Rest Stop

I make a point of stopping at the Interstate 35 south-bound Story City, Iowa, rest area each time I return from a trip north.  It is not my favorite rest area.  That distinction belongs to the Enterprise rest area, midway between Austin, Minnesota, and LaCrosse, Wisconsin on east-bound Interstate 90.  The Enterprise rest stop is a forest-nestled collage of architectural styles and accents, and features a deck that juts out over a cliff edge, affording a view some quarter of a mile below of tree-surrounded, meadowed valley so eye-addlingly beautiful that it causes a retinal chorus of hallelujahs.  I once tried to throw a stone into the stream that meanders through that valley and succeeded only in throwing out my shoulder.  Son of Adam that I am, I had overreached and, for several days, anyway, was disarmed for my transgression.

The Story City rest area lacks the Enterprise’s dazzling and dizzying spectacle, but it has its distinctive attractions nonetheless.  Its theme is transportation, particularly, the history of transportation in Iowa and the role of Iowa and Iowans in the transportation industry.  When the state undertook a renovation of the original 1960s-constructed rest area, it included an artist on the redesign team.  That artistic influence is apparent: wheel-shaped windows and benches, highway marker-like pylons depicting various modes of transportation, a terrazzo floor displaying the intersection of I 35 and U.S. Highway 30, and text and image blocks displaying Iowa’s transportation history set into the walls.  A tree-lined concrete walkway provides opportunity for a leg-stretching saunter, and, most significantly, for my purposes anyway, there’s a carved-through-the-woods spur leading to the Skunk River Greenbelt, a ten-mile nature trail.

Before rest areas, there were waysides and roadside parks.  Before waysides and roadside parks, there was wherever travelers spotted a likely place to pull over—usually places that eventually became formalized in waysides and roadside parks.  The best rest areas preserve that historical texture.  And, like all manufactured things, they have a functional use and a cultural symbolism.  Rest stops testify to the midcentury sense of an expansive America, one in which the space of travel lengthened to the point where rest areas were necessary, and one in which the means for leisure travel were becoming commonly available. 

But for me, the best thing about rest stops is the opportunity to stop and rest, to get back into my body, to unkink pianowire-tight back and neck and shoulder muscles, to redirect my attention from the concentrated focus of driving interstate speeds, to give myself away for a bit, for a while, to something looser and more loping, something that relinquishes attention only to find it denser, more crystallized .  During my most recent stop, as I was stretching my hamstrings, a car pulled up next to me, and through its open windows I heard the driver say to his wife and two teenage sons, “Hurry up; we’ve got a ways to go and I want to keep on schedule.”  I could only smile at the irony: a rest stop where no resting and virtually no stopping is permitted.

When I stop at the Story City rest area, I always take the spur to the Skunk River Greenbelt and sometimes venture a half a mile or a mile onto the Greenbelt trail itself.  I build that walk into my schedule.  It’s one of the best things I do.  Something happens to me, in me.  Perhaps it’s simply the contrast with the rush of driving; perhaps it’s the solitude, for I have yet to encounter another person on the spur; perhaps it’s the sheer motion through a setting that shouts aloud its greened summer vitality.  I wish I could see through language more than darkly.  I wish I could find the words to adequately express the subjective experience of my waywarding pilgrimage, words to convey the physical stimulation, the sensual satisfaction, of moving through rhythms of sun and shadow and feeling their alternating warmth and coolness, of hearing burbling bird song and wind soughing leaves, of smelling tree resin and wildflower and faintly, oh so faintly, from somewhere away, a whisper of suntoasted ginger.  Something happens: a cherishing.  I think “pleasure,” is as close as I can come to describing the experience of the experience, of what the quality of the sensations add up to, are like.

Something happens.  Time thickens, congeals with the arrowroot of consciousness, no longer swings me from its sweeping hands.  It’s like an aperture narrowing, like a camera shot irising in.  The subjective edges shrink toward the center.  It’s like a focus, an intense focus, that somehow glances at a widening scope, a broader space.  Pure pleasure, purely contextual and fleeting, a refugee moment, I realize, but, who knows: bead enough of these ephemeral moments together, leaven them with habits of the heart, and maybe doing will become being, maybe the unfinished poetics of pleasure will become a ligature-strong narrative of a good life.

Thoreau says that “time is but a stream I go a-fishing in.”  He does not say what he caught.  Perhaps that’s not important.  Perhaps, sitting and waiting for a nibble, pursuing an inner odyssey, self-baited, he caught himself.

Orbital House Painting

Every summer I paint a section of the house, methodically working my way around, until, by the time I arrive at my original starting point, it is ready to be repainted.  Now, you might ask, why not paint the entire house and just be done with it.  Well, for one thing, that stealthy huckster age, who promises wisdom has, instead, steadily fleeced my stamina, intent, seemingly, on gradually turning me into a tattered coat on a stick.  Muscling around and emplacing a 24-foot extension ladder equipped with a stabilizer bar, in sometimes tight and awkward spaces, on sometimes uneven ground, during days when the heat index loiters above 100 degrees, pretty much dwindles what diminished strength I still possess. 

For another thing, I am a serial multitasker: I do a variety of things during a day, devoting several hours to each.  There is laundry to do and carpet to vacuum and grass to mow and books to read and essays to write, and fall classes to prepare and pantry shelves to build and porch floor boards to replace and a breezeway to sheetrock and grandchildren’s ballgames and concerts to attend.  As Ishmael says, “I try all things; I achieve what I can.”

But the main thing that confines my painting to a section at a time is that, given the process I follow, the summer does not contain enough days for painting the entire house—unless, as in Joshua 10:13, “the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and hasted not to do down.”  Of course, house painting is hardly a holy cause, and the heat, being unbearable, would surely haste me to the house’s air-conditioned interior.  However, as I do not anticipate divine intervention, I follow my painting process, which is not just finicky; it is finicky spiking the ball in the endzone.  It is anal retention’s anal retentiveness.

Having clamored up the ladder, I first inspect the siding for what the experts term “paint adhesion loss.”  Has the paint alligatored, blistered, cracked, flaked, chalked, ghosted, peeled?  Each type of problem indicates some inadequacy in surface preparation or primer/paint application.  Once the problem is assessed, the scraping begins.  I use three different types and sizes of scraper, all carbide edged, each designed for a particular type or area of adhesion loss.  I am a ruthless scraper, dissatisfied with removing just the obvious flakes and peels.  I want the near-flakes, the perhaps or maybe-could-become flakes, too.  The mere possibility of a flake is spur enough to prick the sides of my scraping intent. 

Then comes sanding.  I use my DeWalt finishing sander, fitted with 80 grit sandpaper, to remove rust from the nail heads, to feather out the edges of the scraped sections and to abrade the remaining painted surface, which provides a purchase for the new coat.  I pull popped or loose nails, replacing them with galvanized wood screws, and caulk any gouges or apertures in the clapboard overlap.   The next day I wash away accumulated dust and grime, using a chemical-free dishwashing liquid and a telescoping device originally intended to scour bathtubs.  I hook two buckets of water to each side of the stabilizer bar, one to rinse the scouring pad, the other to load it with detergent.  When that’s completed, I hose it all down, wait a day for it to dry, and then prime the bare spots, employing a kind of Goldilocks procedure: not to thin, not to thick, just right.  A day later, I paint, careful not to miss a spot, concerned with an even application and flowing brush strokes.  The following day, I ratchet down the ladder and begin again, following the same ritual until the section is completed, and I can step back, take it all in, and pronounce it good.

Did I mention I am fastidious, fussy, persnickety, particular, stickling?  Am I obsessive, possibly masochistic, potentially addled?  Have I studied the Puritans too long, too sedulously, such that the unsweetened jelly of their grim Calvinism has injected itself into the very core of my being?  I don’t know.  But I do know this: I enjoy the painting process, enjoy the discipline of it, the unwavering constancy and steadfastness of it, the essence of it, which, as Aristotle suggests about all essences, derives from pursuing excellence in the purpose of it.

Lao Tzu advises us to keep our “mind from its wandering/ and regain first oneness.”  I’m not sure what “first oneness” is like, or how to regain that which I’m uncertain I ever had to lose.  But I do know that as my painting process unfolds, I enter a space within a space, a space wedged deep in the dense now, a space where I do not indiscriminately give myself away, piece by piece.  I am gathered and mustered for the work at hand--though I allow that at times my mind meanders a bit.  Sometimes, gazing at the hairline fissures in the paint I imagine them some kind of hieroglyphic, some deep-time rune that, could I decipher it, would answer the big questions that plague us all: how to create a just society, does life have an overarching purpose, how does one make perfect al dente pasta.  Mostly, though, I am undistracted, fully focused and unfalteringly attentive.  “When,” John Berryman asks in “Song 384,” “will indifference come.”  My answer, at least while engaged in my painting process, is “never.”

I even like the fact that, having worked my way around the house to the origin, the natal section so to speak, of my painting process, I must begin again.  “Permanence,” Emerson says, “is but a word of degrees.”  Every end is a beginning. We are always setting off, seldom settled.  Only as far as we are “unsettled,” Emerson maintains, “is there hope for” us. There is even a kind of poetics in this ongoingness, this refusal of finishedness--a kind of heroic verse epic, a tragicomedy perhaps, in my battle against the elements, against the effect of acid rain, against the nature of paint and wood itself, for in the street fight between paint and weather, paint is always predestinated to suffer a groin kick.  We may call a halt to things, but, hopefully at least, they do not end.  They accrue meaning, become more than a simple chronicle of ever-receding events, become infused with consequence, with significance.  They resonate and endure; we resonate and endure.  And in that resonance and endurance, our selves remain open-ended questions in search of answers, narratives still being written.

So, like a planet circling the sun, like an electron orbiting a nucleus, like clay on a turning potter’s wheel, I work my way around the house, on an errand that is always in progress, always to be carried out.

The Graduation Party

My second-oldest grandaughter’s recent high-school graduation party offered me the opportunity to meet and to reconnect with members of the many-corridored factions of my family, near-family, and almost-family.  I got caught up with my ex-wife’s aunts and cousins, whom I had not seen in twenty-five years, with my ex-wife and her new partner and her old partner, and I was introduced to my son’s ex-wife’s mother, grandmother, uncles, and cousins.  My son’s ex-wife’s husband was not in attendance.  He was stewing at home, in a fit of pique, because he was late getting ready and my son’s ex-wife, fearing that guests would arrive at the party with no one to greet them, would not wait for him.  She and my ex-wife and my son had spent the better part of the previous evening decorating the shelter.  He had sat in front of the TV drinking beer.  Thus his tardiness in getting ready.  “What a douce,” my oldest grandson said, and I had to agree.

Typically, I enjoy gatherings of this sort, where most of the attendees pursue walks, runs, hits, and errors of life different from my own academic filter bubble.  I like to chat them up, and I like to listen—well, eavesdrop would be the more correct word.

*     *     *

As I sat outside park shelter where the party was being held, bowered from the 90 degree heat by the embracing shade of a hawthorn, drinking a condensation-beaded Bud-lite that my oldest grandson procured from the ice-chest of one of his uncles, watching the wind quarrel with the treetops, thinking that life seldom offers more satisfying moments, my attention was drawn by the following dialog between my son’s ex-wife’s grandmother and her son Arlen. 

“Mom, we’re gonna go to dinner after the party”

“I don’t want to go to dinner.  I won’t be hungry.”

“Yes, you will.”

“No, I won’t”

“You’re gonna go to dinner.  And we’ll have a drink or two before.”

“I don’t want a drink”

“You’re gonna have a fucking drink!”

“I’m not.  And why are you using the f-word?”

“I always use it.  You just don’t listen.”

She lit a cigarette and glared at him.  He polished off his beer and glared at her.  They scoured each other with their glares.  I felt embarrassed.  Here was a family dynamic that would no doubt have sent Freud running for the exit.  I headed for the entrance to the park shelter.

*     *     *

I discover that the beer my oldest grandson scored for me came from another of my son’s ex-wife’s uncles, Ted.  I thanked him, he said, “No problem.”  I told him I was the father of the father of the graduate, and he asked me what I did. 

“I’m a teacher.”

“Yeah?  Where do you teach?”

“In Lamoni, Iowa.  It’s a small, southern Iowa town near the Missouri border.”

“High school?”

“No, at Graceland University.”

“You’re a college professor?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you teach?”

“English.”

He looked at the man next to him, who had been listening.  He smiled; no, he jeer-smiled.  The other man smile-jeered.  The same thought had evidently occurred to them simultaneously.  Both sang, “Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!”

Charming.  I felt unfortunate that I did not have an appropriate lyric for a Culligan Water Softener installer.  Ah, well, just another brick in the wall.

*     *     *

My ex-wife’s cousin Mickey is a pipefitter, and a union man.  A gentle, soft-spoken man, he turned into a semi hauling a volatile mix of raging scorn when I mentioned Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s having survived a recall vote for his legislative push to strip the public unions of their bargaining rights.  I attempted to draw him into argument, not because I am anti-union, but because I relish conversation and believe argument is a truth-seeking enterprise, not a zero-sum debate.

“Well, Mickey, you know a lot of people who are hurting economically look at the wages and pensions the public employees get, and think they’re pretty cushy, and because their taxes fund those wages and pensions—well, I can understand how they’d find Walker a kind of standard-bearer.  It’s like he voices their anxiety and discontent.”

“Shit,” Mickey replied.  “Walker’s a stooge in the pocket of the corporations, and the people who support him are stooges, too.  Christ!  How ignorant can people be?”

I understand.  We all need our monsters, if only to feel the strength of our irresistible otherness. And I don’t know, maybe it was the epithet “Christ,” but I wondered what Jesus would have though, or thinks, about unions.  Would Jesus have been a union man or a right-to-work advocate?  He did claim that a camel would have an easier time passing through the eye of a needle than a rich man passing through the gates of heaven.  He did say that “whatever you did not do for the least among you, you did not do for me.”  He did concern himself with common people living common lives, and ate and drank with people of the lower social ranks, violating Roman and Jewish eating rules.  And, in his name, that first-century Norma Rae, Paul, created one of the largest unions ever, one with great benefits if you forego the wages of sin.

*     *     *

At breakfast the next morning my youngest granddaughter was glum.  I attempted to lift her mirthlessness by sending some cheery words her way, but halfway there they collided with the impenetrable force field of her gloom, splintereened, and floated to the floor.  Her cellphone vibrated: a text message.  She read it and ran crying from the table.  I looked at my son who shrugged and followed her.  When he returned, he said she had received a text from her boyfriend, Chad, who told her he no longer wanted anything to do with her.  His words, exactly: he no longer wanted anything to do with her.

I am three continents away from being a violent man, but at that moment a blinding rage flared in me, a rage so large it cast a shadow before it.   I wanted to confront Chad and cure him of his cruelty.  I wanted to place a hand on his neck, pinion him to a wall, get marine-drill-sergeant in his face, hiss that I did not appreciate his making my granddaughter cry, curse him for his cruelty, and knee him, hard, several times, in the groin. 

This dark capacity in the face of cruelty has visited me before.  Several weeks ago, my step-daughter’s son came running into the house, holding his head and sobbing uncontrollably.  A wasp had stung him while he was out raking leaves from the garden.  My wife cut an onion in half and held the exposed portion against the spot of the sting.  His mother explained that he needed to calm down: his agitation sped the spread of the poison.  That was correct, of course, but not what he needed at the moment.  I gripped his arm and said, “Those wasp stings, they hurt like hell.”  And then I headed outside, determined to slaughter that wasp, any wasp, all wasps, for making my handsome and strapping 14-year-old grandson cry, until my wife called after me and returned me to reason, and the shameful irony that in some uncurated annex of me lay a barely kenneled capacity at odds with the very end I sought.

*     *     *

At my second-oldest grandchild’s graduation party, my grandfatherly pride would have easily filled the Big Room at Carlsbad Cavern: straight-A grades, including every Advanced Placement course her high school offered, a stack of plaques memorializing her scholarly and marching band accomplishments, and a scholarship to the University of Minnesota in the fall to major in Chemical Engineering.  Her curiosity is incandescent; her desire to learn, shoreless.  She is experience-tranced and expectation-imbued and hope-infatuated. 

Unlike most, maybe all, of us in attendance, she is not jacketed by the comforting fit of the familiar; she wants to be surprised rather than flattered, vulnerable to the risk of a different perspective rather than armored in certainty.  She refuses to consider the world necessarily what it is, refuses to occupy it without being much occupied about it.  She wants the world to make sense and make it make sense so it doesn’t break her heart.  I hope it does break her heart, but only in the sense that Mary Oliver describes in her poem “Lead:” “that it break open and never close again/ to the rest of the world.”