Of Desert Rats and Deep Time

Winter and now Spring flee before my calendar. Concurrently, my posts here have been a bit thin on the ground, as thin as trees in the high deserts of northern Arizona. 

We have been there for a short visit, one that somehow seems longer. I would love for time to always pass in this manner. My wife and I have a theory that when we travel, time slows down. We do not go fast enough for time-dilation to occur, except psychologically.

I also have a particular theory about this vacation. The desert itself has something to do with our altered sense of time’s passage. Without driving all that far in a rented Mustang convertible (highly recommended) we have seen many varied arid and semi-arid landscapes in just a few days. Save for the scarcity of water, one might not expect such diversity in the same state. We visited the Granite Dells near Prescott, the scrubby and arid grasslands around Williams, the magnificent rock temples of the Grand Canyon, the primordial landscape of Petrified Forest National Park, the Ponderosa Pine-Forest above Flagstaff, the red-rock coffee-pots, broken arrows, and Snoopy Rock (kinda-sorta) of Sedona.

I loved the Western desert the first time I saw it, outside Phoenix, going on 25 years ago. At that point, I was a young writing teacher with big ideas about a technological revolution in the classroom, at the annual meeting of the CCCC in Phoenix. Now I approach retirement having slowed, marveling at the haste and earnestness of that younger self. The revolution occurred and computing is ubiquitous. Students still struggle to make the transition to writing academic prose, albeit with more distractions and new sources of dopamine addiction. Sometimes the Internet, so wild a frontier in 97, seems a desert and not a majestic one.

Now where did a quarter-century fly off to?

This post cannot answer that, but in an odd manner, returning to the desert did.

We have met decidedly eccentric Arizonans who live under a vast sky with ravens, jackrabbits, Bighorn sheep (saw one!), elk, rattlesnakes, and coyotes. They (human and animal) know something the rest of us don’t. Arizona’s “desert rats” share some inside joke about how one lives in harmony in an unforgiving but majestic place, under all that sky.

Could I learn how to be in on their joke? I doubt it; I do not have enough decades left on this rock. Soon enough I was looking forward to going home, humidity and all. By the time we got to Sedona, our last stop, my favorite place was the Ace Hardware. I was looking forward to working in the garden and seeing the place we live. Something in me changed, and I didn't feel the "further" urge on my wanderlust 20s.

What did I learn? Watching how other visitors react interests me a great deal. Silence, often. Now past (thank God) a stage in my life where I condemned what Edward Abbey called “industrial tourists,” I instead enjoy talking to all sorts of folks on holiday. Even if their idea of paradise is a packaged resort somewhere, I get a window into their world.

Reactions to deserts particularly prove educational. Nan and I chase ghosts of Puebloan cultures while others rush through ancient homelands, pulling 40’ long RVs into fast-food places. I admit, their choices no longer disgust me, as they once did. I don’t even mind a McDonald’s cheeseburger from time to time, mostly for nostalgic reasons. Out of my own discomfort about time passing, I feel some empathy for those who want the security of hauling every conceivable item from home along. The desert unnerves me, just beyond the town limits. Night falls so fast and utterly. But it also draws me like a magnet. Was it Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom who told someone that he liked the Spanish Meseta because he thought that was what he looked like, inside?

The flat expanses between Flagstaff and Winslow (where you can indeed stand on a corner) might be an excuse to put the pedal down on I-40, since old 66 is gone, the ghost of the Mother Road buried under the new superslab. Yet even that open and ostensibly monotonous landscape holds old tales, even old civilizations.

Like the vanished swamps that became the Petrified Forest, the Pueblo ruins of the Sinaguan people teach lessons about time that can terrify or comfort. The night after visiting The Petrified Forest, where I actually had two mild bouts of vertigo because of the altitude as well as the distortion of distances, I could not go to sleep. I thought I was about to stop breathing. The vista of 230 million years of history makes one less than a speck on top of a speck.

Luckily, some saline spray to open desert-dry nostrils restored me.

At Walnut Canyon, one of the Park Service’s final sign boards notes how the Hopi and Navajo believe that “migration is not abandonment.” When life changed the Sinaguan people moved on. A theory holds that they merged with other local tribes, and some current traditions reach back, many centuries, to those old and sacred pueblos.

Compared to the mineralized tree-trunks two hours away, the Sinaguan people were here yesterday. One day something happened. We know a drought sizzled for five years, and dry-land farming cannot survive that. A Hopi man I met described his corn, beans, and squash farming. His photos revealed a very canny way to irrigate from saved water in the monsoon season and from snowfall.His son is working to teach young Hopi how to garden as their ancestors did, to insure food that is healthy and shares a spiritual connection to their ancestors.

That mission, not purported vortexes of energy above Sedona’s T-Shirt shops and celebrity mansions, sticks most with me. The Permian rock that looms above the town will see the Earth’s next Ice Age. We won’t likely be here then.

That continuity of growing food and remembering one’s ancestors may be all we can ask for.  Maybe, all we need.

Get busy with that.

Summer Tractorpunk Reading: Alas, Babylon

June managed to slip by in a flurry of Fall-semester planning and summer-garden planting, so not a post from me. But now that some of the frenzy is behind, and the tomatoes beginning to ripen, I've had time to read a few books. My summer custom is a nautical book (Williwaw,  by Gore Vidal) and a travel one (Mani, by Patrick Leigh Fermor). I even read Rowling's second Harry Potter novel; I'm not a fan but it's a fun diversion from racial-tensions, atop American incompetence and selfishness in the face of a pandemic. Then I tackled a book for the very times we are in, one I'd tried to read 40 years or more ago.

When I was a teen, I began Pat Frank's then famous 1959 novel Alas, Babylon. Back then, the world seemed dangerously close to a nuclear exchange with the Soviets, and to an OCD kid who loved dark science fiction, I wanted to see the glowing mutants stumbling through the radioactive dust of scorched cites. It was a sort of whistling in the dark. I never finished the book, because the cover was the scariest part. The image above is the edition I owned, but the back had no bar-code. Those didn't exist on books in the 70s.

Inside the book, to dorky me, the human drama of survival was boring.  I wanted big explosions and flesh-eating monsters under a Strontium sky.

Now I prefer well developed characters. It seems that only character will get us out of the perils of 2020, when everything seems a powderkeg of a different sort than the global one in 1959. One detail that did stay with me from my teen-aged abortive reading was the blurb on the paperback's back cover, something about the "thin veneer" of civilization vanishing. Well, I learned a new word at least. And that's a good take on Frank's novel, one that compares favorably to more recent work such as Jim Kunstler's World Made by Hand novels or the older Earth Abides by George Stewart. That final one might have been best for this summer, as it concerns a pandemic. Or Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower, with its depiction of a racist American dystopia in the midst of environmental crises.

As for nuclear-war fiction? My gold standard has come to be Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, but that too is another story.

Yet Frank's novel kept calling me. And this time, the human drama kept me reading it. I finished in a couple of sessions, so it's most definitely a page turner.  The book might be called one of the gentlest treatments of nuclear war imaginable; Brian Aldiss called such fictions "cozy catastrophes." Frank lets the horrors happen offstage, making the book readable for those who are ordinarily terrified by such fiction. The little town of Fort Repose, Florida, gets lucky, when an east wind and perhaps a Russian dud aimed at Cape Canaveral save them from the fallout. Yet necessities soon become scarce, the lights go out, and the town's one doctor must cope as best he can.

He'd make a fine protagonist, but Frank chooses Randy Bragg, who begins the novel as a somewhat dissolute Korean-War veteran whose family fortune is quickly vanishing. He's not a static character, as one recent reviewer claims, nor a shallow one. The same review critiques, rather unfairly, a perceived masculist tone of the book, largely based on one moment of internal dialog in Bragg's head.  If anything, Bragg exemplifies the sort of Southern small-town Progressive whose was very rare then and, too often, now: he helps and befriends his African-American neighbors The Henrys, and he demonstrates sympathy for the women in his life. Minor characters, while not as richly drawn as some of Kunstler's, offer a glimpse into the world of ours, circa 1959, on the brink of ending. I particularly enjoyed the Western Union operator, whose contacts with the outside world on The Day show that before the Internet, there was still a global network. The arrogant town banker remains sadder; soon his bank is worthless, because it has only paper money no good for trade.

That points to what remains my biggest problem with World Made By Hand; I wanted Kunstler's story to begin in our own period of technological plenty. In Frank's book, we get that for a good part of the novel. It's nostalgic, too. I well recall pre-Interstate Florida before over-development began the ruination that a rising sea will finish in a century or two.

Yet Alas, Babylon is far from perfect. Dialogue can get wooden between the sexes, in particular. Randy is a bit of a stretch. He has three (at least) old or potential flames and this takes the book into the male-fantasy camp. Yet despite that misstep, the novel really looked ahead in terms of racial politics and a sense of social justice, even if that includes rough justice for highwaymen. Their menace is well portrayed, as they begin to prey upon all races in Fort Repose when the pickings grow slim elsewhere in Florida's "Contaminated Zone."

Why read the book now? And what is it doing in a blog about rural life? I would claim it's a study in building a self-reliant community. I don't believe in the American myth of self-sufficiency, as I've noted before. But self-reliance as a key to resilience? That I celebrate, and Bragg's story takes off when he decides that he and his family need to join others in town to keep that veneer of civilization from vanishing, altogether. They share resources to get well water, post notices about dangers, keep a short-wave radio working, organize a constabulary, make their own alcohol, maintain the town library, fish in the uncontaminated waters around Fort Repose. 

In that regard and others, Alas, Babylon proves a hopeful book for this pandemic. Theirs is a world where folks do what is best for each other, even if they choose a wrong path initially. I compare that to our failure to stay out of restaurants and off beaches. Those show our lack of self-reliance, our inability to sacrifice. Yet there's hope. In the store yesterday, I saw only one white, angry-looking guy without a mask. A few weeks ago, most of the customers went about unmasked.

It's good to see some progress. That's one reason to dig out this old book and see how a classic story of disaster handles the human capacity for cooperation. May we do half so well this year and beyond. Seeing that angry man in the grocery store actually encouraged me. He and his selfish notion of "freedom" looked puny, and I think at some level, he knew it. 

We'll outlast such attitudes.

Old School Tools: The Perfect Book for DIY Farmers

Every sharpened a knife with a whetstone? Want to learn how? I've just the book for you.

What a surprise that after 90 minutes of being overwhelmed in Powells Books in Portland, OR, I found Professor Mack Jones' 1945 guide Shopwork on the Farm, just as I was leaving the store. It was like finding The Rosetta Stone. Suddenly, all of these mysterious objects in our shop or barn began to make sense. Professor Jones, at the University of Missouri, would have encountered many landowners and tenant farmers doing things much the way their grandparents had done.

There was a time when most small farms operated nearly as a closed system; the farm was also an amateur mechanic, blacksmith, plumber, and carpenter. At the end of WWII, many rural areas still lacked electricity, so hand tools were the rule and remained that way for a long time. Power tools were expensive, and farmers on small holdings tend to be a thrifty lot. Sadly, with the passing of generations, the coming of cheap big-box-store tools, and the movement off the small farms to large industrial operations, many old-timey skills have faded.  That's why this book is such a treasure to me. I own so many of the tools described, yet for some I had no idea how they might be used.

To any Millennials who want to try rural life, I'd recommend doing a lot of research first. This book would prove an excellent starting place. Nearly everything I have done with a circular saw, a table saw, a power drill, or an electric planer can be done by hand. And simple tools we rely upon, such as an electric bench grinder, can be put safely to many uses I'd not considered before. Jones' advice is well presented and easy to follow. I realized that all these years I've been using a whetstone incorrectly!

He has advice on everything from using an anvil properly to heating and bending metal in a hand-pumped forge; these are skills I will be putting to the test in the next year when I next shape metal.

While you may not wish to make your own lead-based paints, there is a recipe if you can find enough white lead for the job.  Forgotten those lessons on tying knots in Scouts? Mack Jones has you all set.

Before you ask: I don't loan books or any form of media, even to the closest friends. You'll have to snag your own copy cheaply, at ABE or at Amazon. If  you live in the country and want to do so as off the grid as possible, or if circumstances force your hand, this book will be worth its weight in gold.

Time Enough? Time for February

I have heard people despair out loud about the "wasted month" of February. I guess they want time to run faster so they can get on with whatever business awaits in March. I am not so sure. First, the second month of the year is perfect for trimming woody plants back, perfect for outdoor projects too dangerous when the snakes begin to crawl in the thickets.

Second, the light creeps back into the day, to encourage us all. But I like the dark half of the year enough to use a good bit of February for reading by the wood stove. One of my pursuits involves writing down what writers a lot smarter than I am say about time.

Here are a few favorites from my book of quotations. Naguib Mahfouz called the course of the years "careening, unstoppable Time" and that is my favorite metaphor. These other meditations about time are also quite fine. I end with Annie Dillard's, perhaps my second favorite.

Find some time, take some time, borrow some time, steal some time, save some time to read this month. Just do not waste time.

"And what are two thousand years? What, indeed, if you look down from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot with outlast Shakespeare"

     Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once."

     Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

"Time slides past, slides past beyond recall, while, spellbound, we drift off among details"

    Virgil, The Georgics I: 284-85

"When the waves receded, the shores of Time would spread out there clean, empty, shining with infinite grains of memory and little else."

     Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

"Pass through this moment in time in harmony with nature, and end your journey content, as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew."

     Marcus Aurelius, Meditations IV, 48

"Time itself is nothing; the experiencing of it is everything."

"Time itself, that weightless thing, could only go in one direction, no matter how you defined it or tried to step on its tail--that much at least seemed certain. Nobody knew what time was, but even if you placed all the clocks in the world in a circle, time would still run straight on, and should there be a finite end to time it was not one that could be imagined by human beings with a sense of vertigo. But what then were memories? Time that had been left behind and had now caught up with you, or that you yourself, by moving against the tide of time--doing the impossible in fact--could retrieve."

     Cees Nooteboom, Nomad's Hotel

"He would explore the lateral byways now, the side doors, as it were, in the corridors of time. There months could be an eternity."

     J.G. Ballard, "The Voices of Time"

"Hold to the now, the here, through which the future plunges to the past."

     James Joyce, Ulysses

"We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home."

     Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm