Minnesota 21.7.02: Idyllic Farmland and Catseye Glasses

Idyllic farmland and ugly people with horrific secrets hidden under the guise of holy family: but that theme’s been done to death.

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Last night, in Hutchinson, Minnesota, I watched a man and wife eating dinner, never saying a word to each other. They were at a small square table, but sitting catty-corner from each other. She had badly dyed hair, coal black, in a tight wavy frizz across the top of her head. Her eyes were rapacious, curiously vacant and at the same time fixed greedily on her feed. He was nondescript, a beefy-faced aging farmer, iron-gray hair slicked back from the forehead.

They ate and ate, meat and potatoes, methodically sawing at the meat, putting forkful after forkful into their mouths, never saying a word or showing the slightest interest in their surroundings. She would occasionally cut a forkful of meat, raise it into the air, and look at it and sigh, as if it daunted her.

Then they stopped eating, exchanged a word or two about the quality of the meat (she was displeased), and prepared to leave. She put on those catseye glasses in silver frames that seem always to have a chain on them, wrote a check, and they left.

Minnesota 26.5.02: Nature Is as Nature Does

Steve’s father, as we pass a farm with a row of newly planted trees today: I don’t know why they planted them trees there. They don’t do anything.

There is an almost ruthlessly utilitarian approach to nature here: nature is what does, not what is. Yet that approach stops sharply at reproductive life: there, nature decidedly is. Interesting, the difference, and much commented on by theologians.

Minnesota 25.5.02: Buckle Up Blvd., A Gallon of Blood

Drove to Grand Forks, North Dakota, today. Along the way, in a ditch—rather, on the side of the ditch facing the road—a large American flag. Above it, Mickey and Minnie Mouse cavorting and pointing down at it.

Midwesterners tickle the hell out of me. In any other culture, this “patriotic” display would be considered ludicrous, or playfully subversive and ironic. But I feel absolutely certain those who created it intended it as a serious and attractive display of patriotism. Not an ounce of irony in these bones, no siree.

In Grand Forks, we saw a restaurant on the main highway (Buckle Up Blvd.) called Fire Island. I told Steve I was quite sure the owner had no clue what Fire Island was all about—perhaps, had no inkling a real Fire Island even exists.

Steve later asked some of his relatives about the place. One who is gay told him that at a recent conference about being gay in the rural upper Midwest, a number of attendees went there, assuming it was gay-owned or gay-friendly. The owner had not a clue.

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Sentences you don’t hear every day: Steve’s mother today, “I have a gallon of blood in the freezer. Should I cook up some blood sausage?”

Mary Ann also said today she and John had been good to accept Louis’s partner “into the yard.” This reminds me of the German word Hof, which I’ve heard used in much the same way. In fact, I wonder if Mary Ann’s use of “yard” here is one of those many Germanisms that linger in Steve’s family’s speech. I can recall one of her Schindler cousins in Germany who lives in the house and on the farmplace from which Steve’s ancestor emigrated referring to when their common ancestor Vity Schindler established the Hof there.

The image I get when I hear it used that way is of the enclosed inner courtyard many German farms have—the yard—where house, barn, and work buildings form a kind of enclosure private to the farm. Something very primitive in this use of Hof/yard: our little space, a guarded one, that we open to strangers only with some forethought.

Minnesota 21.5.02: Bright Blond Babies and Menacing Signs

Crudely stenciled billboard sign coming into St. Cloud from the southwest, bright red letters: If you think no means yes, then no, you won’t go to prison. No context for the statement; just the bold assertion. Make what you will of it. If the shoe fits, wear it.

What kind of social nexus produces such vaguely menacing signs? We threaten folks with prison when we feel things are out of control, about to spin wildly in directions uncertain or inimical to us? Is it a warning about date rape? If so, how can anyone know this, with no context for interpretation?

We’ve entered few small towns in Minnesota without seeing right-to-life signs, many of them combining kitsch with guilt: pictures of bright blond babies and the slogan, Choose life; your mother did.

I asked Steve if abortion is such a problem in rural Minnesota towns. No, he thought. It seems the good burghers and farmers of Minnesota want to outlaw other people’s abortions.

Minnesota 20.5.02: Vexed Shimmies and Go Go Gas and Groceries

In New Ulm, in the car outside the Schell brewing company, Steve and I having just taken a walk in the park nearby. Raucous talk radio-cum-country rock station playing loudly in the brewery. As we drove up, an extraordinary thing, a peacock in full display.

When we got out of the car carefully and stood watching, he turned around, insolently, slowly, one foot then another, back to us: an act of aggression? He remained that way, turning slowly at an angle as we tried to retrieve the frontal view, determined to shun us.

Then we approached slightly—aggression for aggression—and he righted himself again, displaying his eyes and feathers, those little spring-like tufts at the nether end of each pin, with a vexed shimmy. The eyes stood out, glaring and moving like the eyes of some menacing predator—as nature has obviously designed them to do in order to protect the male peafowl.

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Now gassing up at a Little Dukes On the Go Go Gas and Groceries. More music blaring on loudspeakers—“Sugar Shack.” When we arrived at the Holiday Inn last night, it was also pouring out of speakers into the parking area, country music fitting incongruously with the kitschy Fachwerk and German flag flapping in the breeze outside the hotel.

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Expressions I’ve heard: Steve’s cousin Beverly’s husband calls Hutchison a “spendy” place; Steve’s aunt Josephine says, “He was natured that way.”

At the restaurant last night, two American Indians were ahead of us in line. When the hostess finally emerges, she looks at them and says, “You want a table?” Then pauses, “Or?” What the hell else could they want, standing in a queue in a restaurant foyer? And what does “or” mean in such a context? The question itself, re: wanting a table, is either-or.

At first, I thought this linguistic subterfuge was her way of coping with anxiety at the presence of wild Indians in Perkins’ Family Restaurant. But no, I think it’s just that way people have in MN—an absolutely maddening way—of pulling the linguistic rug out from under any direct statement. God forbid we should ever express an opinion, reveal a true feeling directly, take a stand, put a foot forward.

This drives me up a wall. The night we arrived, Steve and I talked in the car about how nice it would be to have a Vietnamese meal. After we sit around having a glass of wine and chatting, Glenn proposes going out to eat. He asks what we’d like. Steve asks about Vietnamese places. Glenn says there’s a Vietnamese restaurant at which they’re regulars.

Shall we go there? he asks. Steve says, Anything is fine. And didn’t you mention Greek? And a fish place? Glenn enumerates. Another question: What would you like? Steve: Anything is fine. Glenn: Vietnamese? Steve: We like anything.

I was wild with hunger after a day’s travel in which we had eaten half a sandwich in the Memphis airport. And we’d agreed on Vietnamese ahead of time! But Steve was determined to do all in his power to side-step, duck, evade, avoid commitment, field a direct question, provide a tangential answer. It’s deep in this culture, and I simply cannot comprehend it.

Ozarks 30.7.04: Magic Waterfalls, Healing Green Smells

The green, healing smell of a mountain woodland. Or should it be “the green holy smell,” since we forget the etymological links between heal-whole-holy? To fernes halwes . . . .

I woke thinking of the description of my great-great-grandfather Lindsey’s brother Thomas Madison Lindsey. A biography of this man in a history of Moody, Texas, says that each morning when he arose, he would go to his back porch, wash his face at the washstand, jump high into the air, touch his toes with his hands, and yodel.

I don’t have the energy of my forebears, but these stories seem to run through the Lindsey line. Where is my energy gone?

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Richard Adams, Plague Dogs: “If you can’t live by rotten rules, you have to find some of your own” (438).

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Our hottest day yet here, afternoon sun picking out the colors of the fine display ahead of me, turning the brown surface of the mere to lacquered old bronze displayed in glass with lights above.

The waterfall is magic in this light—gleaming, playing motion of light, water, rock—conspiring to seduce the heart, enthrall the mind. I could gladly lie upon a lichened, sun-warmed stone across from it. I’d gladly be the stone, no other world to occupy my time than silent adoration of the fall.

Ozarks 29.7.04: Rain on Tin Roofs, Tonking Windchimes

I meant to tell about the butterflies. In yesterday’s mild afternoon sun, they gathered in droves on the flat sandstone rocks that form the now-dry portion of the creek bed below the cabin.

Why they do this is mysterious to me. They flatten themselves on the rocks, displaying their wings like patches of Turkey carpets. And what bejeweled patches to look upon: bright yellow and black intermixed in different patterns and shapes on various butterflies, or blue and black on others. Is it the sun itself they crave? Whatever, they provide a rare show when they’re in this mode.

Raining now as I write, a light patter on the tin roof above me. The loss of a sunny day will be more than recompensed, if the rain continues, by the increased force of the music of waterfall and creek.

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Mary Oliver, Long Life: “But there are few stories in the world, after all. There is the story of Wickedness, the story of Good, the story of Love, and the story of Time. It is the telling that is the charm, for it is the expression that gives to the imaginations the experience of the tale” (62).

“Opulent and ornate world, because at its root, and its axis, and its ocean bed, it swings through the universe quietly and certainly. It is: fun, and familiar, and healthful, and unbelievably refreshing, and lovely. And it is the theater of the spiritual; it is the multiform utterly obedient to a mystery” (90).

“It is the intimate, never the general, that is teacherly. The idea of love is not love. The idea of ocean is neither salt nor sand; the face of the seal cannot rise from the idea to stare at you, to astound your heart. Time must grow thick and merry with incident, before thought can begin” (89).

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Thoreau, Walden, “Higher Laws”: “Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails. In the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which thrills us.”

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Ozark rain, summer passing into fall: soft, slow, gentle as the velvet hand of a nurse soothing a fevered brow. Tin roof makes it seem louder and more plenteous than it actually is. The waterfall mere is not even troubled by it until the rain suddenly picks up its tempo, just as suddenly to cease. Then, as drops fall direct as bullets to the water’s rippling skin, tiny spires rise up as though to meet the falling rain.

With no blue above to reach the waiting earth, the silent mere, all the pool is brown, like earth itself in liquid shape. But the chute of water emptying thereunto stays white, fresh, an ever-flowing source of water from above to replenish the bowl into which it flows.

All around the northern edge of the hill above the creek, a fringe of pines runs, darker in the misty air. Beneath, lighter-colored oaks and then the row of trees as if planted like a European allée along the creek bed, which I don’t recognize? Hackberry? Wild cherry? Alder?

The bed of many-layered and lichen-dotted rock at the base of the hill, with its cool mysterious cavities that must welcome small creatures, is beautiful to behold—a reminder that, beneath the trees and the top layers of soil, all is rock. Mountains are not earth upraised to the sky but rock, the rippling muscle of a land once volatile, with molten force beneath it. What now stands still and seems so fixed is evidence of cataclysmic upheaval almost impossible for us to imagine, sitting on this porch.

In the distance, up the shelf of stone that forms the waterfall lip, a calling, croaking, that has to be a frog. And off in the woods to the north, some knocking sound like hollow bamboo canes, those Chinese windchimes you can buy, tonking, tonking, in the still beyond the rain.