Gratitude and Death

 

Table in my old farmhouse

I woke up thankful to be alive on Thanksgiving morning and thankful to have Sunny Juliet by my side, and very thankful she is no longer a puppy, that last a major cause for gratitude. We have made it, she and I, through what seemed like endless years of puppyhood, and I’m sure she was just as frustrated with me as I was with her on many occasions, but she will be four years old in December, and our home life together is much calmer these days.

Always ready for fun!

Thankful for family and friends, of course, and I don’t say “of course” as if reciting a formula. Thursday morning, punctuated by a dog walk in bitter cold wind off Lake Michigan, was also punctuated by texts with friends and family members all over the map. Some sent photos. All in the midst of holiday meal preparations, many already surrounded by family guests (or hosts), we found time to connect with others many miles away. 

We shared food and many memories.

My friend Laura arrived in the afternoon at my place. Our first Thanksgiving together was in 1971, and there were many other holiday dinners between then and now, in one place or another, often with a group of mixed family and friends. This year we collaborated on dinner, and I was very thankful to be able to share another T-Day with Laura and also, beforehand, to enjoy delicious cooking aromas in my old farmhouse while exchanging greetings with others farther afield.

 

And a fine, banal evening in shul it was. There were the usual jitters about the quorum. Pointing to the local Jewish newspaper on the table, one man said, “Maybe we should read the obituaries and see who the mourners are.” Where there’s death, there’s hope. Another man looked at him and asked: “Are you in trusts and estates?” We all agreed that the shul should not have to depend for its services on its mourners. Death is a poor foundation for community. (But it helps.) Eventually there were ten and I said amen.

 

-      Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

 

The author of the excerpt quoted above wrote an entire book focused on his year of mourning for his father, detailing traditional Jewish mourning customs over the years. He had returned, after years away, to his Jewish tradition in order to fulfill his duty to his late father by saying the mourner’s kaddish in the company of nine other Jews for eleven months following his father’s death. I was struck by the passage I quote here, especially the words “Death is a poor foundation for community,” because—always reading more than one book at a time—another book I was reading regularly at the same time was The Dominion of Death, by Robert Pogue Harrison, and it is Harrison’s contention that human rituals surrounding death and burial are the very foundation of civilization, the foundation of our humanity itself, because to be “human,” Harrison argues, is something other than merely belonging to a species. “To be human means above all to bury.” And to bury properly. The towns and cities that make up human homes have always originated, he says, as cemeteries. 

 

I will not attempt to do justice to Harrison’s rich thesis here but want to skip to something (again, as with Wieseltier) near the end of the book:

 

Humanity means mortality. Mortality in turn means that we repossess ourselves only in giving ourselves. For even receiving help is a mode of self-giving, just as the refusal of help is, or can beam a failure of generosity [my emphasis added].

 

      - Robert Pogue Harrison, The Domain of the Dead 

 

If I was, as my mother told me, a selfish child (and I think she was right about that), it didn’t mean that I wanted others to wait on me or help me. I was selfish but not greedy or demanding. In fact, our parents had drummed into us that when we were at someone else’s house we were not to ask for things, and so when we were at Uncle Jim’s house and he offered something (I don’t remember what it was), it felt to me as if accepting would be asking for, and I could only mutter awkwardly (I was an awkward child, as well as a selfish one), “I don’t know,” to which my uncle sensibly replied, “Well, if you don’t know, I don’t know, either.” And so I didn’t get it.

 

Why couldn’t he just give me whatever it was (maybe lemonade?)? I couldn’t ask for it! And accepting was as difficult for me as giving.

Most memories of Uncle Jim were very happy ones!

It all seemed so unbelievably complicated that it took me longer—long into adulthood—to be comfortable with accepting help or gifts or favors than it did to learn how to give. Even saying “Thank you” seemed to acknowledge a debt, and how could I ever repay the debt? I found it easier to say “No, thank you.”

 

Was I a strange and inward child who thought too much and created difficulties where none needed to be? Guilty! But I got over it. Finally.

 

My friend Annie was a bigger help than she ever realized. In the last years of her life, Annie needed a lot of help, and she managed to ask for it gracefully and accept it graciously. No annoying demands, no brusque refusals. Finally, thanks to Annie, I saw how accepting help could be a gift, too. It was certainly a gift she gave me.

 

Friday morning. Only very light snow here so far, and no blizzard expected in the near future. Thankful for a warm house, I bring down a few ornaments from the cold upstairs to decorate my little bookshop tree in Northport and then go outdoors into the cold with my patient dog girl. Another day—and we are still alive!

On-leash (hunting season), there is still a lot to sniff.

Just Call Me a Greedy Little Kid

ruins of old hotel in Dos Cabezas

Just as it never had a church, it’s probably a good bet that, even at the height of the copper mining rush, Dos Cabezas never had a public library. No doubt the mine owner had a few books in the lodge where he entertained potential investors. (I'll have to ask Dorothy.) Surely he would have maps. But the height of the Dos Cabezas population was long ago.

modern library in Willcox

These days there is a good little public library in Willcox, however, the major town back up the highway about 15 miles, and the Friends of the Library group runs a little shop selling donated used books near the area museums. The Artist and I patronize both the library and Friendly Bookstore on a regular basis during our winters here. 

little bookstore in Willcox

But we have always, since long before we met, needed our own private collections of books, too.

My background in books: 

I grew up in a modest and frugal household. My parents were both readers and lovers of poetry and opera, but they were also budget- and savings-minded, and while we did not want for necessities, luxury played no part in our life. Summer vacations, until I was 12 years old and we borrowed an old canvas umbrella tent and began camping in Michigan, were two weeks of visits to grandparents back in Ohio, one week with my father’s father and stepmother, the other with my mother’s mother and stepfather. So as you might guess, the books we read were, for the most part, library books.

When I was in grade school, my class visited our tiny school library on Tuesdays and the bookmobile on Thursdays. Saturday was the big day of the week: a family visit to the grand public library downtown, where decades later I was able to give my husband a complete tour of the holdings of the now-empty former children’s book room, guiding him around the floor as if shelves and books were still in place, telling him, “This is where the Doctor Seuss books were. I discovered them for myself…. Back in this corner were the horse books [Justin Morgan Had a Horse]…. Over in this corner were biographies [Helen Keller’s was the autobiography I read with interest], and here … was Parents Keep Out, by Ogden Nash!”

My sisters and I were permitted to order a few inexpensive paperback Scholastic books when school presented that opportunity, but otherwise, and for beautiful, coveted hardcover books, we had to wait for Christmas and birthdays. On those special occasions, we might hope for one special book apiece. I still remember the year I found Marguerite Henry’s Black Gold under the tree. Santa’s presents to us were as modest as those from family members, but I have never forgotten the sight of that beautiful book waiting for me on Christmas morning.

Why did we only know new books and library books? Had I grown up in Chicago, no doubt I would have discovered used books earlier in life, but I don’t think we knew any shops in Will County that sold used books. Even garage sales were unknown in our edge-of-town 1950s neighborhood (although vacant lots we had aplenty, and what do children do without vacant lots?) Anyway, we were not shopping children. Penny candy and five-cent candy bars exhausted our tiny allowances, and climbing trees, digging holes, and building “forts” with old cardboard refrigerator boxes were more our speed than stores full of merchandise. The first shopping mall lay yet in the future. 

— But books! There were never enough in our house! And we only had a single bathroom for five people! My father called it “the library,” and a frequent plaintive cry from the other side of the door was, “Are you reading in there?”

As a teenaged babysitter, I was dismayed by the lack of books in the neighborhood homes that employed me. One house had only TV Guide for reading material, nothing more! I learned quickly that if I wanted the pleasure of reading after my charges went to sleep, I would have to take my own library books on those babysitting jobs. 

Eventually I did discover — in Urbana, Illinois; East Lansing, Michigan; Kalamazoo, Michigan; etc. — bookshops specializing in used books, and that allowed me to begin assembling a (still modest) private library, an eclectic collection of books that has transformed many times in size and content over the decades, sometimes shrinking (with a move), usually growing, and always taking new turns with new interests. 

My books waited for me!

Bookcase #2

So now, though we are only in a small rented cabin for the winter, with space at a premium, it would not feel like home without our own books in it. Happily, shelves of books accumulated over the past two winters greeted us upon arrival this month, and so it did feel like home when we walked in the door. The waiting books welcomed us (as books do) and even seemed to welcome the new additions we had picked up along the road.

Nature reference

Southwestern history and life

A few cookbooks

Yippee!

On our third evening here in the ghost town, when dark descended early, I suggested to the Artist that I could read aloud to him before we went to bed. We often read aloud to each in bed, but it’s easy then for the listener to fall asleep, so we agreed to try it sitting up in our daytime reading chairs. The first book we tried, despite an intriguing title, didn’t work out too well (“You lost me in the first paragraph”), but our happy second mutual choice was Julia Child’s My Life in France. What enchanting, contagious enthusiasm that Julia had, even in her nineties, looking back on the best time of her life! As Paris is also the magic world city for us, and we could picture clearly the scenes described in the book, it was the perfect book for a dark high desert evening’s dreaming.

It feels luxurious to have choices and variety at hand when we want a change of focus, and as a kid who grew up in a house where we had enough of what we needed but never a lot of what we loved, I love my little ghost town private library! It makes me feel that I live here, that I'm part of the place, and it makes me feel rich. You know all those commercials you hear about "growing" your "wealth"? This is mine.

Sarah likes the book corner, too. The photo here is from 2018, but she is gravitating to the library again this year.

New Beginnings?

Hoppin' john, collard greens, cheesy biscuits

January 1-2, 2019

Dos Cabezas

When you think about it, the idea of a ‘beginning’ to anything is strange. I wrote those words out long-hand on a pad of yellow-lined paper on the morning of January 1st, but they were really (as I also wrote) a continuation of what had begun on my laptop screen two weeks previously as “Desert Diary,” and that was only picking up again a record of descriptions and thoughts written last winter and three years before in blog posts and letters to family and friends.

Cabin from wash on snowy New Year's Day

Was 2015, then, the beginning of all this writing and of my love for mountains and high desert? If so, why did my heart leap up when the owner of our cabin first told us about it, uttering the words “high desert,” “open range,” “ghost town,” words that thrilled me even then? 

Sarah & fence

I’d never longed to see Arizona — it wasn’t a dream for me, like the dream of seeing Paris — but the truth is that I had always, as a young, horse-crazy girl, dreamed of going West, dreamed of the West from the front porch (west-facing) of our family home on the Illinois prairie as I gazed over and past the cornfields across the road and imagined myself on horseback, riding beyond those prosaic fields, into the sunset. Out under — at last! — black skies pricked by innumerable stars, far from any city or suburb. As it always had and perhaps still does to Europeans, “the West” represented freedom to the child I was, fenced about by social rules and expectations. “No running in the house!” Could they not see that I was not running but galloping? That I was not a child but a wild horse? As I galloped, indoors or out, or dreamed on the front porch, gazing across cultivated fields, I imagined boundless wilderness, open and challenging. There were pictures in my head from television cowboy shows, but there were no sheriffs or bandits or range wars in my fantasy. I had no wish to conquer anything or anyone, only to be there, to “breathe free,” and test myself, not against adults or other children or social mores or any arbitrary will or rule, but against natural reality, harsh though it might be.

[Sidebar: Some, I know, will immediately want to compare my girlhood dreams to those of a boy, so I’ll pause here to say that I am not interested at all in that comparison. Men, usually the ones to raise the comparison questions, can only speculate about how their youthful experiences compare to what they can only imagine were those of someone now a woman. They cannot truly compare, as the only experiences they had were their own. And the only experiences I had were mine, so I cannot compare, either, but comparison is not what I’m about. I am only describing my dreams, and I can say definitely that I did not dream of surviving a Western wilderness as a girl, only of meeting the challenges of nature. Perhaps a boy’s dreams center more on becoming a man. Perhaps their dreams are more gendered. I don’t know. I suspect there are as many differences among boys’ dreams as there are among the dreams of girls, but I find questions of gender when they intrude on my experiences with the natural world, whether actual or imaginary, annoying and unwelcome, because part of what I sought to escape in my childhood imagination was just such restricting social norms.]

Back to the more interesting (to me) question of beginnings, though. Did the feelings I now have for my winter Arizona surroundings begin with a child’s dreams as that child gazed across an Illinois cornfield, imagination ablaze with Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and company? Or was the beginning further in the past, when my parents attended their first rodeo out in South Dakota while I was still in my mother’s womb? South Dakota, my birthplace and scene of my conception — would such a place not mark a child with an invisible brand, not to be erased by subsequent moves and homes? Or do I go beyond reason with such a question?

On New Year’s Eve I opened a new book that I took up again in the morning, as the new year officially began. A gift from friends who were here in the cabin for six weeks before our arrival and the most appropriate possible reading for me, here, as we usher out the old and welcome in the new far from northern Michigan, the book is Drum Hadley’s Voice of the Borderlands, poetry of his cowboyin’ experience along la frontera, the mountains and high desert of Sonora, Mexico, and Cochise County, Arizona. Names of familiar places recur in narrative vignettes: Sulphur Springs Valley, Willcox Livestock Auction, Agua Prieta, and there are mentions also of places I know only from maps, such as Guadalupe and Antelope Wells. I finished the first section, “Cowboys and Horses,” with great satisfaction as the new year began and the first snow of 2019 fell on Dos Cabezas. On the morning of January 2nd, we are under a winter storm warning still, with accumulations of eight inches possible at elevations above 5,000 feet (that’s us) and temperatures not to rise above the freezing mark until Thursday.

Beginnings, endings. Human beings designate moments, days, years as such, but are those designations anything more than mileposts we drive into time as a way to organize our stories?

Reading Other People’s Lives

Playing in the snow with the first dog of my life

As years go by, more and more older browsers in my bookshop tell me they love reading biographies. Is it more true of women than men? Maybe so, and probably more men read straight history than women. Across the gender gap, however, it seems that many of us, as we get up in years, turn increasing to nonfiction. 

In girlhood, I read nonfiction very sparingly. I found most history and biography written for young people too much like school lessons. What I looked for when reading for pleasure (which I did voraciously) was to be transported to other worlds, to be able to slip out of my own skin and away from my family and to live vicariously a very different life. Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, The Borrowers — early on, fantasy worked for me better than true-facts kinds of books.

My break-through, the first nonfiction story that succeeded in unlocking another real person’s life was — and the simple title emphasizes my point — The Story of My Life, by Helen Keller. Another girl-child, but with such a different beginning! Almost unimaginable obstacles between that young girl and the larger world! Her curiosity, her frustrations, her hunger, and the unfolding of the world around her, as she explored and discovered it, held my young inquisitive reading self in thrall. Later would come The Diary of Anne Frank, which I read at about the age she had been when writing it. 

The magic of a story well told and of a reader entering into that story is that we readers do take on, vicariously, the experiences of a character or narrator while we read. We leave ourselves behind, in one sense. — In another, of course, we remain ourselves and can only “have” the other’s experiences in translation, as interpreted by our own more familiar experiences, experience remaining, always, a subjective, first-person phenomenon, which is why I used those scare quotes around “have” earlier in this sentence. But really, what is it like to be someone else? Don't we all wish we knew?

And so, autobiography and memoir stand out for me against the more objective biographies written by someone other than the person who lived the life that is the subject of the book. The best biographies, of necessity, must be filled with speculation. Even if the subject told the story to the writer, another layer of translation has be added between subject and reader. Writers of memoir and autobiography are translating their lives for us, too — that I admit. Whether years afterward or in daily writing sessions as life is being lived, what is written is a matter of perspective, selection of facts to be reported, varying emphases, and interpretation of the world (including other people) that formed the environment for that life. Die lebenswelt, phenomenologists call it. But I feel closer when the subject is the writer.

And here my own bias deepens: I am generally more interested in writers’ accounts of childhood than in their stories of later life. Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City moves me much more than his later New York Jew, and Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter has for me an immediacy I don’t find in her later autobiographical books. I could go on and on listing examples, but the question is, why would it be? Why do I prefer — and find more interesting — the stories of childhood?

When famous people write autobiographies or memoirs, accounts of their later lives tend to be filled with other famous people, and too often whole pages come across, for me, as tedious name-dropping. Well, aren’t those other people interesting (even fascinating!), also? Perhaps so, but often the mention of them and their intrusion into the story gets in the way of the reading experience I want to be having. 

Here we might digress to ask the question I already set up above: What is interesting? Who is interesting? 

Well, whatever you take an interest in is, for that very reason, interesting to you. Just so, what I take an interest in is interesting to me. So as I see it, being “interesting” is not a quality of an object or a body of knowledge or any particular field of inquiry or individual human beings.  Some people have more obviously exciting lives than others, but what makes the story of a life interesting is not the plot line but how the story is told — and, for me, how much room the memoirist manages to make for me, the reader, to get inside his or her experience. 

I’ve never pushed my inquiry further until this morning, but now what I’m thinking is that “how I saw and discovered the world” is the story of every childhood, and for me that story is subject to as many variations as there are human beings in the world, so it can never not interest me, while the story of famous adulthoods, on the other hand, tends more toward “how the world saw me,” a very kettle of literary fish. The childhood story lets me, the reader, inside the writer’s life — we see the world together — while the adult story keeps me at a distance (“Look at me!”), relegating me to spectator status. 

Spectator. Audience. There are occasions when that position is both necessary sufficient. Reading history that covers decades or centuries, a reader necessarily views the pageant from a distance. The Frontier in American History does not invite me into any particular individual’s life experience but captivates by its broad sweep and by the development of an argument that engages me as I read. I do not slip into that writer’s experience. That is not the point at all. Instead my relationship is with the writer, not exactly as a partner in conversation, because he is the one onstage, giving a lecture, but I can question and disagree in my mind, as one may press a speaker after a talk in Q&A. If, however, I were reading the story of the author’s life, the life of Frederick Jackson Turner, as told by himself, I suspect I would find my interest lessening as he neared the ripe old age of 30. Just so, when reading Alfred Kazin on literature or Simone de Beauvoir on philosophy, I do not expect to inhabit their skins and lives, only their minds! And that only in a limited sense. But when they are writing of their own lives, I feel closest to them when they were discovering the world rather than being concerned with their own places in it.

As readers, we all have idiosyncratic biases that influence how certain books attract us and hold us through numerous re-readings and how others put us to sleep. What are yours?

Scent of Apples, Lead Me On and Carry Me Back

But when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory. 

 - Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

This, friends, is why one reads Proust! He penetrated so deeply into the passing moments of his life that he fixed them, for us, and for all literate time. When other books disappoint, when sleeplessness comes in the dark of the night (as it did to the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past), one can pick up any volume of Proust, open to any page, and be calmed and made happy. It is even possible to close wakeful eyes (without turning on a light to read) and rehearse in one’s mind the beginning of a lengthy section of the story – the differences between the boy’s bedroom in Combray and his hotel room in Balbec, the ways in which his expectations of Balbec fell short of its complicated reality, his imagination’s pictures of places not yet visited and the magic of their place names....

And so I put aside Daniel Defoe one night in favor of Proust, and the next day another magical book came my way, Wallace Stegner’s unclassifiable Wolf Willow. Almost immediately, reading the introduction by Page Stegner, my Proustian literary antennae began quivering.

It is the history of a small town called Eastend (renamed Whitemud in the narrative), where Wallace Stegner spent the most formative years of his childhood. And it is also, by synecdoche, the chronicle of a process of white settlement on the northern plains, a process that reaches its climax and end in this particular short-grass subdivision of southwestern Canada. 

 But Wolf Willow is utterly atypical of conventional history. What we have here is history filtered through the evocative and judgmental mind (and memory) of the region’s most illustrative native son; Stegner’s response to his subject is a kind of stratified formation of anthropology, sociology, geography, geology, and ecology applied to a literal place—and to literal place as a state of mind.

Yes! This, I think, is the book that will, finally, lead me into the work of Wallace Stegner, a writer whose novels have previously resisted my attempted incursions. The first sentence of the first chapter is everything I want it to be:

An ordinary road map of the United States, one that for courtesy’s sake includes the first hundred miles on the Canadian side of the Line, will show two roads, graded but not paved, reaching up into western Saskatchewan to link U.S. 2 with Canadian 1, the Trans-Canada Highway.

Road map! Unpaved roads! U.S. 2 and the Trans-Canadian Highway! (Place names!) With Stegner's words and lines my imagination flies northwest-west from the northern lower peninsula of Michigan, past the Dakota of my birth, and up to the northern borderland. With the author, I explore and remember the place where he grew up, hearing as a child about “the Cypress Hills,” thinking it somewhere nearby by and not realizing that he lived in the region so named. The town he finds has changed dramatically. Once “bare as a picked bone,” it is now full of trees. The change is charming, but he cannot find in the landscape his own and his family’s past until, coming down to the river itself, where today’s children are playing, he is assailed by a familiar smell, “pungent and pervasive” but at first eluding identification. He investigates further, inhaling the odor of the old bathhouse shack, sniffing a handful of mud. Finally...

I stand [on the bridge] above the water and sniff. On the other side I strip leaves of wild rose and dogwood. Nothing doing. And yet all around me is that odor that I have not smelled since I was eleven, but have never forgotten—have dreamed, more than once. Then I pull myself up the bank by a gray-leaved bush, and I have it. The tantalizing and ambiguous and wholly native smell is no more than the shrub we called wolf willow, now blooming with small yellow flowers.

This smell, Stegner writes, is as evocative as Proust’s madeleine and tea.

For the moment, reality is made exactly equivalent with memory, and a hunger is satisfied. The sensuous little savage that I once was is still intact inside me.

Old apples along farm lane

Is September more redolent of memory-evoking aromas than other months in the Midwest? Sun-kissed apples on trees or in the grass, warm to the touch, or rain-wet apples glistening on branches or bowls of apples on the porch on a rainy day, filling the dense, humid air with their perfume -- apples and sunshine or apples and rain – either conjunction holds volumes, and those volumes open to a succession of years.

The apple tree in my parents’ backyard was an entire universe. That world’s year began for me in spring when the tree burst into generous bloom, its delicate white petals tinged with fugitive pink, bouquet upon bouquet, fragile flowers inviting bees with rich yellow pollen and heavenly scent. During that season I imagined the tree my tropical island, where the staff of life was blossoms in place of bread.

In summer I often retreated high into the tree’s leafy branches with a book, hidden from the busy world of family below and in the house. How seldom human beings look up! They could have seen me much oftener than they did, but I was happy to be invisible, enjoying that childhood fantasy. Sometimes, though, a friend would be invited to join me, and when the playmate was Jimmy the tree became what we called back then a “rocket ship.” We broke off twigs to leave sharp, raw ends and impaled on those points small, hard, green apples to be the control knobs of our ship. We would “blast off” over and over again, leaving earth far behind. Did the earthbound, pedestrian world have any idea what was happening above their heads?

We knew nothing of apple varieties in our family. Fruits of the backyard tree we called “pie apples,” to distinguish them from the “applesauce apples” of the trees in the side yard (the second lot that was also home to a pear tree and raspberry patch). One thing all three apple trees had in common was that the fruit would fall faster than we could usefully gather it up. Good apples went immediately into pies and sauce and, for longer-term storage, into bushel baskets to be stored in the basement “cold room.” (The “cold room” was in the back of the house; frontmost in the basement was the “coal room” with an iron door opening to the driveway for delivery of coal. Learning to distinguish the two names sounding so much alike felt like a giant step forward to my three-year-old self.) But punky, mushy brown, wormy apples had to be picked up, too. They could not be left in the grass to rot. We two little girls, my sister and I (the baby sister still too young for the job), had no objection to the firm, crisp apples (white-fleshed and tart when bitten into), but the others were repulsive to the touch, and my father had to bribe us with coins if he wanted the job done well.

One year when I was six and Deborah three and our baby sister newborn in July, Deborah and I were taken to spend a month with our grandparents outside Springfield, Ohio. Their backyard was orchard but no monoculture: there were apple trees of different varieties, different kinds of plums, peaches, pears, and a grape arbor heavy with fruit over the brick-lined walk from house to outhouse. Here, too, the branches of the apple trees were my private world. One August afternoon as a storm approached I clung near-frenzied to the branches of an apple trees that swayed wildly in the wind until compelled by my grandmother to come down and into the house. (I saw myself as a wild thing of Nature; she saw me as a little child.) The storm arrived and raged. In the aftermath, my grandparents’ transformed orchard was a shocking sight. Fruit littered the ground like hailstones, and it was impossible to take a single barefoot step without treading on bruised and shattered apples, peaches, plums, or grapes. Fruit cultivated lovingly for winter use, as well as for sale, had been laid waste in less than an hour. Nature might not be cruel, but she was definitely unconcerned with human plans.

My adult Septembers continue to be rich in apples. Old orchards in Alger County in the Upper Peninsula, planted to supply lumberjack camps, survive as remnants of those old days, producing apples year after year. Along town streets, washboard roads, and two-tracks, branches hang heavy, trees drop riches to the ground, and the air is filled with apple perfume and wasp flight. Every year I look out again for one particular tree in Grand Marais and remember a long-ago yard sale and the old man who encouraged me to gather up as many of his sweet, yellow-skinned apples as I could carry away.

Then there was the autumn I picked for John and Phyllis Kilcherman. Paid by the box, it was as much as I could do, picking as fast as ever my hands could fly, to fill a single box in two hours. What was the pay per box? That I honestly don’t remember. What I remember is the scent of apples all around, in every kind of weather, cold rain on wet days running down the back of my neck, hands turning numb when the fall weather turned cold, and distant voices from crews in other parts of the orchard, drifting on the wind to where I worked my solitary assignment.

Did my sisters and I offer apples to our teachers when back-to-school time came around? I suppose, perhaps. But the scent of apples does not carry me back to school, I’m happy to say. It takes me outdoors instead, along dusty roads, and up into the trees themselves, branches swaying in the wind.

Comfort me with apples! Bring back to life that "sensuous little savage"!

Wilderness Boyhood with Horses

Where Rivers Change Direction

By Mark Spragg

New York: Riverhead Books

Paper, $16

...I can step my memory onto the backs of the big boulders and hear my boots scuff against the black and rust and corn-yellow lichens that covered them.

When I was a boy ... I lived on the largest block of unfenced wilderness in the forty-eight states. 

-      Mark Spragg, Where Rivers Change Direction

As a bookseller who started out (back in 1993) exclusively with used stock, I still gravitate heavily in that serendipitous direction, ready for a previously overlooked or treasure somehow previously missed to take me by surprise. I also maintain that certain words grant magic to a book title. “Rivers” is one of those words. And so it I saw and picked up Mark Spragg’s book. Turning it over, I saw a sentence fragment, “... wrangles horses for his taciturn father,...” and had to start reading. It had me at “Hello.”

I knew that David would enjoy the setting as well as the writing, so I tried reading aloud to him from the first chapter. I didn’t get very far. He was fully attentive. The problem was that I simply could not pronounce aloud, with a steady voice, sentences that had such a powerful effect on me as these:

I knew the horses as I knew my family. ... We caught them, used them, turned them back into the kidney-warm manure cake of the corrals, into the ridden-to-dust round corral. They rolled and stood and shook and milled. When I was separated from them I felt wrong in the world. When I was separated from them I took no comfort in the sound of the creek. I felt chilled without the heat of them. ...

The ranch life is a beautiful but also hard, even brutal. Much of what might sound like “hardship” was intentional, since the family business is a dude ranch in the Yellowstone Plateau, with clients looking to “get away” from civilization. Thus --

No one ever asked why we had no television, no daily paper. They came for what my brother and I took for granted. They came to live the anachronism that we considered our normal lives.

But much larger difficulties, privations, and challenges come with the territory, unsought. At least half the chapters are what a friend of mine (who speaks of certain movies she recommends as “hard to watch”) might call “hard to read.” I winced through much of the chapter titled “Bones,” in which thirteen-year-old Mark accompanies one of the older ranch hands, John, on an overnight hunting expedition for winter meat, looking for an elk to kill. They find and kill the elk, but early in the butchering process John’s hand is badly cut. The description is graphic enough that I won’t quote it but will just say that for most of the chapter that mutilated hand hangs in the balance. And that’s early on, with much more to come.

A gentler chapter is “Wapiti School.” The school is named for the valley, green only two months of the year, the valley where, scattered far from one another, some two dozen ranching households form a kind of extended family.

America was not yet rich enough for the coastal populations to buy up the hinterland and subdivide it into a patchwork of second homes. The Wapiti ranchers worked their land; they did not sell it. It was a life that lined the face, leaned the body, and satisfied. We knew our neighbors.

School days bring the author to his first shy boyhood venturings into the agonizing mysteries of love. He strives to tame his cowlicks and buys his first gift for a girl, but how to declare his feelings?

Then there is my favorite chapter, “Greybull,” the story of the boy’s first trip to the livestock auction, an hour beyond Cody, outside Greybull (population: 12), a trip made with his father in their old truck with the busted radio.

The parking lot is gravel, rutted from a recent rain, grown up at the edges in tire-broken weeds. The pickups are mud splattered, most of them hitched to trailers, their grills and windshields uneven fields of smeared insect body. There is a row of stock trucks. A semi is backed to a loading chute.

In one of the pens, a horse catches the boy’s eye,

... a single dun gelding. His mane and tail, muzzle, and stockings darkened as deeply brown as wet earth. So is the line that dissects his back, from his mane to the base of his tail. His ears are pricked. His face alive with intelligence. He’s well muscled and put together like a cutter.

The boy has eighty-nine dollars in his pocket, a fat, damp roll mostly of one-dollar bills. Reading this chapter, the reader fears not that someone or something might die, only that the boy might not be able to buy the horse.

(“Only”? Did I say “only”? I was in a fever of excitement reading this chapter, excitement similar to my grandfather’s, so long ago, as he read for himself, at my urging, one of my favorite books, The Black Stallion’s Filly, by Walter Farley. When he reached the chapter of the Kentucky Derby chapter, my grandfather gripped the book more tightly and beads of sweat popped out on his forehead.)

With Spragg’s book in hand, we know the young boy in the stories will grow up to be a writer and that he will be living back in Wyoming when this book is published. But that road away from the ranch and into the future was not an easy ride. A winter of mountain isolation following college was easier for me to understand than a later sojourn in town, both measured against the backdrop of a wilderness boyhood. His parents’ divorce, reported without explanation, struck me as unutterably sad, and his mother’s death was wrenching. But more than that -- the young boy’s openness to the world and everything in it, his early life with horses, hard and sometimes brutal as that wilderness life could be -- I wanted to turn back time.

In the end, Spragg writes that he fears having lived “a careless life.” I read those words and wonder – asking myself -- does he have horses now? Is it possible to – can anyone -- live a “careless life” with horses?

I claim no objectivity whatsoever for my post today. “When I was separated from [horses] I felt wrong in the world.” I am riveted by that sentence. Since I have been separated from horses all my life, except for whatever stolen hours I could find to be near them, seeking them out, I can’t help wondering how I would have felt in the world if my girlhood horse dream had come true or if, later, I hadn’t allowed myself to be sidetracked away from horses, again and again, by other shiny, glittery objects along the way.

But I should clarify: It is not necessary to be “horse-crazy” to appreciate Where Rivers Change Direction. Don’t expect a series of pretty postcards, that’s all: nature’s power would be cruel if not so completely indifferent. But if you can’t get yourself out to Yellowstone, read this book and you will be well rewarded, seeing things in your reading mind’s eye that you would never see out your car windows. If you’ve been to the wilderness, Yellowstone or any other, you’ll enjoy reliving the freedom of these open spaces.

Spragg’s writing is mesmerizing. The wilderness he experienced half a century ago, beautiful and brutal, makes for a compelling story, and the author's shortest, simplest sentences carry emotion and poetry. I highly recommend this unusual, startling, and vivid memoir. I have copies in stock. Come see me soon.

Horses shown today were photographed in Cochise County, Arizona, in early 2015.

Read more about Mark Spragg here.