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.

Dessicated Houses, Under Water: Lake Havasu City, Arizona

You can tell that they’re foreclosure houses if you’re used to looking at the listings.  The teaser—you can own this house for as little as 3% down—is followed by the warning: Property is sold as is.

 

There’s another hint:  you can click the more pictures link, but there might not be any more pictures.  Just the lone shot from the street up the driveway; it’s likely the photographer didn’t bother getting out of the car.  These days, the banks aren’t paying much for the elements of a listing that might draw the casual shopper in.  Besides, there’s probably not much to attract at closer range. 

Over $140,000, though, you might see some inside pictures.  That’s a good sign:  it means the previous owner didn’t leave everything—plastic bags full of old toys, pilled blankets on the unmade beds, unflushed toilet, showerbath with the dandruff shampoo and the little wire soap rack still there in the corner, a lava-flow of dried soap running down the side of the tub. There aren’t dirty dishes still piled in the kitchen sink, the food crusts petrified by the desert air.  

That’s not to say the place didn’t look like that when the foreclosure finally went through and the eviction notice came with the sheriff or the bailiff or the hired process server.  It means Bank of America or Wells Fargo paid one of the services that have appeared in the online yellow pages of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, services that send an estimator and then, after the bank has chosen which of the levels of cleanup it’s ready to pay for, a crew, with a pickup truck to carry off the leavings if it’s an easy one; if not, a dumpster for the fisted wallboard, the carpeting destroyed by water left on in the sinks, old socks or underwear stuffed in the drain to keep the flow slow and steady, ensuring the maximum damage. 

It gets worse than that, of course—we’ve all read about the crews of scavengers who strip the house of every bit of metal, from the P-trap under the kitchen sink to the electrical wiring in the walls.  With these houses so new, and Lake Havasu City so liberal in its building code during the boom years, there’s not a lot of copper piping—it’s mostly PVC. So there’s not nearly the boom business in scrap to be had here as opposed, say, to Detroit or Chicago or Cleveland, where the Sears houses from the ‘20s and the Cape Cods from the postwar years and the raised ranches and split levels from the ‘60s and early ‘70s are a trove of overbuilding.  Even the porcelain sinks of the prewar places fetch a good price at the salvagers, especially if the faucets are still on them.  

Cleaning the surfaces, ripping up and replacing the carpet, waxing the terra-cotta Southwest themed tile floors, repainting the walls, emptying the swimming pool:  these are the daily activities of the only growth industry in Lake Havasu City, these days.

When the listing opens up to a set of pictures, you can often see the residues the cleaning service left, off in the corner of that photo of the cavernous interior of the four-stall garage— a box of contractor trash bags, super heavy duty, a five-gallon tub of cheap paint, the off-white or ivory or even Desert Tawny that the entire place has been repainted, except for the bathroom.  If it’s a HUD house, there seems to be some regulatory requirement that everything be photographed, and the pictures proliferate, and you can see the halo of slightly darkened, slightly more shiny residue where a thousand, ten thousand  hands fumbled for the lightswitch just inside the front door, or the slight valley in the carpeting from the bedroom to the bathroom. 

Sometimes these HUD houses are on their second or third foreclosure.  When that’s the case, you can see the half-finished work of the buyer or the contractor-crew that started to clean it up, the speculator betting—wrong—that the market had fallen as far as it could. 

The market in Lake Havasu City, Arizona has not fallen as far as it could, not even now.  In a week, the realtor has sent me 60 new listings, all foreclosed.  Read the descriptions and look at the pictures, and you can see why.  Almost all of these places, including some as low as $51,000, have RV garages or RV ports, in addition to the three- and usually four-stall garages. In some of these places, the square footage devoted to vehicles is much more than that allocated for the human dweller and mortgage payer.  

Outside, the yards are desert landscaped, which means the house is surrounded by dirt, with a few shrubs or a scrub oak tree or two. The driveways are empty.

It wasn’t this way six years ago, when I came through on the Freeways project.  Then the yards were desert landscaped, the stones were arrayed in geometric patterns, or tasteful arcs that led from one cactus to the next. In the late afternoon light, the cars gleamed:  an SUV, usually a Ford Explorer or Expedition, plus a smaller car, a Honda Accord or a Toyota Camry. If the door to the RV garage was open, or if the RV was parked outside, the garage having filled to capacity with other things—boats and their trailers, half-restored Corvettes, or just the neatly organized metal shelves filled with someone’s historic radio collection, or boxes marked with their contents (Hummel I, next to Hummel II, above Barbie I and Barbie II)—you could see the heavy-duty trailer hitch where that smaller car was attached on the trip from here to other places, places older, with longer histories and more seasons than hot and hotter. 

Lake Havasu City does have a history stretching back to the Great Depression, though to look at the houses for sale, you'd not guess it-- every one of the foreclosures in the last month’s listings was built between 1985 and 2008, and all of them look more-or-less the same:  open plans inside, wall-to-wall mixed with Southwest tiling; hollow-core Lowe’s or Home Depot doors; windows without frames; great planes of drywall leading from entryway past kitchen and dining area, through the living room to the wall separating the bedrooms from the public areas;  the bedroom ceilings often sprayed with popcorn, so that they look, in the pictures, more like motel rooms stripped even of the anonymous furniture that you find in a Red Roof Inn or a Best Western. The kitchen cabinets aren’t built in—they box out from the walls, and where they show their ends, there’s rarely an effort to disguise the cheap panelboard.  

These are houses that were built on spec; real estate speculators bought the acre lot of an older subdivision, bulldozed the adobe ranch house with the desert chiller left over from 1948 or 1955 or even 1970, subdivided the lot into four or six or eight, and crammed the houses in with no concern for their permanence, beauty, or even functionality.  There’s usually a swimming pool taking up much of the small back yard—it’s a swimming pool too small to actually swim in; it’s more like a large bathtub. In June, the average high is 106⁰; in July, it’s 111⁰.  You don’t sit on the veranda or in the cabana drinking a margarita after taking a dip when, at 7pm, it’s still sunny and 98⁰.  Inside, the kitchens aren’t made for real cooking.  The stoves are pristine in the listing pictures; it’s the microwave that shows the signs of protracted use. There’s not much wear in the carpets, outside the master bedroom, that is. These don’t look like houses that were lived in. 

Lake Havasu City was an invented place, invented by waves of speculation, dating back to the building of the Parker Dam in the mid-‘30s, flooding the Colorado River.  From the first, the area was an epicenter for wild-eyed utopian schemes, schemes that emerged as the latest in a succession of spectacular misreadings of the landscape, the climate, the ecology.  Exporting water across hundreds of miles to Los Angeles, San Diego, and the irrigation-dependent agriculture of the Imperial Valley, the Colorado River Aqueduct required half of the electric power generated from the Parker Dam to power the pumps pushing the water up and around mountainsides that cut across the desert wasteland. Traced on satellite photographs, the Aqueduct emerges and disappears as it’s piped through minor elevations; at Iron Mountain, though, north of Desert Center (average high temperature in July: 104^o; average high for the year: 84^o; total average annual rainfall: 4.4 inches), a massive pumping station shoves the water up one mountain, the rush downmountain providing the momentum to carry it all the way to Coxcomb Mountain, where it disappears under the harsh, vegetation-free rockfaces, returns as an on-again-off-again open ditch, then sinks beneath Eagle Mountain, emerging to the west to run parallel with the fantastically misnamed Hayfield Road.  Along these stretches, the satellite pictures show dry washes under which the Aqueduct is piped. 

The Aqueduct is well-sealed;  that’s evident.  No river-loving willows or cottonwoods grow on either side of the waterway.  The air is so dry that evaporation from the water’s surface is so quickly wicked up and dissipated that it fails even to provide a modicum of humidity for a plant to exploit.  West of Eagle Mountain, it’s running north of Interstate 10 and south of Joshua Tree National Park until, a few miles east of Chiriaco Summit, another massive pumping station sends it back into the Eagle Mountains.  There the remnants of the Hayfield Reservoir are etched on the land. In 1939, the Southern California Water District dug a small auxiliary holding reservoir, filled it, and watched the water disappear, sucked down by the porous desert soil that quickly cracked and dessicated, leaving an imprint of white like the ghost of a water-dream.

Hayfield is the last pump lift; after that, the water descends through a long string of tunnels bored into the San Bernardino Mountains, then emerges to water the Quail Ranch Resort and Country Club, passes the Perris Reservoir, and terminates in what was once the Cajalco Reservoir, now Lake Matthews, southwest of Riverside. 

By then the desert has ended;  the satellite images show not a grey-brown shading to the hard white of the alkali desert but a brilliant irrigated green.  Rancho Mirage, Cathedral City, Palm Springs:  these are the oases that served as the fantasy models for Lake Havasu City, Arizona.  Golf courses with names like the El Dorado or Indian Wells are surrounded by densely packed housing subdivisions, many with swimming pools behind each sprawling house, and all of them with green lawns fed by irrigation water.  

This is what Lake Havasu City was supposed to have been.  Look at the satellite pictures, though, and a very different process can be seen hidden in the archaeology of land, its color, its overlays with the grids of building and farming, its striving toward an orderly domesticity of human use subordinating the imperatives of climate, topography, soil.  There are three golf courses—two of them carved out of the same small area near the city’s “center”, though the city has no center:  Lake Havasu Golf Course, and London Bridge Golf Course.  Further north along the lake's edge is the Refuge Golf Course.  These are the spots of green you can read, inserted in the complex weave of subdivision streets.  From a wide angle, at low magnification, the city seems ever-so-slightly greener than its surroundings.  Bring the picture down, and you see why—almost every house has one, or perhaps two, green plantings—shrub palms, mostly, or perhaps mesquite or junipers, usually close to the house, where they can be watered with the garden hose early in the morning or late at night when the temperature drops below 95. And of course, the greens and blues of those small pools, spa pools, they’re called, contribute to the shift in color.  

Along the lakeside, there’s a thin band of greenery, sometimes as narrow as two or three trees deep.  That’s as far as the water can sustain life. Beyond that, the street views confirm what those of us who’ve patrolled the citys know too well:  this is a landscape beyond arid.

What possessed those real estate agents, those speculators, those contractors and subcontractors, bank mortgage agents, those snowbirders and speculative landlords and city boosters:  what did they see that isn’t here?  Palm Springs, California, perhaps, where freely flowing water assured irrigation ditches for the golf courses, sprinklers for the lawns and parks, free-flowing water from the Colorado for as long as it might flow.

Not so Lake Havasu.  By the doctrine of prior claim, it came too late to get more than a tiny stake in the water right beside it.  What the foliage might steal from lake’s edge was about all that could be expropriated;  upriver and downriver claimants were vigilant to keep their rights and slake their own desires for greenswards and golf courses, parks and playing fields.  In Lake Havasu City, even the high school’s baseball and football fields are sparse and parched. 

What Lake Havasu City doesn’t have in greenery or scenery, it more than makes up for in houses.  Houses whose mortgages went under water at the very earliest moments of the Great Bust, and now are dessicated with the drought of interest, attention, fantasy that might bring buyers and dwellers.  The spa pools are dry, the scrub palms are dying;  inside the walls, behind the thin veneer of stucco, the 2x4s are twisting in the absolute dryness, for the air conditioner and the humidifier have long been turned off.  

When this happens to a city in a temperate climate—in Detroit, say, or Cleveland, or Philadelphia—over time the land and its primordial occupants claim back their portions, their rights.  Camilo Vergara, my old friend, has been photographing these sites for decades.In one sequence, we watch as the dome of a library crumbles.  It collapses.  Then the compost of leaves and branches accumulates on the tiled floor.  A tree grows up, rising through the ruined remnants of a Carnegie-funded American monument.  Soon the neighborhood, the city, is a Piranesian  fantasy, only it is American civilization that has had its time, its flowering, and its decay, and is now disappearing from view and from memory.

Not Lake Havasu City.  There’s no foliage to reclaim this land.  There’s no rainfall to hasten the decay, to return plaster to earth, wood to dirt. Instead, it will stand for centuries, perhaps millennia, until, finally, a great wind will come and brush it away, dust to dust.

The Last Weekend

It is the first real weekend in December; last weekend was just too close to November, and Thanksgiving.  It is also the last weekend of deer-hunting season here, if you’re using a regular rifle, and not a muzzle-loader or crossbow.  The day began before light with the sound of gunshot, both near and at a distance. 

By afternoon, though, the noise was coming from chainsaws and log-splitters. You can get a good electric-motor log splitter for around $350, or you could spend three or four thousand for a gas-driven 30+-ton splitter. These aren’t toys for weekenders; with a gas splitter hooked to an ATV you can get back into the far woods, taking on the big trees and splitting eight cords of wood in an afternoon. The sound of that gas engine echoes off the stone walls and the granite faces up the hills so it’s hard to tell where the work is.

That’s not a bad idea these days, when a lot of the splitting is being done on lands that aren’t necessarily owned by the crew with the splitter.  Some is property long unoccupied; perhaps the owner has died or moved far away or gave up on selling it after the market collapsed a few years ago.  In that case, there’s usually some long-standing agreement in place that has passed down by now from father to son and perhaps to grandson.  If the land’s held by one of the old ones, you’re going to split that wood with them, and you’ll split it for them too, saving them the smaller logs, the ones easiest to lift and carry from the woodpile or the abandoned chicken coop or the old well-house.

 Or perhaps it’s state forest land, or it’s on the wrong edge of Catskill Park or it’s part of the wide swath of land the city of New York has claimed for its watershed. This last one is a source of particular grumbling around here.  Partly it’s the stern self-righteousness of the signs telling you to keep out.  They have just a hint of the arrogance locals find in their dealings with the city.  When the governor announced he was going to allow fracking everywhere except in the city’s water-rights areas, he pretty much epitomized the attitude:  if it’s not safe for New York City water, why is it safe for us hardscrabble upstate hicks? Or the obverse:  if it’s so safe, why kowtow to the environmentalist posturing of the city people, people who haven’t ever gotten water from a well.

The poachers up here aren’t cutting down live trees.  There’s no environmental depredation going on.  These are downed trees, and this year the woods are particularly thick with them, often great swaths running down a hill, big trees lying atop one another, their root system still balled by dirt.  The hurricane, and the tropical storm, and a couple of microburst outbreaks took out whole stands of older trees, the tall ones that were most susceptible to the erosion effects of torrential rain and the subsequent strikes of wind. 

That catastrophe of uprooted trees will make superb fuel for wildfires in a year or so if everything’s left alone.  What’s the alternative?  Have the city and the state send in a small army of forestry workers to cut it up and haul it away? And where will all that good firewood end up? In landfills. Up at the Nibble Nook diner, you might hear this line of argument five times between the first sip of coffee and the leaving of the tip.  And the same applies to the deer who have begun to move away from the areas where there’s legitimate hunting, and into the state and city watershed lands.  Up behind the warning signs for Ashokan Reservoir and the long stretches surrounding the pipes down to the city,  they’re no less prone to the devastations of overpopulation—disease, starvation— and they’re all the more likely to end up hit by a car, your car, when they emerge, desperate, at dusk. It’s not like deer in the city watershed are magically protected from propagating deer ticks, and contributing to the Lyme’s Disease epidemic that has every long-timer up here with a case of arthritis and a hefty bill for horse-pill antibiotics.  Up here, there aren’t many long-timers who’ll let their kids or grandkids watch Bambi. They’re too busy checking them for the small black flecks that are immature deer ticks lodged and feeding, or the tell-tale halo of inflammation that tells you it’s time to head back to the clinic for another prescription.

But you won’t hear anyone at the Nibble Nook pretending they hunt deer out of some altruistic desire to eliminate Lymes’ Disease or rebalance the ecosystem to ensure a healthy deer population.  Most of them aren’t particularly keen on the size of the rack, either.  That’s for the stock brokers and financial guys up from the city, hoping for a nice trophy to mount in the game room of their weekend place.  This is about meat, meat that doesn’t cost 6.99 a pound at the Shop-Rite, meat that also isn’t laced with hormones or depleted of nutrients by force-feeding for high feedlot weights. Like the firewood, dressed deer in the freezer sometimes means the difference between your dignity and the ignominy of the food pantry come February. 

So this first real weekend in December, the last weekend of deer season, maybe the last clear, fairly temperate weekend for a while, the days were divided into three parts: hunting from dark to full morning; firewood splitting and hauling till the already-low sun touched the tops of the trees; then back to hunting.  

In the late afternoon light the ridge is rendered vague by the haze of woodburning stoves and wood furnaces that are warming the mobile homes and the small raised ranches and the metal-roofed, paint-scarred houses with the retrofitted chimneys and flues home-installed, probably without a permit from the town. But I’m not too worried about the houses burning down.  These are houses of the volunteer firemen; you can see by the blue lights on the tops of their pickup cabs or the dashboards of the fifteen-year-old Chevys and Fords and Subarus pulled over where there’s a safe space between the road and the woods.  They’re hunting across Harry’s, and Paul and Sarah’s, and our place, too. They’ve owned this territory for decades, and they keep at bay the amateurs, the ones who shoot the joggers and the dogs and the cyclists.  When a cow or goat gets shot up here, it’s not an amusing dinner table story about the stupid rubes upstate. It’s the loss of a significant part of a delicate financial ecosystem.  The dangerous ones, the cow-killers, are posers up from Westchester or Long Island, with the best guns and scopes and the worst aim and no sense of what might be the other side of the deer when they miss.

 Or they’re the ones you give a wide berth to at the supermarket or the discount beer distributor.  Everyone knows who they are.  Like the deer, they’re desperate, sickly, prone to reckless acts. 

So you make sure your guys are out there.  They know the property; they know the angle of fire; they know which way the roads are, and the houses.  If they’re lucky, we’ll have venison chili and stew and maybe a roast, though we usually get the tougher cuts.  We just gave them permission; they’re the ones who sat in the metal folding chair starting at 5am, or shimmied up the tree in the last moonlight, in the cold, and watched, and waited. They deserve the best of the kill and they’re not shy about taking it. 

Next weekend will be different.  That’s the time to pick up the meat from the guy with the handpainted declaration on the piece of beatup plywood leaning against the mailbox post: deer dressed 845-489-0913;  to take it home and put it in the old freezer in the garage after marking each pouch and butcher-paper parcel with the contents and the date, just in case you don’t eat it all before next year. Then it’s time to haul the wood close to the house, to stack it on the old ones’ porches, to fill your own woodsheds and the empty parts of the barn, to make sure the seasoned wood is near and the unseasoned is covered with a tarp or the sheets of metal roof that came off in the storms, too bent for salvage but useful to keep the deep snow out of the pile, so that it’s ready for next year’s stacking, next year’s heat. Maybe by then things will be better. Fuel oil might go down instead of up; you might get more jobs bid with a cushion instead of razor-thin just to get the work, and the boy might get more hours at the mall. New tires. Eggs over easy and ham instead of an order of toast and coffee at the Nibble Nook on Saturday morning. But that’s not for hoping.  And it’s certainly not for planning.

Listening to Limbaugh on the Long Drive

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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.

Settling In, Uneasily

A week after Halloween, and all the weekenders and summer people are up.  They drive too fast out of the hardware store, their faces set and pieces of building material they probably should not be allowed to purchase, let alone attempt to install, akimbo out the back windows of their Priuses, BMWs and Mercedes sedans.  The more stoical and self-righteous have older Mercedes diesels, cars that seemed smart when they bought them, 15 and 20 years old, with 138,000 miles on them.  The plan was to stick them in one of those monthly garage spaces out in the boroughs, and use them to get to and from the place on weekends. Soon enough, that plan collapsed—even a spot miles from the nearest subway stop still cost more than a decent one-bedroom apartment in Kenosha, and besides, the small difference between diesel and turbodiesel, a matter that had escaped their notice when they bought what they bragged at dinner parties was such a bargain! turned out to mean the difference between a car that could get on the freeway, accelerating to a sane 55 or 60 in ten or fifteen heartstopping seconds as the big rigs bore down on them relentlessly, their airhorns blaring, and one that, on the best day with a downhill start, would never ever make it to 55 or 60 in time to avoid being run onto the shoulder, leaving them in the ignominious position of driving on the shoulder with the emergency flashers on for a good deal of the drive from the Garden State or the GW Bridge or 17 to the Thruway. 

So now they kept the Mercedes up at the place. We have a place in the country, or we have a place upstate, or a place in southern Vermont or a place way up in Connecticut:  that is the way they speak of their destination as they ride the Central Hudson line or the New Haven Railroad out of Manhattan on those weekends. It’s not we live up here or even we live up here as much as we can. The language is about having, and being able to say you have, and not about living, with all its complications and its ordinary sublimities.

When they got the place, it was achingly lovely.  Even the small mushrooms growing up inside the house along the stone foundation line were signs of a different life they would soon be leading, a life closer to the organic rhythms of things.  They brought the cat up from the city, and in an excess of good nature, let it roam the field.  Perhaps it brought them offerings—a mouse or two, perhaps still squirming though its neck was broken and flecks of blood showed on its tiny teeth, or a baby bird—before the hawk came down, or the coyotes, and the cat was no more. The pleasures of Friday night pizza from Benny’s on 209 wore a little thin after a few months, but the kitchen was so primitive, the electric stove off-kilter, the refrigerator capable within days of gestating green mold from its core, through the cracks between the plastic panels, requiring a thorough clean before the groceries could go in, after which the lettuce smelled like Clorox and the meat had a hint of lemony freshness that lingered on the tongue, and not in a pleasant way.  The big project loomed—an eat-in kitchen, historically correct down to the 19^th century gas stove, with a half-bath containing a chain-pull toilet bought at the salvage place in Kingston for about twice the price of a new one, and still requiring the reporcelain job that smelled up the house for weeks with the stubborn nose of epoxy resin and acetone.

Summer was over, long over. In between there was the hurricane that took down the best and oldest trees and left the place without power for 10 days.  Returning to that refrigerator and freezer, opening it to the reek of sour milk and rotted meat and the sodden collapsing remains of a Benny’s pizza box that gave up its contents onto the new replica wideboard floor, leaving a permanent stain evidently different than the carefully patinated replica stains the decorator’s finisher had put on in discreet aura of authenticity:  that was tough.  Trying to make the insurance claims after flood insurance had seemed such a needless luxury when the windows needed reglazing and the landscaper charged so much just to plow out the driveway before Friday night’s arrival:  that was tougher.  Sobering. If it weren’t for the fact that everyone else was in the same situation, it might have been humiliating.  As it was, it was the subject of intent dinnertable conversation, back in the city and at the little fall parties in the waning weekends once the mess was subdued and the contractor paid off.

Now it was that weekend after Halloween, the weekend for closing up, or for making over. By comparison, closing up was relatively easy.  The heat was already on—you’d called the propane man to get the stubborn wall unit going the week after the hurricane, even if you had to pay a premium to get ahead in the line.  The gutters had to be cleaned, the garage closed up, the firewood out back covered again with the tarp, and enough brought into the cellar to cover the first couple of winter weekends, but not so much as to attract the termites and the tarantulas that one of you believed, despite all entomological evidence on Google and Wikipedia, were bound to come in with the kindling.  At the least, the tell-tale mark of the Black Widow was sure to be found on the belly of the spiders that had seemed so benign all summer, so fascinating as they wove their death-shrouds around the still-buzzing horseflies and moths that were good riddance to bad rubbish anyway.

The big job was the storm windows.  It was tempting to just give in and embrace the summer-people ethic—to turn off the water, drain the pipes, leave the faucets open, turn off the water heater, turn the valve on the propane tank until it would turn no more, lock the Mercedes diesel in the garage or at the least put the tarp over it, say goodbye until April, and wait for your turn to get the local taxi to take you to the train.

But all those weekends of cross-country skiing, all those cozy nights in front of the fireplace, not to mention the turkey dinner at Christmas, or the New Year’s Eve party that you’d not have to drive home from, drunk, peevish, neither liking the person in the car next to you nor liked by them, or the chance to escape the piles of dingy snow in the city, saturated with dog urine and festooned with piles of poop and random garbage, to come to the pristine reaches of snow and the clear icicles dripping water in the morning sun:  these were fantasies too irresistible to subject to the klieg lights of pragmatism and statistical odds-making.

So you were bound to take the wooden storm windows out of the outbuilding or the garage loft.  They were heavy, and dirty with the cobwebs and bird-droppings and dust of summer and fall.  They had to be handled one at a time down the ladder, and then they had to be washed, inside and out, before they went on the window.  There was always the mystery of the code—which number was the right one?  The one in black magic marker on the edge, now somewhat obscured, or the inner one, in pencil? And the ones on the upper floors meant taking the ladder down from the storage shed and bringing it up to the house.  You rued, perhaps, your decision to take out those standard storms, the ones that slid up and down a little squeakily but seemed to work fine, even though they weren’t nearly as authentic and they reminded you of the previous owners and their very different approach to living on, or near, the land.  So you’d paid to have them taken off, paid to have the old ones in the loft reglazed and painted, paid for the three or four that you never could find, the ones that went on the windows where you most needed succor from the storms.

Then there were the ones who weren’t closing up at all.  They were in to prepare for the Thanksgiving turnout.  They’d invited their friends from the city, and their relatives from the suburbs, and college friends from the far-flung provinces like St. Louis and Houston, and this year, everyone was coming, charmed by the description of a long rustic weekend. This was to be a feast that would demonstrate the rationale for the double oven and the oversize refrigerator-freezer, the extra harvest tables bought at the antiques fair in High Falls or North Guilford or Rhinebeck, the midweight down comforters bought online from The Company Store to cover the historically correct replica beds in all the bedrooms that had been so assiduously insulated with environmentally correct ingredients by the green contractor last summer. 

 At the hardware store, stony-faced, the two factions faced off, first in  the fasteners aisle and then with the custom-paint guy, and finally at the cash register.  Everything packed into a car never meant for any contents not wearing cashmere or khaki, backup lights impatiently gleaming as the parking-lot ballet worked itself out.  At the turnoffs from the main highway to the side roads, the cars would line up, waiting impatiently for a break in the oncoming traffic, where the dump trucks carrying road-repair gravel might afford a notch in the long line of cars going to and from the Thruway, to and from the supermarket, to and from Benny’s Pizza and the liquor store.  Quick now, but not so quick as to knock over the paint cans or slide the 6 feet of aluminum gutter already angled rather dangerously out the window.  Quick, because there was still more to do, and daylight savings had come, and the sun was already low on the horizon, though it seemed just moments from midday.

Where were we?  We were in there, too.  We were stuck between factions; more accurately, we were both of them together, an awkward, ill-organized to-do-list. We were, no doubt, the subject of knowing glances from the ones whose diesel pickups stayed idling in the back, daring anyone to box them in, the ones picking up stuff not for them, but for those who paid them to do the work they didn’t dare to do, and thereby made this marginal economy a little less harsh. 

Some of what we did marked us as sojourners, romantics tripping over the big feet of our illusions. Some of it was different:  we were semi-locals, here sometimes for months, and soon to be here for good. Ours was a different list. Call Wayne and Wayne about trenching the ditch in the hayfield.  Make the arrangements with Harry and Kurt for the deer hunters who’d be shooting across our fields to state their turf, so they’d keep the poachers and the trespassers at bay. Split the oak from the tree that went down last spring, and had lain in two-foot diameter segments out behind the garage.  Fill in the bird feeders. Talk to Jeff about the squeak in the front suspension—we’re driving back: is it safe? Bring the dog to the vet and the old one to the nephrologist. Cook and freeze the meals, labeling them in large clear letters with instructions on microwave times. Unplug the tv. Walk the fields one last time.

 It will only be a couple of weeks, maybe three, maybe four—it depends on the work.  But in that time, everything will have changed.  The roads will be emptier and it will be mostly pickup trucks on them, pickups and older sedans with noisy snow tires, and the Subarus of every type, age, and color, the only vehicles that will definitely make it to school, to work, to the doctor’s or the old one’s house if the plow is slow or the sand truck runs low. The prim houses with their historically correct colors will be dark, the chimneys cold, while the double-wides and the raised ranches and the Sears bungalows and the balloon-frame farmhouses will be nearly invisible under the protective walls of firewood and the wood-furnaces and the wood-stoves will fill the air with the smell of the cold and the fight against its menace. When it snows, we will shovel, side by side, unless some neighbor comes back from a morning of contract plowing and, sweeping in, honks us out of the way and in one pass clears us with a quick wave of the hand.

We are not natives.  We will probably always live in the old Pratt house or the old Pratt house that the ladies used to have. But we are settling in. It is good to be so.

Looking at America: Closing Up

Looking at America: Closing Up: I had missed the service at Christ the King on the Friday before, because I had to return to Chicago to teach. I’d told Harry I’d be back ...

Closing Up

I had missed the service at Christ the King on the Friday before, because I had to return to Chicago to teach.  I’d told Harry I’d be back to help him when the others, the friends and relatives, mourners all, had left and he would have more use for me.

I was up at 3:30 Friday morning checking my boarding pass to Newark and my printouts for the rental car; with these early flights, it’s hard not to lie awake worrying that the alarm won’t go off or the taxi won’t arrive in time.  I had directions from Google Maps that took me from Newark Airport to the Thruway, after which it was pretty much rote memory to get over the mountain and back to the farm and to Harry’s.  The first few miles took me right through Newark, so far as I could tell, and the rush-hour traffic was just beginning to thin out as the directions started to get much more detailed and complicated and I found myself trying to calculate just where I was on the sequence that Google Maps prints out.  It’s always difficult to determine which set of mileages applies to which segment on the printouts, and the rental car’s trip odometer wouldn’t zero out, leaving me with recurrent exercises in addition and subtraction even as the traffic sped up and my chances of properly executing the moves diminished steadily.

When I called Harry, I was somewhere between Ho-Ho-Kus and Mah-Wah on New Jersey 17.  It was after I had turned on the smart-phone GPS and then obeyed an order to exit immediately, a move that got me onto Passaic Street in what was probably Rochelle Park, though I didn’t notice, as there was no return ramp to 17, and the GPS firmly and repeatedly instructed me to take an immediate U-turn and get back on the offramp.  After a half-hour tour of the small-house suburbs of Jersey, I found a quick-talking Pakistani gas station manager who put me back on 17: two lefts and a right quick as you can, three blocks you see the sign. I was clearly not the first person he'd seen flimflammed into getting off onto Passaic Street.

The houses off Passaic were originally small postwar Cape Cods, close cousins of the famous Levittown, Long Island mass-production houses that are generally seen as the model housebuilder’s response to the housing shortage brought on by extraordinary demands of returning GIs and their new families.  This was one of those small ad-hoc developments, and the streets here were named after the relatives of the builder’s extended family—Marion Avenue, Dorothy Avenue, Gertrude Avenue, and Ward Street were sandwiched between Spring Valley Road and Fairview Avenue.

Catherine Pskowski, my mother-in-law, pointed out that the experience of most postwar house-seekers involved not mass-scale developments like Levittown, but small, in-fill projects like the one off Passaic—three or four streets filling in a few acres of residual farmland or a larger estate gone to seed during the Great Depression and unexploited during the war. She and Ed had bought a house like that on Greylock Parkway in Belleville, about 12 miles south of the development I was haplessly circling, as the GPS voice repeatedly announced it was recalculating route and then, repeatedly, directed me to that suicidal drive the wrong way up the exit ramp on Passaic. She’d had an aunt who’d bought a house in Belleville, a more substantial place put up on spec. in the economic upturn just before we entered the war, when Lend-Lease and war conversion were restarting the American manufacturing engine. Now that developer had bought a parcel, run a cul-de-sac street into it, and was building a dozen houses on the satellite streets off the semicircle. It was small, but they were glad to have it. It was their first house;  Fredericka was already born and Catherine was pregnant with Eddie. When they moved up toward Montclair years later, they’d had no trouble selling the Greylock house. It was a starter home, and now a new family was going to begin there.

The houses on Dorothy, and Gertrude, Marion and Ward are no longer uniform boxes of a thousand square feet.  As in Levittown, the generations of buyers and sellers have put their personal stamps on the houses.  Over the last couple of years, despite the housing crisis, houses on Dorothy and Marion have sold for prices in the $350,000 range; they average about 2,100 square feet, and it was only because I have been studying Levittown’s transformations over the course of the postwar years that I could detect the small, unprepossessing starter home embedded in the elaborations of various remodelers:  second and even third floors, dormers, large entry atriums, bulging extensions off the backs, filling most of the small lot with family rooms and bedrooms and large eat-in kitchens.

But there were still near-untouched original houses tucked between the looming rehabs.  They were the ones whose owners were out on that Friday morning, clearing the fallen limbs from the fluke October snow-and-windstorm that had swept through the last weekend, knocking out power for days and taking down many of the trees that had lined the streetscape.  Those were the trees planted as saplings by the developer some 60 years before; fast-growing trees that had reached maturity decades ago and were now aging and vulnerable.

The men and women out on that Friday were probably out of work or forcibly retired;  they were the vestigial union workers who had soldiered on in the shrinking industrial economy until the Great Crash of 2008: commuters down to the factories and ship- and railyards  in the towns and cities on the west side of the Hudson River, connected by the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan:  Fairview, West New York, Union City, Hoboken.  Now they had time to clear their yards of the storm’s detritus, and they looked at me as a suspicious stranger in a neighborhood wrapped up within itself and its shrinking hopes.

In the Cold War years when this part of New Jersey was booming, NY 17 was a vital arterial roadway between the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel and the New York State Thruway, one of the major postwar superhighways completed before the Interstate Highway System was fully incorporated. During the years between 1953 and 1960, the road was widened and the intersections were converted to freeway-style interchanges, a process that had been proposed as early as 1936, during the first wave of “parkway” and other limited-access motorways. Along 17, the patchwork of interchanges, stoplights, construction zones and older and newer commercial strips made for a deeply frustrating drive if you were trying to get somewhere in a hurry.  But for many of those who’d thronged to Jersey after the war, it was a sort of consumer-capitalist thrill-ride; LaZBoy franchises chock-a-block with Chevy dealerships, with metal-clad diners to stop at if you were heading, say, for the Irish or the Jewish Catskills, for the working-class and emerging middle-class summer cottages in clusters off NY 209 or perhaps up further, on NY28, to the hotels and resorts.

Today you can still see vestiges of those cottage resorts on the roads up from 209.  When you turn up toward the mountains, the roads get rougher and less populated, and you’ll see the concrete walls of swimming pools long abandoned to fill with leaves turning to loam, saplings growing up in their midst, with the collapsed roofs and disconsolate clapboard facades of the cottages sometimes visible under the welter of vines and weeds and brush.

I didn’t stay on 17 to the 209 intersection in Wurtsboro.  I managed the last maneuver that got me to the Thruway, and I called Harry back, pretty sure we wouldn’t lose the signal this time.  He told me we were going to take the netting off the vines;  it was a three-person job, and Klink was back from Boston for the day to round out the crew.  It was a gorgeous afternoon, and as we reached the end of each row, I had the chance to straighten up from the big can into which I was stuffing the netting as Harry drove the tractor forward and Klink walked along the other side of the row, lifting the netting off the vine-ends that had grown through the crisscross of sharp-edged plastic that discouraged the deer and the turkeys from feasting on the cab frank and the chardonnay grapes, and abraded my hands until they bled as I shoved the stuff down into the storage bags locked into the garbage can roped to the back of the tractor on the makeshift platform Harry and Peter had welded together a few years ago, working from a catalog photograph for a $5,000 version of the thing, sold by an upscale gentleman-winemaker supplier. Theirs had costed-out at just over $500 and, like everything Harry did, was simultaneously makeshift and meticulous.

Stretching my arms toward the blue blue sky, I could see the hawk still following us along the updraft, and below that, Harry’s shoulders, slumped in a sort of resolute grieving, as he steered the tractor and Klink kept up a clatter of talk to distract us all from what we had no words to face. We were men in the company of men.  We might pause for a moment, lapse into silence, look into each others’ faces knowing what was behind our careful demeanor. Then Harry would put the tractor in gear, it would make its slow arc to the next row, and we would begin again the ritual of work that could suffice for everything else we could not do or say.