The Back Story on a Tremendous Fish

“I caught a tremendous fish,” begins the speaker in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “The Fish.” And so did I catch a tremendous fish, last Friday night. But for every tremendous fish—well, not every; there’s something called beginner’s luck, where some novice will sit down with a monstrous hook, ancient line, and his grandfather’s pole and reel in a tremendous fish on his first cast. Huh! What a great time he will think fishing is—until the next time he catches a tremendous fish, twenty years hence! No, for many tremendous fish that are caught comes a tremendous input of time, wasted time some would say, of waiting and praying.

I perfected the latter skill as a young lad. I prayed for fish, nearly wept and prayed. As my bobber danced along the rocky dikes of Lake Shetek I appealed to the Almighty, “Please, please let the fish bite! Please, please, PLEASE!” watching my line intently, willing it under with my faith in His answer. I also tried looking away, thinking maybe God liked to answer prayers when you weren’t looking, to add to the surprise.

I also tried incantations, rhymes that integrated my dad’s theories about the habits of fish. One went something like this: “Walleyes, walleyes, come to shore, so my life won’t be-such-a bore.” I should have tried something a bit more like “Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble,” but what did I know about incantations or their effect on the hidden underworld that is a lake?

I’ve only started to realize how fishing spurs the imagination as I listen to my son talk. By this time in my life, I’ve read enough fishing magazines to think I have a sense of how fish work, and so now I craft our fishing spots and techniques around my own theories: fish into the wind because the wind drives baitfish up on shore; fish current because game fish will lay just off the current and wait for baitfish swept downstream by the current as easy pickings; fish the inside turns of points rather than the points themselves because this is the part of structure that will hold fish, etc. It’s all faith—or very nearly faith. Still, it sounds like surety, and so I can extend my son’s patience by spewing such a theory: “This hour before sunset is the best time to fish.”

“Why dad?”

“Because this is when fish like to feed.”

“Maybe we’ll catch a hundred.”

Other times he’ll make up a scene that he thinks is occurring underneath the surface of the lake: “Maybe they’re just all swimming around my minnow deciding who’s going to bite it first!”

Yes, it very well could be. I really have no idea most of the time.

All of this type of experience—prayers, theories, transactions of intergenerational knowledge—is behind a “tremendous fish.” During just the late afternoon and evening of my tremendous fish, we had casted and retrieved, jigged, bottom bounced, drifted, and trolled away time. Sunset had forced us to retreat to lighted bobbers: hollowed out plastic bobbers that have a thin battery inside which you can turn on so that your bobber produces a warm glow when it’s too dark to see it on the surface of the water any longer. With our lighted bobbers and minnows we were catching all the walleyes we wanted—10 inch “cigars,” walleyes just past fingerling stage when they’re easy pickin’s for northern pike.

Then my bobber went out, as in, it stopped working. Perhaps some water from my fingers had adversely affected the battery, perhaps the battery was wearing out, perhaps lights aren’t meant to be inside bobbers and fisher people are meant to go home to their spouses. Whatever the case, mine got finicky and I couldn’t make it stay lit. I took the little metal cylinder that was the light and pushed and pulled it, stuck my fingernail into several crevices to trigger the on-off switch, and got it lit several times only to have it turn off again when I screwed the top back on. Once, it even was lit all the way through the air on a beautiful cast, only to go out upon impacting the water. Finally, I got it to stay lit and cast it out as far as I could from the boat.

The bite had stopped. Our steady diet of “cigars” had completely disappeared; only a flicker of light remained on the horizon; the adolescent walleyes had gone to bed.

Another theory that I’ve heard is that walleyes bite at night, especially under moonlight. We were a week past a full moon, although I had tried out that theory last week with no success. Still, I’m easy prey for the fishing theory that says, “Just a little longer; wait a little longer and you will be rewarded.” It’s this theory more than any other that makes fishing unpopular with spouses. All this was on the backside of tremendous fish.

When my little light got blurry because it had been carried below the surface of the water, however, my faith had been rewarded. I reeled line to make sure when I set the hook I didn’t just pull against my own loose line, alert the fish to my presence and have him spit out the bait. No, I reeled up so that when I set the hook, I felt his (her) weight at the other end.

“Is it a better one?” my cohort Kevin asked.

“I think so.” Never count your chickens.

There was more weight there at the end of the line, yes. I was just hoping for a keeper to add to the one keeper we already had, a fifteen-incher, the unwritten minimum length for walleyes. My pole was bent and bobbing as the fish shook his head. I could hear regular metallic clicks from the drag on my reel, which meant it was giving some so that my line wouldn’t break, and I expected it to fully sing when the fish neared the boat, realized his predicament, and made a run to get away, but for the most part the fish came right toward the boat as I reeled.

“Do you need the net?” Kevin asked. I tried to remain noncommittal. Still, it was heavy.

“Yeah, I do.”

It lightly shook one more time and then there it was on the top of the water, a wide silver slab that Kevin dipped with the net.

“That’s a big fish,” he said. I wish he’d have said “tremendous”; it’s more poetical.

“I bet it’s twenty-four,” I said, already moving on to measurements.

“It’s bigger than that,” Kevin said.

The first odd thing about the “venerable” fish in Bishop’s poem is that the speaker tells us, “He didn’t fight./ He hadn’t fought at all.” It was the same for my fish. I’ve had two-pounder’s fight harder. It hadn’t even made one run, just held back as I reeled and shook its head a time or two.

How’s that for complacency and entitlement? Had he learned it was pointless to resist? Was he a fatalist? Or was he just old and tired or perhaps fat and out of shape, a fish equivalent of a couch potato who didn’t have it in him to do more than shake his head a time or two? After all, he was the only fish out hunting right now, no doubt preying on perch and other fish whose eyesight is notoriously bad, gobbling up a quick meal of easy pickings. Maybe in the dark he just couldn’t see us and he got disoriented from what was happening.

Then again, what was I looking for? If I was looking for a fight, a legendary struggle to tell the grandchildren about, then why was I fishing walleyes which are anything but notorious for their fight. Was I out here simply for my own ego?

Bishop’s fish—or the fish in her poem—is a survivor. He’s “speckled with barnacles” and “infested/ with tiny white sea-lice.” The speaker looks at his “frightening gills” and thinks of his miraculous innards, culminating with his “pink swim bladder/ like a big peony,” and finally notices “that from his lower lip . . . hung five old pieces of fish-line . . . with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth.” Surely, a fish story, I think, though I have caught a couple of fish that had one old hook in their mouths, and once Kevin had his line bitten off three times before he finally caught the northern that was doing the biting. When I filleted the fish, I found the three lures in the fish’s stomach and gave them back to their owner. Still, the five-haired beard is no doubt poetic license, but Bishop’s rendering makes me think that my fish, too, is still grandiose for not fighting. There’s still something wise here, still something impressive in the large, never-blinking eyes, the laid back girth of the golden sides.

I removed the hook which was lightly embedded behind his tongue in the arrow point of his white plastic gill apparatus and held him by the external slit in his gill just under his mouth.

“You wanna measure him?” Kevin asked. There’s a yardstick-like sticker on the side of the boat for just such a purpose. I stepped over a bench to get near it and held it up. You’re supposed to measure walleyes from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail pinched together. Once you have the measurement you can find a chart that will convert the length to a weight. I carefully put the nose at zero and stretched the tail out, propping up his underside with my hand so he wouldn’t sag. The tail, spread out, reached to the 27-inch mark before he wriggled out of my hands onto the aluminum back bench and then over into the space between the orange gas tank and back of the boat. He was in a tight corner, but shaking himself to move. Sure, now he fights. I had to move the gas tank in order to get him out, then held him up again quickly to the measuring stick.

“I’ll give you 27 ½,” Kevin said.

Yes, it’s all a matter of measurement.

“Do you want a picture?” he asked.

“Yeah, could you?” I said. “Oh, what about the flash?” I asked. This would be a cellphone pic and it was now after ten o’clock.

“Oh, I’ve got an app for that,” he said, smiling. “This thing’s got everything.”

And so I presented the fish, and smiled, and Kevin’s phone, a “Droid,” flashed weakly; then he leaned back for a wider angle and I presented it even more Vanna White-like, extending the tail against my leg with my empty hand.

“I’ve gotta put it back, right?” I asked, sheepishly.

“It’s up to you,” Kevin said.

Consensus around serious walleye fishermen is that you should put the biggest fish back. Big walleyes are almost always females and produce an incredible amount of eggs—many more than small ones. Also, since big ones are not the best eating, unless you’re going to mount one on your wall, you should put them back. Thus, Minnesota instituted a law last year that allows you to keep only one walleye over 20 inches. It allows for one “trophy fish.”

I didn’t know off the top of my head what 27-inches translated into for weight. I knew that 29-30 inches approached 10 pounds, but even then I don’t think I want a dead fish on my wall forever and ever. No, if I was going to keep this fish it would be to eat it. Walleyes taste good. At 27-inches this would be like a Thanksgiving turkey: it could feed a whole family. We like to eat fish at our house: battered in Shore Lunch and pan fried; eaten in a corn tortilla with lime, onions, cilantro, cabbage and salsa as a fish taco; panfish kept whole and deep fried and eaten with rice, with my children eating the eyes, which get crunchy in the deep frier; larger fish broiled or grilled with lime and salt and eaten Thai-style in lettuce wraps with noodles and herbs and peanut dipping sauce.

In short, when I bring fish home, I’m a . . . producer of sorts. I hesitate to say “producer.” The hunter-gatherer enterprise is simply a lot more hit-and-miss than that. There are few sureties, which is why you need prayer and theories. In fact, coming home with fish seems more like the gift of fate than anything, producing a feeling in the producer of humility, of being in the right time at the right place when providence smiles. But when you stay out late, past the time when it’s beautiful and comfortable to fish, when the light is gone and your bobber doesn’t work and the mosquitoes set in en masse, and then you come home and your wife says, “Did you catch anything?” and you say, “No,” and she says, “Then why’d you stay out so late?” there’s no possible answer. But when you pull out a 27-incher, she says, “Wow!” Problem solved.

But there’s another strike against me as producer in catching fish in the great outdoors. Toward the back of the Minnesota Fishing Regulations handbook, several pages explain the dangers of eating fish. “Most fish are healthy to eat,” the page begins, to assuage any fears from the get-go. “But any fish (store-bought or sport-caught) could have contaminants such as mercury and PCBs that can harm human health—especially children and fetuses” (74). I have no idea what PCBs are, but they sound scary. I do know what children and fetuses are, and I’m not too keen on producing mercury and PCBs for them in the fish I catch. For the modern would-be hunter-gatherer, this represents another factor at odds with our would-be hunting and gathering, a different kind of fate with a different kind of expression on its face.

Later pages give guidelines for the same group of child-bearing women and children when it comes to eating fish: Panfish—one meal per week; walleyes under 20-inches—one meal per month; walleyes over 20-inches—do not eat (76). Well, I guess that solves it. What’s the point in staying out late to catch a 27-inch walleye that fights like a log and is carrying mercury death in his muscles? It’s a matter of measurement and pictures. (Incidentally, for “other adults,” eating panfish is “unrestricted,” and all other species of fish are “one meal per week,” so I could go ahead and ingest the mercury myself if I so desired.)

So Bishop’s poem doesn’t give you the backlog on the “tremendous fish,” a backlog that might make the ending of that poem even more powerful. Near the end of the poem, the speaker, after admiring the “great grunting weight” of the fish for some time, and after looking closer to find his “five-haired beard of wisdom” and realizing both what this fish has survived and that now it’s in the speaker’s boat, is overcome by a tremendous feeling. “I stared and stared,” the speaker says,

and victory filled up

the little rented boat,

from the pool of bilge

where oil had spread a rainbow

around the rusted engine

to the bailer rusted orange,

the sun-cracked thwarts,

the oarlocks on their strings,

the gunnels—until everything

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

It’s somewhat surprising at first that Bishop turns our attention to the ugly little boat, to the sheen of oil it’s left that certainly has a rainbow tint to it as it lays on the water but which is anything but glorious, anything but pristine. Still, this poem teaches us not underestimate the power of beauty, either of the survivor-beauty of the “venerable” fish or the unexpected location of rainbows, which still may still “shine out” to us from the most unexpected places.

But after this transformative power has spread over everything, comes the final line: “And I let the fish go.” After all that back story, after all that conquest where others had failed to conquer, the tremendous fish goes back in the water, without so much as a measurement or a picture.

I, too, let my tremendous fish go. I rested him in the water with two hands, one under his body just behind his gills, the other on the tail. I eased him back and forth, letting the cool water run over his gills and restore him to alertness, if he ever was alert, this lethargic old-timer. Eventually, I saw one of his ventral fins flutter, but when I began to let go he lurched to port, still imbalanced, so I kept easing him back and forth until he righted himself, like a boy on a bike, and then slowly he swam away and down into the depths again, out of reach of the flashlight beam.

Victory did fill up the little boat, I suppose. I had had my hands on a tremendous fish, had overcome the great urge to possess him, and had given him back to the lake, back to the smiling if tainted providence from which he’d come. Everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow. And so, as the darkness deepened and stars peaked through the canvas of cloud overhead, since neither of us had anything pressing in the morning, we decided to stay out just a little bit longer.

Minnesota Fishing Regulations 2010. http://files.dnr.state.mn.us/rlp/regulations/fishing/fishing2010.pdf>

Death of the Lawn?

It happens every year. In fact, by the testimony of the unused bags of “Fall Weed and Feed” in my garage, it happens twice a year: I contemplate the state of my lawn, watch the spread of clover and dandelions and weigh whether or not I should put down the recommended chemicals that will magically choke the weeds and fertilize the grasses—correction, grass, singular: as per the suburban lawn usual, my lawn is predominantly made up of Kentucky bluegrass, which may or may not be a native of Kentucky.

But the issue of lawns has swollen in my mind to being almost unmanageable. On the one hand there is the tradition of lawns and what they signify. I have a sense that in my parents’ generation, lawns meant a great deal. I get this from a number of sources. When we used to drive around the countryside, my father saved his encomium for the most well-manicured farm places: carefully tended flower beds, newly painted buildings, and newly-mowed straight-lined lawns. “This guy’s a good operator,” he’d say. “Always has his place just like a park!” We, too, mowed our lawn carefully, often in diagonal lines, which my parents found the most attractive.

I see this same tradition in our next door neighbors to the south, high school contemporaries of my parents, who mow their lawn at a ratio of two or three times to our once. They have a bird bath, a stone eagle, and an American flag as part of their carefully constructed landscaping, and I once had to trim one of my trees because it “messed with” his flag. It was true enough, just totally not in my line of thinking on these sorts of things.

What makes me think about lawn care again is that these neighbors, on one of their mowing expeditions have mowed well into our lawn—at least two full swipes, a total of eight or so feet. I’m wondering if this is a message. Is it a hint? “Mow your lawn regularly or I will?” Is it pity? “Those poor Schaaps are so overwhelmed—we’ll help them out a little bit!” Or is it simply pragmatics: they have a rider, we don’t; therefore it’s easier for them to mow our lawn.

Then, too, there’s the issue of the denigration of our bluegrass monoculture. Clover is spreading like a plague; the first spring dandelions arched up their straw necks and poofy heads in alarming numbers; a colony of succors formed a small forest around one of our trees. I even found unidentified white flowers blooming where an old flower bed used to be.

What might the neighbors be saying?

I’m made all the more paranoid because a neighbor across the road approached me in the coffee shop the other day.

“You’re not going to turn me in for breaking the Sabbath, are you?”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Sunday afternoon I said to my wife, ‘Is it worse thinking about it or actually doing it?’” A fair point, I thought. It turns out he was talking about our other neighbors across the road who care not at all about dandelions and so have a regular field full of them. “I knew they were gone to the lake so I filled my lawn tractor up with a tank of spray and started spraying.” He grins sheepishly. “I sprayed three whole tanks full before I was done.”

It’s funny but also a type of insult. I take notice.

I’m tempted to say this lawn critique is dated, but that’s not quite true. Not long ago, friends of ours were talking about lawn practices. They were commenting on one gentleman whose habit of mowing his lawn at night, with a flashlight, resulted both in crooked lines in his lawn and whisperings from his neighbors. “Of course,” the story ended, “he had more problems.”

Clearly, the two are not unconnected: a lawn poorly cared for signifies a soul in disarray. That’s what I’m afraid of.

The American lawn is not, of course, without its critics. For example, in Steve Martin’s “The W.A.S.P.”, a satire of the ’50s family, the father initiates his son into the adult world of ownership by classifying his own lawn as a luxury item:

A luxury item is a thing that you have that annoys other people that you have it. Like our very green lawn. That’s a luxury item. Oh, it could be less green, I suppose; but that’s not what it’s about. I work on that lawn, maybe more than I should and pour a little bit o’ money into it, but it’s a luxury item for me, out there to annoy the others. (19)

The Minnesota writer and prairie champion Paul Gruchow let his lawn grow and got turned in by his neighbors. The county agent came by to tell Gruchow he had to mow his lawn on the authority that otherwise he would be spreading noxious weeds to his neighbors. Gruchow asked him about the different plants which had grown up in his lawn, some of which were native prairie plants. The agent didn’t know what they were and just stuck by his demand that Gruchow mow his lawn, leaving Gruchow to bemoan the fact that if county agents don’t know what’s what in the plant world, who does?

Then there’s the environmental effects. Among other things, run off from lawns is notoriously implicated in the insane algae blooms in Minnesota lakes that turns the waters aqua and makes them unswimmable.

I also simply don’t trust the smell. It smells like cancer. I’ve seen the signs posted on my neighbor’s professionally treated lawns—from companies like “TruGreen” and “ChemLawn”; thank you, a lawn that is chemically green is not truly green, and I want a grass lawn, not a chemical lawn—that warn small children to stay away. What’s the difference in my bag fertilizer, even though the bag proclaims “zero phosphorous,” but warns me to wear gloves and long pants and to burn them as soon as I’m through with them (okay, it says “wash them”), and to keep the “drift” away from people and “desirable” plants, and make sure it doesn’t wash off into storm sewers? Coupling these warnings with the nature of drop-spreaders—surely the most imprecise technology since all the technology invented to plug runaway oil wells on the ocean floor—and it seems a recipe for disaster.

“Don’t go on the lawn for a while,” I’ll tell my children, “I just put poison on it.”

My solution to everything is to sow my lawn down in a mixture of prairie grasses and let it grow. I’ve approached another neighbor who’s a biology teacher and he’s in agreement. So’s the neighbor two doors down who mowed his lawn three times total all last summer, though he raised the potential difficulty we might have in finding the kids. We’d quite literally have to beat the—well, grasses to find them.

But imagine not only the flora but the fauna on such a lawn. In the morning I could step out on my patio and shoot a pheasant rising from the blue stem without leaving my own property. Okay, so that’s its own distortion.

In any case, I don’t think it would fly with the town council. Runaway grasses would no doubt decrease “curb appeal” and unbeautify our tidy little town.

Still, the trend may be in my favor, though it may take a while to reach Edgerton. Buffalo grass has begun replacing Kentucky blue grass in some western locales. Even the Minnesota Twins move from the Metrodome to Target Field seems to be in my favor. Early in Target Field’s young life, a kestrel perched atop one of the foul poles and caught and ate all the moths it could. Last week, a squirrel came out on the field, prompting chants of “Let’s go, squirrel” from the crowd. The TV announcer remarked fantastically and sarcastically, “Eventually we’ll have deer out here. Moose. Bear.”

And I say amen.

Martin, Steve. WASP and Other Plays. Samuel French, 1998. Web. Google Books. 2 June 2010.

My morning thanks

This morning's Writer's Almanac quotes the poet Linda Pastan, who talks about her insane passion to write. "I often write poems in my head to distract myself during hard times," she wrote somewhere. "Years ago, after a car crash, while I lay waiting for the ambulance, I actually finished a poem I had been working on, determined not to die before I had it right."

Now that's insane, I think. But then again,it's not yet five in the morning, and while there are no flashing lights that I know of on their way to the basement here, most the world would say, I'm sure, that I'm just as crazy.

Last night I finished reading the manuscript of an ex-student, who decided, long after taking my class (where he did not necessarily distinguish himself), that he wanted to write a novel. I took up the job reluctantly--I've read enough student fiction in the last six months, as a matter of fact--but once I started, I had his novel finished in just two nights.

The truth is, it has more than its share of errors, but simply to read it was a blessing to me because I know only too well what kind of commitment it takes to sit down and write a 200-page novel, for better or for worse, and what kind of hope just doing it requires.

"People without hope don't write novels," Flannery O'Connor once famously wrote, and she's right. But then people without hope don't put on roofs or do root canals either. In a way, that line feels a bit presumptuous because people without hope don't plant tomatoes either or put out fires or even sweep the front porch.

I may be myopic about all of this, given the fact that I'm here and there isn't a bit of light yet outside my basement window, but I believe her nonetheless because I know Pastan's lunatic impulse--it's something about trying to make meaning, trying to make sense. That's what O'Connor is testifying, and it's why I'm here now.


This ex-student's first-draft novel has a brightly engaging plot line; it brings into question important issues, it's set securely in time and place, and it has memorable characters. But what thrills me as much as anything about holding it in my hands is just holding it in my hands. What he's trying to do is nothing more or less than make sense of what seems sometimes senseless.

Getting novels published is nearly an impossible task these days, and the mere fact that he wrote this whole story out is wonderful. Honestly, there are many reasons to love the work, but the real story of the novel, to me at least, is that he did it at all--and that's the great gift, the blessing of the manuscript that sits here beside me.

May he continue to work, to try to make sense, in the light of the Caribbean sun, where he lives, or in the early morning darkness, even in the fervent anticipation of flashing lights.

This morning I'm thankful for his gifts.

The Bakery Conversation

I got sandwiched in a conversation on my Saturday morning bakery run. In the back of the Edgerton Bakery, rolls and loaves of fresh bread were coming out of the oven and needed to be sliced, so that left one high school girl to work the counter up front for a whole line of customers. Outside it was windy and raining lightly, a hard drizzle, and the temperature was in the mid forties. Miserable. We were in the middle of a string of cold, rainy, early May days, still shaken from the long winter past but daring to hope for a 75-degree day that we might stretch ourselves collectively and tell ourselves again why we’ve chosen to live here. That kind of day was nowhere in sight, however, which left us feeling uncharitable and almost unjustly persecuted.

“So much for global warming,” a man to my left began.

“Like those Minnesotans who are for global warming,” another answered across my person to the first speaker. Pause without response. “There are a group of Minnesotans who say they are in favor of global warming.”

“Oh, in favor of global warming? Ha ha. Yeah, we could use it about now.”

Oh, boy. Here we go. Global warming, Barack Obama, Mexican immigration. I always feel at risk in conversations like this. Like I should pipe up with a good liberal arts perspective to balance the scales. Then I think, it’s easier not to say anything. To listen.

“Hope this doesn’t mean it’s gonna be like last summer.”

“It never did get warm.”

“I think we had six hours of 90 degree weather.”

“All summer.”

“All summer.”

We live on a ridge in the middle of the continent. The nearest ocean is days away, but we’re far enough east of the Rockies that aridity—real drought—hasn’t been a serious problem since at least the ’80s (knock on wood). Winters are often brutal; so, if our winters would turn into the typical winters of, say, Kansas City, life would be seemingly easier in southwest Minnesota. It’s not bad logic, just self-interested.

“But it’s as a whole that the earth is warming.” Sarcasm.

“Ha ha. Yeah right.”

“Well, 2001. 2001 was the hottest year. But since then it’s been down.”

I’ve heard that that there was a bit of a push of “global cooling” in the 1970s. Seems incredibly ironic that ideas could change that fast, even though today that ’70s thinking has been discredited by the scientific community. Still, in middle America it makes one even more wary of new global theories, especially when they get associated with a particular type, a particular politics.

“But that’s not what they want you to believe.”

“Nope. That’s not what Al Gore wants you to believe.”

“And he’s made a mint off this thing.”

“Oh, millions.”

I had a Prof in college who lauded Al Gore for his work on the environment long before An Inconvenient Truth. I’d never thought about the fact that he’s probably made money off of it. It’s a tough jab to parry. As soon as someone stands to gain personally from an issue—see Halliburton and the war in Iraq—pure motives are shot. The Marxist critic Frederic Jameson has said that “ecological politics tend to be bourgeois politics,” another tough jab to parry, that we sit around and talk about the environment because our money enables us to do so. In a more complete form, Jameson’s quote runs like this: “My observation of these things in the West—is that ecological politics tend to be bourgeois politics, that lower-class people are interested in other issues that are sometimes incompatible with ecology” (Jameson, Buchanan 79).

“So how d’you like hauling hogs?”

The conversation turns. Or does it? One of these men used to be a long-distance trucker, it turns out, but now he hauls hogs shorter distances—hundreds of miles instead of thousands of miles, or, perhaps more likely, thousands of miles instead of tens of thousands of miles. I would bet the farm that he also listens to talk radio—thus the information that “2001 was our hottest year”—and his general acerbic skepticism. He doesn’t know me, identifying my place in the line by saying “That guy in the yellow coat is the end of the line,” when someone asks.

The other gentleman is a shirt-tail relative of mine through marriage. Story is that he knocked up my cousin—one of those cousins about 30 years older than I am—and had to get married. His wife, who often asks about my parents, I’ve talked to many times; never to him. He may know me but doesn’t acknowledge me, nor I him, an older, never-talked-to relative. By his clothes, he, too, is “a working man.”

I won’t enter this conversation because I have no “street cred” with these men. Though I’ve lived almost my whole life in the community (I defected for four years of college in the city), though I’m the son of a farmer (I’ve defected to a career in higher education), and though “my issues” are really also their issues (the integrity of the landscape, economic viability on small farms), I’m now part of the academic establishment that is theoretical and therefore impractical, liberal, and distant. Or I’m afraid that’s how I might be perceived if I jumped in with a comment such as, “But gentlemen, your socioeconomic status also predisposes you to the conservative rhetoric that makes you pawns of the global capitalist establishment.”

No, if I’m to enter this conversation, I must do so from a practical route, one that proves that I have local knowledge and that I can apply any theoretical knowledge pragmatically. I must enter the conversation on their terms and engage their way of life.

I don’t. I hold my tongue and think of my roll order.

It’s well nigh impossible to think of doing things other than the way we do them. Even as oil spews into the Gulf of Mexico and threatens ruination upon a way of life along an entire coastline, it’s hard to think of a model of life that doesn’t revolve around oil. Anyone who asks us to do that threatens a way of life, and there may be nothing more religious than the collective idea of “a way of life.” That is, if Al Gore’s interest in global warming can be questioned as “bourgeois politics,” these men’s interest in driving over the idea of global warming as so much road kill is equally a type of socioeconomic politics.

It strikes me that, in this bakery line in the midst of a reluctant spring in the middle of the continent, this is a question, ultimately, of faith. Not quite religious faith, though there are ties, but faith in a story.

I don’t know that one can call belief in one’s own system, one’s own way of life, “faith.” If faith is being “sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see,” then “faith” in one’s own way of life is not really faith, it’s something else. That is, one quality of faith, it seems to me, is that it’s a bit nonsensical and beyond self-interest.

There are those who believe in the “gospel” of global warming, or—to fashion it as “good news”—the “gospel” of a green earth. I read about one such woman who had herself sterilized to make sure the carbon footprint she left was small.

On the other hand, however, what strikes me about the global warming story is that it does encourage us to think beyond self-interest, to think of the small group of islanders in the pacific who can’t afford to lose six inches of coast; to think of the loss of creatures due to the shrinking of already narrow temperature bands within which those creatures can survive (note: I’m resisting the politicized polar bear; think instead “human being”); to think of living in a way that doesn’t mean plugging something in, flipping a switch, turning a wheel, throwing away. And that’s hard. That takes imagination. And faith of a sort.

On the landscape of the Middle West and West, the worst kind of mistake can be misplaced faith, even though our history is full of such misplaced faiths: the myth that rain would follow the plow comes to mind, among others. No, although myths have driven us out here and although we cling to our favorite myths, we’re tremendously skeptical of new myths. We stick to what we [think we] know.

And so I leave without opening my mouth once. I leave to sort out for myself myths false and true, to think about how to engage myths in bakery conversations, how to unify disparate elements of environmental politics around a central myth. In an increasingly fragmented world, that common vision seems more and more illusory. Once again, this is where faith enters the picture. Faith gains its strength from the Biblical vision of what might be, of a land flowing with milk and honey, of a holy city where Christ himself is the light. Of course, even these visions and how one interprets them and makes them to serve political ends can lead to controversy, which gets at another quality of faith: while it can be political, it cannot only be political; while it can have a vision of an end goal, that end goal must be fluid and not set in stone; while it can and should have earthly ends in mind, it must also have the mind of heaven.

When it comes to the global environment, then, I’m sure of what I hope for and certain of what I do not see. Now to get that into a bakery conversation. . .

Happy Birthday, Ms. O'Connor

Somewhere in a file down here in the basement, I have at least a half dozen old stories, some published, some not, that bear the unmistakeable influence of Flannery O'Connor, a woman who, more than anyone else, was, once upon a time, my role model. I think I came to know her best when I first started teaching in college--her bizarre ledger of freaks and misfits, her whacko humor, her Southern gothic sensibility. When I first had time to write, hers was the only path my heart knew toward writing stories.

What both impressed and challenged me was her uncanny ability to let her faith move mountains in the weird tales she told. "The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all," she once wrote. "I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development." The supernatural descends often brutally in O'Connor, most often with a vengeance. God is there. Be careful.

Born and reared a determined Roman Catholic, she sometimes appears, in her stories, as if she were some strange holy roller herself. Her characters, she most famously admitted, were Southern, and therefore "Christ-haunted"; but in a way, so was she. Her God was very real and identifiable, even if he appeared as a rogue bull or mad man. "You shall know the truth," she wrote once upon a time, "and the truth shall make you odd."

Flannery O'Connor's popularity crossed over the oldest boundaries of all--between nature and grace. When I had Ray Carver as a teacher in the summer of 1981, he assigned Mystery and Manners, her essays; that book was required reading, even though he never said a word about religion, and M and M is full the brim of her faith. Somehow, everyone--or nearly so--loved Flannery O'Connor, believers and non, and that's why, for several years, I tried to be her, tried to write like her, tried to pattern my stories after her.

Lord knows I could have had a worse heroes back then, even though I didn't stand a chance in the world of ever doing anything akin to what she did. She understood that. She had a very deterministic sense of particular calling--and she was right: "The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live," she once said. One has to find one's own voice--that step may be the first and foremost in the life of any writer.

Nonetheless, she was there at the very dawn of my own desire to write stories, an inspiration--and she still is: "Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not."

She died young, a victim of lupus. Like Dickinson, once she received her education--including a stint at Iowa in the early years of the program--she returned to her childhood home in Milledgeville, Georgia, rarely left, and finally died there, at just forty years old, having completed only a couple dozen short stories and two very strange novels.

"All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful," she once wrote and amply demonstrated through her odd, short lifetime as a writer.

Today she'd be 85 years old, had she lived. If I had the time to write fiction, I think I'd still try to write like she did, just not so much in her way. What she saw is what every Christian writer sees, or should: "The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location."

This morning's thanks is a belated happy birthday wish to someone who has played no minor role in my life. My guess is she's somewhere not far off, scribbling away.

Happy Birthday

They never crossed paths, although they each spent considerable time in each other's neighborhoods. One of them, a daughter of the pioneering days, didn't write much at all until she looked back on a girlhood she thought of as idyllic, even though most of it happened the rough American wilderness was still being settled. You can find a dozen towns in the American Midwest today that celebrate their right to the beloved heritage of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

The other, a much younger male, got sick unto death of what that same world looked like once all the pioneering dust had settled. Sinclair Lewis made his literary fortune by making fun of the descendants of the people Ms. Wilder loved, people from whom he'd himself come, ordinary folks from small-town Minnesota, the same folks Garrison Keillor has made a career of chronicling.

It's their mutual birthday today--Ms. Wilder and Mr. Lewis, highly esteemed writers from America's Upper Midwest, as honored and celebrated as any writers whose roots are here. But they couldn't be more different.

Laura Ingalls Wilder loved her world and those who peopled it. Lewis hated it. Wilder romances the reader with sweet tales sixth grade girls can love. Lewis's bitterness enchants cynics. Both bring joy, I suppose, but the tonal qualities are at exact opposite ends of the spectrum.

Wilder's books have never gone out of print. I'm sure Lewis's haven't either. But the only place you'll find Sinclair Lewis these days is English departments. Laura Ingalls Wilder's books still find their way into the hands of new readers, none of whom read them for credit.

Takes all kinds, prairie wisdom asserts, and it does. Garrison Keillor isn't all warm fuzzies, and part of the attraction of the Cohn brother's Fargo is that the film about the very same region has a sweet bit of Laura Ingalls Wilder, as well as a good stiff shot of Sinclair Lewis.

The truth is, I've read a ton of Lewis; and even though I've seen hundreds of Little House TV episodes, I've never read a single Wilder novel and probably never will.

But even though that's true, and even though I'll likely not read either of them again, of the today's two birthday people, I'd rather be Wilder than Lewis.

And I can tell you why, too--through the eyes of another Midwestern writer, Ted Koozer, in this morning's Writer's Almanac, where I discovered these birthday parties. Ted Koozer knows how to count his blessings. Ted Koozer knows how to offer morning thanks. Ted Koozer knows what he wants, and it's not much.

This Paper Boat

Carefully placed upon the future,
it tips from the breeze and skims away,
frail thing of words, this valentine,
so far to sail. And if you find it
caught in the reeds, its message blurred,
the thought that you are holding it
a moment is enough for me.

Something tells me Ms. Wilder would like that poem. Mr. Lewis would just cackle. And me, I'd rather live in love than bitterness.

But they're all wonderful blessings--Wilder, Koozer, Keillor, and Sinclair Lewis too, all of them.
______________________________

"This Paper Boat" by Ted Kooser, from Valentines. (c) University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

You can listen to this morning's Writers Almanac at

http://www.elabs7.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,k68d,dv,ch2w,1k6c,lxj6,d21w

That poor, stupid squirrel

If I'm not mistaken, it was the very first writing conference I ever attended--at UW-LaCrosse--and the featured writer was Robert Bly, Minnesota's ace, who later went on to make a mint beating his chest for men's stuff. No matter. He read his poetry while accompanying himself on his dulcimer at the conference, and I thought the whole thing enchanting.

I remember him quoting Whitman in a kind of swoon. "I heard you, solemn sweet pipes of the organ. . ." He made me appreciate Whitman in a way I never had before.

But only one thing he said that night stayed with me, and that was a kind of encyclical he pronounced almost in jest: "No one should write anything until they're 35." I'm not sure he made the pronoun error I just did, but that was the effect. I'm quite sure I wasn't--35, I mean; but I was old enough to understand what he meant.

And it's Robert Bly I thought of when I read this morning's Writer's Almanac poem, so wise it stops me in my morning tracks, because this guy knows, too.

Father to the Man

Tom C. Hunley

The OBGYN said babies almost never
arrive right on their due dates, so
the night before my firstborn was due
to make his debut, I went out with the guys

until a guilt‑twinge convinced me to convince them
to leave the sports bar and watch game six
on my 20‑inch, rabbit eared, crap TV. After we
arrived, my wife whispered, "My water broke"

as the guys cheered and spilled potato chips
for our little dog to eat up. I can't remember
who was playing whom, but someone got called
for a technical, as the crowd made a noise

that could have been a quick wind, high‑fiving
leaf after leaf after leaf. I grabbed our suitcase
and told the guys they cold stay put, but we
were heading for the hospital and the rest of

our lives. No, we're out of here, they said.
Part of me wanted to head out with them,
back to the smell of hot wings and microbrews,
then maybe to a night club full of heavy bass

and perfume, or just into a beater Ford with a full
ash tray, speeding farther and farther into
the night, into nowhere in particular. Instead I walked
my wife to our minivan, held her hand as she

stepped down from the curb, opened her door,
shut the suitcases into the trunk, and
ran right over that part of me, left it
bleeding and limping like a poor, stupid squirrel.

from Octopus. (c) Logan House, 2008.

There is, of course, no accounting for taste, and on the night before the birth of our first child I certainly wasn't out with the boys at some sports bar or watching the NBA finals with a gang of Schlitz swillers in our apartment. Nothing like that at all.

But count me among those who would say, unequivocally, that while getting married didn't alter the course of my life all that much, the ship of state got totally rerouted when that first child made her glorious debut.

Some old self, sure as anything, got flattened; and when I remember that moment now--happily, I might add, looking down the long road behind me--I sure as anything see that poor, stupid squirrel.