Working Words

As I was driving to work before sunrise this morning, after spending the better part of 5 days working with wood and dirt in my back yard, I turned off National Public Radio and opened the car window so that premature bits of sunlight could come in. I was not especially happy to return to the office, but it was today's responsibility. I was trying to think of what to write here (or whether to write anything at all), and here's the first sentence that came to me:

One of the college courses I sometimes teach is centered around literature of and about the workplace--you know, where you spend so much time often wishing you were someplace else.

Knowing, of course, that I could not stop with a single sentence, I sat down tonight and belched some more. They go like this.

If, like me, you spend many hours in a corporate cubicle, maybe you decorate your walls. I have a picture of my wife pinned to one wall, and I have two buttons; one button reads "Another Writer for Peace," and the other button reads "Another Veteran for Peace." On the door to my filing cabinet, I have photographs of Yosemite, snow camping, backpacking, back-country skiing, and Martha's Vineyard. I don't have any poetry, though I do use some words from one version or another of Magnetic Poetry to keep my photographs in place.

In the class I teach, we examine not just poetry but also short stories and essays that, thematically, relate to the workplace. Some of the poems are written by people you might have heard of: Marge Piercy ("To Be of Use"), Carl Sandburg ("The Dynamiter"), and Theodore Roethke ("Old Florist"). But, frankly, the textbook I have to use is lousy--thin on content, short on relevance to the students.... So, sometimes, I sneak other works into the course. For example, Phillip Levine. He is not only one of my favorite contemporary poets, he's actually written entire books that contain nothing but work-related poetry--such as What Work Is. Most of Levine's poems are, however, a bit too long for me to type accurately, so I'll provide just a few stanzas from his work.

You Can Have It

My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labors, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

. . . . . .

Growth

In the soap factory where I worked
when I was fourteen, I spoke to
no one and only one man spoke
to me and then to command me
to wheel the little cars of damp chips
into the ovens. While the chips dried
I made more racks, nailing together
wood lath and ordinary screen
you'd use to keep flies out, racks
and more racks each long afternoon,
for this was a growing business
in a year of growth....

. . . . . .

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another....

I also bring in something different, a Sandburg poem that is not in our authorized text. I'm not a big fan of Sandburg, but, like Levine, he uses a language common to most of us. Here's one of his complete poems (from Chicago Poems).

Working Girls

The working girls in the morning are going to work--long lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores and factories, thousands with little brick-shaped lunches wrapped in newspapers under their arms.

Each morning as I move through this river of young-woman life I feel a wonder about where it is all going, so many with a peach bloom of young years on them and laughter of red lips and memories in their eyes of dances the night before and plays and walks.

Green and gray streams run side by side in a river and so here are always the others, those who have been over the way, the women who know each one the end of life's gamble for her, the meaning and the clew, the how and the why of the dances and the arms that passed around their waists and the fingers that played in their hair.

Faces go by written over: "I know it all, I know where the bloom and the laughter go and I have memories," and the feet of these move slower and they have wisdom where the others have beauty.

So the green and the gray move in the early morning on the
downtown streets.

There is, of course, always something more to say. Perhaps tomorrow.

Basin & Range

When you know you need to say something but do not quite know how to say it, you get this....

The first long car ride I remember is a night-time trip from northern Illinois to western Kentucky, from our home to my great-uncle's farm. It is the first family vacation I recall. Of course, it might have been a daytime ride that has simply grown darker over the ensuing decades. I was probably 6 or 7...maybe 8 or 9. Maybe 4 or 5. My great-uncle had tractors and pigs. I have 8mm movies of me sitting on the tractor and of pigs sticking their snouts through the fence. We made that trip once more when I was a kid, and on one trip or another my oldest sister got one of my younger sisters to close her eyes and open her mouth, and then my oldest sister put a frog in that open mouth. Ha ha ha. You have to love oldest sisters. I also remember looking for Boonesborough, something that certainly betrays my age. (Sing along: "From the coonskin cap on the top of old Dan to the heel of his rawhide shoe....")

But Kentucky is not what I want to discuss....

The second long car trip I remember was from that same spot in northern Illinois to Ohio, though I don't remember exactly where. We where there for a family reunion, but there were no tractors or pigs. Decades later I would return to Kentucky for a family reunion, and someone from Illinois would show up. But, again, that's not what I want to discuss.

A third trip involved driving all night with my grandparents to Lake of the Woods in Ontario, Canada, for a wonderful fishing trip. We drove through International Falls, the first place I encountered the odor of a paper mill. Later in life I would encounter that same odor in Pensacola, Florida, and Antioch, California. Once you've smelled it, you always will.

There were other car trips somewhere in there--shorter trips to Michigan and Wisconsin and Missouri. On the way to Missouri for summer vacation, the car somehow ran off the road and we bounded through a field until the front wheels dropped into a ditched and everything stopped moving. That was fun.

For all of these trips, I was in the back seat. My first trip in the front seat was when my father and I left that place in northern Illinois for a new place in northern California. We headed south on Route 47, turned right on Interstate 80, and then didn't stop for several days. In the car with us were a dog and a hamster, both of which were on their first long car trip. If you want to make a 13-year-old boy miserable, put him in a blue Ford station wagon, and send him cross-country with a silent father and no radio.

There were few car trips for several years afterward. Then, during another batch of several years, most of my miles were nautical. When I finally got back on land and bought my first car (a Honda Civic), I discovered that I had learned something from even my limited number of trips: I like long car trips. I even started calling them "road trips" because it sounds more romantic in a Kerouac sort of way.

And believe it or not, everything that comes before this is a waste of time--merely a setup for the main point. Of anyplace I've driven, Nevada's Basin and Range has become my favorite. Interstates by design and nature are not especially attractive, but Interstate 80 from one side of Nevada to another is a good thing. I don't remember making the trip with my father, our dog, and our hamster, but I remember the first time I did it alone: leaving Sacramento about 3 a.m., getting to Park City, Utah, about 12 hours later. I was in a 1984 Ford Tempo, and I lost radio reception so was alone with my thoughts for a long, long time. I realized on that trip that my father must have felt the same thing when he was driving us west and I was looking out the window on the north side of the car: nobody to talk to.

I have since made the west-east-west trip* many times--alone, with my wife and sons, with my friend, with my friend and his wife--Reno-Sparks-Lovelock-Winnemucca-Battle Mountain-Elko-West Wendover... Last year while driving alone from my home town in Illinois to St. Louis, following part of the same route my father and I took, I found that flat Illinois prairie is certainly nice, but it is not...expansive. Perhaps other places, provide what Nevada does--northwestern Oregon is certainly wide open, and what I've seen of Arizona might be the next best thing.

But cruise control and good music an hour before sunrise in Nevada, either alone or with someone sitting quietly in the seat next to you, is treasure.

* Kominski has experienced this place, so perhaps he'll chime in.... Anyone, of course, may comment.

North by Northwest

Portland, OR

The Southwest 737 lifts off from SMF and heads northwest, and just as we reach 10,000 feet the sun rises between twin Sierra peaks. I think of Icarus--not because my wings are melting but because like most sons I never spent enough time listening to my father. About 90 minutes later we descend into cold and sunny PDX, where I am embraced by family who after a couple stops transport us and an energetic basset hound toward the Oregon coast. How green are the valleys and hills, a nice change from the great central valley of northern California that is already acquiring its normal shade of summer brown. The sun is full, and Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens are bold against the blue sky. It is Chamber of Commerce weather.

We pass through Tillamook but do not stop for cheese. I was last in Tillamook 2 years ago when one of these same family members attended a memorial service for a friend but left me to wander rainy streets and to sit comfortably in Muddy Waters Coffee and Tea Company. During that same trip we buried the cat Phoenix in the back yard, so that trip was nothing if not unique. On this visit, after Tillamook we proceed north to Manzanita Beach for a run across the sand, a nice respite for a chronically painful lower back that a day's worth of 800 mg. ibuprofen has done very little to help. I've been eating the pills like candy for the last week. On the sand, I run with Maya the Amazing Basset and am happy there is one creature that has legs shorter than my own. It's not Chariots of Fire by any means, but I'm proud that I can still out-run a hound dog, at least until it gets bored with me.

Farther north is Cannon Beach where we romp some more and search for shells of the nautical variety. Kids fly kites. Humans let their dogs run free on the beach. Seagulls--rats with beaks-- glide above us; dead ones decompose in feathery clumps at our feet. Several hours later we are in Tualatin, a place I have grown quite fond of even if I do sometimes have to bury cats.

The next day we visit Powell's Books, a place you could get lost in and not complain. I pick up a new soft-cover Moleskine notebook, Edward Hirsch's Special Orders (new/poetry); Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth (used/fiction); and Tim Cahill's Lost in My Own Backyard (used/nonfiction). I would buy more, but I am limited to carry-on luggage, which is probably a good limitation. There are volumes of Emerson and Thoreau I caress but finally reject, and an apparently newly published collection of Vonnegut essays that will have to wait until I get home and can use my Border's gift card, a gift from a son who understands this book-thing. Some people might find this bookstore overwhelming, nearly unbrowsable because of the sheer number of possibilities. This is a bookstore that offers a color-coded map, it is so large. There is a coffee shop.

Another Southwest flight takes me southwest. The plane is full and the man in the middle seat next to me takes possession of my shoulder space and our shared armrest so that I spend the entire flight listing to starboard. He pulls one cell phone out of his pocket and one from his little cell-phone holder, and he shuts them both off. I read the current edition of Harper's Magazine and finish right before touchdown--nearing depression because of how bleak articles in the magazine make the economy out to be. The man in the middle seat turns his cellphones back on as soon as he receives permission, and I think again: what would happen if we had phones but nobody called? Hell, nobody calls mine. Outside the airport the air is too warm for early April, but it will have to do.

Another Place I've Been Before

Gualala, CA

Notes not from the underground but from California's Mendocino Coast... Kominksi recently described a diagonal descent to the southeast, and you should know that you can slice a different diagonal to the northwest and get just as far. My diagonal cuts out of the Valley and onto the coast--no hawks on signs but cows mingling precariously across Highway 1. Somewhere on the rocks below there must be a hefty bull carcass sustaining a Jonathan Livingston Seagull and his family.

I leave home planning to listen to my iPod's current audiobook selection History of Hitler's Empire (download for about $19 from The Teaching Company). But, when the iPod goes missing, I fall back to a CD of Paul Zarzyski, whom I have heard read thrice at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. When Zarzyski is done I start on the first of 4 Led Zeppelin CDs. Nearly 4 hours after leaving home, I'm greeted by a friend and a couple of borderline Border Collies, one of which is blind in its left eye like Jim Harrison, who writes wonderful novels and novellas, as well as essays about road-trips, cooking, and drinking. (I recommend the lengthy novel Dalva as a starting point, then work backward from there.) The dogs will come to tolerate me after a few hours; my friend has come to tolerate me over the span of nearly 20 years.

It is 2 days of, for me, basically nothing but watching someone else work. I prepare some classnotes in preparation of my next meeting with a classroom full of obnoxious, demanding, petulant, and angry students I have inherited and will spend 12 hours with over the next 3 Mondays. They might not know yet that I, too, lean toward obnoxious, demanding, petulant, and angry. A trip into town produces chicken and wine for dinner; a brief conversation and an exchange of money with one of the owner's of Noma, where I habitually buy artistic works and trinkets; and, from Four-Eyed Frog Books, Cormac McArthy's Child of God, the first sentence of which is about 70 words in length. Whoo-hoo: we got us a string of words here! After an afternoon hike, we drive to Pt. Arena for a bit of grub, and I'm shown where the town's working pier is--someplace where commercial fisherman still work. We don't linger in the cold wind, but I tell myself to return one day to see the fishermen in action.

The TV is not turned on the entire time. In fact, it's not even close to being excited. After evenings that include good food and samplings of whiskey, wine, and beer, we sleep in our respective tents each night, unmolested by skunks, raccoons, bats, coyotes, mountain lions, deer, bears, or ticks, all of which are known to pass through. I listen to the not-so-distant ocean, and I think of the nights I stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier listening to the radar antennae spinning and the ship's bow cutting through water.

I arrived on my birthday, and I left 2 days later. At home, I learn that my dog spent an unsupervised evening feasting on garbage and then depositing it on the carpet. He doesn't seem especially pleased to see me, perhaps because he knows he can no longer sleep in my bedroom: Alpha male displaces animal. It is the start of a new week--4 days of corporate work, 3 nights of teaching at 2 different colleges, then off to Portland for yet another 3-day misadventure.