Where Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake Took Me

 

I really enjoyed reading Rachel Kushner’s newest novel Creation Lake.  I only read a book I like this much about once or twice a year (I read fifty or sixty books a year).  I had just come off binge watching both Slow Horses and Black Doves, the former is superb, the later . . . somewhat regrettable.  In any case, these unwittingly primed me for a novel about spies, in Kushner’s case, a spy-for-hire who narrates the book. Kushner’s character is smart and interesting, a likable sociopath (which should be an oxymoron but isn’t).

            I had read two previous books by Kushner, her debut novel The Flamethrowers and her more recent essay collection, The Hard Crowd, Essays 2000–2020. I preferred the essays. I may reread The Flamethowers to try to articulate how and why she happened to not one hundred percent win me over.  I liked her portrayal of the motorcycle world—about which I knew nothing—but had a hard time buying her descriptions of downhill skiing, about which I know a fair bit.   Maybe that’s it: a reader with any expertise is often hyper-critical of a writer who stakes claim to the same territory.  But Kushner’s love of motorcycles, cars, and speed is pretty damned convincing (even though in “Girl on a Motorcycle” she describes a harrowing accident that almost defies our belief).  Almost: I did believe it, but HOLY SHIT.  Also, I read somewhere that she is afficionado of the Ford Galaxy, which at first seems unlikely, but ultimately wins over any native son of Dearborn, Michigan, where it seemed everyone’s dad worked for Ford and a Galaxy sat in every driveway, or, in many cases the station wagon version, the Country Squire. These were conveniently equipped with an enormous 390 for when mom had to haul ass to the grocery store.

            In Creation Lake the narrator's task is to infiltrate a leftist commune of eco-terrorists in France and set them up for an assassination attempt, or at least, a fall. To put herself in position to do this she enters into a love affair––at least the partner thinks it is a love affair––with a French man at whose country estate she stays, alone, while infiltrating the group.  Late in her stay she initiates an affair with Rene, one of the members of the group.

    Rene had been a factory worker at a Daimler plant in Germany.  “Rene’s job was to stamp metal panels that would become car doors.” Further, she says, “in order to activate the compression for stamping . . . you had to have both hands on the outside of the machine. There was no way to accidentally bring the stamper down on your own hand or arm.”  The point of this explanation was that workers found a way to circumvent the safety mechanism and maim themselves by “sacrifice a functioning limb” in order to receive compensation enough to buy a new E-Class Mercedes (gotta love that it was specifically an E Class) and receive a lifetime pension.

            This is where the book and my life intersect (probably the only place) and now I leave the text and sink into memory. 

In the late spring of 1973 I took at job at the Dearborn Stamping Plant, part of Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Plant, at the time the largest factory in the world. I operated a spot welding machine on the assembly line, afternoon shift.  

            The parking lot at the plant was enormous and I remember the walk from the car to my work station took as long as the drive from my home to the parking lot.  You could actually take a bus from the lot through the gates, but I never took it. On my very first day I remember passing a guy leaving the day shift with an enormous white bandage swaddling his hand. I distinctly remember him smiling, though it never occurred to me he might have done this on purpose.  In any case, my thought was what fresh new hell is this?

            The work was almost exactly as Kushner describes: I grabbed a small piece of metal, placed it of a larger piece of metal on a moving track, and pressed two buttons, one with each hand, which activated the spot welder, and moved the piece down to the next station.

            When the spot welder ignited, the points of contact would shoot a stream of sparks that often hit me in the face, once somehow finding my eyes despite the safety goggles.  Another time, my supervisor came by and mimed—you couldn’t hear anything in there—to brush my head—then I smelled it, the sparks had ignited my hair. 

            I’ve seen photographs of the assembly line today: clean and bright, the workers attired in shining white lab coats. It wasn’t that like that in 1973. The line was dark and dirty, loud and dangerous, more like something out of a Dickens novel than a model of late 20^thcentury engineering.  From my work station—from which, by the way, I never moved––I could see a tiny open window in the ceiling far above me.  Once in a while a star would pass across it.

            Mike Schonhofen, another Dearborn and Ford refugee, and I were remembering this the other day: the white large sign at the gates that announced in red letters DAYS WITHOUT AN ACCIDENT: then there was a number that could be changed by hand like an old-fashioned baseball scoreboard. We laughed that the number was always zero, only a bit of an exaggeration.

            When my shift was over, if I hurried, I could get to the bar, The New Place, ten minutes before last call. At least a half dozen of my friends would be there––had been there all night—and I could order three beers, Strohs, and drink them in the forty minutes before the lights went on, blinding us and ushering us out to the parking lot where we would stand around for another hour or so shooting the shit.  What we might have talked about is utterly lost to me now.  The friends: P.J., Clay, the Arch, Simmons are all gone now. The New Place remains.

            Some nights I would meet up with my friend John who also worked an afternoon shift at a steel plant west of the city and we would plan the mountaineering trip that we would take at the end of the summer. We wouldn’t want to wake up anyone at our parents’ houses so we’d just walk the streets, talking, full of plans, too wired to sleep.  After the climbing trip John would head to Durham England for junior year abroad, and I would go to Mexico ostensibly to research a book about the volcanoes there.

            At the end of the summer I left the assembly line for my travels. I felt guilty about quitting.  Just about everyone who worked there was working at the best job they could ever hope to have.  We were paid very well for the work; all you had to do was sign over your soul. When I returned from Mexico I had enough money left to buy a used car—a 1968 American Motors Javelin. It would be another year before I left Michigan for good–in the Javelin. I think of Dylan’s line “Drove that car as far as we could, abandoned it out west.”  More accurately, the Javelin abandoned me first.  It was towed to Gunther’s boneyard east of Yelm, Washington and I drove out of there in a 1970 VW Squareback.

            Someone once asked me what the part was that I welded.  I couldn’t begin to guess. If it had a name, I didn’t know it.  Could I, at least, tell what car I was working on?  I could.  It was a four-door Maverick.  Designed as a poor man’s Mustang, but really it was just a cut above Ford’s other bad idea, the Pinto. I haven’t  seen one of those Mavericks on the road in decades, but you might find one in some mechanic’s steely boneyard, among the Country Squires and Javelins.

            

Almost Winter Solstice

The day before the shortest day of the year

we drive to town to do errands,

 

stop at Robert’s Books to drop off a box for store credit, or to be 

donated to the library,

 

drive past the feed store by mistake,

 

drop off the glass for recycling, remembering now that we forgot the batteries,

 

stop at the Goodwill to drop off a couple bags of clothing,

 

the bank to get cash to pay Jim for installing the closet doors,

 

Barnacle Bills for just under a pound of freshly caught salmon,

 

return the cans with deposits for recycling at the grocers,

 

pick up just enough at the store to last the few days before we leave for Christmas,

 

stop at the department store for face cream with the added bonus of the man ahead in the checkout line who spends $110 on condoms and Viagra,

 

now remember the feed store for black sunflower seeds for our crow overlords,

 

the hardware store for putty to hold the window screen in that keeps blowing out in the 

winds,

 

finally, street tacos from our favorite food truck and a couple drafts of IPA,

 

then, almost home, leave the coffee that Aisha ground for Rhonda on her front porch.

 

At sunset we walk down to the shore in unseasonably mild weather, where we meet our neighbors and watch, first, the sun set, and then, the running lights of the crab boats–eleven of them we count–blink on suddenly on the horizon as darkness falls. 

Singing Autumn Song: a Walk in the Tuscan Hills

 

We are driving in a medieval hilltop village in Tuscany. The driver stops the car in the middle of the street (the street is only about 12 feet wide: it is all middle) and he points up an ancient moss-covered rock stair well.  “The hike starts here,” he says.

         The steps are somewhat odd in that they don’t particularly lead to anything.  They end in a kind of road, a grown-over two-track that seems to function more as a property line than a road. In any case, they haven’t led to a plateau. The route ahead continues upward.

         First weekend in October and it’s rained the previous day so even though the sun is shining now, the ground is damp and the air chilled.  Just the week before Rome felt sweltering. But today autumn is in the air.  The air, the certainty of fall, calls to mind past fall hiking rituals, which in Alaska were often wet: the Goldmint Trail up in Hatcher Pass or the Lost Lake Trail down in Seward. We never seemed to be on those trails in summer, only fall, always wet.  Today is expected to be dry, but for adversity we have an awful lot of uphill travel.  My mind is supplying a Van Morrison soundtrack:

You just might feel like singing autumn song

You just might feel like singing autumn song.

         We are not on a trail.  It’s a road, or once was, surely no car could use it now.  To prevent the road from washing away completely, at some point a layer of rock fill had been added.  Among this rock fill are shards of colorful tile or pottery, which I imagined to be salvaged from excavation sites. 

We rarely know where we are. There is very little signage and when it does exist it is usually just inscrutable numbers and arrows.  Once we see a minuscule sign for mountain biking.  The terrain is steep and rocky.  Aisha says, “So this is where mountain bikers come to practice their deaths.”

We have a set of written directions, but following them is not easy. This is not due to the fact that they have been translated from Italian, but rather to the language, which I first thought to be vague and at some point changed my view: the words began to look timeless and mythic:

Pass on your right a country house.  

Go straight.  

The trail enters a wood. 

There is a mill grinding stone on your track.

         It was like following breadcrumbs of words. After many wrong turns we deferred to our GPS. 

         Although we did not see any people we came upon a burro in a fenced field. It was very curious, friendly.  But all we had for it were Aisha’s words, “Hi baby, hi baby.”  It was, by the way, a spectacular field with terrific views of the countryside from which we had ascended. 

         Finally we did see a person, a hunter. He had five wet dogs, two muddy spaniels and three others of indeterminate breed.  The hunter was not young and was attired in tweed and leather.  Slung at his back was an elegant shotgun, highly polished. He looks like a gamekeeper out of an early twentieth century British novel. He greeted us almost tersely; he was hunting cinghiale, wild boar.  We had seen the word on menus.  Aisha’s most fervent wish was to not encounter one of these in the wild. We did not.

                  At the junction with a metal crucifix, take the left branch and keep

climbing.  Shortly after reaching a pine wood, the trail starts descending.

         Finally we crested some kind of ridge and soon in the distance we could see where our hike would end: Lake Trasimene.

         We found a spot for lunch with a view of the lake.  Grapes and olives, although we had not understood in advance that we would, in fact, be walking much of the day through olive groves and vineyards.  Pecorino cheese and bread. A shared piece of chocolate.  Plenty of water.

         After lunch was easier, gravity now our ally, and it would be almost impossible to miss the Lake, although still possible to miss the rendezvous spot with our driver.

    

Reach a first house of the village with a garden and continue on the tarmac road.

Now the walking was very easy.  We stopped to take the last of our water at an archaeological site, an “ustrina” designed by Hannibal’s engineers.  These appeared to be large bricked-in holes, perhaps fifteen feet deep and thirty feet in circumference.  Over the top were enormous iron grates of latticed iron.  There were two of them and we sat on a bench in the adjacent vineyard.  We had assumed these were enormous cisterns for storing water.  Later we learned these were elaborate cremation sites to dispose of the bodies of the dead soldiers. 

Historical aside: Lake Trasimene is the site of a famous battle of the Punic War (217 B.C.) between Hannibal and the Romans.  When he left Carthage, Hannibal’s army consisted of 100,000 soldiers and 40 “war elephants.” He crossed the Alps with these beasts.  Hannibal’s army “won” the battle of Trasimene, killing 15,000 Romans.  Our driver told us so many were killed said the lake ran red with blood.  Ultimately Hannibal did not defeat the Romans, but neither did they defeat him.

When I was in grade school I learned a song that went:

         Hannibal, Hannibal, Hannibal, Hannibal,

         Hannibal crossed the Alps.

This has stuck with me all these years–I couldn’t tell you why–and now I couldn’t get it out of my head.

         We were looking forward to having a beer at the café at our pick-up point, but nothing was open.  It was lakeside resort now we were in the off-season and the place had an aura of sad abandonment and an empty trash-blown parking lot.  When our driver found us he only had one question, “Did you see the burro?” 

         I count this among the perfect days of my life (I would find find out Aisha did not feel quite the same; all day long she held onto a secret mantra: “Don’t whine, don’t whine, don’t whine.”)  I didn’t know. Because she did not whine. 

        

         In the car as we drove back to our hotel I thought of another of my favorites by Van Morrison, “Coney Island.”  It ends like this: 

I look at thes side of your face

As the sunlight comes streaming through the window

In the autumn sunshine

And all the time going to Coney Island I’m thinking 

‘Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?

Wouldn’t it?

Dia de los Muertos 2024 or Notes on Not Letting Go: A Photo Essay

 

Nine years ago today, the first of November, I was home alone when I heard the knock on the door, after which nothing would ever be the same.  They found his body in Willow Creek, east of the Parks Highway, the road to Denali. Possibly he had been there since the day before.  Dia de los Muertos. When was the universe ever this fucking literal?

 

After a few days passed–in a grief-stunned blur–one of the concrete chores was to retrieve his truck from the impound lot.  I suppose I hoped the truck would reveal some clue to the mystery of his death, but that would not prove to be the case.

The truck bed was partially filled with snow, a few cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon frozen in place, scraps of lumber, the crutches that he had needed until recently.  His last text to me weeks earlier, saved of course, reads “I think I snapped my ankle skateboarding.  Can you take me to the emergency room?”  Later we found out he had not been skateboarding, but had jumped off the roof of his friend’s house. Somewhere there’s a video of him leaping off a rock outcropping into a steep slope of soft snow.  He emerges unscathed and speaks directly into the camera: “I recommend it, dude.”  Heights, including earth, for example, were just things from which to launch himself.

 

That his truck was a mess was no surprise.  What was surprising was the clutch was shot. I had to nurse it back to Anchorage, with no real expectation of making it home.

 

The decision was made to sell it rather than replace the clutch.  I emptied the truck out, fully conscious that every object it contained was something touched by him.

         

I scraped up the greasy coins. That was one bag.

 

The cigarette butts, another.

 

And finally the guitar picks, which I added to the other guitar picks littered around the house. When he walked guitar picks scattered in his wake.

 

The last PBR.

 

We moved out of that house he off-and-on shared with us a few months after he was gone.  Sometimes when I was in Anchorage painful memories were fixed to particular places, the corner of Arctic and Tudor, to name one stop on a private map of grief.  I travelled through the city carefully.  And now we’ve left Alaska.  

Nine years gone. Dia de los Muertos. Don’t worry, Macklin, we’re never letting go.

         

When you're retired is it still called a vacation?

Early in the visit our son’s little dog Kush suffers a heart attack.  She is thirteen years old and has 

previously survived a vicious attack from larger dogs and being hit by a car.  Now she has just shown off 

her I’ve still got it speed” and then collapsed with a heartbreaking yelp.  Dougal shifts into emergency 

mode and administers CPR, bringing her back to life. This little dog has been his anchor to this earth and 

no one wants to think about a world without her in it.

 

I’ve seen my old friend Ed three times in the last year.  That is, three times since his “cognitive decline” has been so pronounced that he needs to be watched 24 hours a day.  But this is the first time my wife has seen him in this new much-diminished state.  She is learning how to talk to him. 

“How long were you married to her, Ed?” My wife asks innocently enough.

“Oh,” says Ed, “I don’t know, two or three years.”

The actual number of years is 21, Ed’s son, behind him, signs to us.

Ed is hopeful that “the bad thing” that has happened to him will reverse itself as mysteriously as it came on.

“The memories are all still in there, aren’t they?” I ask, “It’s just really really hard to access them?”

“That’s it!” he says, face alight.

 

Our family is only a few generations removed from our Irish homeland. My mother is visited by my brother’s old friend Jim.  Jim tells her about his visit to distant relatives in Ireland. At the cemetery Jim asks about the epidemic that killed so many of his ancestors.

“Epidemic?” his cousin corrects, “They were starved to death.”

 

My son is the same age I was when I started graduate school.  33.  He says, “Same age as Jesus when he died.”  He pauses, adds, “Time to start overturning tables at the temples and consorting with whores.”

 

My mother’s eyebrows have gone in reverse from white to black.  Black streaks, too, now visible in her hair.  She is 93 years old.  

 

If my mother keeps losing years as I add them, in 2034 we will be the same age.

 

“I’d like to know,” Ed says, “where my motorcycle is.  And my Ford Falcon.  “I’d like to work on those,” he says, “take them out on the road.”  His son, behind him, shaking his head: no way.

 

My son is highly skeptical of the presidential choices he’s been offered in his voting life.  “Who would you happily vote for?” I ask.

“Erykah Badu,” he says, “I’d vote for her.”

 

If you were out on the lake and didn’t know the wetlands existed, you couldn’t find the channel that leads to and through them.  It’s hidden in a wall of cattails and all manner of lake vegetation, snags and stumps of a ghost forest. The channel winds through a lush swampland, home to herons and red-winged blackbirds, the swan family rules there and the loons, the pair of them, nest there, too.  My mother’s happiness as we kayak through here is almost a humming thing.  Turtles give her a special pleasure. She sits in the front seat of the two-seater; I’m in the back.  My wife is in a solo rig.  Our son has borrowed a third boat and his dog, Kush, an aging eleven-pound terror, surveys the watery terrain from his lap. We glide silently through the glassy channel, each moment suffused with a kind of holiness.

 

A summer ritual since our children were small: a hike to the lighthouse at Big Sable on Lake Michigan.  We go out on a service road through the dunes and come back on the shoreline, where sometimes the bones of an old shipwreck reveal themselves in the shifting sand.  Our family photo albums have a yearly shot of the boys.  It’s three of us now, not four.  We don’t talk about him, but I know there are long silences in which we are feeling our loss. The dog, who is not supposed to be there anyway, has to be carried through the heat. We have the coastline to ourselves.  Another holy ritual.

 

My wife takes a photograph of Ed and me. I don’t look at it until much later. The image surprises me.  Ed, always a strong guy, looks like he’s physically shrinking commensurate with his diminished memory. “It’s the way it is,” Ed said, many times during our visit.

 

My mother awakens us.  The northern lights.  We walk by the light of our phones carefully down to the lake’s edge.  We are on the south side of the lake, so there is little ambient light ahead of us. There they are: green and red, a faint shimmer.  My mother had never seen them before this summer, her 93^rd.  Now she has seen them, twice. It’s never too late for a miracle.

 

Everyday Notes, June 2024

  

 

 

My favorite piece of clothing was a track jacket made by the North Face.  I’m not sure why I liked it so much. It was little garish with bright orange zippers and burgundy and gray fabric.  I bought it at Hoarding Marmot in Anchorage, the last thing I bought there.  And I bought it a little too small and shed enough weight so that it fit well. Anyway, I lost it.  I couldn’t believe it. This felt like the ultimate senior moment.  I went back to a couple restaurants to ask if they had lost and found.  No go. 

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago. I see my jacket on a guy walking down our street with a dog and friend.  It’s raining pretty hard, but I run to catch up to him.  It’s awkward, but I told him I lost a jacket exactly like the one he was wearing. He took it off immediately and said it had been at the restaurant he worked at for months and finally he just took it.

I felt bad, because it was raining. 

But later I realized I had gone to that very restaurant looking for it and had been told they didn’t have it. 

I washed the jacket and began to happily wear it. But the jacket didn’t feel the same. 

I would have washed it twice, my wife said, adding, “To tell you the truth I never really liked that jacket.”  

I stopped wearing it.  And that restaurant, one of our favorite neighborhood hangouts: we haven’t been back.

 

We haven’t seen many pelicans yet this year.  I read that they are “cold, emaciated, and starved” in high numbers down in California.  Very disheartening.

 

 

I have tumor on my thyroid.  I’m conscious of it, but the biopsy came back benign, and so far I choose to pretend it’s not there.  Every six months I see the specialist.  He’s up in Hillsboro, two and half hours north. This time he emphasizes how large it is and tells me that one of the premier thyroid guys believes tumors of this size must always be excised.  Then, he relates an anecdote about one of his patients who had one this size who chose to have it removed, then found that the biopsy had been a false negative.  In other words it had been cancerous after all.

What is preventing you from having it removed?

Well, I said, you haven’t explicitly advised me to do so.

I know, he says, but what’s your objection?

I don’t want to be committed to taking a prescribed drug every day for the rest of my life.

How many do you take now?

None.

Oh, he said, once you get used to it, it’s not a big deal.

I didn’t say it. But it seemed to me that once the floodgates open it’s just the beginning of the end.  Anyway, I forestalled the excision decision or six months.

 

 

The thyroid doctor is three hours from home, is only five minutes from my friends', two of my best and oldest friends, the Schonhofens, live. They’ve been struggling with the recent losses of Margaret’s sister Jane and brother David in separate random health events.  My intention was to lighten the mood.

We got to talking about Mike’s obsession with screwdrivers. Even he can’t really estimate how many he owns.  Surely hundreds. Somewhere less than a thousand. Feeling picked on, Mike leads me to the refrigerator where he opens a drawer of old school 35 mm camera film.  There are perhaps thirty rolls in there, the familiar old Kodak gold boxes with black print, the green and white Fuji boxes, more obscure boxes I didn’t recognize.

These, Mike says, have been in here for over thirty years. Much laughter, now at Margaret’s expense. 

Not fair! says Margaret.  You wouldn’t let me use them!

This dates back to a driving trip through Europe where Mike wouldn’t stop the car for photographs.  (I realize this trip occurred before I met them, which if they had really been saving the film that long, was closer to fifty years ago, not thirty.)

Mike countered that he couldn’t stop the car for photos because he had bought a pair of skis in Austria, Kneissl White Stars, and they didn’t fit in the car so they drove around Europe with the skis extending out the window, stopping only for the night when the skis could be safely stashed indoors.

Mike went over to the counter and found a photo that I had printed after David died.  It was taken at Crystal Mountain after a long day of skiing in January 1979. The photos is very dark, enshadowed, taken in the parking lot after a great day.  Mike is holding his skis in the air, as if in triumph, David, more retsrained, holds his skis at his side. These are those very skis from Austria, Mike said, then sighed gently, David loved those Kneissls.

            Mike and David and I never skied together again after that day.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if David ever skied again after that.  A series of accidents rendered him quite hobbled.  But that day, yeah, that day we were kings.

 

Driving southward on I-5 heading back home after visiting the Schonhofens.  A car swerved from the right lane absolutely blindly into my lane.  I could only avoid it by also swerving–also blindly­–into the left lane.  Miraculously, there was no car in the left lane.  But I didn’t know that when I swerved. This occurred in three or four seconds and takes just three lines to tell you, but I was much shaken.

 

It takes two and a half hours to drive from our home on the coast to Portland and sometimes when we go to the airport it’s more convenient to take the shuttle.  There is only one.  It’s utterly reliable and not exorbitantly expensive.  However, the driver is a complete sociopath.  He harangues his customers, threatens to throw people off the van if he doesn’t like their opinions, and in general is a complete asshole. We sit in the backrow, put on headphones, and don’t engage. When I picked up my wife at the van stop last week from her recent work travels she told me that the driver had been his normal obnoxious self.  My wife said that when this sweet little old lady got off the van she said to him, very quietly, “You are piece of crap.”  We found this deliriously funny.

 

On the solstice we saw a perfect line of a dozen pelicans heading north. They glide in perfect synchrony, just inches off the surface of the ocean. A beautiful sight.

 

Yeah, I have to have this tumor taken out.

 

Still haven’t been back to that restaurant.

The First Quarter (of a "craft essay" I was nudged to write~)

 

Setting out into the adult world the first thing that had to be established was my draft status.  A high lottery number took care of that and suddenly my central preoccupation vanished. I wanted to write and climb mountains. I had been to Mexico on a climbing trip and found very little information in English about climbing there. I would go to Mexico, find all the information, and write a guidebook about what I found.  My ride dropped me at an intersection in the desert north of El Paso in the middle of the night and the adventure began under the darkest sky and the brightest stars I had ever seen.  

 

In my recent past life I worked with writers who were also teachers of writing. We presented “craft talks” to our students, even if we could not agree on what a craft talk actually was.  This, for example, may be a craft talk.

 

“I would write and climb mountains” doesn’t really address the reasoning.  Why do those things?  I’ve never been very articulate about that. I know that my love of writing follows my love of reading. In his journals John Cheever wrote “This, then, is the thrill of writing, of playing on this team, the truly thrilling sense of this as an adventure; . . . the density of the rain forest, the shyness of venomous serpents, the resounding conviction that one will, tomorrow, find the dugout and the paddle and the river that flows past the delta to the sea.”  I share these thrills, this conviction.  I want to play on that same team.

 

When I returned from Mexico I had notes, a journal, photographs, and a couple books.  I bought a sheaf of 500 sheets of typing paper.  Very few words were ever written and it would be about a decade before the sheaf of typing paper was used up.  I put all the Mexico stuff into a Strohs beer box and carried it around with me for a few decades.

 

Climbing was easier than writing. After about a decade, my writing caught up to my climbing.  I can’t pinpoint the moment. It happened gradually over two or three years like an iceberg rolling over in a frozen sea, captured in film in slow motion.

 

One rationalization for not writing (many would follow under other circumstances) was that if a guidebook existed it would have the effect of making the mountain travel too easy.  My reward, I rationalized, had been figuring out all that stuff for myself.  Why would I wish to deprive the next person of that experience?

 

Some of my fellow writing teachers seemed to harbor unspoken questions about whether writing could, in fact, be taught.  But I think we agreed that it can be learned, and that learning can be facilitated, encouraged, (sometimes discouraged) edited, steered, cheered. 

 

In 1981 R.J. Secor published a guide to the volcanoes of Mexico.  It was exactly the book I would have written.  But by 1981 I had no regrets whatever about this. I harbored loftier writing goals–goals I instinctively did not share with others–than writing a guidebook. 

 

Denis Johnson talking to the fiction editor at The New Yorker about his last book, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, which would be published shortly after his death.  She was asking why the book took so long, seven years, to write.  He said that seven years wasn’t long at all, and in fact it took him on average ten to twelve years to write a story from “initial impulse to abandonment.”  He never comments on “the abandonment,” but the remark suggests that the work is not actually finished, only that he has stopped working on it.  Later in the interview he remembers that one of the anecdotes recounted in the story “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden,” in fact, was first written down 38 years earlier.  Thus he revised his ten-to-twelve year estimate to complete a work to thirty-eight.

 

Most of my books, four of the five I’ve written, are comprised of short discrete pieces, which over time accrued and became books. The book that did not accrue in that way was a novel, Forty Crows. That took me a long time to write and was finally published in 2018.  I had around a hundred and fifty pages written, over many years, by December of 2006. On January 1, 2007 I committed to writing a single page a day for a year.  This was a contract I had entered into with myself on many a New Year’s day in the past; after all, in one year I would have 365 new pages.  But I had never before got past about day ten.  What was different this year? I was in my fifties.  I couldn’t fool myself any longer: it was now or never, with never looking the more likely scenario.

 

This was in the pre-laptop days, when our family of four shared a single computer.  The computer sat in an alcove of the dining room and looked out on our backyard in the rural Midwest.  Just below the window was an enormous forsythia bush in which I once counted nine cardinals sheltering from the wind. Every morning I tried to write for an hour before the rest of the family awoke and the daily drama of getting the kids off to school began. 

 

Among Hemingway’s more famous remarks about writing is “I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”  This is commonly interpreted to mean that when one stops writing for the day they should stop almost mid-sentence so as to know where they are going when they take the work up the next day.  But often when writing Forty Crows I did not know where the story was going.  Some days when I finished writing I didn’t know what would happen next.  I only knew that something would happen, because I was committed to the writing.  This is more along the lines of E.L. Doctorow’s’ famous analogy in his Paris Review interview: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

I think about climbing at night by headlamp, concentrating fully only on the terrain illuminated within arm’s reach, within the circle of light in front of me.

Forty Crows takes place mostly in Mexico City.  It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that I began thinking about it that day after I stepped into the Texas desert, crossed the border to Ciudad Juarez and boarded the train, second class to save money, to Mexico City.  That was 1973. Although the book was finished in 2008, it didn’t find a publisher until 2018.  An expanse of forty-five years, if we use Denis Johnson’s accounting methods.

For most of the ten years between finishing Forty Crows and it being published, the manuscript had only one reader (not counting any editors who may have looked at it before rejecting it).  That reader was my son Macklin.  He didn’t say much about it.  It was like a secret we shared. 

Although my wife is almost always my first reader, she didn’t read Forty Crows until after it was published.  Upon doing so, she asked me: “Who wrote this?”