

These are times when it is hard to have spent one’s life in pursuit of rationality.  It started in first grade; Pa  gave me a Wesclox wind-up with two bells on the top to take apart and put back together again, after I asked him how clocks told time. When the car pulls to the left on the Ohio Turnpike, it might take an hour to calculate all the possible causes and the odds for each:  angling of the roadway by rational highway engineers seeking to control runoff; one tire underinflated; wind steady and strong from the southeast; misalignment; worn strut; suspension damaged by the deer that leapt into the front right headlight and caromed into the ditch on Thanksgiving night, leaving a baseball-sized dent and swatches of stiff fur imbedded where the light met the bumper.  Then:  the odds that a deer leaping across the highway would hit your car; the question of whether driving faster would lessen or increase the odds; calculating the angle of sight at various speeds and the predictability of behavior of any given deer.

This is dull stuff. Describing a rational sequence, language loses its color and rhythm, and there’s little room for the play of rhetoric—an idea underneath percolating up toward the surface of the writing’s consciousness and then hovering for a moment before sinking under the weight of details and distractions precisely weighed as the keyboard clicks first fast then slow, interspersed with erratic silences as the mind retreats from expression to thought and calculation, then returns to the pouring of words into the unvoiced ear of an imaginary reader.

Dull stuff, but it is what I believe in, not religiously, the way Grandma Catherine believes all things are here for a reason, but empirically, because from these careful tracks of logic something comes that can be verified and, when verified, can be extrapolated to the next circumstance.  This is not what Rush Limbaugh practices.  It is, indeed, what he abhors, fears, rails against.  He knows nothing of the scientific method that has liberated us from cholera and made his ubiquitous voice possible.  He knows nothing of the triumphant logic of athletic training, where regimen is built of precedent tested and modified by specifics:  he is fat and loud and, when you listen carefully, you can hear that he has lost his wind from the nicotine and the bad food.  When hospitalized with chest pains, he depended on doctors trained in the rational world he abjurs.  Even in the car, hours into the long drive away from the place that is ours, from the rattle of locust seedpods on the roof and the rustle of mice in the walls and the surprise of mist on the hayfield in the hour of sunrise, I knew better than to be angry at a stupid mouthpiece selling mugsets with his picture on them to people who thought being flimflammed for $14 was a patriotic act.  I knew better, but my hands were still tight on the wheel and I was hunched over as if punched in the stomach.

It is embarrassing being caught out as an American patriot at a moment like that.  For as we switched the radio from Rush to Chris Young singing I Hear Voices on Froggy99, the big-country station, I knew I’d been brought back to my profound and unyielding love of my country, right or wrong.  This is what I have spent my life fighting against, within and without, and I have lost every battle, within and without.  

Limbaugh’s back-to-back combination of hypocrisy (so then, Rush, this must mean that abortion is legal and right, since the Supreme Court has repeatedly said so) and linguistic stupidity (so all analogic phrases must be read literally; no analogic figures of speech are allowed to be ironic?) was only a moment in a long season of willful hypocrisies and stupidities awash in American mass culture. For a moment, there, taut with impotent rage against this moment and this turn of things and this mouthpiece of malapropisms and misinformation, I thought to myself: it has never been this bad.

But of course it has.  It’s been way, way worse.  When my great-grandfather settled in Provo, Utah in the 1890s, the nation was awash in plutocracy, a flood more influential even than today.  Today the politicians of the right, and to my shame and sorrow, of the left as well, keep the bribe-money in legal accounts.  In the ‘90s, they installed safes in their offices to keep the cash from the oil companies and the meatpackers and the steelmill owners and the bankers. In the ‘30s, Father Coughlin rode the radio waves with weekly addresses that Rush has surely studied, though rarely surmounted. When my father returned from the war, his eyes still yellow from hepatitis and his hands still shaky with weakness, he had a few years to recover his health and his hopes before McCarthy swept through the public eye, before Richard Nixon, running for Congress against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950 smeared her as a Communist fellow-traveler.  My first vote for President was a vote against the same Richard Nixon. Right and left may be equally frail and quick to surrender to temptation, but American demagogues come from the right, and they feed on fear and play on patriotism.

It’s been worse.  I can say that this morning, with the wind gusts ruffling the fur around the dog’s face so she looks beleaguered and irritable, and we lean into it to watch the woman walk south to the bus-stop, waiting for her to turn around and wave, once more, as she always does.  I can say it this morning, looking at the front yards of the well-kept two- and three-flats on my Ukrainian Village street in Chicago, each yard now tidily cleared of the controlled riots of sunflowers and roses and daffodils and daylilies and black-eyed susans in the midst of which you might have seen, in midsummer, a small ceramic statue of the Virgin, or of St. Andrew, the patron saint of the home country, or St. Michael The Archangel, patron of Kiev.  The weekend before I left to meet her at the farm, my bag full of apples for the Thanksgiving pie and untidy printouts of recipes stuck into the piles of papers to grade, I had walked back and forth along the streets and watched the older couples weeding and clearing, putting saran wrap and traffic cones over the rose bushes and raking the last small leaves out from in between the small, well-trimmed evergreens.

We will make it through this one.  But it won’t be easy. It’s never easy.  They’ll pull the driver out of the semi-, alive or dead, and they’ll pull the twisted metal to the side, and the cars will get by on the shoulder and everyone will stay later tonight as a consequence, just to get the work done. The sand- and mud-spattered cars on Lake Shore Drive will pull into the handwash on Clark or Broadway or on Dodge in Evanston or up at Clark’s in Naperville tomorrow or over the weekend, and the illegal Mexican workers will clean them off, vacuum out the insides, leave the stray dollar bills and the lost watch and the spare change in a neat pile on the passenger seat.  In a decade or a generation, they’ll be citizens, or their children will, Rush to the contrary.  Already there’s a Mexican restaurant in a beat-up RV parked by the Pilot truckstop off I-80 in western Pennsylvania, and the kids driving back to college and the truckers carrying the Christmas inventories from the container sites in Jersey City to the stores in Pittsburgh and Youngstown and Cleveland were lined up with us, waiting for the tamales. One of them, weathered and big-bellied, ordered three, and when he climbed up into the cab and shut the door, I saw it was festooned with Limbaugh bumper stickers.

I hope they pull that trucker out unharmed.  I hope, in any case, that it isn’t any of the truckers we were jockeying with all day yesterday. I even hope it’s not the one with the three tamales, the one who gave us a little wave and a smile as he pulled out in front of our old car, packed tight, with the old dog enthroned in the back seat, heading back from one place to another.

A Note About These Essays and the Looking at America blog

Readers have commented that it's sometimes difficult to know what in these essays is based in fact and what is imaginative. The interpenetration of these two is a central theme of my life's work, apparent in Atomic Spaces and moreso in the forthcoming study of American culture from the end of World War II to the Virtual Age, Outside the Gates. In the case of these essays, though, the apparently factual assertions are drawn from verifiable sources-- for example, the case of the strip miner who was thrown through the windshield after the dumper on the gigantic supertruck he was operating failed because the interlocks had been removed: that's drawn from a pending legal case. The preceding description of methane in the tunnels of the deep mines is drawn from the 2011 disaster.

More broadly, the essays are drawn from four different wellsprings: historical research of the sort I've been trained in by great mentors over forty years; personal observation, the result of my research travels in the spirit of J.B. Jackson and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz; personal memory, which is necessarily as flawed and unreliable as is all of ours, with the exception that my visual and spatial memory has always been preternaturally acute (and that is part of the reason I was drawn to this field, decades ago); and imaginative reconstruction, often based upon the combination of other sources and the combing of reminiscences, interviews, letters, and other forms of documentation available to me.

Two other requests: I receive a number of emailed and facebook message responses, but there seems to be some reticence to write comments on this site. Please do! Part of the goal of this site is to provide a space for discussion among the many different types of readers and writers who share an interest in the subject of the ordinary but significant American landscape.

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