I realized I could easily get this blog going again, what with all the writing I'll be doing over the next three years (in Iowa State's MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment. Here are a few pieces I've written so far for my favorite class of the semester: Rewriting the West with Ben Percy, and unBELEVIably talented writer who I love (Language of Elks and Refresh, Refresh, his short story collections are very worth checking out).
Each week, we have to read a book, and respond in two ways: one critical, and one creative. These are my first two (completely unrevised) creative responses. The first is a response to Charles Portis' novel, True Grit, and the second is a response to The Virginian by Owen Wister. Let me know what you think!
“The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner.”
~ Psalm 118, Douay-Rheims Bible
In Bozeman, Montana, there was a wetland I passed every day. It was a small marsh, blooming with cattails through the winter, their thin straw stalks poking through the snow, home to squawking fowl in the spring, ducklings tottering behind their brown mallard mothers. One day I saw a great blue heron there, perched, still, on a sideways branch; it looked as if his eyes were closed. Wetland is such a simple word, just a little corner of nature stuck behind the buildings growing downtown, taken for granted. This marsh sat quietly adjacent to cattle ranching land, drinking in pollutants, breathing the particles of nitrogen and phosphorous through a complex life-cycle, protecting the water in our table glasses, our bathtubs, our washing machines, absorbing into the sediment on our behalf.
A developer named Mike Delaney diverted the water that flowed and fed the marsh, because the city couldn’t get the money together to buy it s a park. The wetland has become “The Village Downtown”, a brick strip of shops, home to a grocery store where the people of Bozeman can purchase filtered, bottled water.
***
The first white explorers of North America faced a wide ocean of tall grasses in shaded and muted colors like overcast sunny days, yellows and blues. Indiangrass brushed their legs as they walked, forbs and coneflowers bursts of color explosion over the miles of whispering grasses. A prairie is a living thing, buzzing with insect life, swarms of grasshoppers and crickets feeding, great bands of birds whirling overhead, diving and dancing, singing. The accumulation of loess and organic matter made the soil of the tallgrass prairie some of the deepest ever recorded. John Deere invented the steel plow, enabling farmers to dig for gold, turning and turning this lush resource, tearing out tall grasses and planting vegetables instead. Over 99 percent of North America’s tallgrass prairie is now farmland.
The blossoming prairie digs deep into its soil, hundreds of plant species providing a primary food source for the birds that eat agricultural pests. The higher the concentration of plant life, the greater the possibility for carbon sequestration; prairies would inhale our gases.
***
The Pacific Yew is a Western conifer, with craggy, gnarled bark, in tones of red like the clay soil of Wyoming, spotted with bone white lichen. But there is magic in that innocuous bark, the power of healing; when peeled gently off the trunk, exposing a yellow-white heart of wood, and transformed through lab-coat alchemy, Pacific Yew bark becomes Paclitaxel, one of the world’s most successful chemotherapy drug treatments. The Pacific Yew’s thin and delicate bark contains a treatment for cancer. Already scarce by the time this discovery was made, this promising Yew was never commercially harvested. Scientists scrambled to mimic the bark’s properties in a lab, to write its secrets down before they disappeared.
Current estimates suggest that between 35 and 100 species go extinct every day.
***
A settlement was recently reached between the corporation in charge of highway transportation in California to reduce the amount of toxic storm water runoff in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. Previously, more than six million gallons of oil ran into California’s waters, in addition to trash, rubber, brake dust and microscopic bits of metal that killed or poisoned marine species, including fish in waters where commercial fishing is legal. The water reaches us all.
One of the newly implemented storm water runoff control mechanisms will be freshly-planted strips of absorbent vegetation.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
I braided my hair this morning in Wisconsin, pulling the wet strands into French pigtails while he sat on the cigarette-burned sheets and watched Animal Planet. It was sticky mid-June in the Midwest, but we weren’t staying put. We were driving across the country, Kerouac pilgrims in our early twenties. The car was packed so full, and I was so hot I couldn’t fathom climbing back in. He waited as I lounged around on the cheap motel bed, letting my skin dry off, rolling his eyes and trying to tease me into moving faster. I laughed, knowing I was frustrating him, and teased him back, “You hate me today.”
When we took a shower together, the whole bathroom flooded—only about a half-inch of water—but we didn’t want to spare any of the too-small hotel towels, so we’re leaving it that way. This is a shit motel anyway, with small, brown-edged holes burned straight through the sheets by someone else’s cigarette, and we’re not too pleased with Madison or Wisconsin in general. Last night, after eleven hours of driving, we tried to get a bottle of wine to go with the motel cable, only to discover that you can’t buy alcohol in this state after 9pm. It took some time for us to get over this, because we have a habit of latching on to things and embracing our mutual hatred as an inside joke. For the rest of the summer, we laughed about how awful Wisconsin was.
The thing about Wisconsin was I’d never been there before. Not just there, but anywhere like it; this was my first venture west of the Mississippi, and I knew only from pictures the enormity that lay ahead. I was so curious about the Midwest, so conscious of this transitory landscape. Wisconsin was both the first and the last: a reminder of the past and an indication of what was to come. The new, rocky landscape was just beginning to sprout from the ground while the old, humid weather was sticking to my still-wet, bare arms, echoing home.
Eventually, we had to leave, and I let him take the first shift at the wheel. His brown feet pressed against the pedals, air conditioning coming in spurts against the particular crevices of our bodies. We leave the windows up, except when we’re smoking, and I press my feet against the windshield, begging for a scolding. We’re going to try and make it to Wyoming tonight, but neither of us knows what to expect of South Dakota, which it turns out is just about the biggest state I’ve ever seen. We’re in Central Time Zone, headed for Mountain.
Along I-90 through Madison, there are massive red rock outcroppings. They tower dangerously high, out over the road as if they are about to collapse, like those games where you stack logs on top of each other, carelessly. I’d never even seen red rock before, and the large pieces of stone I’d seen up until then were the White Mountains, where you can barely even see the granite for the trees. I wore sunglasses and stared at myself in the passenger side mirror, watching rocks and states slide by behind me and trying to see myself change.
The back of the Subaru was packed and not budging with as few things as I could muster, and all the extras he couldn’t fit the first time out. An old bike for me, a tub full of chemicals and a photo enlarger, two enormous suitcases, boxes of books and bandanas, a tent and a huge sleeping bag. I was wearing only a striped cotton sundress, and my flip-flops sat on the floor of the passenger side. There were piles of maps, my huge CD binder, Ulysses, my empty Nalgene, before it had any stickers on it. The 90-degree weather seeps in through the glass. I shaved my legs in traffic in Ohio yesterday, and I read out loud to him in between eating cheese sandwiches and pasta salad—road food for vegetarians.
Whenever I got tired, I moved the countless empty Styrofoam cups to the floor and curled into him, my head on his thigh, my body wedged in between the gear shift and the arm rest. He kept his hand on me while he drove, usually on my leg, his fingertips tucked around and underneath my left thigh, but sometimes in my hair or on my neck, sometimes just the back of my seat, his two longest fingers dancing and teasing on the top of my head. When I drove, he tried to sleep on my shoulder, but he was too timid to relax his head all the way, worried I’m not strong enough to support his weight.
All the hours are bleeding together, all the state lines our only milestones, and the further West we got, the fewer there were.
In South Dakota, we pulled off the road onto one of those wide, paved shoulders to watch the sunset. We sat on the warm engine hood and waited, the immense Badlands stretched out in front of us, welcoming the sun. The cliffs seemed to be stained from previous sunsets, with clear striations in the rock of blue, green, grey, beige and red. I was so recently removed from the Eastern land of green and blue mountain forest lagoon, thrown now into heat without moisture. The sandy, dusty sweat of the desert replacing the sticky, maple syrup sweat of black fly summers. Flat, wide, endless expanses of land, leading straight up to the mountains, all I could see for miles, sky and rock and earth.
An entire country of possibilities stretched in front of me. I was content to move out West and live a cowboy life off a page: a life of casual front porches, of late nights in bars, working or drinking, doesn’t matter. Where I write only on a typewriter and paint my walls like a rainforest and don’t wash my hands, where I learned to dance without shoes on and stop pushing the hair out of my eyes.
The next morning, we stopped for gas at a wooden outpost in Wyoming, where I made friends with a shepherd dog wearing a red bandana, and the owner told us where to find the best fishing. We climbed back into the Subaru for one last day, and as I started to drive away, dust kicking up under our New York tires, I noticed the freckles on my arms growing stronger, readying themselves for the mountain sun.
When we took a shower together, the whole bathroom flooded—only about a half-inch of water—but we didn’t want to spare any of the too-small hotel towels, so we’re leaving it that way. This is a shit motel anyway, with small, brown-edged holes burned straight through the sheets by someone else’s cigarette, and we’re not too pleased with Madison or Wisconsin in general. Last night, after eleven hours of driving, we tried to get a bottle of wine to go with the motel cable, only to discover that you can’t buy alcohol in this state after 9pm. It took some time for us to get over this, because we have a habit of latching on to things and embracing our mutual hatred as an inside joke. For the rest of the summer, we laughed about how awful Wisconsin was.
The thing about Wisconsin was I’d never been there before. Not just there, but anywhere like it; this was my first venture west of the Mississippi, and I knew only from pictures the enormity that lay ahead. I was so curious about the Midwest, so conscious of this transitory landscape. Wisconsin was both the first and the last: a reminder of the past and an indication of what was to come. The new, rocky landscape was just beginning to sprout from the ground while the old, humid weather was sticking to my still-wet, bare arms, echoing home.
Eventually, we had to leave, and I let him take the first shift at the wheel. His brown feet pressed against the pedals, air conditioning coming in spurts against the particular crevices of our bodies. We leave the windows up, except when we’re smoking, and I press my feet against the windshield, begging for a scolding. We’re going to try and make it to Wyoming tonight, but neither of us knows what to expect of South Dakota, which it turns out is just about the biggest state I’ve ever seen. We’re in Central Time Zone, headed for Mountain.
Along I-90 through Madison, there are massive red rock outcroppings. They tower dangerously high, out over the road as if they are about to collapse, like those games where you stack logs on top of each other, carelessly. I’d never even seen red rock before, and the large pieces of stone I’d seen up until then were the White Mountains, where you can barely even see the granite for the trees. I wore sunglasses and stared at myself in the passenger side mirror, watching rocks and states slide by behind me and trying to see myself change.
The back of the Subaru was packed and not budging with as few things as I could muster, and all the extras he couldn’t fit the first time out. An old bike for me, a tub full of chemicals and a photo enlarger, two enormous suitcases, boxes of books and bandanas, a tent and a huge sleeping bag. I was wearing only a striped cotton sundress, and my flip-flops sat on the floor of the passenger side. There were piles of maps, my huge CD binder, Ulysses, my empty Nalgene, before it had any stickers on it. The 90-degree weather seeps in through the glass. I shaved my legs in traffic in Ohio yesterday, and I read out loud to him in between eating cheese sandwiches and pasta salad—road food for vegetarians.
Whenever I got tired, I moved the countless empty Styrofoam cups to the floor and curled into him, my head on his thigh, my body wedged in between the gear shift and the arm rest. He kept his hand on me while he drove, usually on my leg, his fingertips tucked around and underneath my left thigh, but sometimes in my hair or on my neck, sometimes just the back of my seat, his two longest fingers dancing and teasing on the top of my head. When I drove, he tried to sleep on my shoulder, but he was too timid to relax his head all the way, worried I’m not strong enough to support his weight.
All the hours are bleeding together, all the state lines our only milestones, and the further West we got, the fewer there were.
In South Dakota, we pulled off the road onto one of those wide, paved shoulders to watch the sunset. We sat on the warm engine hood and waited, the immense Badlands stretched out in front of us, welcoming the sun. The cliffs seemed to be stained from previous sunsets, with clear striations in the rock of blue, green, grey, beige and red. I was so recently removed from the Eastern land of green and blue mountain forest lagoon, thrown now into heat without moisture. The sandy, dusty sweat of the desert replacing the sticky, maple syrup sweat of black fly summers. Flat, wide, endless expanses of land, leading straight up to the mountains, all I could see for miles, sky and rock and earth.
An entire country of possibilities stretched in front of me. I was content to move out West and live a cowboy life off a page: a life of casual front porches, of late nights in bars, working or drinking, doesn’t matter. Where I write only on a typewriter and paint my walls like a rainforest and don’t wash my hands, where I learned to dance without shoes on and stop pushing the hair out of my eyes.
The next morning, we stopped for gas at a wooden outpost in Wyoming, where I made friends with a shepherd dog wearing a red bandana, and the owner told us where to find the best fishing. We climbed back into the Subaru for one last day, and as I started to drive away, dust kicking up under our New York tires, I noticed the freckles on my arms growing stronger, readying themselves for the mountain sun.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
