Street find 
posted by bell roe @ 10:20 PM
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Wednesday, September 08, 2004
A night in the tub
A water snake flapped by, whitefaced with effort. I backed away in instinct, although I love snakes, the feel of their dry skin on my wrists. He traveled off at a high rate, twice as fast as the current. I reached, even called but he exceeded me. Going away, he felt like my last cigarette falling into the Royal Gorge or my little daughter riding away in the school bus. What a ridiculous sight, him flapping away madly with my heart in his mouth. Couldn’t decide if it’s making him sink or holding him aloft, with the mad water at cross purposes. Good bye mister, see you in the funny papers, us two ships passing in the night. When your heart is gone, they say your bones feel. They say your bones know. Sitting in the kitchen after washing the floors, I can drink a whole frozen hunk of lemon aide. After loving Nettie I can eat a whole pineapple. After loving Nettie I can love Nettie again. I am never full. Sitting here with the bruise landing like a hen, I know my bones can be full. I just have no idea how to reduce the situation to the bones.
posted by bell roe @ 9:35 PM
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Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Invest in some property
Why I love Iowa
Why have I bought into this regionalist, sense of place stuff? It’s a combination of having my mind warped by the likes of Sherman Paul, and William Carlos Williams through Sherman Paul, and Wes Jackson and then Faulkner and his hypnotic concentration on one county. But at what point did it set into resolve and then stubbornness? Would it be unfaithful and unstoic of me to jump ship at this point, or would it be getting out just in time?
I realize what I love about Iowa is exactly what isn’t supposed to be here anymore, the things that would have been destroyed by now in a state with a “healthy” economy and people dedicated to “progress.” I’m talking about the What Cheer Opera House, where farmers come in with their deeply sunburned arms and the whorls of grease they can’t rub out, to hear the country singers warble like sour milk. They come in droves to that place, to stand in long lines for the tiny bathrooms and buy little paper cups of dead coke at intermission.
The old houses and barns and sheds that hold on somehow out in the country and in the little towns, growing a little more hunch shouldered every year, but more deeply faint in color, are as beautiful as the low notes on a piano held out in some room of my childhood.
This is the meloncholy that I am addicted to, and more and more of it disappears everyday. If I left Iowa, I might not be sentimental anymore. Would that be such a bad thing?
I saw a PBS show about regional sandwiches, and most all of them were urban and straffed in ethnicity, exotic spices and colors and smells and the people who make them and the people who eat them. Iowa, and the rural world in general, had one entry, but it stood out completely from all the rest. It was the loose meat sandwich, the Maidrite, which was invented here in Iowa, beautiful in its simple blandness. Just a pile of dry meat crumbs on a white bun served with a glass of water. Maybe some onions and ketchup, sure, a pickle, ok, go crazy, but that’s it.
Hanging out with Grandma
I went out to visit Grandma yesterday and got her going on the old stories, pinned her down on some history that will otherwise be lost when she’s gone. She’s 86. Grandpa died of bone cancer almost a decade ago. They were farmers. I come from a long line of farmers and stand on the end of that line. My dad was a halftime, though not halfhearted, farmer. He taught junior high biology on the side. I helped attack the fields with a cavalry of John Deere tractors. And although I was shielded from the pesticides and sun inside my air conditioned cab, I could still smell the earth bucked over by the moldboards.
I had Grandma recount the succession of places they had rented, bought and sold. Starting with the place just north of Williamsburg where Dad was born and then something like an hour north to the Fiester place where they had a tenant arrangement with an 80-year-old man named Fiester. They did all the work and gave away half of everything they made to this guy. They kept a room in the house for when he came to visit and oversee. Grandma remembers having to entertain him while Grandpa would be out working. Otherwise she’d have been out there right beside him.
So Grandma was up at her parents’ place one day when the owner of a nearby farm stopped by and let it slip he was selling. Grandma took this information home, a secret in her heart. Always, driving from the Fiesters up toward the hills where both of them had been born and raised, Grandpa dreamt about someday owning that very land.
Years later, the Wolfe property (the farm where I was raised) came up for sale and Grandma said the idea to buy it “went off like a firecracker” in Grandpa’s head. The Wolfes had one daughter, Gertie, who never married. Grandma said when Gertie’s first date showed up at the house, her father wanted to go along. That was the last time a boy ever asked her out. Gertie’s first cousin, Millie, lives in the house just down the road from where I grew up. She’s 80-something and still drives into Marengo every day for a job at the Big G grocery store. Millie’s only child, Frank, died of MS when he was in his early 30s. I remember him always driving by real slow in his copper-colored Chevy van, at first to keep from coating his prized possession with limestone dust, and later because it was all the faster his disease would let him go.
I didn’t know Frank or Millie as people, even though they lived just down the road. I can’t romanticize our quaint neighborliness because there wasn’t very much of that. I do have dim memories of helping our neighbors bail hay and of them coming to help us when it was our turn. The neighbors all owned a baler and elevator in common, you see. But I do not ever remember visiting our neighbors on a regular basis. I do remember that one of our neighbors, Red Brecht, would on Christmas Eve make the rounds as Santa Claus, bearing gifts of apples and oranges. I remember his costume being unbearably old-fashioned, frayed and rubbed shiny in places.
My favorite people in the world
Marv and Jenny Clarence live in a homemade house near Knoxville, Iowa, the stockcar racing capital of the world and rumored birthplace of the Iowa flag. I probably wouldn’t have been introduced into the world of the Clarences if my girlfriend hadn’t rented a room in their house and I hadn’t gone to visit her there roughly every other weekend. The Clarences are what you’d call Iowa free spirits, in their late 40s and rustic as hell. They moved onto their wooded lot 20 years ago and started putting down roots. They lived out of a trailer as they cobbled the house together from wood Marv scrapped off the Pella Windows lot and whatever else he could find.
They had two babies wincing against cold the trailer's tiny heater couldn't warm off their skins. They're still adding on, Jenny and her scrappy daughter finishing up a stone wall the first time I visited. Marv putters around the place doing psychedelic folk paintings and making wine. My favorite is the cherry, but the amaretto is pretty good too. The inside of the house is eccentric and wonderful. A gargolye spits water into a stone-lined pool, a spiral staircase leads to the second floor; the centerpole a varnished tree trunk.
It's so peaceful to sit out on the back stoop on a fall day and look out over the yard with its chaos of dilapidated audorondac chairs, a pisshole of a shack, and the vertical scores of grass and trees (a loosely woven and someplaces broken-open basket that let's the mind out but keeps the eyes in). On a warm fall day, we all sat out in that yard and spooned our stomachs full of homemade chicken dumpling soup. Marv kept trying to distract his daughter--"See that bright red flower over there?"--so he could steal the carrots out of her bowl. That only worked once. It felt warm enough for flowers, but they had already gone to dust on the sticks crouched low in anticipation of the wet snow that almost always falls before Thanksgiving. The dust of bright red flowers was in the air that day, and lady and boxelder bugs, later huddling in the ebbing warmth on the west side of the house as the sun finally went down.
Yesterday, we went out to “survey” the property Barry is considering buying. He’s been living at Marv and Jenny’s place now for almost eight years saving up. Marv and I broke away from the group long enough for him to tell me how he and Jenny had come about their land. It turns out Jenny owns the ground where they built the house, and Marv owns a wilder stretch 15 minutes south of there where he built a cabin out of plywood and old doors when their marriage started falling apart.
The story of how Jenny bought her land goes like this: One day the two of them were out driving and they came upon an abandoned house. They stopped to explore and fell in love with it. When an old woman showed up to kick them off the property, they tried to smooth her feathers by expressing interest in buying the place. She just said it wasn’t for sale.
But Jenny had a dream one night that at some point in the future they’d live across the road from this house and think back on the time when that old woman kicked them off. Flash forward several years, and Jenny’s brother ends up buying the land Jenny had dreamed about, and through some legal rigmarole ends up owning it herself.
Marv's land purchase, of course, came during less happy times, years after they’d worked in beautiful tandem on building and decorating their house. He said he thought it would be best to just go along with her request for a divorce. That’s when he saw this property was up for sale. Marv built the cabin and lived out there for four months. His brother Colin would come and visit him to make sure he didn’t kill himself, but the visits only made Marv more depressed. Colin complaining about his own wife and kids when he had a wife that wanted him and kids who stayed in school. He lived without electricity or plumbing. He had a generator, but it was just too loud. Loud sounds sometimes are more lonely than none at all.
We walked on this fresh land that Barry was thinking of buying as Marv related all of this. He said surveying new property was one of the things he still got excited about. I wanted to ask him about his and Jenny’s current arrangement, how it was that they were living in the same house but not remarried. But I thought it might be rude. The measure of our talk anyway was the distance from where we left the others to the road, and we were almost there. The mystery could have been solved with a few more yards of Barry’s prospective land to lull us further into confidence.
Maybe it’s a mixture of Jenny’s hope that Marv will still somehow come around and hers that he will somehow still change; maybe it’s just an arrangement of convenience.
Fear of flying
Of course, I’ve traveled farther from home than I let on. My dad’s double income allowed us to take some pretty extravagant summer vacations—all States-bound but still pretty far out there for a family in our neighborhood. And after my parents divorced—also a neighborhood anomoly—my mom and us blew a lot of child support on trips to places like Quebec and New Orleans. As an adult, I head annually to Austin, Texas, for the SXSW music festival. The first few years, we drove down and I remember passing through the alien landscape of the Kansas Flint Hills for the first time. This was in March, and the grass looked like moondust. Even as seen from the relative comfort, familiarity and conformity of an interstate tollway, I remember momentarily forgetting how to speak or form words.
My flow of language from the ground up had been interupted, or more accurately, I was being required to abruptly switch power sources. And although I’ve had my reality and cultural xx mitgated by movies, TV, radio, etc. (I’ve had far more than one power source to draw from since day one in other words), I still was, if only for a moment, completely at a loss. I wonder what will happen when I get up in the jet for the first time next week to head for year’s festival. Will I forget how speak, or even think, for a split second? Or will this loss of grounding be offset by the gaining of perspective?
I didn’t forget how to talk or think, but I was moved, for a moment, as we left the ground—and rose. The feeling of everything solid falling out from under you for the first time is something. Sitting across the aisle from me was a woman and her baby. “This is your first flight,” she cooed. Her two little daughters sat in front of her and she murmured reassurances whenever she sensed the need. “What’s that, baby?” she’d ask when one of the girls had a question that couldn’t quite be heard against the tremble of the jet engines through the bulwark. I was glad she was there to talk me in.
The main thing that suprised me, though, about flying was how they haven’t managed to engineer away the physical sense of great effort and stress it so obviously requires to become airborne and then basically drop like a rock from the sky. Maybe a person (which is probably most people this day and age) who hasn’t first flown as a baby or even child would find my surprise surprising.
The other surprising thing was that, although you think you should be able to with no problem, I couldn’t for the life of me recoginze anything familiar, not a town, a road, or a field from the sky as we flew over land I’ve been soaking in for 40 years.
After the colonscopy
After my colonscopy, Dave drove me to the North Liberty grocery store to get a bunch of fruit to break my fast. The woman at the checkout reminded Dave of Carol, the love of his life whom he’d cheated on and lost over a decade before. I was supposed to be in bed resting, but after a feast of fruit sliced up in organic yogart and thick slices of homemade banana bread we drove to a pine grove north of town. Dave told me to listen. What are they saying? I asked. “Whoossssh,” he said, “and shhhhhhhhhh.” He kept trying to get me to agree to live in the house he wanted to build on the piece of land he bought from his brother north of town. I'd pay the utiltities and live there for free. I suggested we use the timber and pine trimming from my childhood house—abandoned after my parent’s divorce--to build a new one, but he insisted it wouldn't be economically feasible.
Then we drove to the path that leads to Squire Point. “We used to come running down this path,” Dave reminisced as we walked the path into the woods. “Once we got our jeeps stuck out here and it took us three days to dig them out.” The Point is a place where boats can come in close. The crazy high school kids running down the path in the moonlight just ran straight off the cliff and into the water, swam to the boat for an all-night kegger or whatever.
This was the place where years later Dave and Carol had picnics. They’d drink a bottle of wine and make love. He kept pointing out spots where they'd done it, drank a bottle and made love. Afterward, they dammed creek in places to make deep pools where they’d wash and soak.
We got out to Squire Point and sat there eating plums and oranges. It was windy. "Whitecaps!" he cried. "Whitecaps on Lake Macbride!" I asked him what a squire was. A peasant who owns land, he said. He asked me what the rock we were sitting on was. I said I didn't know. My brain must still have been pretty woozy from the sedative. “Coral,” he said. “This was all once a coral reef. Why do you think they call it Coralville?” As we walked back Dave related how he used to tell Carol he’d build her a house on the opposite shore. “I'm such a failure,” he said. “No, you're not,” I said. “You experienced all that.” More than I ever did, I thought enviously.
But that didn't satisfy him. He was worried about his heart, his second artirial block, self-diagnosed from his EKG like when he had snuck a look at his chest x-rays and diagnosed himself with late-stage lung cancer a few weeks before. "I'm just going to Africa," he had promised. "Noone's going to bag up my shit and piss." I was worried about my test at the time and promised to accompany him. Of course, it turned out to be nothing.
Now Dave was looking for the ruts where the jeeps got stuck. This was like 20 years ago. Worn away, he concluded disappointedly after we finally found the spot where he thought it had happened--although he claimed to be able to see some remnant of the event in how the hiking trail softened at a certain rise. A ghost. Dave had come out here with Carol--his second lost love, but this time through no fault of his own--a few years ago. That was the first time he had been back in years, willing to brave it somehow with Carol. Going up the hill, Dave's chest was hurting and mine was too a little. He decided the only solution was to press on harder, and then at the top of the hill, hollering he'd meet me there, he burst into a thundering sprint for the car.
Revelations
There’s a hum in the air. A night in early fall, four miles north of Exit 104, Interstate 80. A discernable hum. It’s not interstate. Four miles is enough to drown the drum of trucks and cars. No, Far Cloud (some call him Bert), the storyteller is waving a lengthening strand of interlocked hoops over his audience, laid prone around him in a circle. “Pull back your noses,” he warns with that indescribable intonation. “Hold back your chins, or the UFOs will grab you and take you up with them.” That intonation is combined with the unexpected accents on words, like footfalls breaking through ice, but under less harrowing circumstances like butter daubed over ears of fresh corn.
The line of whirling hoops is a white blur and coming lower. He somehow adds yet another hoop, extending himself farther. A whistling now. I can’t believe no one is panicking. I would panic for sure, I think, just sit straight up. And I imagine the awful sting of the hoops as they crash into the side of my face. “Get close to the earth. Get close.” Whining, the hoops spun into wind. Greatest temptation to bolt. And then...silence. The moment when the loved one lifts off in the plane you are following with your eyes or floats above you in your embrace...
I can’t remember how he ended, how he removed the threat of the hoops in one instant. I think maybe he just let go, let the great momentum fling them safely beyond his faithful circle. Maybe the hoops just disappeared, got spun into thin air. They all passed. They all got to stay. And what a contrast to the notion of Rapture!
Earlier, Katie and I had joined in. The evening started with a pow wow set to awaken the prairie. This commenced in a circle hewn from a dense stand of Big Bluestem, Indian grass, little bluestem, switchgrass. We sat on hay bales and blankets. Indian war veterans carried in flags to the beating of drums. Speaking over the too-hot PA, the Indian announcer said we should rise. The drumming and singing started and then the circling dancers, representing youthful male vigor, the clipped shyness of young maidens, the dried sap storms of old men, and the huge floating cloudness of venerable women. I was moved. The voices railing against the rooms of drums. The purple light dovetailing with the purple grass. I thought, I belong here and these might be my people. I bit my tongue and ruined it with thoughts. Then I read from the program, “When used traditionally, the drum takes people out of their cultural trance and connects us with the earth, our communities, and our own hearts and souls.” Men and women from different tribes took turns singing and drumming.
There was one guy who looked like me from a distance and I digested the signifigance of my first doppelganger. “A traditional fancy dance from ...” Soon the audience was asked to join in and complete the makeshift community. The brave obliged, most looking like plucked chickens beside the susurrating panoply, strutting their fanny packs for plumage. Karie convinced me to participate. I made sure we stuck ourselves as close to the hub as possible so as not to be visible to the audience of pale suburbanites on their bales, the chorus of eyes that I had just left to be seen and judged—although none of them were probably as harsh as me. Up close, I didn’t really look that much like myself. We continued into one ladies choice dance with specfic steps. It was fine, but not moving, like it had been when the whole thing had started. I broke away to take advantage of a sandwich stand we’d passed on the way in. They were all out of buns so they sold me a big hunk of smoked pork for a dollar. I went back to my bale and chawed it with a can of diet Pepsi. Mars was bright and hard in the southeast. Everyone just kept dancing, going in a circle.
But it didn’t end there. There was a beautiful young hoop dancer who prepared for her dance by laying 30 or more hoops on the ground around her. Then she moved like a zephyr and scooped them up one by one, spinning her body through them, letting them collect against her raised hand like foam in a fast stream and finally wiring them together in a big ball the announcer said represented mother earth as it bounced like an echo from her suddenly, incomprehensibly stilled body. These were the same hoops that Far Cloud would spin over his circle, and that we would stumble through around the fire in our own clumsy re-enactment of what we had just witnessed.
The announcement was made that those who wanted to hear the storyteller should leave the prairie circle and head over to the teepee and bonfire. We were ready for stories, starved. When we reached the teepee and fire, they were counting people into the tent, keeping track to see if they could break last year’s record of packing a hundred inside. Katie and I got counted inside and took a seat around the outer rim. I suddenly felt worried, trapped, checking to make sure we could escape under the edges if something went wrong. Sure enough, there were kids gusting in and out under the flap, calming my fears but also ruining the chances for an authentic record. Once we were all settled in, at a recording-breaking 120 heads, that old pre-show silence spread through. Somebody had one of those big flashlights and shone it up to the apex of the teepee, but still it didn’t illuminate the two dark Indians who swayed before us or our own faces tipped up in waiting.
I suppose I was expecting a charming Indian story, with lots of charming Indian names, and animals of the forest figuring prominently. I was expecting entertainment, although not exactly needing it; we had all been pushed beyond that now. “I’m worried about the kids,” began the storyteller. “They’re watching too much TV and playing those video games. They’re not spending enough time outside.” If we had paid, we would have been thinking this wasn’t what we had paid for. But maybe he was just warming up, for the wild narrative that he would spin and transport us beyond the confines of this tent, and as this tent represented earth, maybe beyond even that, galloping with stallions and swooping with eagles on the storm path of the cosmos! He talked about the importance of women and the importance of men, and how they fit together to make everything whole. One was like the sky and the other the earth. He referred to the other man, on one knee with brow knit over arrows bunched in one of his hands, and testing the points with the fingers of his other. I was sure the arrowheads were just plastic or paper. I tried to see their flaw in the weak light.
This man talked about the slow sacrament of making the arrowheads as he imagined how they would spring to their targets, flesh and blood and bone. He talked about hunting and focus, and how important both were for boys who had lost their direction. He waved the quiver in the air, in slow graceful arcs chased by tight little jerks. Then he’d lower them to the face of a boy, who would reach out to touch them as if they were hot, and finding them cool daring to run the back of his hand across the serrated edge before the boquet of bone was snatched away, lifted high and then lowered to the nose of a new boy. I was almost certain we were going to be killed, that this was all some kind of an elaborate ambush. Then I noticed the drums in the distance, like you notice the wind of a blizzard after hearing it for so long, a cliche of elemental force.
And I had the sincere thought that this was the closest that any of us could ever get to being in that earlier time or being in this moment, because these people had so humbly opened their ways to us and were showing such grave and heartfelt concern for our welfare. The great effort it took for them to call and gather and weep over and touch with us, what we shared. The storyteller was adding that good aim and focus could kill hate and prejudice too, and then the stones were lowered to me and I touched them. They were real.
When it was all over, we made our way back to the wagon that would return us to our cars, sat by a hip young mother and her kids. The kids were laughing, talking about the UFO circle. They had been part of the Inner Circle, they had braved the test and passed. Part of their giddiness was the relief of having survived, no doubt, maybe some of it holiness, but also a of having fun at someone else’s expense. What is it? asked the mother darting kind of proud, kind of bemused glances at us. This woman possessed the kind of sharp sarcasm I gloried in growing up, mostly on my mother’s side of the family, that chicken coop of whip-smart first cousins, a sense of belonging that I missed so much. “There was a fat guy in the circle,” said the boy, the ring leader and probably his mother’s favorite, “who kept getting hit in the stomach by the hoops.” They laughed more, trying to block the delirum with their hands, then their mother’s sweatshirt smirched with woodsmoke.
If I ever get to the point when I’m brave enough to get into that circle and have those hoops whine over me, I will probably be the guy who gets his belt buckle nicked, the one the kids laugh about as they head home. It doesn’t really bother me. I’ll be happy just to get to stick around.
Why have I bought into this regionalist, sense of place stuff? It’s a combination of having my mind warped by the likes of Sherman Paul, and William Carlos Williams through Sherman Paul, and Wes Jackson and then Faulkner and his hypnotic concentration on one county. But at what point did it set into resolve and then stubbornness? Would it be unfaithful and unstoic of me to jump ship at this point, or would it be getting out just in time?
I realize what I love about Iowa is exactly what isn’t supposed to be here anymore, the things that would have been destroyed by now in a state with a “healthy” economy and people dedicated to “progress.” I’m talking about the What Cheer Opera House, where farmers come in with their deeply sunburned arms and the whorls of grease they can’t rub out, to hear the country singers warble like sour milk. They come in droves to that place, to stand in long lines for the tiny bathrooms and buy little paper cups of dead coke at intermission.
The old houses and barns and sheds that hold on somehow out in the country and in the little towns, growing a little more hunch shouldered every year, but more deeply faint in color, are as beautiful as the low notes on a piano held out in some room of my childhood.
This is the meloncholy that I am addicted to, and more and more of it disappears everyday. If I left Iowa, I might not be sentimental anymore. Would that be such a bad thing?
I saw a PBS show about regional sandwiches, and most all of them were urban and straffed in ethnicity, exotic spices and colors and smells and the people who make them and the people who eat them. Iowa, and the rural world in general, had one entry, but it stood out completely from all the rest. It was the loose meat sandwich, the Maidrite, which was invented here in Iowa, beautiful in its simple blandness. Just a pile of dry meat crumbs on a white bun served with a glass of water. Maybe some onions and ketchup, sure, a pickle, ok, go crazy, but that’s it.
Hanging out with Grandma
I went out to visit Grandma yesterday and got her going on the old stories, pinned her down on some history that will otherwise be lost when she’s gone. She’s 86. Grandpa died of bone cancer almost a decade ago. They were farmers. I come from a long line of farmers and stand on the end of that line. My dad was a halftime, though not halfhearted, farmer. He taught junior high biology on the side. I helped attack the fields with a cavalry of John Deere tractors. And although I was shielded from the pesticides and sun inside my air conditioned cab, I could still smell the earth bucked over by the moldboards.
I had Grandma recount the succession of places they had rented, bought and sold. Starting with the place just north of Williamsburg where Dad was born and then something like an hour north to the Fiester place where they had a tenant arrangement with an 80-year-old man named Fiester. They did all the work and gave away half of everything they made to this guy. They kept a room in the house for when he came to visit and oversee. Grandma remembers having to entertain him while Grandpa would be out working. Otherwise she’d have been out there right beside him.
So Grandma was up at her parents’ place one day when the owner of a nearby farm stopped by and let it slip he was selling. Grandma took this information home, a secret in her heart. Always, driving from the Fiesters up toward the hills where both of them had been born and raised, Grandpa dreamt about someday owning that very land.
Years later, the Wolfe property (the farm where I was raised) came up for sale and Grandma said the idea to buy it “went off like a firecracker” in Grandpa’s head. The Wolfes had one daughter, Gertie, who never married. Grandma said when Gertie’s first date showed up at the house, her father wanted to go along. That was the last time a boy ever asked her out. Gertie’s first cousin, Millie, lives in the house just down the road from where I grew up. She’s 80-something and still drives into Marengo every day for a job at the Big G grocery store. Millie’s only child, Frank, died of MS when he was in his early 30s. I remember him always driving by real slow in his copper-colored Chevy van, at first to keep from coating his prized possession with limestone dust, and later because it was all the faster his disease would let him go.
I didn’t know Frank or Millie as people, even though they lived just down the road. I can’t romanticize our quaint neighborliness because there wasn’t very much of that. I do have dim memories of helping our neighbors bail hay and of them coming to help us when it was our turn. The neighbors all owned a baler and elevator in common, you see. But I do not ever remember visiting our neighbors on a regular basis. I do remember that one of our neighbors, Red Brecht, would on Christmas Eve make the rounds as Santa Claus, bearing gifts of apples and oranges. I remember his costume being unbearably old-fashioned, frayed and rubbed shiny in places.
My favorite people in the world
Marv and Jenny Clarence live in a homemade house near Knoxville, Iowa, the stockcar racing capital of the world and rumored birthplace of the Iowa flag. I probably wouldn’t have been introduced into the world of the Clarences if my girlfriend hadn’t rented a room in their house and I hadn’t gone to visit her there roughly every other weekend. The Clarences are what you’d call Iowa free spirits, in their late 40s and rustic as hell. They moved onto their wooded lot 20 years ago and started putting down roots. They lived out of a trailer as they cobbled the house together from wood Marv scrapped off the Pella Windows lot and whatever else he could find.
They had two babies wincing against cold the trailer's tiny heater couldn't warm off their skins. They're still adding on, Jenny and her scrappy daughter finishing up a stone wall the first time I visited. Marv putters around the place doing psychedelic folk paintings and making wine. My favorite is the cherry, but the amaretto is pretty good too. The inside of the house is eccentric and wonderful. A gargolye spits water into a stone-lined pool, a spiral staircase leads to the second floor; the centerpole a varnished tree trunk.
It's so peaceful to sit out on the back stoop on a fall day and look out over the yard with its chaos of dilapidated audorondac chairs, a pisshole of a shack, and the vertical scores of grass and trees (a loosely woven and someplaces broken-open basket that let's the mind out but keeps the eyes in). On a warm fall day, we all sat out in that yard and spooned our stomachs full of homemade chicken dumpling soup. Marv kept trying to distract his daughter--"See that bright red flower over there?"--so he could steal the carrots out of her bowl. That only worked once. It felt warm enough for flowers, but they had already gone to dust on the sticks crouched low in anticipation of the wet snow that almost always falls before Thanksgiving. The dust of bright red flowers was in the air that day, and lady and boxelder bugs, later huddling in the ebbing warmth on the west side of the house as the sun finally went down.
Yesterday, we went out to “survey” the property Barry is considering buying. He’s been living at Marv and Jenny’s place now for almost eight years saving up. Marv and I broke away from the group long enough for him to tell me how he and Jenny had come about their land. It turns out Jenny owns the ground where they built the house, and Marv owns a wilder stretch 15 minutes south of there where he built a cabin out of plywood and old doors when their marriage started falling apart.
The story of how Jenny bought her land goes like this: One day the two of them were out driving and they came upon an abandoned house. They stopped to explore and fell in love with it. When an old woman showed up to kick them off the property, they tried to smooth her feathers by expressing interest in buying the place. She just said it wasn’t for sale.
But Jenny had a dream one night that at some point in the future they’d live across the road from this house and think back on the time when that old woman kicked them off. Flash forward several years, and Jenny’s brother ends up buying the land Jenny had dreamed about, and through some legal rigmarole ends up owning it herself.
Marv's land purchase, of course, came during less happy times, years after they’d worked in beautiful tandem on building and decorating their house. He said he thought it would be best to just go along with her request for a divorce. That’s when he saw this property was up for sale. Marv built the cabin and lived out there for four months. His brother Colin would come and visit him to make sure he didn’t kill himself, but the visits only made Marv more depressed. Colin complaining about his own wife and kids when he had a wife that wanted him and kids who stayed in school. He lived without electricity or plumbing. He had a generator, but it was just too loud. Loud sounds sometimes are more lonely than none at all.
We walked on this fresh land that Barry was thinking of buying as Marv related all of this. He said surveying new property was one of the things he still got excited about. I wanted to ask him about his and Jenny’s current arrangement, how it was that they were living in the same house but not remarried. But I thought it might be rude. The measure of our talk anyway was the distance from where we left the others to the road, and we were almost there. The mystery could have been solved with a few more yards of Barry’s prospective land to lull us further into confidence.
Maybe it’s a mixture of Jenny’s hope that Marv will still somehow come around and hers that he will somehow still change; maybe it’s just an arrangement of convenience.
Fear of flying
Of course, I’ve traveled farther from home than I let on. My dad’s double income allowed us to take some pretty extravagant summer vacations—all States-bound but still pretty far out there for a family in our neighborhood. And after my parents divorced—also a neighborhood anomoly—my mom and us blew a lot of child support on trips to places like Quebec and New Orleans. As an adult, I head annually to Austin, Texas, for the SXSW music festival. The first few years, we drove down and I remember passing through the alien landscape of the Kansas Flint Hills for the first time. This was in March, and the grass looked like moondust. Even as seen from the relative comfort, familiarity and conformity of an interstate tollway, I remember momentarily forgetting how to speak or form words.
My flow of language from the ground up had been interupted, or more accurately, I was being required to abruptly switch power sources. And although I’ve had my reality and cultural xx mitgated by movies, TV, radio, etc. (I’ve had far more than one power source to draw from since day one in other words), I still was, if only for a moment, completely at a loss. I wonder what will happen when I get up in the jet for the first time next week to head for year’s festival. Will I forget how speak, or even think, for a split second? Or will this loss of grounding be offset by the gaining of perspective?
I didn’t forget how to talk or think, but I was moved, for a moment, as we left the ground—and rose. The feeling of everything solid falling out from under you for the first time is something. Sitting across the aisle from me was a woman and her baby. “This is your first flight,” she cooed. Her two little daughters sat in front of her and she murmured reassurances whenever she sensed the need. “What’s that, baby?” she’d ask when one of the girls had a question that couldn’t quite be heard against the tremble of the jet engines through the bulwark. I was glad she was there to talk me in.
The main thing that suprised me, though, about flying was how they haven’t managed to engineer away the physical sense of great effort and stress it so obviously requires to become airborne and then basically drop like a rock from the sky. Maybe a person (which is probably most people this day and age) who hasn’t first flown as a baby or even child would find my surprise surprising.
The other surprising thing was that, although you think you should be able to with no problem, I couldn’t for the life of me recoginze anything familiar, not a town, a road, or a field from the sky as we flew over land I’ve been soaking in for 40 years.
After the colonscopy
After my colonscopy, Dave drove me to the North Liberty grocery store to get a bunch of fruit to break my fast. The woman at the checkout reminded Dave of Carol, the love of his life whom he’d cheated on and lost over a decade before. I was supposed to be in bed resting, but after a feast of fruit sliced up in organic yogart and thick slices of homemade banana bread we drove to a pine grove north of town. Dave told me to listen. What are they saying? I asked. “Whoossssh,” he said, “and shhhhhhhhhh.” He kept trying to get me to agree to live in the house he wanted to build on the piece of land he bought from his brother north of town. I'd pay the utiltities and live there for free. I suggested we use the timber and pine trimming from my childhood house—abandoned after my parent’s divorce--to build a new one, but he insisted it wouldn't be economically feasible.
Then we drove to the path that leads to Squire Point. “We used to come running down this path,” Dave reminisced as we walked the path into the woods. “Once we got our jeeps stuck out here and it took us three days to dig them out.” The Point is a place where boats can come in close. The crazy high school kids running down the path in the moonlight just ran straight off the cliff and into the water, swam to the boat for an all-night kegger or whatever.
This was the place where years later Dave and Carol had picnics. They’d drink a bottle of wine and make love. He kept pointing out spots where they'd done it, drank a bottle and made love. Afterward, they dammed creek in places to make deep pools where they’d wash and soak.
We got out to Squire Point and sat there eating plums and oranges. It was windy. "Whitecaps!" he cried. "Whitecaps on Lake Macbride!" I asked him what a squire was. A peasant who owns land, he said. He asked me what the rock we were sitting on was. I said I didn't know. My brain must still have been pretty woozy from the sedative. “Coral,” he said. “This was all once a coral reef. Why do you think they call it Coralville?” As we walked back Dave related how he used to tell Carol he’d build her a house on the opposite shore. “I'm such a failure,” he said. “No, you're not,” I said. “You experienced all that.” More than I ever did, I thought enviously.
But that didn't satisfy him. He was worried about his heart, his second artirial block, self-diagnosed from his EKG like when he had snuck a look at his chest x-rays and diagnosed himself with late-stage lung cancer a few weeks before. "I'm just going to Africa," he had promised. "Noone's going to bag up my shit and piss." I was worried about my test at the time and promised to accompany him. Of course, it turned out to be nothing.
Now Dave was looking for the ruts where the jeeps got stuck. This was like 20 years ago. Worn away, he concluded disappointedly after we finally found the spot where he thought it had happened--although he claimed to be able to see some remnant of the event in how the hiking trail softened at a certain rise. A ghost. Dave had come out here with Carol--his second lost love, but this time through no fault of his own--a few years ago. That was the first time he had been back in years, willing to brave it somehow with Carol. Going up the hill, Dave's chest was hurting and mine was too a little. He decided the only solution was to press on harder, and then at the top of the hill, hollering he'd meet me there, he burst into a thundering sprint for the car.
Revelations
There’s a hum in the air. A night in early fall, four miles north of Exit 104, Interstate 80. A discernable hum. It’s not interstate. Four miles is enough to drown the drum of trucks and cars. No, Far Cloud (some call him Bert), the storyteller is waving a lengthening strand of interlocked hoops over his audience, laid prone around him in a circle. “Pull back your noses,” he warns with that indescribable intonation. “Hold back your chins, or the UFOs will grab you and take you up with them.” That intonation is combined with the unexpected accents on words, like footfalls breaking through ice, but under less harrowing circumstances like butter daubed over ears of fresh corn.
The line of whirling hoops is a white blur and coming lower. He somehow adds yet another hoop, extending himself farther. A whistling now. I can’t believe no one is panicking. I would panic for sure, I think, just sit straight up. And I imagine the awful sting of the hoops as they crash into the side of my face. “Get close to the earth. Get close.” Whining, the hoops spun into wind. Greatest temptation to bolt. And then...silence. The moment when the loved one lifts off in the plane you are following with your eyes or floats above you in your embrace...
I can’t remember how he ended, how he removed the threat of the hoops in one instant. I think maybe he just let go, let the great momentum fling them safely beyond his faithful circle. Maybe the hoops just disappeared, got spun into thin air. They all passed. They all got to stay. And what a contrast to the notion of Rapture!
Earlier, Katie and I had joined in. The evening started with a pow wow set to awaken the prairie. This commenced in a circle hewn from a dense stand of Big Bluestem, Indian grass, little bluestem, switchgrass. We sat on hay bales and blankets. Indian war veterans carried in flags to the beating of drums. Speaking over the too-hot PA, the Indian announcer said we should rise. The drumming and singing started and then the circling dancers, representing youthful male vigor, the clipped shyness of young maidens, the dried sap storms of old men, and the huge floating cloudness of venerable women. I was moved. The voices railing against the rooms of drums. The purple light dovetailing with the purple grass. I thought, I belong here and these might be my people. I bit my tongue and ruined it with thoughts. Then I read from the program, “When used traditionally, the drum takes people out of their cultural trance and connects us with the earth, our communities, and our own hearts and souls.” Men and women from different tribes took turns singing and drumming.
There was one guy who looked like me from a distance and I digested the signifigance of my first doppelganger. “A traditional fancy dance from ...” Soon the audience was asked to join in and complete the makeshift community. The brave obliged, most looking like plucked chickens beside the susurrating panoply, strutting their fanny packs for plumage. Karie convinced me to participate. I made sure we stuck ourselves as close to the hub as possible so as not to be visible to the audience of pale suburbanites on their bales, the chorus of eyes that I had just left to be seen and judged—although none of them were probably as harsh as me. Up close, I didn’t really look that much like myself. We continued into one ladies choice dance with specfic steps. It was fine, but not moving, like it had been when the whole thing had started. I broke away to take advantage of a sandwich stand we’d passed on the way in. They were all out of buns so they sold me a big hunk of smoked pork for a dollar. I went back to my bale and chawed it with a can of diet Pepsi. Mars was bright and hard in the southeast. Everyone just kept dancing, going in a circle.
But it didn’t end there. There was a beautiful young hoop dancer who prepared for her dance by laying 30 or more hoops on the ground around her. Then she moved like a zephyr and scooped them up one by one, spinning her body through them, letting them collect against her raised hand like foam in a fast stream and finally wiring them together in a big ball the announcer said represented mother earth as it bounced like an echo from her suddenly, incomprehensibly stilled body. These were the same hoops that Far Cloud would spin over his circle, and that we would stumble through around the fire in our own clumsy re-enactment of what we had just witnessed.
The announcement was made that those who wanted to hear the storyteller should leave the prairie circle and head over to the teepee and bonfire. We were ready for stories, starved. When we reached the teepee and fire, they were counting people into the tent, keeping track to see if they could break last year’s record of packing a hundred inside. Katie and I got counted inside and took a seat around the outer rim. I suddenly felt worried, trapped, checking to make sure we could escape under the edges if something went wrong. Sure enough, there were kids gusting in and out under the flap, calming my fears but also ruining the chances for an authentic record. Once we were all settled in, at a recording-breaking 120 heads, that old pre-show silence spread through. Somebody had one of those big flashlights and shone it up to the apex of the teepee, but still it didn’t illuminate the two dark Indians who swayed before us or our own faces tipped up in waiting.
I suppose I was expecting a charming Indian story, with lots of charming Indian names, and animals of the forest figuring prominently. I was expecting entertainment, although not exactly needing it; we had all been pushed beyond that now. “I’m worried about the kids,” began the storyteller. “They’re watching too much TV and playing those video games. They’re not spending enough time outside.” If we had paid, we would have been thinking this wasn’t what we had paid for. But maybe he was just warming up, for the wild narrative that he would spin and transport us beyond the confines of this tent, and as this tent represented earth, maybe beyond even that, galloping with stallions and swooping with eagles on the storm path of the cosmos! He talked about the importance of women and the importance of men, and how they fit together to make everything whole. One was like the sky and the other the earth. He referred to the other man, on one knee with brow knit over arrows bunched in one of his hands, and testing the points with the fingers of his other. I was sure the arrowheads were just plastic or paper. I tried to see their flaw in the weak light.
This man talked about the slow sacrament of making the arrowheads as he imagined how they would spring to their targets, flesh and blood and bone. He talked about hunting and focus, and how important both were for boys who had lost their direction. He waved the quiver in the air, in slow graceful arcs chased by tight little jerks. Then he’d lower them to the face of a boy, who would reach out to touch them as if they were hot, and finding them cool daring to run the back of his hand across the serrated edge before the boquet of bone was snatched away, lifted high and then lowered to the nose of a new boy. I was almost certain we were going to be killed, that this was all some kind of an elaborate ambush. Then I noticed the drums in the distance, like you notice the wind of a blizzard after hearing it for so long, a cliche of elemental force.
And I had the sincere thought that this was the closest that any of us could ever get to being in that earlier time or being in this moment, because these people had so humbly opened their ways to us and were showing such grave and heartfelt concern for our welfare. The great effort it took for them to call and gather and weep over and touch with us, what we shared. The storyteller was adding that good aim and focus could kill hate and prejudice too, and then the stones were lowered to me and I touched them. They were real.
When it was all over, we made our way back to the wagon that would return us to our cars, sat by a hip young mother and her kids. The kids were laughing, talking about the UFO circle. They had been part of the Inner Circle, they had braved the test and passed. Part of their giddiness was the relief of having survived, no doubt, maybe some of it holiness, but also a of having fun at someone else’s expense. What is it? asked the mother darting kind of proud, kind of bemused glances at us. This woman possessed the kind of sharp sarcasm I gloried in growing up, mostly on my mother’s side of the family, that chicken coop of whip-smart first cousins, a sense of belonging that I missed so much. “There was a fat guy in the circle,” said the boy, the ring leader and probably his mother’s favorite, “who kept getting hit in the stomach by the hoops.” They laughed more, trying to block the delirum with their hands, then their mother’s sweatshirt smirched with woodsmoke.
If I ever get to the point when I’m brave enough to get into that circle and have those hoops whine over me, I will probably be the guy who gets his belt buckle nicked, the one the kids laugh about as they head home. It doesn’t really bother me. I’ll be happy just to get to stick around.
posted by bell roe @ 7:54 PM
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