The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  And what would that mean? If essential solitude is “keeping a part of your mind always to yourself,” what does that look like? Feel like? What does it do to and for a writer? No, for anyone—we’re in this together, reader, writer.

  I find myself reaching back to the first contemporary poem I loved, a poem whose simplicity overwhelmed me. It’s the first poem I taught to a group of students, when I was hardly older than they, in my hot little miniskirt and Frye boots at the University of Iowa in 1968. I have never stopped loving this poem, but I may only have begun to understand it. Maybe. Yet it’s such a simple poem. I put it on our bedroom wall, and I have it “by heart,” as we speak of memorization. James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”:

  Over my head I see the bronze butterfly

  Asleep on the black trunk,

  Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

  Down the ravine, behind the empty house,

  The cowbells follow one another

  Into the distances of the afternoon.

  To my right,

  In a field of sunlight between two pines,

  The droppings of last year’s horses

  Blaze up like golden stones.

  I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

  A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

  I have wasted my life.

  It was only many years after first reading it that I discovered Wright’s final line—I have wasted my life—is a steal from or homage to Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Rilke’s poem is also built as a description—in his case of a fragment of a Greek statue. Wright knew Rilke’s poem in the original German, and must have been dazzled by the startling final line that seems to have no logical or even associative connection with the poem’s description. After taking three stanzas to describe the statue in all its detail, Rilke ends with the stern, unexplained finale: You must change your life.

  When I discovered the Rilke poem, much later, it seemed to me that it had been influenced by Wright, not the other way round. It was Wright’s poem that riveted me, describing a landscape I knew intimately, the landscape of my flyover state, a town barely an hour from my hometown. Just to see its name in a book of poetry thrilled me. Pine Island! Imagine, in a poem! And then, years later, you and I drove past Pine Island time and again on the freeway to the Mayo Clinic, that Lourdes we visited so faithfully, for a while a place of miracles.

  Wright’s poem bedeviled me for years. At first I thought the final line was a statement of defeat. It seemed brave, if sad. Some years later I felt smart and considerably more literary when I decided no, I have wasted my life is a cry of triumph—I’m lying here in this hammock doing nothing and ha-ha on you out there working your lives away. I have the nerve to waste my life.

  Much later still, very much later, with various betrayals and deaths and my own failures behind me and yet ever before me, I realized that Wright was attesting to failure, but a very different failure than I had understood as a young poet enthralled with the idea of solitude and afraid of the life of love.

  Here’s how I’ve come to understand this apparently simple poem: lying in the hammock the poet is alone, empty-minded. That is, he is living in solitude, the solitude of his mind. The world in its homely detail—sleeping butterfly, horse droppings—enters this solitude that is his consciousness. He realizes this has never happened to him before—he has never truly seen the world, its reality and detail. He is stunned to realize this. He has wasted his life precisely because he sees he has not wasted his life enough. Or really, at all until this moment. That was his mistake. He has not “failed” as I thought as a girl first reading the poem, imagining the defeat was that he was just describing a butterfly, a wizened horse turd, a this, a that. I thought he was ashamed of his aimlessness, that he was valiantly articulating his failure.

  Nor did I understand the poem when I read it again in the ambition of my own first poems when I thought he was thumbing his arty nose at all the worker bees out there, that he was proudly claiming to be a free spirit who doesn’t labor, and glories in lying around all day. He was a vainglorious lily of the field.

  All wrong, I see now. He was acknowledging the waste of his life—that is, of his mind. But not for the reason I had thought. Rather, that final line—I have wasted my life—is suffused with wonder, the wonder of revelation that his experience in the hammock has given him. He is finally wasting his life. It’s a conversion moment, I suppose. An exultant ah-ha!

  He sees that this emptiness of self—that this alone—makes a life worth living, a life worth writing. He has been rinsed of ambition, of pride in himself, rinsed of shame over his failures, emptied of his grudges. He has even let go of time, of history—the sources of our regret, our sense that we have done it all wrong. Once reality has stabbed you in the heart like this, you are indeed free—or, when that sweet pain does leave you (Montaigne got that so right: it’s about portraying passing), the realization remains, a sure memory. This realization, not your ego, is your true self. Alone, outside time, but paradoxically within the moment.

  There he is, a poet suspended on planet earth in that most ephemeral piece of furniture, the hammock, swinging in the eternity of the moment, and he is empty of himself—at last. The whole world rushes in.

  It’s wildly ordinary—this moment of horse dung and cowbells. And it’s beautiful, and he can write it because, as the dying man advised—your last intelligence debriefed in the kitchen, holding the warm coffee mug I had handed you—his mind is separate. It rests in the solitude that opens, finally, fully, to the world.

  Is that what you were saying, darling, my face turned away, your voice coming to me from the other side you were approaching?

  * * *

  The dog has curled up on the dark navy back deck cushion, her place. And the coffee theme advances, this time my hand holding one of the blue willow cups we bought in that Prairie du Chien secondhand store, a whole set for the boat because you had read that it was the pattern used on riverboats in the nineteenth century.

  I still come down here, sit, read, stare out at the river as the barges go by this scruffy city marina tucked under the High Bridge. We never thought of mooring the boat out of the city, on the prettier (people say) St. Croix. We wanted a working river, wanted to be at the Mississippi headwaters, the beginning of the great waterway to the sea. The barges drift along in their stately way, nudged forth by chubby workboats called tows or tugs, though in fact they push the barges from behind, no tugging or towing involved. We remarked on that, our usual preoccupation with words, words. Must look that up, you said—why they’re towboats, not pushboats. Never got around to that.

  It’s a ragged 1940 Chris-Craft cabin cruiser, a woody you bought while we were “courting” (that antique term you used). It was as if you’d tossed an old Steinway in the water. You’d always wanted a boat, a Kansas boy long in love with water—your Elsewhere. But you got the Chris-Craft, you told me later, to romance me—After a whirlwind courtship of eight years, you liked to say, we got married. But really, you had me at the garbage bins the day I moved into the apartment above yours.

  The boat has a deco look, as if Bogart might step out of the main saloon with a shaker of martinis. A boat just big enough (thirty-three feet) for us to pretend it was a cottage—back deck like a little porch where I sit looking out, the mahogany saloon outfitted with chairs, table, the chrome-fitted steering wheel, windows that roll down like car windows, then a few steps down to the tiny galley (starboard side) and, tinier still, the head (port side). Forward, the jewel box of the V-berth, our nest, a round hatch at the top of the silky white-painted chamber, fitted with a screen, nights when we had to scramble to pull down the hatch when it rained. That we loved, rain tapping on the little wooden craft, our legs twined under the cloud of the marine blue duvet, thunder, lightning, curled up together in the
chamber of wood, as if within a perfectly tuned musical instrument.

  “There is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing,” Rat informs Mole in The Wind in the Willows, “as simply messing about in boats.” He speaks with the domestic satisfaction of the householder, not the adventure-voice of the seafarer. Cabin cruisers and houseboats play a watery riff on the art of housekeeping. Mornings we climbed onto the forward deck with a can of Brasso to polish the chrome fittings, the boat bobbing like a well-rocked cradle in the marina slip. Not to mention your fiddling belowdeck with the engine, the generator, the bilge pumps. This marine housecleaning is not to be confused with dusting the dining room chairs or vacuuming the rug at home. It’s messing about in boats. It’s domestic romance.

  Whole seasons can go by—and did—in a round of such fantasy housekeeping, interrupted by picnic rides out of the marina up to the confluence of the Mississippi and the Minnesota rivers, one dark steel, the other golden brown, past Fort Snelling, high on the bluff, the fact of the sprawling metropolitan area erased, as we drifted by stands of oak, past a heron rookery, a tangle of old cottonwood roots exposed in the mud.

  The boat returned contentedly to the slip like a nag glad to regain her stall. Not to mention—though I want to mention all of it, all those years—the sheer dreamy frittering of time, sitting on the back deck reading to the end of Villette, one of those fat novels I always meant to finish, getting up to make coffee in the marine-spruce galley, a rare place-for-everything-everything-in-its-place place. At twilight the plush emerald-headed mallards moved from boat to boat along the little community marina where some of the boats were year-round homes for live-aboards, and we stood on the back deck tossing bits of bread into the water.

  The long afternoons swooned into night, and it was time to switch on the radio, catch the Twins losing again as the dark water sent up gleaming reflections from the city lights. A soft bobbing like a riverine heartbeat whenever a barge passed by, shedding faint waves toward shore. “That’s the charm of it,” Rat explains. “You’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular.”

  We talked for years about taking a big trip downriver. We had the river, we had the boat, frail old craft that she was. We seemed only to lack the gumption. Where to go? New Orleans? Too ambitious. St. Louis? Still too far, and word in the marina was that the best scenery on the river was our own—the Upper Mississippi above Dubuque.

  We settled finally on Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, as our destination, about two hundred miles south of St. Paul, an easy day trip by car. But with our sedate Hercules Flathead 6 engine (rebuilt) conducting herself like a dowager royal, we only made ten miles an hour, tops, going with the current, considerably less on the upriver return. Two weeks, down and back up. Doable.

  Prairie du Chien had another appeal. There, at the mouth of the Wisconsin River, the veteran voyageur Louis Jolliet, along with Père Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit trained as a cartographer and fluent in several Indian languages, canoed with their Indian guides down the Fox and Wisconsin rivers from their raw station of St. Ignace, and arrived finally on June 17, 1673, at their long-imagined destination: the Mississippi. Marquette’s diary notation is the first European record of an encounter with the river. We were traveling not simply to a place, but to a point in history.

  We studied the guidebooks and river charts—“Think we can make Red Wing in a day?” we wondered, speaking with real worry about a town barely an hour away by car. We decided to take two days, better not chance it. By the time we departed in mid-July, when we spoke of going to Prairie du Chien, we sounded as if we were embarking for Cathay.

  The charts were littered with the names of landings and sloughs without road access or populations, places long forgotten or never settled, abandoned except by the agate type of the river charts: Winters Landing, Coon Middle Daymark, Ruby Ferry Light, Bad Ax Island, Betsy Slough and Millstone Landing, Canton Chute, Winfield Access, Shady Creek, and my favorite, Point No Point.

  Reading these names gave presence to anonymous and unmarked islands, the sandy or forested riverbanks we passed. The absence of habitation attached to a place name made the very real landscape somehow an imaginative construct. Point No Point, indeed. The river pooled and spread, opening at sudden turns into inlets and back channels where we could not go. Only shallow-draft boats, canoes, and johnboats could explore those mysterious byways. We held to the channel, nine feet deep, that the Corps of Engineers had dredged for the tows, a public works project dating from the Depression, looking off to the named places, hidden and somehow imaginary, existing only in the words given them on the charts.

  The tidy canal-like channel of the river we knew in downtown St. Paul gave way to an island-studded relay of industrial parks and generous suburban lots, the riversides heavy with parked barges, and finally a sewage plant up against a heron rookery, one of the major bird sanctuaries on the great Mississippi flyway. White egrets, refined as Egyptian ibis, streaked over the water, landing their minimal forms on the gray bleached driftwood lying in the shallows, composed together like a collection of Brancusi sculptures.

  We followed the channel, obeying the markers, as the river opened up, threading our course around uninhabited islands, keeping the illusion we were moving on a straight and narrow waterway. But even as we kept thinking of the river as a line running down the middle of the country, it revealed itself as a massive conspiracy of waterways, a feuding, feeding clan of intermarried streams and related watercourses perfectly capable of spilling over almost a third of the American landmass at its heart—as it had in the historic floods of 1993, when we were still treating the boat as a cabin, sitting snug in our marina slip. Left to its own devices (if ever that was—even the Ojibwe made dams and rudimentary fordings), the Upper Midwest is a vast wetland. At our center we are not “the heartland,” but islands adrift in a waterland, individualism not simply an American idea, but a fact of our geography.

  Our trip was punctuated by brief dramas of “locking through” the nine locks between St. Paul and Prairie du Chien. You were pretty convincing at the wheel, your face still and steady, pulling the grand piano we had unwisely set afloat right up to the side of the wet mossy cement lock wall. I lurched around madly grabbing for the line the lockkeeper slung down.

  But these were frantic interludes in the long, dreamy progress through a landscape that became increasingly improbable, beautiful—sublime in a way the Midwest is not supposed to be. Gone the farmlands and prairies, gone the featureless flyover I had fretted against all my girlhood and beyond. The modesty and long horizons of the Midwest’s usual rural charms (never charming to me looking for the great world, my real estate searches for châteaus and seaside cottages in Brittany)—all this usual expectation and assumption about the landscape gave way, between Red Wing and La Crosse, to high romantic vistas, arrays of sheer-face palisades and bluffs that effectively erased the dairy farms, the corn and bean fields that lay beyond them. The whole length of the trip we saw only one silo, set high in the distance like a campanile. Move over, castles on the Rhine, you said as we passed Trempeleau on the Wisconsin side.

  We were not in the pioneer farmscape of the nineteenth century, but further back to the terrain of the French and Indian hunters and traders, the explorers of the seventeenth century, almost back to Montaigne’s homme simple et grossier, his simple crude fellow who could report to him on the creatures of the New World, the men living naked and free.

  Nowhere does the Midwest feel as ancient. Or as unmarked, even with the intrusion of the locks and dams. To experience this time travel, the dislocation of history, we had to be on the river. We had taken the same trip many times by car, down the Minnesota side, up the Wisconsin side. But never these views, the theatrical palisades obscuring with a tease, and then revealing a whole panorama of interlocked channels and inlets, even grander bluffs plunging into the river as the boat rounded an island curve. Somewhere there were bean fields, s
omewhere apple orchards, dairy farms and all that cheese, but here, low down in the channel, the passage was caught in the older drift of history and the memory of bark canoes.

  The camaraderie of real travel, of those meeting off the beaten trail and needing the kindness of strangers, was ours too. From Prescott, our first stop, all the way to Prairie du Chien, the marinas where we rented a slip each night proved to be worlds of their own, transient communities with the easy friendliness of campgrounds. At Prescott the marina owner gave us a bag of charcoal so we could use the grill in the town park pitched above the river. I stood on the grassy rise, glass of wine in hand, turning the chicken, gazing out at the confluence where the deep blue ribbon of the St. Croix cuts into the golden brown of the Mississippi. Next to the grill a bronze plaque marked the place: “In 1680 Explorers Hennepin and DuLhut passed this point.”

  The bag of charcoal was not the only kindness offered by strangers. At every marina, people jumped off their boats to help us land and cast off, emerging from their houseboats, then drifting courteously away again. In La Crosse, we walked from our slip at Pettibone Marina along the highway in the dark until we arrived at a convenience store/office of a campground that had a laundromat. While we were paying for a carton of milk, we mentioned to the owner of the place, a tired-looking man who must have put in a long day, that we were docked at Pettibone and had walked over. Too bad we hadn’t known about the laundromat, I said, hard to find places to do laundry on the river.

  “Here,” he said, and handed over his car keys. “Drive over to Pettibone and bring your laundry over to wash.” He wouldn’t take our driver’s licenses, didn’t even glance at them as we tried to push them on him as collateral. We climbed into his Chrysler, the radio tuned to the C&W station, and headed back to the marina.