Having watched Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" before, grudgingly, and not having been a big fan of his ... we'll say "abrasive" personality, I was a bit wary about my level of enjoyment for reading "The Nasty Bits". But I'm in the middle of writing my own book about food, so I thought reading the writing of someone who knew food intimately, someone who has given his life to understanding and explaining food as a sensory experience and cultural metaphor, could only be a good idea for my own writing, stylistically, so I jumped in.
And immediately, with just the preface to the book, I was hooked. Bourdain jumps right in with an imagistic account of a valuable cultural experience, sets the scene, a classic writer's move. By the time I got to the second page and to his question "How do I make that beautiful?" I knew I was reading a fellow writer, someone grappling with the larger difficulties of putting experience to page. I thought the rest of the book was an up-and-down journey of that idea.
Sure, Bourdain's fuck-you style came out at times, but even then I found I enjoyed it more than on TV, as I could see he was using anger for a specific stylistic purpose, dropping short rants like "The Food Terrorists" in among flowery odes like "My Manhattan" or "Sleaze Gone By" (very different views on the same topic, which I loved). I tolerated the rage because it was well-paced throughout the book and provided structural variety.
Overall, I'd be more interested now in reading some full-length Bourdain, where he might be able to more deeply explore some of the complex issues raised in shorts here--his ideas on vegetarianism or the raw food movement, for example--but this was a fly-through book, and pretty nice on the ears.
Friday, April 02, 2010
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
It's been awhile... I'm taking a book-length project workshop this summer, so I'm writing ten pages a week but I don't know how they are coming together as a whole unit yet. Here's a sample...
I had never been to a yacht club before. I had never even seen a yacht before, so when the press rep for the McNish Classic Yacht Race told me she’d put my name on the guest list for the Friday night reception at the Pacific Corinthian Yacht Club in Oxnard, California, I conjured images of men in navy polos and white loafers, of women wearing pearls with frosted blonde hair, of pink alcohol in martini glasses and small plates of things called canapés. So I dug through my closet, discarding blouse after skirt, until I could piece together from my dirt-poor, post-college wardrobe something respectable enough for a yacht club: a pink sleeveless shirt, my purple a-line (with French words on it), the pale pink kitten heels that my mother’d bought me to wear to church last Easter Sunday, and the fake pearls I still had from my performance of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” sophomore year. Other than the notepad poking out of my purse, a necessary accessory for a journalist, I figured I’d fit right in.
But when I ran into Louise, the press rep I’d spoken to on the phone, in the parking lot of the yacht club, a loud, round woman wearing a red visor, khakis and embroidered McNish Classic polo, she snickered. “Cute shoes, doll. Too bad you’ll have to take ‘em off.” I had no idea what she was talking about. Louise had to take a call and waved me inside, where a brunette woman in a PCYC blazer gave me a nametag and directed me to the upstairs ballroom.
I stood awkwardly in the corner, surveying the room until Louise came back to start introducing me, berating myself once again for being a shitty journalist. What kind of reporter is too shy to talk to people? Kind of goes with the territory. I pulled out my notepad and started jotting down observations: my fashion assessments had been pretty far off, but my cocktail predictions seemed accurate. Cosmopolitans, glasses of white wine, martinis (with extra olives): I wandered over to the bar and picked up a glass of chardonnay, then out onto the balcony, settling myself in a corner to observe. Almost everyone was wearing shorts and t-shirts, mostly untucked. People were laughing more than I anticipated members of a yacht club laughing. I thought I’d stay for an hour, get a handful of quotes and head home.
Home was just a ten-minute drive from the yacht club, a tiny one-bedroom for $900 a month two blocks from the beach. Tonight was an hour covering this story, dinner for one of a quick stir fry with the last of last week’s farmer’s market vegetables, an hour of TV, organizing whatever notes I gathered tonight and going to bed. Most of my three months in California had been spent similarly: every other week the boyfriend I’d followed here was out on the island counting nests, so I put in plenty of overtime at work to fill in the blank spaces and got used to hanging out in my underwear and cooking for one. Tomorrow, I’d roll out of bed early to head back to the yacht club and cover the race itself. All I knew so far was that this was the 30th and final year of the race founded by and named after the infamous Dick McNish, a notoriously shy 82-year-old Venturan. The race was open only to classic yachts, and I didn’t yet have any idea what that meant. My editor Matt had instructed me to get some good quotes from McNish, known for his disdain of the media. Matt had purposely sent me to cover the race, thinking if anyone could get McNish to talk it’d be a petite 24-year-old “with that big smile”. Tomorrow, I’d be out on the press boat, watching the race from a distance, so this was my chance to meet the man himself. I had a tendency to get seasick, so I reminded myself to stop and get ginger tea on the way home. Louise had warned me that anyone on the press boat who ‘fed the fishes’ would be mocked mercilessly.
I leaned against the metal railing along the deck’s edge and closed my eyes, trying to conjure the words for the dank smell of the ocean in high summer. The gray-blue water bobbed quietly, sending shivers of splash against the bellies of boats docked at the harbor. All I could see were tall-reaching masts: a mix of white fiberglass from the PCYC’s members and the varnished wood of the visiting classic yachts. I felt a hand on my back and turned to see Louise, who told me Dick was doing an interview with the County Star but would talk with me later.
“You wanna see a tall ship,” she asked, smiling. I bit my lower lip to keep from giggling at the vaguely sexual language I’d be encountering all night, but nodded, and Louise introduced Jon and Graem, co-owners of the Raietea, a 43-foot sloop whose name is a lesser-known French Polynesian island which, in Tahitian, means bright sky, up from Long Beach for the weekend. “These gentlemen volunteered to be your tour guides for the evening,” she told me. It’s in my nature to be a little wary when two middle-aged men offer to show me their sloop, but I definitely wanted to see what the inside of a classic yacht’s cabin looked like so I shook their hands demurely and got the spellings of their last names and let them lead me down the winding staircase to the plank dock below.
As soon as I stepped off the bottom step to the dock, Graem’s head snapped around to look at my feet.
“Heels?” He shook his head, the gray edges of his hair rustling in the ocean breeze. “No way you’re getting on the Raietea with heels on.”
Jon laughed a little. “Took us two hours to varnish the main deck’s teak flooring and a couple thousand to pay for those boards—you’ll scratch ‘em up.”
I was horrified. How did I always manage to do it? I thought I’d get all decked out, did my best to look the part and still embarrassed myself. Why was I even a writer? Could I be any more obvious?
“No big deal, sweetheart,” Jon said, throwing his big arm around my shoulders. “You’ll just tour the boats barefoot.”
Graem smiled again, kindly. “You’ve never done this before, have you?”
Though it was true—my cute shoes had betrayed me for the conspicuous outsider I was—I felt better knowing that it was out there. I wouldn’t have to pretend to recognize anything, and I knew it was better for the story that they carefully explain everything to me as a beginner anyway.
“Alright, star reporter,” Graem continued, taking the empty wine glass from my hand and setting it on the bare deck. “Let’s get you a real drink.”
My heels shoved into the tote bag slung over my left shoulder, I took the hand Jon offered me, pulling me up and over the brass railing onto the Raiatea. Graem ducked into the cabin to start mixing drinks and Jon led me around the main deck, describing the hard work of varnishing the floorboards, which he and Graem did themselves, on their hands and knees. The masts, he told me, were the same holly beams that the original owner, who built the boat, installed, and they had bought crisp new ivory sails for race day. The back of my throat tingled slightly from the sharp smell of varnish still fresh on the deck, and then a breeze passed through, trembling the rolled-up sails. I wrinkled my nose: fish, Jon told me. Most of the yacht owners spent the long weekend in Ventura for the race, went fishing on Friday and cooked their own dinner.
“That’s why you smell kerosene, too,” he said as Graem emerged from the belly of the ship with two cocktails in his fists, handing one off to me without bothering to tell me what it was. “The party’s just getting started.”
I was conscious, when I accepted the first Jack and Coke on board the Raiatea, of the fact that I probably shouldn’t be drinking while covering a story. But something about it seemed appropriate here: these men referred to themselves as salty dogs and to me as a star reporter; they wore baseball caps to a yacht club and had stocked the bar on their boat with top-shelf liquor and plastic tumblers that wouldn’t scratch the floorboards if they shattered. My kitten heels were poking out of my purse and my bare feet felt comfortable on the teak floorboards. Plus, I hadn’t been out for drinks since I’d moved to California. My boyfriend was gone most of the time and anyway his idea of going out was throwing on a pair of flip-flops and grabbing a beer at the Sewer, the alleyway bar around the corner from our apartment. I worked as a reporter, a largely solitary job. I spent my days wandering around in the sand, marveling at the ocean and typing at coffee shops for the free wireless. I made barely $1000 a month. I was 24 and I lived at the beach. Nothing seemed better to me than watching the sun set into the Pacific with cocktail in hand, shooting the breeze with a bunch of kind middle-aged men. Here was a chance to play dress-up and entertain the notion that I was an adult who knew how she liked her whiskey. Plus, open bar.
So I followed when Jon and Graem led me onto the deck of their harbor neighbor, the Spitfire, where the crew were playing Scottish bagpipe music loudly and accepted when they offered me a mai-tai, and a second one, and declared myself a member of the Hunter S. Thompson school of journalism. I kicked my bare feet up on the white plastic cushions on the Spitfire’s benches and said, “Tell me your favorite race stories, gentlemen.”
We spent an hour and a half there, men gossiping on the deck of their yacht like they were around a kitchen table:
“I heard that the paint job on Circe cost more than the down payment on a house!”
And “to rename your ship superstition says you’ve first got to run her aground, and no self-respecting yacht owner would ever dream of hurting his girl like that,” and
“Grand prize is the skipper’s weight in Mum’s champagne!” and
“It’s not about who wins or loses, but about getting these old gals together,” and
“The anchor motor on the Sparrow came from a B-52” and
Goddamnit we’re out of rum! – Let’s head over to the Sparrow!”
And, glasses raised, “To Dick McNish!”
This was July in southern California, so even as eight p.m. rolled around, the sky was still a pink-streaked blue and the conversation lulled like the waves softly rocking the boat.
“See, man, we don’t need a flat screen,” Jon said to Graem.
Graem smirked and turned to me. “Ok star reporter, settle something for us,” he said. “I think we should get a flat screen HD for our cabin. Take ‘er out on a Sunday, get a cooler of beer, watch the game. Duff here thinks I’m being spoiled.”
“Not spoiled,” Jon said. “I just think—we go sailing to get away from that life.”
The other men nodded quietly, as if a grave secret was being shared. I asked about day jobs: IT manager, auto parts manufacturer, quality control specialists. I had no idea what any of them really did, because while they were here, docked in Oxnard, drinking cocktails as the waves lapped at their girls wooden bellies, they were ships’ captains and nothing else. They lost themselves in this life, in manning the helms and reading the wind. This wasn’t a general kind of escapism, not middle-aged men looking for some retreat from the daily grind: there was a specific charm to racing these boats, this way that was so appealing to them. Wooden boats have a history tucked inside the grains of their floor boards, and the owners seek only to highlight that history, to bring another time back to life for an afternoon, to remind themselves and the race’s audience of an era of boating before fiberglass and high-speed motors.
“These are time machine boats,” Jon said. “The moment you step on board, you are transported back.”
I saw other boats: with enchanting names like the Dauntless, the Rose of Sharon, the Vignette, Circe. But the tours were a blur of minute details: the original 1947 lantern mounted from the cabin’s ceiling; the story of the silver dollar installed below the center mast for good luck; the forest-green sleeping bags balled up on the thin mattresses in the sleeping quarters, since all captains believe you must sleep on the boat the night before a big race; the names of their wives engraved on a brass plate mounted beneath the steering column; the laughter, the leis, the mixed drinks. Everything was hand-chosen, carefully researched, perfectly authentic. Owning a wooden yacht, they told me, is a labor of love.
The sun dipped lower, casting a harsh orange sheen on the surface of the ocean as we again fell into silence on the deck of the Raiatea. I sucked on the cherry from my hurricane and thought about my job. Being a journalist was going pretty well. When I’d moved to California, I took a job helping the underachievers of rich Orange County lawyers study for the SATs and had gotten a little freelance reporting on the side. Now I had a story every week, some of which had taken me out to the islands, into symphony halls and crowded bars for live concerts, browsing around art galleries, interviewing Ben Harper and lounging at the yacht club on a Friday night. I was teaching and writing for a living. So why did I still feel so disconnected from this strange permanent-summer life?
A small motorboat chugged by, helmed by the people I expected to see at the Pacific Corinthian that night: an older man with a white driver’s cap and navy-striped polo steering; his wife, bleached blond hair, black dress, white cardigan tied tennis-style around her shoulders. She sipped her glass of chardonnay and looked out toward the motley crew of us—men in tartan hats and Hawaiian print shirts, with purple leis and umbrellas in their red plastic cups, women without the decency to wear shoes—and yelled out to us that classic yachts were, “too high maintenance!” We all laughed, and the men echoed what they’d told me all night: that was the difference between people willing to sacrifice the history and effort of a classic yacht for the creature comforts of modern boating, who would pick the easy care of shiny white fiberglass over the smooth, peaceful sailing of a wooden vessel. All anybody else saw when they looked at a wooden boat was the work involved, the very thing they loved.
Graem snickered slightly, and took a shot back: “Actually, I think she was talking about herself.”
I ended the night with Jon and Graem back inside the club, the three of us gathered around a small white-clothed table, a Long Island iced tea in front of each of us. It had been dark when we’d climbed the stairs back into the club and Louise gave me a bear hug, patted Jon on the back.
“Jesus, where’d you take her,” she harassed them.
“They took good care of me,” I replied. “I saw all the great ones. I heard about the Dauntless and the Rose of Sharon.” I could see her pride as I showed her my five pages of notes.
“Well, Dick’s gone for the night,” she told me, and my heart skipped. Hunter S. Thompson my ass, who was I kidding, I couldn’t pull off this kind of journalism, I’d missed the big interview. Louise must have sensed my disappointment. “Don’t worry, doll,” she told me. “I’ll get you five with him at the trophy ceremony tomorrow night.”
So I relaxed and Graem said “one more drink?” and I nodded and slumped at the table with them, listening to the jazz trio on the balcony finish out the evening.
“So star reporter,” Graem leaned in. “Tell us something about yourself.”
First, don’t talk about yourself is a pretty basic tenant of journalism. It’s not about being secretive, but the more you talk the less they do, and they’re the story.
Second, generally speaking, it’s a good idea not to get personally involved in your story. It’s much more difficult to write something when you feel too strongly one way or the other about your subjects. So making friends is generally discouraged.
But third, I was drunk. I weighed 120 pounds, hadn’t had dinner and had downed a glass of wine, a Jack and coke, two mai-tais, a hurricane and was working my way through a Long Island iced tea at this point.
So I told them I’d just gotten engaged.
And they balked—couldn’t believe how young I was. Where was the ring? Well, it was spontaneous, I said, and told them the elaborate story. How I’d gone out to Santa Barbara Island with him for a night, and how we’d sat watching the sunset on Signal Peak. And how he’d just leaned over and whispered, “let’s get married” and how I’d started to laugh at first because I thought he was joking. And how we wouldn’t actually get married for a few years but we wanted to make that commitment.
None of which was true.
And even as the words were coming out of my mouth I wondered why. I had plenty about myself I could’ve told them that wasn’t a lie, but suddenly I wanted all of this life. I wanted, very suddenly and very strongly to be this person: the girl who wore pearls and drank whiskey at yacht clubs, the girl who was engaged to the boy she’d already moved cross-country for—twice—the girl who could swap stories with anyone she encountered, seamlessly, flawlessly, without being too shy to ask any questions or getting drunk and missing the key interview or wearing the wrong damn shoes.
Instead I stumbled home that night, twisted my ankle walking through the front door. I passed out diagonally across the bed in just my tank top and underwear and woke up at two a.m. to puke and realize I’d forgotten to stop for tea.
At seven my alarm went off. I actually do get seasick and probably should have turned down the assignment but didn’t want to pass up a feature. So I rolled out of bed and showered leaning against the wall and threw my wet hair in a ponytail. This time I just wore jeans and sneakers and dark sunglasses to cover the bags under my eyes. Luckily, the Leaf and Bean on the way to Oxnard had peach ginger tea so I bought two cups and downed them before I made it into the PCYC parking lot, then dragged myself over to dock eleven, where Louise had told me I could meet the press boat, a gorgeous white motorboat with an expansive front deck that I spent the next three hours cross-legged on, watching the parade of the time machines.
The magnificent vessels floated gracefully along with the wind, their massive sails puffed out without a single wrinkle, as if a solid, structured thing. Some were brand-new bright white, others ivory, others the worn gold of years-old. I was surrounded by these historic creatures, dipping and curving into the wind, waiting patiently for their start time. Dick decided to delay the start an hour, in hopes that the wind would pick up, as if they could control this thing, this ocean. The sun was harsh bright, a white-hot yellow and I squinted into the puffy clouds. Even just five miles out from shore I couldn’t see the harbor, couldn’t see anything but the line where the sea met the sky and these floating artifacts, their tall masts lovingly varnished and glinting in the sun. A crew member of the Bequia climbed the mast, and I held my breath. The boat rocked with the waves, but he remained steady, harnessed in, a testament to the skill the crew put in to sailing these ships. Watching them race, slowly, was a reminder of the time they have not forgotten—a time when everyone who owned a boat built her himself, and knew how to sail her, too.
And the ginger tea must have done the trick, because I didn’t throw up.
I had never been to a yacht club before. I had never even seen a yacht before, so when the press rep for the McNish Classic Yacht Race told me she’d put my name on the guest list for the Friday night reception at the Pacific Corinthian Yacht Club in Oxnard, California, I conjured images of men in navy polos and white loafers, of women wearing pearls with frosted blonde hair, of pink alcohol in martini glasses and small plates of things called canapés. So I dug through my closet, discarding blouse after skirt, until I could piece together from my dirt-poor, post-college wardrobe something respectable enough for a yacht club: a pink sleeveless shirt, my purple a-line (with French words on it), the pale pink kitten heels that my mother’d bought me to wear to church last Easter Sunday, and the fake pearls I still had from my performance of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” sophomore year. Other than the notepad poking out of my purse, a necessary accessory for a journalist, I figured I’d fit right in.
But when I ran into Louise, the press rep I’d spoken to on the phone, in the parking lot of the yacht club, a loud, round woman wearing a red visor, khakis and embroidered McNish Classic polo, she snickered. “Cute shoes, doll. Too bad you’ll have to take ‘em off.” I had no idea what she was talking about. Louise had to take a call and waved me inside, where a brunette woman in a PCYC blazer gave me a nametag and directed me to the upstairs ballroom.
I stood awkwardly in the corner, surveying the room until Louise came back to start introducing me, berating myself once again for being a shitty journalist. What kind of reporter is too shy to talk to people? Kind of goes with the territory. I pulled out my notepad and started jotting down observations: my fashion assessments had been pretty far off, but my cocktail predictions seemed accurate. Cosmopolitans, glasses of white wine, martinis (with extra olives): I wandered over to the bar and picked up a glass of chardonnay, then out onto the balcony, settling myself in a corner to observe. Almost everyone was wearing shorts and t-shirts, mostly untucked. People were laughing more than I anticipated members of a yacht club laughing. I thought I’d stay for an hour, get a handful of quotes and head home.
Home was just a ten-minute drive from the yacht club, a tiny one-bedroom for $900 a month two blocks from the beach. Tonight was an hour covering this story, dinner for one of a quick stir fry with the last of last week’s farmer’s market vegetables, an hour of TV, organizing whatever notes I gathered tonight and going to bed. Most of my three months in California had been spent similarly: every other week the boyfriend I’d followed here was out on the island counting nests, so I put in plenty of overtime at work to fill in the blank spaces and got used to hanging out in my underwear and cooking for one. Tomorrow, I’d roll out of bed early to head back to the yacht club and cover the race itself. All I knew so far was that this was the 30th and final year of the race founded by and named after the infamous Dick McNish, a notoriously shy 82-year-old Venturan. The race was open only to classic yachts, and I didn’t yet have any idea what that meant. My editor Matt had instructed me to get some good quotes from McNish, known for his disdain of the media. Matt had purposely sent me to cover the race, thinking if anyone could get McNish to talk it’d be a petite 24-year-old “with that big smile”. Tomorrow, I’d be out on the press boat, watching the race from a distance, so this was my chance to meet the man himself. I had a tendency to get seasick, so I reminded myself to stop and get ginger tea on the way home. Louise had warned me that anyone on the press boat who ‘fed the fishes’ would be mocked mercilessly.
I leaned against the metal railing along the deck’s edge and closed my eyes, trying to conjure the words for the dank smell of the ocean in high summer. The gray-blue water bobbed quietly, sending shivers of splash against the bellies of boats docked at the harbor. All I could see were tall-reaching masts: a mix of white fiberglass from the PCYC’s members and the varnished wood of the visiting classic yachts. I felt a hand on my back and turned to see Louise, who told me Dick was doing an interview with the County Star but would talk with me later.
“You wanna see a tall ship,” she asked, smiling. I bit my lower lip to keep from giggling at the vaguely sexual language I’d be encountering all night, but nodded, and Louise introduced Jon and Graem, co-owners of the Raietea, a 43-foot sloop whose name is a lesser-known French Polynesian island which, in Tahitian, means bright sky, up from Long Beach for the weekend. “These gentlemen volunteered to be your tour guides for the evening,” she told me. It’s in my nature to be a little wary when two middle-aged men offer to show me their sloop, but I definitely wanted to see what the inside of a classic yacht’s cabin looked like so I shook their hands demurely and got the spellings of their last names and let them lead me down the winding staircase to the plank dock below.
As soon as I stepped off the bottom step to the dock, Graem’s head snapped around to look at my feet.
“Heels?” He shook his head, the gray edges of his hair rustling in the ocean breeze. “No way you’re getting on the Raietea with heels on.”
Jon laughed a little. “Took us two hours to varnish the main deck’s teak flooring and a couple thousand to pay for those boards—you’ll scratch ‘em up.”
I was horrified. How did I always manage to do it? I thought I’d get all decked out, did my best to look the part and still embarrassed myself. Why was I even a writer? Could I be any more obvious?
“No big deal, sweetheart,” Jon said, throwing his big arm around my shoulders. “You’ll just tour the boats barefoot.”
Graem smiled again, kindly. “You’ve never done this before, have you?”
Though it was true—my cute shoes had betrayed me for the conspicuous outsider I was—I felt better knowing that it was out there. I wouldn’t have to pretend to recognize anything, and I knew it was better for the story that they carefully explain everything to me as a beginner anyway.
“Alright, star reporter,” Graem continued, taking the empty wine glass from my hand and setting it on the bare deck. “Let’s get you a real drink.”
My heels shoved into the tote bag slung over my left shoulder, I took the hand Jon offered me, pulling me up and over the brass railing onto the Raiatea. Graem ducked into the cabin to start mixing drinks and Jon led me around the main deck, describing the hard work of varnishing the floorboards, which he and Graem did themselves, on their hands and knees. The masts, he told me, were the same holly beams that the original owner, who built the boat, installed, and they had bought crisp new ivory sails for race day. The back of my throat tingled slightly from the sharp smell of varnish still fresh on the deck, and then a breeze passed through, trembling the rolled-up sails. I wrinkled my nose: fish, Jon told me. Most of the yacht owners spent the long weekend in Ventura for the race, went fishing on Friday and cooked their own dinner.
“That’s why you smell kerosene, too,” he said as Graem emerged from the belly of the ship with two cocktails in his fists, handing one off to me without bothering to tell me what it was. “The party’s just getting started.”
I was conscious, when I accepted the first Jack and Coke on board the Raiatea, of the fact that I probably shouldn’t be drinking while covering a story. But something about it seemed appropriate here: these men referred to themselves as salty dogs and to me as a star reporter; they wore baseball caps to a yacht club and had stocked the bar on their boat with top-shelf liquor and plastic tumblers that wouldn’t scratch the floorboards if they shattered. My kitten heels were poking out of my purse and my bare feet felt comfortable on the teak floorboards. Plus, I hadn’t been out for drinks since I’d moved to California. My boyfriend was gone most of the time and anyway his idea of going out was throwing on a pair of flip-flops and grabbing a beer at the Sewer, the alleyway bar around the corner from our apartment. I worked as a reporter, a largely solitary job. I spent my days wandering around in the sand, marveling at the ocean and typing at coffee shops for the free wireless. I made barely $1000 a month. I was 24 and I lived at the beach. Nothing seemed better to me than watching the sun set into the Pacific with cocktail in hand, shooting the breeze with a bunch of kind middle-aged men. Here was a chance to play dress-up and entertain the notion that I was an adult who knew how she liked her whiskey. Plus, open bar.
So I followed when Jon and Graem led me onto the deck of their harbor neighbor, the Spitfire, where the crew were playing Scottish bagpipe music loudly and accepted when they offered me a mai-tai, and a second one, and declared myself a member of the Hunter S. Thompson school of journalism. I kicked my bare feet up on the white plastic cushions on the Spitfire’s benches and said, “Tell me your favorite race stories, gentlemen.”
We spent an hour and a half there, men gossiping on the deck of their yacht like they were around a kitchen table:
“I heard that the paint job on Circe cost more than the down payment on a house!”
And “to rename your ship superstition says you’ve first got to run her aground, and no self-respecting yacht owner would ever dream of hurting his girl like that,” and
“Grand prize is the skipper’s weight in Mum’s champagne!” and
“It’s not about who wins or loses, but about getting these old gals together,” and
“The anchor motor on the Sparrow came from a B-52” and
Goddamnit we’re out of rum! – Let’s head over to the Sparrow!”
And, glasses raised, “To Dick McNish!”
This was July in southern California, so even as eight p.m. rolled around, the sky was still a pink-streaked blue and the conversation lulled like the waves softly rocking the boat.
“See, man, we don’t need a flat screen,” Jon said to Graem.
Graem smirked and turned to me. “Ok star reporter, settle something for us,” he said. “I think we should get a flat screen HD for our cabin. Take ‘er out on a Sunday, get a cooler of beer, watch the game. Duff here thinks I’m being spoiled.”
“Not spoiled,” Jon said. “I just think—we go sailing to get away from that life.”
The other men nodded quietly, as if a grave secret was being shared. I asked about day jobs: IT manager, auto parts manufacturer, quality control specialists. I had no idea what any of them really did, because while they were here, docked in Oxnard, drinking cocktails as the waves lapped at their girls wooden bellies, they were ships’ captains and nothing else. They lost themselves in this life, in manning the helms and reading the wind. This wasn’t a general kind of escapism, not middle-aged men looking for some retreat from the daily grind: there was a specific charm to racing these boats, this way that was so appealing to them. Wooden boats have a history tucked inside the grains of their floor boards, and the owners seek only to highlight that history, to bring another time back to life for an afternoon, to remind themselves and the race’s audience of an era of boating before fiberglass and high-speed motors.
“These are time machine boats,” Jon said. “The moment you step on board, you are transported back.”
I saw other boats: with enchanting names like the Dauntless, the Rose of Sharon, the Vignette, Circe. But the tours were a blur of minute details: the original 1947 lantern mounted from the cabin’s ceiling; the story of the silver dollar installed below the center mast for good luck; the forest-green sleeping bags balled up on the thin mattresses in the sleeping quarters, since all captains believe you must sleep on the boat the night before a big race; the names of their wives engraved on a brass plate mounted beneath the steering column; the laughter, the leis, the mixed drinks. Everything was hand-chosen, carefully researched, perfectly authentic. Owning a wooden yacht, they told me, is a labor of love.
The sun dipped lower, casting a harsh orange sheen on the surface of the ocean as we again fell into silence on the deck of the Raiatea. I sucked on the cherry from my hurricane and thought about my job. Being a journalist was going pretty well. When I’d moved to California, I took a job helping the underachievers of rich Orange County lawyers study for the SATs and had gotten a little freelance reporting on the side. Now I had a story every week, some of which had taken me out to the islands, into symphony halls and crowded bars for live concerts, browsing around art galleries, interviewing Ben Harper and lounging at the yacht club on a Friday night. I was teaching and writing for a living. So why did I still feel so disconnected from this strange permanent-summer life?
A small motorboat chugged by, helmed by the people I expected to see at the Pacific Corinthian that night: an older man with a white driver’s cap and navy-striped polo steering; his wife, bleached blond hair, black dress, white cardigan tied tennis-style around her shoulders. She sipped her glass of chardonnay and looked out toward the motley crew of us—men in tartan hats and Hawaiian print shirts, with purple leis and umbrellas in their red plastic cups, women without the decency to wear shoes—and yelled out to us that classic yachts were, “too high maintenance!” We all laughed, and the men echoed what they’d told me all night: that was the difference between people willing to sacrifice the history and effort of a classic yacht for the creature comforts of modern boating, who would pick the easy care of shiny white fiberglass over the smooth, peaceful sailing of a wooden vessel. All anybody else saw when they looked at a wooden boat was the work involved, the very thing they loved.
Graem snickered slightly, and took a shot back: “Actually, I think she was talking about herself.”
I ended the night with Jon and Graem back inside the club, the three of us gathered around a small white-clothed table, a Long Island iced tea in front of each of us. It had been dark when we’d climbed the stairs back into the club and Louise gave me a bear hug, patted Jon on the back.
“Jesus, where’d you take her,” she harassed them.
“They took good care of me,” I replied. “I saw all the great ones. I heard about the Dauntless and the Rose of Sharon.” I could see her pride as I showed her my five pages of notes.
“Well, Dick’s gone for the night,” she told me, and my heart skipped. Hunter S. Thompson my ass, who was I kidding, I couldn’t pull off this kind of journalism, I’d missed the big interview. Louise must have sensed my disappointment. “Don’t worry, doll,” she told me. “I’ll get you five with him at the trophy ceremony tomorrow night.”
So I relaxed and Graem said “one more drink?” and I nodded and slumped at the table with them, listening to the jazz trio on the balcony finish out the evening.
“So star reporter,” Graem leaned in. “Tell us something about yourself.”
First, don’t talk about yourself is a pretty basic tenant of journalism. It’s not about being secretive, but the more you talk the less they do, and they’re the story.
Second, generally speaking, it’s a good idea not to get personally involved in your story. It’s much more difficult to write something when you feel too strongly one way or the other about your subjects. So making friends is generally discouraged.
But third, I was drunk. I weighed 120 pounds, hadn’t had dinner and had downed a glass of wine, a Jack and coke, two mai-tais, a hurricane and was working my way through a Long Island iced tea at this point.
So I told them I’d just gotten engaged.
And they balked—couldn’t believe how young I was. Where was the ring? Well, it was spontaneous, I said, and told them the elaborate story. How I’d gone out to Santa Barbara Island with him for a night, and how we’d sat watching the sunset on Signal Peak. And how he’d just leaned over and whispered, “let’s get married” and how I’d started to laugh at first because I thought he was joking. And how we wouldn’t actually get married for a few years but we wanted to make that commitment.
None of which was true.
And even as the words were coming out of my mouth I wondered why. I had plenty about myself I could’ve told them that wasn’t a lie, but suddenly I wanted all of this life. I wanted, very suddenly and very strongly to be this person: the girl who wore pearls and drank whiskey at yacht clubs, the girl who was engaged to the boy she’d already moved cross-country for—twice—the girl who could swap stories with anyone she encountered, seamlessly, flawlessly, without being too shy to ask any questions or getting drunk and missing the key interview or wearing the wrong damn shoes.
Instead I stumbled home that night, twisted my ankle walking through the front door. I passed out diagonally across the bed in just my tank top and underwear and woke up at two a.m. to puke and realize I’d forgotten to stop for tea.
At seven my alarm went off. I actually do get seasick and probably should have turned down the assignment but didn’t want to pass up a feature. So I rolled out of bed and showered leaning against the wall and threw my wet hair in a ponytail. This time I just wore jeans and sneakers and dark sunglasses to cover the bags under my eyes. Luckily, the Leaf and Bean on the way to Oxnard had peach ginger tea so I bought two cups and downed them before I made it into the PCYC parking lot, then dragged myself over to dock eleven, where Louise had told me I could meet the press boat, a gorgeous white motorboat with an expansive front deck that I spent the next three hours cross-legged on, watching the parade of the time machines.
The magnificent vessels floated gracefully along with the wind, their massive sails puffed out without a single wrinkle, as if a solid, structured thing. Some were brand-new bright white, others ivory, others the worn gold of years-old. I was surrounded by these historic creatures, dipping and curving into the wind, waiting patiently for their start time. Dick decided to delay the start an hour, in hopes that the wind would pick up, as if they could control this thing, this ocean. The sun was harsh bright, a white-hot yellow and I squinted into the puffy clouds. Even just five miles out from shore I couldn’t see the harbor, couldn’t see anything but the line where the sea met the sky and these floating artifacts, their tall masts lovingly varnished and glinting in the sun. A crew member of the Bequia climbed the mast, and I held my breath. The boat rocked with the waves, but he remained steady, harnessed in, a testament to the skill the crew put in to sailing these ships. Watching them race, slowly, was a reminder of the time they have not forgotten—a time when everyone who owned a boat built her himself, and knew how to sail her, too.
And the ginger tea must have done the trick, because I didn’t throw up.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Northern Forest, cont.
Mary Beth thought it would be harder to touch her dead grandmother’s hand than it was. She spent most of that evening, back at the Fraser house by the fireplace, stocking feet tucked beneath her on a stiff, high-back loveseat with Jack, tuning out relatives telling stories about Alice and thinking about that journal. While Elizabeth laughed, remembering the first time she’d tried to make Alice’s pot roast for Arthur, after they’d married, and she’d filled the house with smoke and called Alice in tears, only to find out her mother-in-law already had a backup pot roast prepared, just in case, Mary Beth wondered whether or not they’d covered the coffin with dirt yet. She watched relatives shuffle around the large Fraser formal dining table, picking at finger sandwiches and fruit salad on small plastic plates, basket of cloth napkins in the corner, and tried to imagine how cold the hands she’d have to move would be. Once, she and Jack had had a pet rat that died while Jack was out of state, looking at the site for their place in Wyoming and Mary’d had to take it out of the cage to bury it in the backyard by the sycamore tree. She’d jumped when she wrapped her head around its tiny furry body, at how cold it was, just hours after death. Mary Beth didn’t know why she wanted to dig up her grandmother: it seemed to her a horrible thing to want. She couldn’t get away from the desperate, consuming wanting-to-know. She’d never had a problem with getting her hands in the dirt, with digging or heavy physical labor that strained her lower back until sweat beads burst onto the back of her slender neck. She’d helped Jack put up the drywall in their new house and install the porcelain sink in the bathroom and had planted her own expansive vegetable garden and built her own worktable for the art studio out back. But she knew that digging up a grave, however little dirt had already been laid on top of that dark, oak coffin, would be harder than any of that.
There hadn’t been much dirt, yet, not packed in with whatever monstrous piece of equipment they used to pound people back below the surface of the earth, just loose clods of it dumped on, as if by the back legs of a horse. When she smeared the loose soil off the lid of the coffin in the yellow glow of that moon, she felt calmer than she had at the wake, staring at creamy pink walls and folded hands poked out of suit coats too formal for the men of Berlin and trying to avoid looking at those brown, mannequin hands. Mary Beth felt the sweat mingle with the dry dirt into muddy trails running down her cheeks as she bent to creak open the lid of her grandmother’s coffin, heavier than the dirt in the shovel. In the darkness, Alice looked like the woman Mary Beth remembered from childhood, the women who kneaded and punched sourdough loaves and had flour permanently in the creases of her face and neck, who would gather her grandchildren up in her thick arms and whisper the Celtic prayers her mother’d taught her young. She looked asleep, peaceful, praying some Hail Mary from the center of her rosary and silently resting beside her long-dead husband. Mary Beth shook, reaching out toward the softly wrinkled fingers of the left hand. They were cold, colder than she could have imagined, but it didn’t startle her: instead she ran her own fingers tenderly along the soft pillows of the undersides, taking her grandmother’s hand in her own as if they were praying the Our Father, lifting it and slowly removing the bulging black notebook from underneath. She lowered her grandmother’s hand back to her chest with a pang of guilt. Would Grammy notice the absence of the journal? Miss it? Mary Beth shook her head. Catholic or no, she knew that nothing of her grandmother was left in this body, that she wasn’t sleeping but slowly beginning the process of decay. And if she did believe in heaven or any of it, she knew her grandmother would want Mary Beth to understand her own grandfather, would want her to read their shared history and would want to teach Mary Beth, in any way she could, the heart of the father Mary’d long since given up on understanding. If Grampy had been connected, somehow, to the Gorham Pulp Mill, Mary Beth had to know.
Mary Beth thought it would be harder to touch her dead grandmother’s hand than it was. She spent most of that evening, back at the Fraser house by the fireplace, stocking feet tucked beneath her on a stiff, high-back loveseat with Jack, tuning out relatives telling stories about Alice and thinking about that journal. While Elizabeth laughed, remembering the first time she’d tried to make Alice’s pot roast for Arthur, after they’d married, and she’d filled the house with smoke and called Alice in tears, only to find out her mother-in-law already had a backup pot roast prepared, just in case, Mary Beth wondered whether or not they’d covered the coffin with dirt yet. She watched relatives shuffle around the large Fraser formal dining table, picking at finger sandwiches and fruit salad on small plastic plates, basket of cloth napkins in the corner, and tried to imagine how cold the hands she’d have to move would be. Once, she and Jack had had a pet rat that died while Jack was out of state, looking at the site for their place in Wyoming and Mary’d had to take it out of the cage to bury it in the backyard by the sycamore tree. She’d jumped when she wrapped her head around its tiny furry body, at how cold it was, just hours after death. Mary Beth didn’t know why she wanted to dig up her grandmother: it seemed to her a horrible thing to want. She couldn’t get away from the desperate, consuming wanting-to-know. She’d never had a problem with getting her hands in the dirt, with digging or heavy physical labor that strained her lower back until sweat beads burst onto the back of her slender neck. She’d helped Jack put up the drywall in their new house and install the porcelain sink in the bathroom and had planted her own expansive vegetable garden and built her own worktable for the art studio out back. But she knew that digging up a grave, however little dirt had already been laid on top of that dark, oak coffin, would be harder than any of that.
There hadn’t been much dirt, yet, not packed in with whatever monstrous piece of equipment they used to pound people back below the surface of the earth, just loose clods of it dumped on, as if by the back legs of a horse. When she smeared the loose soil off the lid of the coffin in the yellow glow of that moon, she felt calmer than she had at the wake, staring at creamy pink walls and folded hands poked out of suit coats too formal for the men of Berlin and trying to avoid looking at those brown, mannequin hands. Mary Beth felt the sweat mingle with the dry dirt into muddy trails running down her cheeks as she bent to creak open the lid of her grandmother’s coffin, heavier than the dirt in the shovel. In the darkness, Alice looked like the woman Mary Beth remembered from childhood, the women who kneaded and punched sourdough loaves and had flour permanently in the creases of her face and neck, who would gather her grandchildren up in her thick arms and whisper the Celtic prayers her mother’d taught her young. She looked asleep, peaceful, praying some Hail Mary from the center of her rosary and silently resting beside her long-dead husband. Mary Beth shook, reaching out toward the softly wrinkled fingers of the left hand. They were cold, colder than she could have imagined, but it didn’t startle her: instead she ran her own fingers tenderly along the soft pillows of the undersides, taking her grandmother’s hand in her own as if they were praying the Our Father, lifting it and slowly removing the bulging black notebook from underneath. She lowered her grandmother’s hand back to her chest with a pang of guilt. Would Grammy notice the absence of the journal? Miss it? Mary Beth shook her head. Catholic or no, she knew that nothing of her grandmother was left in this body, that she wasn’t sleeping but slowly beginning the process of decay. And if she did believe in heaven or any of it, she knew her grandmother would want Mary Beth to understand her own grandfather, would want her to read their shared history and would want to teach Mary Beth, in any way she could, the heart of the father Mary’d long since given up on understanding. If Grampy had been connected, somehow, to the Gorham Pulp Mill, Mary Beth had to know.
Monday, May 04, 2009
"Northern Forest" continued ...
Mary’s mother, Elizabeth, had told her that her grandmother had probably been dead for a few days before anyone had found her. It was the maid who stumbled upon the body, sprawled across the bed, apparent heart attack, four days’ worth of Berlin Daily Suns stacked on the doorstep. But even knowing all that, even hearing the gruesome specifics that Mary’s mother wanted to, needed to talk to someone about but couldn’t mention to her husband, couldn’t bring herself to force him to think of his own mother that way, even those details didn’t prepare Mary Beth for the way her grandmother looked at the wake. Mary Beth hated wakes, an unfortunate Catholic tradition that the Frasers happily upheld, because there was her grandmother: face and hands tan with makeup, looking like a plastic mannequin empty version of herself, long nails painted a pearled pink, clutching a wooden rosary and a creased, black leather notebook. Unrecognizable. Mary Beth and Jack knelt together in front of the casket and Mary Beth stared at her folded hands for what she felt was the appropriate amount of time, trying to avoid looking up at her grandmother’s body cocooned in white satin.
Later, Mary Beth caught her mother’s elbow at the mourning meal—buffet style roast beef, herbed carrots and potatoes, salad, rolls and bottles of Sam Adams at the Country Tavern special events room—to ask about the book she’d seen.
“Mom,” Mary Beth whispered, leaning against an exposed wooden beam near the staircase, where her parents were shaking hands and murmuring thanks to sorry for your losses and we’ll miss hers and she was a great lady’s, “what was that notebook Grammy was holding?”
“Oh, it was your Grampy’s journal,” Elizabeth replied. “Uncle Bill found it in Grammy’s nightstand when they were packing up her jewelry and they thought it would be nice to bury her with it.”
“Did they read any of it?” Mary Beth had been just fifteen when her grandfather died, a quiet funny old man who Arthur had never wanted to spend much time around, always nervous and overly formal, shaking his own father’s hand until the day he was gone. Mary could count on one hand the number of times she’d been alone with either of her grandparents and had never known much about their lives before her, let alone before Arthur.
“Of course not,” Elizabeth replied, mildly horrified, as she turned back to embrace Mrs. Harrendanks from St. Teresa’s knitting circle and coo a thank you back to her I’m so sorry. Mary Beth turned from her mother back toward the room to find Jack. He stood by the buffet, laughing with her Uncle Bill: Bill’s meaty fist clutching a beer, face red from the laughter or the alcohol or the crowd. Jack’s smile still cut across his face like a wide gorge, just like in high school, his tousled brown hair ruffled against his forehead and Mary Beth smiled to see him so comfortable at a Fraser family gathering. Jack had always been closer to Bill and Mary Beth suspected it was construction that did it, men who worked with their hands understanding each other on a physical level. Jack was a framer, worked in the skeletons of future houses, and had a scar on his left hand from the place a nail gun had pierced straight through, pinning his palm to a two-by-four. Mary’d had to squirt the antiseptic fluid into the hollow wound for a week, Jack’s friends holding his shoulders down so he couldn’t thrash, roaring and wild against the pain. And Bill was a contractor, the Fraser family’s version of blue collar, who spent every day at his job site, blueprints balled in his fists and yellow hard hat teetering on his massive, balding forehead. But more and more frequently there was no job site to visit. Plenty of land up here to build on, Bill would say, thanks to the once-booming business of the pulp mill clearing out most of Berlin’s northern pine forest, but not many people left who can afford to build on it. The second half of that sentence went: since Arthur Fraser closed down the pulp mill last year but that was the part nobody said unless Bill’d been drinking.
Mary Beth watched Jack bob his head respectfully, his mouth pursed in that tense way men have when discussing serious business, as Bill’s voice lowered.
“No, it’s been a long time since Fraser Paper was that kind of company,” Bill said gravely, “the kind that cared about their workers, knew their faces and made sure they had food on their tables.” Jack shook his head and studied his feet hard. He didn’t have to ask how long or what happened, because he knew. Mary Beth knew. How long it’d been was since Arthur Fraser bought the Berlin Paper Company, ten years before Mary Beth was born, parlaying an MBA from Harvard Business into the title of youngest CEO and his own name on the sign at the gates.
“Berlin Paper used to own the pulp mill, ‘dya know that?” Bill asked, and Jack nodded politely, glancing around for his wife and Mary Beth made her way over to rescue Jack from the awkward rant he’d heard more than once before. “Yup, owned the pulp mill and paper factory and still they made that kind of effort to know their own people. But not anymore. Now it’s cutbacks and cost-effectiveness research reports and Fraser Paper, like the name mattered more than the place!” Mary Beth slid her arm through Jack’s and leaned in to kiss her uncle on his hot cheek just as he slammed his bottle down on the edge of the buffet table and swore under his breath. Mary’d seen it before. Bill would drink too much, his hometown pride mixed with what must’ve been jealousy at the brother who’d made it in the big city and come home to work his little town into shape and he’d start to bubble over. First the rant, then the bottle-slam, the quiet cursing and then,
“God DAMN it, Arthur!” Several heads snapped over to Bill then away quickly, as if embarrassed to be caught judging one of the grieving sons. Others never looked up, having heard Bill’s tirade before. Arthur’s head snapped over to his younger brother and didn’t look away, his eyes narrowing, his chest moving with the deep inhale that meant you were just another burden on his already laden shoulders, as he moved towards them.
“Show some respect, William,” Arthur hissed, his hand clamped down hard on Bill’s shoulder, “this is your own mother’s funeral.”
“Respect!” Bill replied, swerving around to face his brother. “Like the respect you showed shutting down the pulp mill, putting all those folks out of work, folks just like your own father? The last tie we had to him, Art!” Bill poked his finger into his big brother’s chest, then stalked away, muttering, “the last damn thing we had left,” straight out of the room, straight down the stairs and straight out of his own mother’s mourning meal early. Arthur took another deep breath and looked up at Mary Beth, their matching grey eyes meeting for the first time since she’d set foot back in Berlin last night and gave her a curt nod, same for Jack, and went back to shaking hands with the crowd.
Mary Beth exhaled slowly, rubbing the creases between her eyebrows with one hand, willing away the headache she could feel working its way into the foreground. Jack rubbed her neck gently and leaned in to whisper,
“What was that about your grandfather?”
“I don’t know,” Mary Beth replied, glancing up at her husband, sagging slightly against his chest. And she really didn’t. Mary Beth remembered her grandfather in fragments: she remembered he wore bow ties to mass and his great, shaking laugh, belly full and spreading like syrup. She remembered his pressed blue jeans and his gnarled, scarred hands that she’d love to run her little-girl fingers over, riddled with arthritic bumps like the knots of a tree stripped of its bark. She remember his string art of the sailboat hanging over his drafting table and how he’d always microwave her a can of spaghetti-os and him holding the pencil, feet up in the recliner, filling out the weekly crossword. But she couldn’t remember a single thing he’d said to her and she’d never known he had any connection to the pulp mill or Fraser Paper.
“I don’t know,” Mary Beth repeated, headache throbbing like the dull shine of fork against ceramic sink, but preoccupied now with memory. “Do you know that was his journal Grammy was holding in the coffin? Wish I could get a look in that and find out,” she murmured absent-mindedly.
Jack leaned in and kissed his wife’s forehead, sensing her tension. “Mmm, not unless you dig it up. All that’s down in the dirt, now.”
Mary’s mother, Elizabeth, had told her that her grandmother had probably been dead for a few days before anyone had found her. It was the maid who stumbled upon the body, sprawled across the bed, apparent heart attack, four days’ worth of Berlin Daily Suns stacked on the doorstep. But even knowing all that, even hearing the gruesome specifics that Mary’s mother wanted to, needed to talk to someone about but couldn’t mention to her husband, couldn’t bring herself to force him to think of his own mother that way, even those details didn’t prepare Mary Beth for the way her grandmother looked at the wake. Mary Beth hated wakes, an unfortunate Catholic tradition that the Frasers happily upheld, because there was her grandmother: face and hands tan with makeup, looking like a plastic mannequin empty version of herself, long nails painted a pearled pink, clutching a wooden rosary and a creased, black leather notebook. Unrecognizable. Mary Beth and Jack knelt together in front of the casket and Mary Beth stared at her folded hands for what she felt was the appropriate amount of time, trying to avoid looking up at her grandmother’s body cocooned in white satin.
Later, Mary Beth caught her mother’s elbow at the mourning meal—buffet style roast beef, herbed carrots and potatoes, salad, rolls and bottles of Sam Adams at the Country Tavern special events room—to ask about the book she’d seen.
“Mom,” Mary Beth whispered, leaning against an exposed wooden beam near the staircase, where her parents were shaking hands and murmuring thanks to sorry for your losses and we’ll miss hers and she was a great lady’s, “what was that notebook Grammy was holding?”
“Oh, it was your Grampy’s journal,” Elizabeth replied. “Uncle Bill found it in Grammy’s nightstand when they were packing up her jewelry and they thought it would be nice to bury her with it.”
“Did they read any of it?” Mary Beth had been just fifteen when her grandfather died, a quiet funny old man who Arthur had never wanted to spend much time around, always nervous and overly formal, shaking his own father’s hand until the day he was gone. Mary could count on one hand the number of times she’d been alone with either of her grandparents and had never known much about their lives before her, let alone before Arthur.
“Of course not,” Elizabeth replied, mildly horrified, as she turned back to embrace Mrs. Harrendanks from St. Teresa’s knitting circle and coo a thank you back to her I’m so sorry. Mary Beth turned from her mother back toward the room to find Jack. He stood by the buffet, laughing with her Uncle Bill: Bill’s meaty fist clutching a beer, face red from the laughter or the alcohol or the crowd. Jack’s smile still cut across his face like a wide gorge, just like in high school, his tousled brown hair ruffled against his forehead and Mary Beth smiled to see him so comfortable at a Fraser family gathering. Jack had always been closer to Bill and Mary Beth suspected it was construction that did it, men who worked with their hands understanding each other on a physical level. Jack was a framer, worked in the skeletons of future houses, and had a scar on his left hand from the place a nail gun had pierced straight through, pinning his palm to a two-by-four. Mary’d had to squirt the antiseptic fluid into the hollow wound for a week, Jack’s friends holding his shoulders down so he couldn’t thrash, roaring and wild against the pain. And Bill was a contractor, the Fraser family’s version of blue collar, who spent every day at his job site, blueprints balled in his fists and yellow hard hat teetering on his massive, balding forehead. But more and more frequently there was no job site to visit. Plenty of land up here to build on, Bill would say, thanks to the once-booming business of the pulp mill clearing out most of Berlin’s northern pine forest, but not many people left who can afford to build on it. The second half of that sentence went: since Arthur Fraser closed down the pulp mill last year but that was the part nobody said unless Bill’d been drinking.
Mary Beth watched Jack bob his head respectfully, his mouth pursed in that tense way men have when discussing serious business, as Bill’s voice lowered.
“No, it’s been a long time since Fraser Paper was that kind of company,” Bill said gravely, “the kind that cared about their workers, knew their faces and made sure they had food on their tables.” Jack shook his head and studied his feet hard. He didn’t have to ask how long or what happened, because he knew. Mary Beth knew. How long it’d been was since Arthur Fraser bought the Berlin Paper Company, ten years before Mary Beth was born, parlaying an MBA from Harvard Business into the title of youngest CEO and his own name on the sign at the gates.
“Berlin Paper used to own the pulp mill, ‘dya know that?” Bill asked, and Jack nodded politely, glancing around for his wife and Mary Beth made her way over to rescue Jack from the awkward rant he’d heard more than once before. “Yup, owned the pulp mill and paper factory and still they made that kind of effort to know their own people. But not anymore. Now it’s cutbacks and cost-effectiveness research reports and Fraser Paper, like the name mattered more than the place!” Mary Beth slid her arm through Jack’s and leaned in to kiss her uncle on his hot cheek just as he slammed his bottle down on the edge of the buffet table and swore under his breath. Mary’d seen it before. Bill would drink too much, his hometown pride mixed with what must’ve been jealousy at the brother who’d made it in the big city and come home to work his little town into shape and he’d start to bubble over. First the rant, then the bottle-slam, the quiet cursing and then,
“God DAMN it, Arthur!” Several heads snapped over to Bill then away quickly, as if embarrassed to be caught judging one of the grieving sons. Others never looked up, having heard Bill’s tirade before. Arthur’s head snapped over to his younger brother and didn’t look away, his eyes narrowing, his chest moving with the deep inhale that meant you were just another burden on his already laden shoulders, as he moved towards them.
“Show some respect, William,” Arthur hissed, his hand clamped down hard on Bill’s shoulder, “this is your own mother’s funeral.”
“Respect!” Bill replied, swerving around to face his brother. “Like the respect you showed shutting down the pulp mill, putting all those folks out of work, folks just like your own father? The last tie we had to him, Art!” Bill poked his finger into his big brother’s chest, then stalked away, muttering, “the last damn thing we had left,” straight out of the room, straight down the stairs and straight out of his own mother’s mourning meal early. Arthur took another deep breath and looked up at Mary Beth, their matching grey eyes meeting for the first time since she’d set foot back in Berlin last night and gave her a curt nod, same for Jack, and went back to shaking hands with the crowd.
Mary Beth exhaled slowly, rubbing the creases between her eyebrows with one hand, willing away the headache she could feel working its way into the foreground. Jack rubbed her neck gently and leaned in to whisper,
“What was that about your grandfather?”
“I don’t know,” Mary Beth replied, glancing up at her husband, sagging slightly against his chest. And she really didn’t. Mary Beth remembered her grandfather in fragments: she remembered he wore bow ties to mass and his great, shaking laugh, belly full and spreading like syrup. She remembered his pressed blue jeans and his gnarled, scarred hands that she’d love to run her little-girl fingers over, riddled with arthritic bumps like the knots of a tree stripped of its bark. She remember his string art of the sailboat hanging over his drafting table and how he’d always microwave her a can of spaghetti-os and him holding the pencil, feet up in the recliner, filling out the weekly crossword. But she couldn’t remember a single thing he’d said to her and she’d never known he had any connection to the pulp mill or Fraser Paper.
“I don’t know,” Mary Beth repeated, headache throbbing like the dull shine of fork against ceramic sink, but preoccupied now with memory. “Do you know that was his journal Grammy was holding in the coffin? Wish I could get a look in that and find out,” she murmured absent-mindedly.
Jack leaned in and kissed his wife’s forehead, sensing her tension. “Mmm, not unless you dig it up. All that’s down in the dirt, now.”
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Teaser from my seminar paper for Environmental Lit (20 page critical literature research paper), aka the bane of my existence for the last three months. Due tomorrow and never looking back... (Seriously, it's pretty boring and pretentious-sounding, but I have to do something with it!)
Word as Weapon: Dismantling Hierarchy Through Boundary-Crossing in Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge and Arundhati Roy’s The Cost of Living
"The establishment has always feared writers, because writers have the power of clarity, and when they choose to use it, it can be deadly."
–Arundhati Roy, DAM/AGE, a film with Arundhati Roy
Contemporary writers across the globe such as Terry Tempest Williams, Rick Bass, Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy combine environmental and social activism with literature, employing creative literary devices to reach a wider political audience. The willingness of such authors to blur the lines between nonfiction reporting and creative literature is indicative of a holistic approach to solving the world’s social and environmental ills that is also reflected in modern political movements. In an article on the relationship between postcolonial and ecocritical literature, Graham Huggan recognizes that the similarities between these literary movements are rooted in a shared holistic view of social problems. Criticizing a primarily European American approach to ecocriticism, Huggan suggests that postcolonial literature is characterized by an insistence on the inseparability of current crises of ecological mismanagement from historical legacies of imperialistic exploitation and authoritarian abuse (702). However, western ecocritical female writers are exploring similar links between environmental and human degradation by aligning specific human and ecological communities, often going so far as to link the landscape to the physical human body. Terry Tempest Williams, an ecofeminist author from a developed nation, and Arundhati Roy, an ecocritical writer from a developing nation, both seek to challenge the traditional power structures of their various environments by analyzing the deep connection between their “othered” groups and the specific ecological locations they inhabit. In doing so, these two writers demonstrate the similar techniques and approaches of ecofeminist and postcolonial literary activists, despite their different geographic locations and personal backgrounds.
On the surface, a Mormon naturalist from a wealthy family of developers in Salt Lake City, Utah may not seem to have much in common with a former student of architecture and novelist from New Delhi. But the differences in the backgrounds of Terry Tempest Williams and Arundhati Roy lead them both to a life of activism, devoted to the communities—both human and ecological—from which they came. Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge is a book devoted to two such communities: her immediate family, a Mormon stronghold shaken to the core by the deaths of its women, in this case, Williams’ mother, by cancer; and the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, which, during the same season, suffered a devastating loss of habitat due to the flooding of the Great Salt Lake. Arundhati Roy’s collection of two essays, The Cost of Living, explores the relationship of Indians to their modern environment: in “The Greater Common Good”, addressing the close ties between the Adivasi and the Narmada River; in “The End of Imagination”, analyzing the potential physical and psychological impacts of Indian nuclear proliferation on the country’s people as a whole.
In both works of literature, the authors share a common goal: to bring together the fates of a people and their ecological community in a way that challenges their domination by questioning the traditional structure of power. To this end, Williams and Roy employ similar literary techniques, namely: aligning the identity of a specific group of people to a specific place and linking the physical human body (often female) with the natural landscape, in order to place their texts in a larger political context by refusing to adhere to preconceived boundaries on which the exploitation of resources is based.
If you got this far, bravo. Tell me what you think!
coming soon to a conference near you?
Word as Weapon: Dismantling Hierarchy Through Boundary-Crossing in Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge and Arundhati Roy’s The Cost of Living
"The establishment has always feared writers, because writers have the power of clarity, and when they choose to use it, it can be deadly."
–Arundhati Roy, DAM/AGE, a film with Arundhati Roy
Contemporary writers across the globe such as Terry Tempest Williams, Rick Bass, Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy combine environmental and social activism with literature, employing creative literary devices to reach a wider political audience. The willingness of such authors to blur the lines between nonfiction reporting and creative literature is indicative of a holistic approach to solving the world’s social and environmental ills that is also reflected in modern political movements. In an article on the relationship between postcolonial and ecocritical literature, Graham Huggan recognizes that the similarities between these literary movements are rooted in a shared holistic view of social problems. Criticizing a primarily European American approach to ecocriticism, Huggan suggests that postcolonial literature is characterized by an insistence on the inseparability of current crises of ecological mismanagement from historical legacies of imperialistic exploitation and authoritarian abuse (702). However, western ecocritical female writers are exploring similar links between environmental and human degradation by aligning specific human and ecological communities, often going so far as to link the landscape to the physical human body. Terry Tempest Williams, an ecofeminist author from a developed nation, and Arundhati Roy, an ecocritical writer from a developing nation, both seek to challenge the traditional power structures of their various environments by analyzing the deep connection between their “othered” groups and the specific ecological locations they inhabit. In doing so, these two writers demonstrate the similar techniques and approaches of ecofeminist and postcolonial literary activists, despite their different geographic locations and personal backgrounds.
On the surface, a Mormon naturalist from a wealthy family of developers in Salt Lake City, Utah may not seem to have much in common with a former student of architecture and novelist from New Delhi. But the differences in the backgrounds of Terry Tempest Williams and Arundhati Roy lead them both to a life of activism, devoted to the communities—both human and ecological—from which they came. Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge is a book devoted to two such communities: her immediate family, a Mormon stronghold shaken to the core by the deaths of its women, in this case, Williams’ mother, by cancer; and the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, which, during the same season, suffered a devastating loss of habitat due to the flooding of the Great Salt Lake. Arundhati Roy’s collection of two essays, The Cost of Living, explores the relationship of Indians to their modern environment: in “The Greater Common Good”, addressing the close ties between the Adivasi and the Narmada River; in “The End of Imagination”, analyzing the potential physical and psychological impacts of Indian nuclear proliferation on the country’s people as a whole.
In both works of literature, the authors share a common goal: to bring together the fates of a people and their ecological community in a way that challenges their domination by questioning the traditional structure of power. To this end, Williams and Roy employ similar literary techniques, namely: aligning the identity of a specific group of people to a specific place and linking the physical human body (often female) with the natural landscape, in order to place their texts in a larger political context by refusing to adhere to preconceived boundaries on which the exploitation of resources is based.
If you got this far, bravo. Tell me what you think!
coming soon to a conference near you?
Sunday, April 26, 2009
I wrote a little something about starlings. I started this last fall, shortly after we watched a starling die, and then had a little encounter with one this weekend that made me want to write more. I'm not sure if it's finished, or what it's really about, but I have a few little vignettes and maybe they will become something bigger.
A starling peers over the edge of the gutter, looking straight down at my face through the window, his head cocked and considering. I find my neck at an angle too, gazing up at him through the streaked glass of the window, watching his sharp twitches and speckled neck and long, thin beak until he hops backward, into the wet pile of leaves on my roof and joins two friends. They launch, swooping suddenly up and over my watching eyes to the power lines across the street. Three black parallel lines sag slightly against the grey-blue Saturday morning sky and three starlings wait there, one on each cable, feet grasping the metal in silhouette. The pale yellow sun of late autumn is still below the tree line, but lightens the sky to the shining of sun on water, backlighting the birds on the wire.
It’s early autumn and I am new to Iowa, but not to starlings. They live scattered across these United States—I have seen them in every time zone. I know of the animosity that even bird-lovers hold for these large, simple birds. I know they’ve edged out native species across the country. I know they were brought over from Europe centuries ago, for a nobleman who wanted to populate the new world with all of the birds referenced in Shakespeare’s scripts. A testament to the transformative power of literature. I know Shakespeare has inadvertently changed the dynamics of bird population and migration in this new world. I watch the starlings chirp and squawk at each other. Some people even go so far as to intentionally starve starlings—their goal is to protect the native birds, so they set out food for those species, and pull it back indoors when the starlings show up to scavenge. It seems unfair to blame these three starlings for the disruption. It seems cruel to starve them. But I also know that nature is often cruel and would let all the natives die out. Starlings are stronger, and therefore more fit to survive.
*
Last week, I watched a starling die. We found one sitting on the floor of the magazine office, its brown flecked wings tucked beneath its body against the cement floor, just sitting and waiting. Rachel took it into her cupped palms without a fight, and sat on the yellow sofa, stroking it and speaking in a low mother’s voice, trying to coax energy back into its tired body. We had no idea how it got inside.
The starling had one last fight in it, and leapt, falling out of Rachel’s hands, fluttering sideways and scared beneath an old ottoman. She got down on her knees and bent, fingers crawling tentatively under the furniture and cradled him softly out again. He needed food and water and hope, so we took him outside and kneeled in the wet bark mulch and tried to feed it bits of white bread crust from Rachel’s roast beef sandwich but he wouldn’t take it. Instead, he tried again to fly. We were suddenly elated, his weary wings beating like a pulse three times and then he lay on the ground with us. Oh no, we all sighed, knowing. We knew he didn’t have much time left, we knew as he arched his back, showing us his smooth white belly feathers, flecked with mud from the plot of garden outside our office building, we knew a life was about to leave.
*
Nearly a year later, I stand outside in the rain, waterproof hood pulled up over my hair, huddled under the slight overhang of my front door. I wanted to watch the downpour up close, to see the April rain beat the pavement into puddles. When I scuffed a sneaker against the cement stoop, a starling suddenly appeared from above and behind my head, flapping wildly up and away, to a tree just across the small lawn, near the sidewalk. I looked up at the corner of my gutter and saw the small hole stuffed with mud, loose twigs poking out the entrance. I think it was a she-starling, but I don’t know, saw only a grey-black shadow of a bird scuttle out of the nest it was building, startled by my presence.
The starling danced with my for the next ten minutes, as I waited out the storm outside my front door. She would swoop in for a landing, wings beating backwards ceaselessly to slow her descent as she scuttled back into her nest-box. She’d stay for a few minutes, and I stared at her small opening, hoping for a glimpse of a furrowed wing, nestled in against the rain. Then I would move too suddenly, clear my throat, shift the weight to my other leg, and she’d flutter out to the tree. Once she dove down toward the nest but lost her nerve at the last minute, hovering above my head and then retreating again. Or perhaps she was warning me, flying at me like a predator, pseudo-attack in hope of my retreat. After another ten minutes in the tree, she began squawking at me, angry staccato calls like get away get away. I should know, but I don’t, whether or not she’s laid eggs. Is this a mother’s defense of her babies? A standard response to anyone too close to the nest? Am I reacting in a way that surprises her or frustrates her or am I exactly what she expected?
*
When the starling died last September, it took a long last breath. It’s back arched further, stretching into an angle that looked like a question mark, further than I thought possible. At its furthest point, head curved back against its wing feathers, it quivered slightly, as if a chill ran through its hollow spine. I know this sounds too appropriate to be true, too much like a metaphor, but it isn’t. Birds are flying metaphors, full of the hope and potential we land bound mammals can only dream of, but this one wasn’t flying anymore. Its eyes pinched shut like a baby falling asleep against all its best efforts; it quivered, and sighed a giant exhale of its whole life and then relaxed. The tautness of struggle left its body, its feet curled up towards its white, muddy belly, and it was gone.
We had to go back inside for class, Rachel and I. I could see she was upset and I felt tears welling up from way down in my throat. We sat through workshop and put what was left of Rachel’s sandwich back in the refrigerator and didn’t talk about it for the rest of the day. When I told Kevin about it later that night, I started to cry and as he held me I thought myself ridiculous for allowing something so mundane as the death of a wild bird that got trapped inside a building for a whole weekend without food to bother me so deeply. But I had never seen a living thing die before, never seen the life actually leave a body or feel the tiny heart actually stop beating and perhaps I had never really know that death happened. But now I knew, and couldn’t escape it, couldn’t move back from the knowledge that when a starling dies it shudders.
A starling peers over the edge of the gutter, looking straight down at my face through the window, his head cocked and considering. I find my neck at an angle too, gazing up at him through the streaked glass of the window, watching his sharp twitches and speckled neck and long, thin beak until he hops backward, into the wet pile of leaves on my roof and joins two friends. They launch, swooping suddenly up and over my watching eyes to the power lines across the street. Three black parallel lines sag slightly against the grey-blue Saturday morning sky and three starlings wait there, one on each cable, feet grasping the metal in silhouette. The pale yellow sun of late autumn is still below the tree line, but lightens the sky to the shining of sun on water, backlighting the birds on the wire.
It’s early autumn and I am new to Iowa, but not to starlings. They live scattered across these United States—I have seen them in every time zone. I know of the animosity that even bird-lovers hold for these large, simple birds. I know they’ve edged out native species across the country. I know they were brought over from Europe centuries ago, for a nobleman who wanted to populate the new world with all of the birds referenced in Shakespeare’s scripts. A testament to the transformative power of literature. I know Shakespeare has inadvertently changed the dynamics of bird population and migration in this new world. I watch the starlings chirp and squawk at each other. Some people even go so far as to intentionally starve starlings—their goal is to protect the native birds, so they set out food for those species, and pull it back indoors when the starlings show up to scavenge. It seems unfair to blame these three starlings for the disruption. It seems cruel to starve them. But I also know that nature is often cruel and would let all the natives die out. Starlings are stronger, and therefore more fit to survive.
*
Last week, I watched a starling die. We found one sitting on the floor of the magazine office, its brown flecked wings tucked beneath its body against the cement floor, just sitting and waiting. Rachel took it into her cupped palms without a fight, and sat on the yellow sofa, stroking it and speaking in a low mother’s voice, trying to coax energy back into its tired body. We had no idea how it got inside.
The starling had one last fight in it, and leapt, falling out of Rachel’s hands, fluttering sideways and scared beneath an old ottoman. She got down on her knees and bent, fingers crawling tentatively under the furniture and cradled him softly out again. He needed food and water and hope, so we took him outside and kneeled in the wet bark mulch and tried to feed it bits of white bread crust from Rachel’s roast beef sandwich but he wouldn’t take it. Instead, he tried again to fly. We were suddenly elated, his weary wings beating like a pulse three times and then he lay on the ground with us. Oh no, we all sighed, knowing. We knew he didn’t have much time left, we knew as he arched his back, showing us his smooth white belly feathers, flecked with mud from the plot of garden outside our office building, we knew a life was about to leave.
*
Nearly a year later, I stand outside in the rain, waterproof hood pulled up over my hair, huddled under the slight overhang of my front door. I wanted to watch the downpour up close, to see the April rain beat the pavement into puddles. When I scuffed a sneaker against the cement stoop, a starling suddenly appeared from above and behind my head, flapping wildly up and away, to a tree just across the small lawn, near the sidewalk. I looked up at the corner of my gutter and saw the small hole stuffed with mud, loose twigs poking out the entrance. I think it was a she-starling, but I don’t know, saw only a grey-black shadow of a bird scuttle out of the nest it was building, startled by my presence.
The starling danced with my for the next ten minutes, as I waited out the storm outside my front door. She would swoop in for a landing, wings beating backwards ceaselessly to slow her descent as she scuttled back into her nest-box. She’d stay for a few minutes, and I stared at her small opening, hoping for a glimpse of a furrowed wing, nestled in against the rain. Then I would move too suddenly, clear my throat, shift the weight to my other leg, and she’d flutter out to the tree. Once she dove down toward the nest but lost her nerve at the last minute, hovering above my head and then retreating again. Or perhaps she was warning me, flying at me like a predator, pseudo-attack in hope of my retreat. After another ten minutes in the tree, she began squawking at me, angry staccato calls like get away get away. I should know, but I don’t, whether or not she’s laid eggs. Is this a mother’s defense of her babies? A standard response to anyone too close to the nest? Am I reacting in a way that surprises her or frustrates her or am I exactly what she expected?
*
When the starling died last September, it took a long last breath. It’s back arched further, stretching into an angle that looked like a question mark, further than I thought possible. At its furthest point, head curved back against its wing feathers, it quivered slightly, as if a chill ran through its hollow spine. I know this sounds too appropriate to be true, too much like a metaphor, but it isn’t. Birds are flying metaphors, full of the hope and potential we land bound mammals can only dream of, but this one wasn’t flying anymore. Its eyes pinched shut like a baby falling asleep against all its best efforts; it quivered, and sighed a giant exhale of its whole life and then relaxed. The tautness of struggle left its body, its feet curled up towards its white, muddy belly, and it was gone.
We had to go back inside for class, Rachel and I. I could see she was upset and I felt tears welling up from way down in my throat. We sat through workshop and put what was left of Rachel’s sandwich back in the refrigerator and didn’t talk about it for the rest of the day. When I told Kevin about it later that night, I started to cry and as he held me I thought myself ridiculous for allowing something so mundane as the death of a wild bird that got trapped inside a building for a whole weekend without food to bother me so deeply. But I had never seen a living thing die before, never seen the life actually leave a body or feel the tiny heart actually stop beating and perhaps I had never really know that death happened. But now I knew, and couldn’t escape it, couldn’t move back from the knowledge that when a starling dies it shudders.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
A start the long project I want to work on this summer (a series of essays springing from the ideas in my "ended up midwestern" essay revolving around issues that were going on in Montana and California when I lived there that I may not have necessarily been a part of). This is the beginning of something about homelessness, or something?
The stench of fish guts has sunk into the wood of the Ventura pier, its wide thick planks sticky and wet with the blood and juices of fish that died there, and of the ocean. Salty Pacific water sprays the pier constantly, embedding sharp crystals and dank, faint rot into the meat of the wood. You become immersed in sea there: the loud caws of circling gulls like buzzards, the spray stinging your porous skin, the hot July sun sizzle into the top of your shiny hair and the stink of fish.
Some fish for fun: white and Chicano families gathered around one or two poles, a red plastic cooler with long necks of juice boxes, a portable stereo hissing a crackling connection from the mainland, sometimes a picnic with Zip locked bologna sandwiches, sliced cheese, and grapes. The fathers wrap their arms around children, guiding the long, thin line down into the sea. They throw fish bodies onto ice or the plastic cutting boards nailed to some of the piers’ benches. They laugh.
Some fish without laughing. These are the men—mostly men, almost always men—you see sitting cross-legged on sidewalks outside the Main St. Ben & Jerry’s or curled, sleeping surrounded by garbage bags beneath the trees in Fir St. Park. Men who walk more slowly than any others you’ve seen, not just because they are laden with all their worldly possessions—flannels tied around their waists, leading scrappy, matted dogs on leashes of rope—but because they have nowhere to be. These men fish off the pier with scrabbled-together equipment, with branches, actual tree branches stripped of foliage, and worms not purchased at the smell tackle stand on Fifth and Laurel, but dug from the ground or gather, after rain, in discarded Chinese take-out containers.
The stench of fish guts has sunk into the wood of the Ventura pier, its wide thick planks sticky and wet with the blood and juices of fish that died there, and of the ocean. Salty Pacific water sprays the pier constantly, embedding sharp crystals and dank, faint rot into the meat of the wood. You become immersed in sea there: the loud caws of circling gulls like buzzards, the spray stinging your porous skin, the hot July sun sizzle into the top of your shiny hair and the stink of fish.
Some fish for fun: white and Chicano families gathered around one or two poles, a red plastic cooler with long necks of juice boxes, a portable stereo hissing a crackling connection from the mainland, sometimes a picnic with Zip locked bologna sandwiches, sliced cheese, and grapes. The fathers wrap their arms around children, guiding the long, thin line down into the sea. They throw fish bodies onto ice or the plastic cutting boards nailed to some of the piers’ benches. They laugh.
Some fish without laughing. These are the men—mostly men, almost always men—you see sitting cross-legged on sidewalks outside the Main St. Ben & Jerry’s or curled, sleeping surrounded by garbage bags beneath the trees in Fir St. Park. Men who walk more slowly than any others you’ve seen, not just because they are laden with all their worldly possessions—flannels tied around their waists, leading scrappy, matted dogs on leashes of rope—but because they have nowhere to be. These men fish off the pier with scrabbled-together equipment, with branches, actual tree branches stripped of foliage, and worms not purchased at the smell tackle stand on Fifth and Laurel, but dug from the ground or gather, after rain, in discarded Chinese take-out containers.
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