In Dubious Camper or Wearing Hubris Like a Medal (Part 4)

Fiction, NSP Meditations ,

It all comes down to this truth: you have read way too much literature, but apparently some of it, like Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, not very well. Yes, that one was skimmed. In this Depression-era novel, an idealistic young communist struggles to organize a bunch of California fruit tramps to strike for better wages. For his efforts, he gets killed by a goon shotgun blast that shears away his face.

Just like the communist, your ass has been thoroughly kicked. You have orchestrated a perfect sober folly and not even for the benefit of the working class. Your wife knew it was going to happen, but she didn’t issue the rope and she would never issue a stay. You are what your Old Man calls a “loser deluxe.” You are an over-the-header in the classic American tradition of President George W. Bush, the American military command in Vietnam, Henry Kissinger trying to find his soul, the Drug Enforcement Agency, Andrew Johnson after Lincoln, and Orson Welles on a movie set for the first time directing his first film. Of course he made Citizen Kane but you are no Orson Welles and definitely more like Andrew Johnson. You are to this trip what Andrew Johnson was to Reconstruction.

You want to quit right here, sell the truck and camper, or give them away, or roll them down a ravine, and catch a plane for home. You thought traveling public transportation through Eastern Europe before Gorbachev, the Middle East, North Africa, and Mexico had prepared you for the Alaska Highway in a camper with a ten-disc CD changer and a stocked liquor cabinet. Those other trips were fucking cake compared to this one. Lying prone in the camper, utterly dissipated, with Ray waiting to be fed, you pull the curtains open, and look out the window. The sleet has picked up and there are still 1200 miles over even shittier roads to the Arctic Ocean…and 4000 miles to finish the trip.

Now for some wonderful literary irony: you have yet to write a single word. You haven’t set up the computer. No notes. No postcards to former students. No photographs. No field recordings of the colorful locals. No stories from the blue-haired RV tribe that you occasionally intermingle with at diners and gas stations. No talk with The People. No conversations at all except for a 22-year-old gorgeous female Harvard graduate wearing a Buck knife who was assigned to write up a new section of traveling the Alaska Highway for Let’s Go Alaska. She drove a rented Japanese sedan and had about a dozen binders worth of material.

What’s it all about? It’s an epiphany on the order when a laser-guided daisy cutter bomb sprays molten aluminum through a Stone Age fortified position. It’s about a lyric from Aimee Mann’s Bachelor #2 CD, a sublime piece of perfect music you’ve had in the disc changer the whole way and listened to probably 30 times, committing it to memory. It’s a lyric that sums everything pretentious you are as an aspiring writer and this vainglorious camper/writer fiasco.

Wearing hubris like a medal…

And your medal came from Grenada after vanquishing Cuban construction workers or by designing software that more efficiently tracked fuel consumption of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

What is left? What is the plan? You can’t sleep on it because the latitude won’t allow it. You can’t call anyone and what would you say anyway? Rock and Roll sounds irrelevant here and indeed every place on the Alaska Highway. Writing in your logbook might help if you already had a few observations recorded, but there are none. Taking a long walk is impossible because mosquitoes will swarm every uncovered orifice of your body. The prospect of reading a novel to help gather yourself is stillborn. Masturbation is out of the question—Ray will watch. And there’s no booze or a joint because you tossed out all relaxing agents days earlier in some now inexplicable, sanctimonious purge.

You’ve got to rally, that’s what it’s all about. The Quality Lit God never brought forth writing about quitting. Books about death, insanity, or total failure get published, not books about quitting. Nobody wants to read about quitting or not even trying. That’s what most people do daily, weekly, annually, for perpetuity, on matters of personal creative importance. You don’t even have a book about quitting. You’ve got jack shit.

It has all come back to you so very hard, a sledge hammer to a lone human testicle. You got called on your hypocrisy, which for any educator still in the classroom is pretty rare. But for you, the classroom is long gone. There are no lessons here to impart to students. You are now the student and have to learn how everything went wrong and how to undo it all. That seems impossible to conceive at 2:00 a.m. when you feel fake, it’s light outside, you are in a camper, emotionally marooned in the Last Great Frontier, but still mobile as far as an operational V-8 engine goes, with mileage and mileage to go before you sleep to see the Arctic Ocean and return home and possibly reshape the clay to become a writer. Today, at some point, you will get up and you will drive and think about going back across the bridge.

In Dubious Camper or Wearing Hubris Like a Medal (Part 3)

Fiction, NSP Meditations , ,

The Big Trip is: in June drive to the top of Alaska, see the Arctic Ocean, explore the Last Frontier, meet its indigenous or transplanted freaks—8000 miles—100,000 words. In print.

The maps come out, the itinerary developed, gear purchased, and the multiple magazine queries mailed. What publication wouldn’t want this story? Adventure non-fiction is on fire!

This is the plan: drive north up the Oregon Coast on Highway 101, cross the once-mighty but now dammed Columbia River, head up the Washington shoreline until the route turns east around the Olympic Mountains, backtrack west to see Neah Bay and the Makah Indian Reservation, probe the untainted Olympic National Park beaches that William O. Douglas helped save from roads and condomania, head east paralleling the Strait of Juan de Fuca and find Raymond Carver’s grave in Port Angeles, cross upper Puget Sound to avoid the disaster of Seattle, go north into Gary Snyder’s Skagit Valley, farther north and east into the North Cascades, the Mt. Baker Wilderness where Kerouac did hard writer’s time as a fire lookout to realize the Dharma Bums, into British Columbia, follow the Fraser River, hook up with the Alaska Highway, over the Canadian Rockies, take it into the Yukon, see the gold fields, party in wild Whitehorse, join the Klondike Highway and conjure Jack London’s spirit, keep venturing north and experience the unbearable summer solstice lightness, scale the Top of the World Highway, descend a circuitous west into Fairbanks, turn north again, brave the haul road past the Brooks Range, to Deadhorse and Prudhoe to see the bitter well-paid dregs facilitate our insane addiction to fossil fuel, wade in the surf of the Arctic Ocean, visit the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before it gets drilled and pumped like a Las Vegas convention hooker, roar back down south past Denali, get drunk in Anchorage, explore the Kenai Peninsula, rip it back east through the Wrangell Mountains and the Elias Range, turn south on the Cassiar Highway, piss near the Sitkine River, an area Edward Hoagland wrote perfect sentences about, and finally cruise back to the Oregon Coast and probably into the writer/adventurer pantheon.

It will take a month, maybe longer. No one is telling you when to come home. You will need time to talk to the folks, break bread and venison with them, drink their vodka undiluted out of plastic containers. You will spend many days and blackless midnights checking out the backcountry too, its wildlife, surging undammed rivers, and government subsidized natural resource sodomy. All of these images, and countless more you can’t even imagine, will be documented by Walker Evans-style photographs and earthy prose that would make John Steinbeck proud. The rule is: every day, in the camper parked in the woods, at a wayside, near a river or a lake, in the shadow of snowy peaks, or in front of tavern, a minimum of 750 words must be crunched out on the computer. The cheap wine will be lavishly spilled, Ray will chew bones, the Replacements and Crazy Horse will be your backing band, and it should be obvious that once these stories come out, the fig-eating weaklings at the slick magazines will be compelled to travel to the Oregon Coast and write a feature about you!

It’s all flawless. You have conceived the master physics strategy to achieve escape velocity out of the teaching profession and soon will be in orbit around the one planet in the solar system inhabited exclusively by professional writers. Floating high overhead, it’s simply a matter of gravity before you come to land and reside forever on this planet.

During May, before departure, you perform a little needed half-ass surgery on Emotional Rescue: new turnbuckles purchased and secured, new shelving, new parts for the heater, new propane tank, waste water system rerouted. To eliminate swaying in the curves, you cut up a few boards and wedge them between the camper and the truck’s side panels. The Ford also receives attention: new tires, fluid changes, and a mechanical inspection from a professional with a lot of youthful acne. You tell him the rig needs to be “squared away” for a trip on the Alaska Highway and he asks, “Where’s that go?”

Inside the camper you have arranged the means of production for great writing. It will work like this: every night fold out a desk, lift a desktop computer from off a shelf, put it on the desk, plug everything in, boot up the computer…and start cranking out the prose dreams of the golden mountains.

As for other literary accouterments, the list is: two tape recorders, two cameras, two journals, bundles of maps, guidebooks, a bulletin board hung, an eclectic library assembled from the local thrift stores, and postcards of famous drunk writers, none of whom ever wrote in a camper, tacked up in every nook and cranny.

You stock up on simple, hearty food and beer and wine and whiskey. You buy a new toolbox and load it with shiny new Craftsmen tools. You devise a secret compartment for emergency cash and a couple of joints. The wife has baked you cookies. The last purchase is a first aid kit and several flares.

It’s now early June and you go online and learn the snow up north has been cleared and the roads are open. The future is now. You second act is about to begin. You pity the slaves back in the faculty meetings! Real writers don’t go to meetings.

On the morning you leave the Oregon Coast it’s raining and a little gusty. You open the door and Ray jumps in to take up the shotgun position. An owl amulet your wife gave you dangles from the rearview mirror. She kisses you goodbye and you climb in the cab. You have black coffee with just a splash of bourbon in it for writerly effect steaming in the cup holder. The first disc in the CD changer is Exile on Main St. and “Rocks Off” begins as you ease the camper down the driveway.

Five miles later you pull into a gas station to fill both tanks. You get out of the truck and notice three of the four turnbuckles are unattached, hanging down, swinging back and forth, scraping off paint. You refasten them with a hammer and duct tape. You also realize that your support boards are gone. You brought along spares however, wedge them in, and this time nail them to the camper with four-inch nails retrieved from the new toolbox. The attendant pumping your gas doesn’t say a word as he watches all these repairs take place. You pay the gas bill, put the key into the ignition, turn it, receive a substantial electric shock, which happens about once in a hundred cranks with this truck, drive away, steer Emotional Rescue north, into the wind, take a sip of the coffee, and let the tingle dissipate from the right side of your body.

Nine days later you are stopped in the wilderness near Chicken, Alaska, just a few miles west of the Yukon border. You are totally alone in a campground and more physically and emotionally exhausted than any other point in your life. Earlier that day you drove 20 miles per hour for five hours over the Top of the World Highway in fog, wind, snow, rain, and rock shrapnel at 4500 feet on the worst unpaved road on the continent with plummets down either side of the ridge steep enough to cause vertigo just looking at them from the cab. It often made you nauseous. Several times the potholes were so deep and utterly unavoidable, that the impact lifted the camper completely off the truck bed. Each time it made a sound like a juvenile delinquent hitting a metal garbage can with an aluminum bat. Virtually ever minute of this ride you assumed the truck’s rear axle or chassis would crack. You have no cell phone or citizen’s band radio. You had never changed a tire on the truck. Or belts. You didn’t bring any belts. There was no shoulder anyway. You have no tow insurance for the truck onr any insurance at all for the camper. The windshield got pounded into a spider web right outside of Dawson City by a shotgun spread of gravel flown up by an oncoming truck. There was no place to pull out to check the rig or regroup. As you drove, the screaming second-guessing began. You pleaded for fewer potholes. You cursed the frequent sight of the little red flags that marked an especially deep, bottomless depression. You could have murdered the cranked-up, truck drivers barreling down from the other direction. You harangued the Yukon Province’s and then the State of Alaska’s ineptitude at basic road maintenance. You ran your fingers through your hair and came up with a greasy handful. Over and over, “Give me some fucking decent road!” It was a useless request and futile calming mantra. There was no decent road. There never would be. The safety flagger said so. He should know. He’d been flagging the same stretch of road for 14 years. All the while Ray is staring directly at you and it calls to mind a line from Travels with Charley, “I wonder why we think the thoughts and emotions of animals are simple?”

Finally you limped into the campground. You didn’t pay the fee. The spasms in your right arm finally settled. It was sleeting. Poetically it should have been dark too, but the daylight is unremitting, and the sleep deprivation has steadily mounted to POW-interrogation proportions. You headed to the pit toilet, opened the door, took in the smell, went to one knee, braced yourself with your left hand on a piss-soaked wall, and vomited all over the grated floor.

Inside the camper you take stock of the trip. Prior to the Top of the World Highway, which appeared quite benign on the Web, you nearly dumped the camper a dozen times on curves and canyons in the road, and when barely avoiding foxes, lynxes, moose and grizzly cubs. Your support boards flew out in the Fraser River canyon. They easily could have smashed into a vehicle behind you and caused the death of everyone on board. You shoved in more support boards and nailed them down with six-inch nails, but they didn’t hold either, and swung out perpendicular five feet from the camper, metal bristling, looking medieval, ready to impale the hitchhikers and bikers who traveled the Alaska Highway too, and without trying exuded about a thousand times more hardcore ethic than you. There was even a guy in loafers carrying only a briefcase and walking stick, in the middle of the Yukon Territory, in fog, near moose, who had no sane reason to be there except that perhaps he too had literary aspirations.

There were more mishaps, like the leaking propane tank, the flooded icebox, and all your firewood falling out because you forgot to shut the truck’s tailgate. The truly debilitating aspect of this trip, however, is not counting off the numerous fuck-ups, but the crushing fatigue of driving 10-12 hours a day, usually under 40 miles per hour, over road craters that could serve as slit trenches, without ever once letting up on concentration. You can also figure in another two hours every day pumping gas at prices the world is accustomed to, but not an American from the lower 48. A good day nets barely six inches highlighted on your map. The distance to the Arctic Ocean from the Oregon Coast didn’t look so far on the projection you used, but then again, you are one of those idiots who think Greenland is bigger than Australia and North America is at the center of the world.

And there in the campground at the western entrance to the top of the World Highway, map unrolled, legend finally read, the pure geography of it all is fathomed—you aren’t even half way.

In Dubious Camper or Wearing Hubris Like a Medal (Part 2)

Fiction, NSP Meditations ,

The search for a camper begins and you figure it must be like buying a used car: read up on the subject at the library, buy a couple of consumer magazines, check the classifieds, visit a few RV lots, maybe surf the Web, and it will all come together, especially since you intend to pay with cash and are highly educated and think that anything worth knowing can be mastered by reading about it first and tasting a little experience later for dessert.

You already own a big Ford pickup truck, which is an absurdity considering the timing of the purchase—when a former oil executive became President of the United States. But high gas prices will not abort great journalism and great literature, or a young man’s dream, and it’s hard to write in a tent anyway, so a camper it is.

You investigate a couple of possibilities, but they are too modern and too expensive. Great journalism and literature doesn’t need self-contained showers and toilets. Steinbeck had neither and he wrote a masterpiece. Same with Kerouac and Meriwether Lewis. And how about Woody Guthrie?

After a month of false starts and ad for an eight-foot, $2500, 1988, Lance camper appears. Model name “Squire.” Perfect. You make a call and talk to some dude who tells you a story: my uncle is dying of cancer and I have to get rid of this thing for him. It’s fucking sweet, in cherry fuckin’ condition and I got to unload it fast. People have been calling. It’s going to move. It’s $500 below book. You should check it out now!

You can definitely dig his advice. This rig feels hot. Luckily the wife is in Portland and you direct her to investigate and report back. She calls later and describes the camper as “small” and “shaky-looking.”

That’s not what you want to hear. You call the dude back and set up a meeting the next evening.

It’s a dark and stormy winter night when you pull your Ford F-150 into a potholed parking lot near a condemned donut shop. There it is, jacked up, just waiting for some aspiring gonzo writer to soak the interior upholstery with ether and blow those pussy university press memoirists and Granta short story writers away! That writer is you!

You meet the dude, who owns an auto detailing business in a very sketchy part of Portland. He twitches a lot and uses “fuck” as practically every part of speech. He has a lackey in tow, clad in a denim jump suit. The camper looks pretty good from the outside although it is dark and the dude apologizes for not bringing a flashlight. At least a weak light inside works and it throws a few beams to reveal the interior is dry, clean, Spartan, and utterly devoid of character. It also has no discernible smells that might reveal vices or traits from the previous owner, now allegedly in a coma. Of course the camper’s anonymity will change once you appoint it with the right trappings: mounted compass, weather station, old maps, altimeter, thrift store cookery, mediocre whiskey, coffee pot, arcane books, an 8-track player, beads, Jesus candles, poetry anthologies, stolen lawn gnomes, Rolling Stones’ album covers, and kitsch magnets from all over the West you will collect from the road.

It will be pretty much original these days as far as writing studios go. No one in New York, LA or in graduate school has this. It might even qualify as a tax deduction! Just like Steinbeck in Travels with Charley you’ll drink applejack after a long day’s drive, share your Cognac with migrant workers, and hole up in non-corporate motel every fourth day or so, soak in a tub and drink double vodkas. It’s all so cool a name for the camper materializes without any effort—Emotional Rescue. Keith Richards would definitely play guitar in here, maybe even take up smack again. Ramble on. Thunder prose. Born to write. All those particular places to go. Running on full. Smells like John Steinbeck’s spirit.

It’s all so flawless and outlined except the camper doesn’t actually fit the pickup—it’s too small and the jacks don’t hold it up high enough for you to back the pickup under it. No matter, this is America and these are your people godammit! The auto detail dude and his paroled fixers will fix it up, improve, make it happen right there, by building a platform for the truck bed to raise the camper precious inches so the overhang doesn’t collapse the cab. You’ll take it, without any haggling, because these Salts of the Earth are hustling hard for you to get Emotional Rescue on the road and into print.

The next morning you hand over the cash, and the auto detail dude arranges to have a forklift pick up the camper and set it down onto your pickup. It works. Was there ever any doubt? You shake hands, pull away, give the thumbs-up sign, and head west for home. The ten-disc CD changer you had recently installed is turned up to nearly criminal volume and early Tom Petty is rocking with twangy Rickenbacher magic. It’s happening and happening well, debt-free, on a straight, illuminated four-lane highway with a median. No longer a dream deferred for an American adult with a graduate teaching degree.

Out of Portland and through the franchised wasteland of the west-side suburbs. You start back over the Coast Range and gradually nervousness begins to gnaw. It’s a new feeling, one that apparently comes when driving on three black beers with an unsecured load of 1500 pounds shifting in the turns of the Wilson River Highway, a twisting, dark, road teeming with wildlife that William Stafford used to drive and wrote a great poem about. You actually taught it in class. Something about death you recall. Suddenly two deer bolt in front of you, brakes lock up, a fishtail commences. But the shoulder is atypically wide here, you slow the rig to an idle, check the front end for blood and fur, find nothing, and keep bearing to the sea.

You make it home and the wife is waiting. She remarks how the camper doesn’t seem to fit the truck. You explain and she seems highly skeptical. A week later you inventory the camper before the debut voyage—a one-day reconnoiter to the untainted Southern Oregon Coast. Here is the service report: you can’t turn on the heater and the camper fills up with gas. (Just bring more blankets.) Every lock is stripped. (Trust the proletariat.) There are no manuals. (Lewis and Clark never needed them.) None of the propane gauges work. (The tank must be full.) One of the hydraulic jacks is broken. (Fix it later with a Leatherman.) You have no idea how to operate the other three. (Ask a gas station attendant.) Two of the camper’s tie-down turnbuckles are rusted tight and will not attach. (Two is enough anyway.) There is no refrigerator as originally thought, but rather an icebox that requires a block of ice to cool your beer. (No freon to ruin the ozone layer.) There is no way to drain waste water because the truck’s side panel blocks the outflow pipe. (Fuck it!) You examine the title for the first time and even to an untrained eye it appears forged. (Good literary value in this detail.)

None of this is dissuading and you kiss the wife goodbye, load up Ray, load up the disc changer with the perfect programmed concert, and roll south down Highway 101 on the inaugural voyage. A storm is forecast but blow-dried meteorologists from Portland television stations are always wrong about the Oregon Coast’s weather and dire predictions barely concern you. Getting to the liquor store before it closes, that concerns you.

You buy the trusty Jim Beam Traveler, stock up on food, ice, and outfit the kitchen with the ugliest, grooviest, 70s-style pots and pans. At dusk you are approaching the lost-in-the-clouds, arcing-into-the-sky Yaquina Bay Bridge. Five cars hug your ass. The Who is blaring when the winds slam the camper. You can’t see for miles, only a few feet. The camper starts shaking like Tina Turner in 1969. It feels like you might pitch over the side, down 300 feet to the white-capped black sea below and die a truly ignominious, unpublished greenhorn death that might not even be noticed.

You hold the rudder firm, curse, scream, “Why does it have to rain and blow today in a drought winter?” It’s the wrong question to ask. The right question is to ask the bridge’s architect why the lanes are so narrow.

It takes what seems like an hour to pass through the green arches and make it across. Somehow it feels like a god intervened. You pull over, turn off the music, flip-off the ass huggers, reconsider this little sojourn, curse more, take a belt, look at Ray who appears scared…and decide to continue and brave other bridges and a barometer level now plummeting on your mail order weather station.

Four hours later you stop in non-Rock and Roll darkness at state park north of Bandon. The campground area is strewn with Sitka spruce branches. You are the only rig there. Your arms are cramping, head pounding, and the body odor emanating from your chest is pushing gag reflex levers. You need a double shot.

You get out of the cab, horizontal rain is now an afterthought, shine a flashlight, and notice two safety turnbuckles have vanished and the camper has shifted six inches in the bed of the truck. Inside, it looks like teenagers threw a party or the cops tossed the joint on a drug warrant. You take another belt, feed Ray, straighten up, try unsuccessfully for 15 minutes to turn on the heater, gas up the place, open the windows, read for 15 minutes, and go to sleep. You don’t even write a post card or in the special journal “log book” that was to record all the nuggets of dialogue and media fragments that would later end up as polished narrative gold.

The storm blows through that night. You eat breakfast in a packed Coos Bay diner and don’t overhear one interesting story. It’s mostly cracker bullshit full of double negatives about conspiracies so stupid they wouldn’t get aired on paranoid talk radio. The ride home in a drizzle is slow and uneventful. Ray sleeps the whole way. There’s really nothing to tell the wife when she asks how “it” all went.

Okay, so you took a few licks and the literary panning turned up nothing but gravel. It’s not going to happen all the time. But the camper is intact. Maiden voyage in the can. You have turned a lighter shade of green. Next time you’ll research the weather better and spot-weld the turnbuckles down tight if necessary. You will also avoid driving at night.

So, you deduce that you have the Right Stuff to take a Big Trip, the kind of Big Trip that will pre-sell magazine stories to the glossies, maybe even a book deal. It will be epic, a heart-palpitating work of staggering big-ball genius and “roughing it” that will translate to literary pieces full of “doing” and “action” with plot moving at the speed of a NASCAR race. No private reflection to the point of insanity like Edmund Wilson castigated Proust and Joyce for. They were weak and laid in bed or sat in cafes. You are on the road!

When the Big Trip is over and the ink has dried, Emotional Rescue will be parked in the museum of bitchin’ literary transportation right next to Che’s motorcycle, Hunter’s convertible, Ahab’s Pequod, the Merry Pranksters’ Further, Captain Nemo’s Nautilus and Noah’s Ark!

In Dubious Camper or Wearing Hubris Like a Medal (Part 1)

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , , ,

(A short story I wrote in 2002.)

A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Assigned for College Prep English, you read Travels with Charley in a suburban high school and a notion must have conceived then, gestated over two decades, and now begins its birth here in your unpublished adulthood on the Oregon Coast.

To John Steinbeck, the nation’s people and landscape were his subject and inspiration. Toward the end of his career, he wanted to reacquaint himself with his stock and trade so he took to the road to ask great questions of Americans. Having the luxury of no job to report to, he crossed the country leisurely in the era before corporations branded homogeneity on our culture. His loyal poodle Charley rode shotgun and their means of transportation was a crude but funky custom-made truck camper, a novelty at the time that only a famous author could afford. He named the rig Rocinante, after the nag in Don Quixote.

In Travels with Charley, which the rest of your class hated, Steinbeck wrote, “An American writer has to know his land and the people if he is going to write about America,” and that’s exactly what he did in the era before Interstate Highway System murdered automobile touring in this country and metastasized urban degeneracy into rural America.

The book, the camper, the dog, the wanderlust, Steinbeck’s credo—they all must have stoked some atavistic embers, heated a branding iron red and left a smoking black mark on your youth.

Unfortunately, this mark was not painful enough to set you directly on the course to becoming a writer. Other seductions prevailed, namely, the comfortable dictatorship of being a public high school teacher which brainwashes you into believing two things: 1) you are always right; 2) preparing a cutting edge lesson plan is the zenith of liberal intellectual risk-taking.

Now, almost two decades later, after 17 subjects, seven schools, two continents, and ten years in climate-controlled classrooms, you actually achieved what Philip Roth wrote about teachers, “Perpetually hovering at the edge of depletion.” Now a non-MFA, non-trust fund, non-grant, attempt to create the professional writing life is unfolding. You have ideas, you have experiences, you know they are fresh, you want to write, you think you can write, and maybe you are on the brink.

So you quit teaching at this final gig on the Oregon Coast but never told your colleagues, burned all your curriculum files, or cashed in the pension to dynamite the last bridge back to the classroom. It will remain standing should you fail. It always remains standing for a certain kind of teacher who wants out of the profession but can’t make it.

The nation’s people and landscape are your subject and inspiration too. You have a loyal dog, Ray, named after Raymond Carver who sometimes wrote in his car, and couldn’t hack it as a high school English teacher. And you now also have various luxuries of time and temporary liquidity since you are unemployed, childless, repaid the college loan, saved cash, and the wife took on a new and particularly grinding social service job to help finance your transformation.

So, a plan that gestated for one score emerges from the birth canal: you will buy a camper, explore and document the Pacific Northwest’s special places and freaks and become a writer editors commission to investigate and declare authentically for art and the record—The State of the Region—or the entire country for that matter. You will serve as writer in residence in a camper and this gimmick will put you on the literary NPR map. After you hit the road, the stories will flow like the Columbia River used to. And naturally, you will be so utterly cool in this role that you will copy Barry Lopez and pull over at the sight of roadkill and drag their bodies off the killing ground to provide them a sliver of dignity in the face of appalling human impatience and destruction wrought by the internal combustion engine.

Of course you could just buy a van, but Steinbeck would never drive a van, and your wife has filled your head with wonderful stories of her cozy sleep-overs in her Grandfather’s homemade camper, and his gritty trips to Baja and Hells Canyon. It must be a camper and it must sit upon a big truck.

Before School–A Poem (February 18, 2010)

NSP Meditations, Poetry , ,

I saw the same homeless man in Starbucks this morning.

He’s always there when I grade before school.

His beard belonged to Bob Marley;

his glasses very Buddy Holly.

He drank coffee at 5:30 a.m. and surfed his stickered laptop.

I think it was Facebook.

“Reading the news,” I asked, as I went for a newspaper.

“I don’t read the news. Nothing in there affects me.”

“What about global warming?”

“The hell with that!”

“What about in 50 years?” (I really said that.)

“Warming’s good for me.”

I glanced at the newspaper’s headline: something grim about jobs.

“I have to go to work,” I said.

“That’s a four letter word.”

“Yes it is.”

I took my coffee to the truck and drove to school.

The shell sign blasted light into the sky,

murdering the Big Dipper.

Queen played on the radio. Crazy Little Thing Called Love.

A rusted bike lay splayed in the gravel. No one would ride it again.

The reader board wished happy birthday in red and blue.

The mole living under the parking lot

somehow pushed dirt up through the asphalt.

The black school cat prowled the portables.

Sea lions barked down on the Bayfront.

Dogs at the shelter barked, too.

I beat the head custodian again,

he’s dying from Agent Orange.

My students wrote well on the disappearance of stars.

Later, we’ll walk to the cemetery and write about the dead.

Swallows In My Garage–A Poem (2007)

NSP Meditations, Poetry ,

For the third or fourth

dusk in a row,

the thirty to forty

that live in my garage

mass on the power line,

joining others from the refuge,

one hundred to two hundred strong,

doing what swallows do

before they fly south

to escape the Oregon Coast

winter rain

that drove Meriwether Lewis insane.

Reclined on the lawn,

I watch them,

not knowing

if the third or fourth dusk

will end the season

of my swallows,

until they return

next spring,

from Mexico.

They mass, they prepare.

I do not want them to leave

and not because when they leave

I know summer has flown.

In April there was one,

then two,

then three scouts appeared.

A week later,

the couples arrived,

again,

to the very nests

they made years ago,

made from mud, twigs

and dryer lint.

Some did not return.

I know who they were,

and how each flew

unique in flight,

diving

near my head,

a certain Kamikaze

kind of flight,

a beautiful

menacing flight

that awoke everything in me.

They never hit me,

or crashed,

or peppered me,

although

they shotgunned

my garage

with so much white

that I must park

the truck outside

from April to August.

It’s a small price to pay.

I know my swallows

understand

no such thing

as reciprocity,

but they have become

my sublime

mosquito-eating machine,

the most perfect

pesticide,

that has always been

here under the sun.

but in this case,

the moon.

I leave the garage door

open all the time

for my swallows,

and the window too,

and I tack boxes

below the nests

to catch the droppings.

The real show begins

when the eggs hatch,

and the four or five chicks

from each of the six nests,

launch their lives

as swallows

in my garage.

What wildness it is!

A tabernacle

of nature

with

all the water

humans need

to douse

their world on fire

is there.

All the answers

to avoid answering

the question:

“What color is it

when black is burned?”

are revealed.

It is so obvious,

that I,

in passing by,

conscious of

the swallows’ nests

in my garage,

saw Great Nature’s Face,

and did not

let it pass

infinite by me.

I know nothing of

swallow biology

except they

mate for life.

There’s pleasure

in not knowing more,

the writer’s arcane of it all,

the Annie Dillard

the John McPhee,

noticing something

to death,

or worse,

to the point of

no mystery.

Cindy once said,

on our walk

on the refuge,

“Just stop talking

about nature and

let it be

without you.”

She is gone from our home

but the swallows return.

We used to talk to them together.

I wake them,

all of them,

in the morning,

still dark,

but dawning,

as I tread my garage

on my way

to walk the dogs

in the woods of the refuge.

“Hello birdies!” I greet them

with my swallow greeting voice.

They alight and our day has begun.

When they begin to mass,

I watch them more,

but never talk

about it

to anyone.

Who is there to tell?

What does it say

about a man whose

best friends are his

three big dogs and

the thirty to forty swallows

that live in his

shit stained garage?

What does it say about a man

who would vote

Republican the rest

of his life,

and renounce

the Rolling Stones,

if it guaranteed

the next occupants

housed here

let the nests be,

garaged,

and want

to recline on the lawn,

maybe even alone,

and watch the swallows

mass on the power line?

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