The Call of the Wild

A woman is the howl of a wolf. O to be the throat from which is torn such a song! For a wolf lives wholly in his howl. A hound-in the fist of the leash upon his collar.

The women hunt in packs, dense and electric as balloons. And O to be the fist that lets them go. Floating over watchful houses. Distant as a wolf’s red cry.

Good Morning America, How Are You?

(an unwanted column)

Rather than fly or drive, I boarded an east-bound train. I was leaving California behind for a while, rolling on home to tend a young vineyard on the land where I grew up in Saline County Kansas. I took the train because I want a slower brand of living, because in my heart I know that traveling a mile above the earth while sitting in a seat designed by Mengele next to an obese sales representative for a syringe factory is lunacy, and because I wanted to interrogate the western landscape-make it give up its secrets.

As the California Zephyr chug-a-lugged from town to town, one difference between following old rails and driving the four lane interstate highway was immediately apparent-no businesses were designed to cater to us. On the interstate, each exit is a corporate shipwreck encrusted with barnacle-like gas stations, fast food joints, and budget hotels. Often these conveniences exist as islands of their own, without even the name of a town to add color to our journey. We cannot wholly escape the terrifying beauty and chaotic variety of America in a car, but somehow four lanes of traffic hurtling through space at seventy miles per hour dominate the horizon. The sameness of modern human civilization inures us to the majestic sweep of creation, and the miles are just notches on a playboy’s bedpost. It is a black mark against humanity that gawking at mountains, canyons, rivers, buttes, deserts, and prairies has not cost a greater number of lives.

There isn’t a lot of wealth in the railroad business these days, so our little passenger train was forced to share the tracks with freight trains, rolling over meek as a kitten as those sooty, graffiti-tagged tomcats strutted by. The little towns we moved through were all freight train towns, having hedged their bets for prosperity on having their place on the line. A partial list of the resources and goods provided, past of present, by these pastoral pit-stops runs thus: water, hydroelectric power, lumber, coal, peaches, pears, apricots, cherries, “minerals”, uranium, cantaloupes, watermelons, steel, copper, cattle, wheat, sheep, corn, ice, and nuclear weapons. The Vulcan coal mine near New Castle, Colorado blew up for the second time in 1913. Beneath the mountain, the mine is still on fire.

Prosperity and contentment are not the lot of these freight train towns. Many are ghost towns, and the spectre of death hovers over most of the others. They had the advantages of natural resources and lines of commerce, so what went wrong?

The railroad often runs along the edge of what was once downtown and is now merely what remains of the town. Any profits that a nearby highway might provide are invisible here, and at any rate the McDonald’s and the Shell station at best provide minimum wage employment for a handful of residents. The real money is sent far, far away. Similarly, whatever resources these towns might provide, the primary benefits are shipped down the line.

The depravity, despair, and depression so often associated with rural America are generally explained in blameless terms. Who can resist the glitz and glamour of the big city? Technological innovation leads to increased urbanization. History! Zeitgeist! Progress! The strength of the Nation! All these explanations imply that the use and subsequent emptying of our small places is something that happened naturally and irrevocably-like the displacement of the Native Americans. But the exploitation of that realm in which humanity directly encounters the natural world—rural America—is not something that happened, it is something that was done with full knowledge, intent, and at great profit-like the displacement of the Native Americans.

During my train ride, the West gave up a few secrets. I heard a tale of sound and fury, but signifying something. I heard the roar of untold millions feasting out of rural America’s trough. I saw the gluttony of modern life gut its places of natural riches, then throw them aside. I heard the rattle of chains and slavery. Resource theft and exploitation is not limited to the second and third world. It is happening throughout rural America today. Distant fat-cats and global lines of commerce exult in their power and wealth, while the country-side that provides it withers and dies. For a tour, next time you travel, just take the train.

Tax Day

Today the circumstances of my routine were unexpectedly altered. In the afternoon I take manila envelopes to the post office. Within these envelopes are other envelopes with my name and address written on them. The first envelope carries a story to a journal and the second carries it back to me after several months. My stories are never published. A metal paper clip preserves the order and integrity of the pages. When I open the envelopes that come back to me and retrieve the rejected story, the paper clip is rarely disturbed, and so I assume that my work is often not read past the first page. Twice I have received hand-written and solicitous letters in addition to my returned story. The lines at the post office are usually short and composed of retirees, housewives, and other strange people who do not work. The other people waiting in line carry packages. I carry envelopes. The employees of the postal service loathe all of us with the indifference of Christ. Today the line was long, although I was, as usual, the only young man in the company. Other young men, I am convinced, live like sparrows. Everyone in line was carrying an envelope similar to mine. Lively and familiar conversations were being carried on by strangers all around me. When I arrived at the end of the line an elderly woman with a large necklace strung with plastic purple beads shouted “Here comes another one!” and most of the other people waiting laughed and nodded to me knowingly. A sharp panic took shape within my confusion. What if these people were all writers? I see in other writers a grotesque menagerie of every inadequacy and vice that dooms me to charlatanism and inconsequence; I cannot bear them. I can only bear myself but gently. My fear, however, was soon soothed- the conversations around me were thoughtful and wry, filled with genuine laughter and edged with sadness. Everyone was talking about money. As I moved through the line the whole range of human emotion bloomed around me like flowers or fire. The commonality of men and women were a tapestry around me because it was tax day. Food no longer binds us to the table, what we read and who we vote for set us apart, family is a crown of thorns. Money alone brings us together, money alone can cause an entire line of people to speak openly about their lives and joke with nameless neighbors, money alone reminds us that we are human. I do not earn enough to file my taxes and was thus was excluded from this ritual, though the others included me tacitly. I eventually gave two dollars and nineteen cents to the hate-filled postal employee and sent my thin stories on to their piteous fate. Then I came home and began to write this. Spring is here and it belongs to accountants.