It’s a sweaty, smoky, stinky business, branding. It’s like football without pads, it’s like wrassling in high-heeled shoes. It’s hard on cows, hard on cowboys, and hard on animal-rights activists. It is a noisy spectacle in an unforgiving arena. And when you’re a kid among strangers, it’s a test you can’t walk away from. All those cowboys, all that creased leather, the noise, the smoke, your only option would be to walk off into the sagebrush, and then where would you go? Back to your bunk? Out to the dusty county road, to stick out your thumb, catch a ride to the interstate? Nope, you grab the rope and get in there.
I’m a header. I wear one leather glove on my right hand, and when the horse comes at me, towing a bawling calf, I slip past the horse’s right flank, dipping in behind the stirrup, and grab the rope—stiff and rough as a frayed oak branch—loosely in my right hand. Stepping quickly now, I run my hand down its taut length until my fist snubs up against the calf’s neck. The minute my fist hits, I swing my hips up against the calf’s rib cage, reach my left arm across and over the calf’s burred spine and down to the left flank, grab the web of skin between the abdomen and upper leg and then hoist. It all has to happen at once: Hoist, bend your back, lift straight up with both hands, knee the beast skyward and then, with a tug at the left flank, roll the calf a quarter turn in midair, laying him out flat so when we hit the dirt the left side will be exposed to the branding iron. Everything has to happen in one fluid motion. Any break in the momentum and the calf will kick free.
People can get hurt if a calf breaks loose. We work in three or four clumps, usually with our heads down and our backs turned. In the midst of all the heat and dust and noise, men are running from clump to clump handling knives, syringes and glowing branding irons. A rack of extra irons heats in an open flame. Horses work in and out of the groups, and although they’re seasoned, a calf stampeding their underbelly can still cause pandemonium. And so the header and the heeler learn to work together, learn to perform this rough work like two dancers reenacting a mugging. Drop the calf, twist its head back on its neck, flip the lasso free, and hang on until the branding iron arrives.
I think I can still throw a calf. Putting a brand on God is tougher. And what do I believe? I believe Jean Cocteau was on to something when he said there are truths that one can only say after having won the right to say them. I have to believe that, because that has been my path. I believe that the search for truth follows an arc. You begin with the simple truth of ignorance, proceed to the baffling truth of complexity, and then, perhaps not until after death, end your journey with the true truth—the truth of clarity. I’m not sure the truth of clarity is available on this earth. I’ve met some who claim it, but they often speak not in terms of struggle but of revelation, and I am suspicious. I suspect they have taken a shortcut, cutting across from the beginning of the arc to the end. In all likelihood, they overshot, and are right back at the beginning, just in a different shade. Very little in this life is simply revealed. There is usually digging and heavy lifting involved, or some falling down. Winning—in Cocteau’s terms—is costly. In the battle for my soul, I believe I won the right to some truth, but may have lost the right to redemption. Or is redemption yet available? I hope so. I pray for it, am desperate for it. Peace, grace, a fresh start…how I long for them in the dark hours. It is the great irony of spiritual progression: When I had peace, I didn’t need it; now that I do, I can’t find it. And yes, I’ve gone back for a look, but it’s not where I left it. I read Emerson too late: “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please; you can never have both.”
So what lies beyond this troubled life? Heaven? Who can say? Residual faith—hanging in threads from the ghostly paradigm—tells me death leads to some type of sorting, but perhaps not. If there’s nothing, there’s nothing. If there’s punishment, get on with it. If there’s redemption, well, humble hallelujahs. If we can customize heaven, I’ll place my order now: a beat-up truck, an endless back road, and Lord, a clear conscience.
I assume there will be some accountability, I just don’t know to whom. The best I can do is assume a sort of global, no, a universal humility. Not an angry atheism, or passive agnosticism. Nor cynignosticism, if you will. Cynicism is over-rated, and far too easy. In small doses, cynicism—like irony—provides an essential tempering quality. But to wallow in it, and to dismiss things like hope and faith, is cowardly and unoriginal. On the other hand, wide-eyed spiritualism doesn’t do much good either. Whenever I encounter someone wafting around discovering beauty in all things, I think of Jacob Needleman: “For someone living an uptight, head-restricted experience, a hot bath can feel extraordinary—but it’s not a mystical experience. We live such constricted lives that the slightest triggering of a new vital energy gets labeled ‘spiritual.’” And so, the best I can offer is an unexciting but honest, “I’m sure there’s someone bigger than me in this thing, I just don’t know.” Call it a spiritual cop-out if you will, but I just want to be on record as saying so. So I can stand there someday and say, I didn’t know what was right, but I never said you were wrong.
That won’t get me far with Brother Tim.
I don’t remember if anyone stood that night in the granary. It seems no one did, but many years have passed. If they did, they stood late. Brother Tim closed with a prayer. A quiet prayer. Heartfelt. A gentle coda to a fevered symphony. I sat with my head bowed, glad to be where I was. Doubt was still running under the radar. While everyone filed out of the benches, headed for the other end of the granary for chatter and hot chocolate, I sidestepped through the people to the girl with the ringlet. We slipped out a side door. She took my hand and we ran off through the dust devils, down the long dirt track that cut west through the wheat fields. Thunder tumbled around the sky, and skeins of lightning stitched the clouds as the storm hove over us.
The perception of truth evolves through small revelations. Old truths decay in the same way. The revelations are rarely thunderous. They are mites you can barely hear, working behind the wood. They are corns of wheat, bits of string. They piggyback our dreams, or wait in the dirt until the day we hit it face-first. We accrete truth like silt. It hones us like wind over sandstone. Over time, it shifts, regrooves itself, reconfigures our faith. We are never finished. We are provided glimpses, if we’ll look, but just as quickly, the perspective shifts, and truth is redrawn at the convergence of a new set of lines.
Truth does not always strengthen us. False truth yields false strength, but the truth of clarity cannot be hunted down or summoned from the heavens. A blinding revelation blinds more than it reveals.
Beware truth that strikes like lightning.
At a slight rise well beyond the buildings, we stopped to turn back, and knowing I might never see her again, I gathered her up in my arms. The first fat raindrops were popping in the dust, and we held each other tight, faces thrown back, souls wide open to the water and the fire, and the wind sent Brother Tim’s words spinning through the wheat, blowing them out across Chugwater Flats to mingle with the spent breath of long-dead buffalo.
1999
Postscript
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHERS
The covers of Population: 485 and Off Main Street are composed on photographs made by John Shimon and Julie Lindemann. I admire the way they work.
We met in prison. And that’s where the David Allan Coe–Merle Haggard shtick terminates, because John Shimon and Julie Lindemann are photographers, and I am a writer for hire, and we were sent to the Big House under the aegis of a popular magazine. A freelance gig. A single afternoon, in and out. Medium-security, no less.
Still, it was a distinctive introduction—we were, after all, photographing and interviewing lifers, men who had killed other men—and it led to a wind-down in the back room of a small-town tavern. Turned out we were all three products of rural Wisconsin. John’s dad raised hogs, Julie’s father was a cheese maker. My family milked cows and raised sheep. We talked 4H, FFA and lambing, and parsed th
e virtues of Holstein production versus Jersey cream. We discussed the desperations and satisfactions of the freelance life.
The shared affinities served as a nice icebreaker, but my interest in Shimon and Lindemann remains sustained because it has given me reason to ponder what it is we are striving at when we tag something—a process, a lifestyle, an art form—with the “alternative” label.
The discipline of photography has a history of serial abandonment. Old technology and process are discarded for new. Inevitably, some visionary Luddite protests, pointing out that “new” is no synonym for “improved.” In 1902, the visionary was a man named Alfred Stieglitz, who maintained that the photographic orthodoxy had become stultified by the pursuit of the perfect image. By obsessing over trivial details and compulsively retouching their work, said Stieglitz, mainstream photographers were pandering to mass taste, trading soul for slickness.
Country music fans will recognize the nature of the contention. Reverting to processes that drew on the past and yielded more visual ambiguity, Stieglitz and his group of like-minded contemporaries formed the Photo-Secession movement, eschewing meretricious perfection for a rougher but more compelling look. You might call it “alt-photography.”
Shimon and Lindemann are Photo-Secessionist descendants. Their experiments with vintage equipment began in the mid-1980s, and were born, according to Julie, “out of poverty—we couldn’t afford new equipment.” When we met in early 1999, they had just purchased a circa 1913 12 × 20 Folmer & Schwing banquet camera—essentially, a thirty-pound box of lumber and glass.
The primitive, often cumbersome nature of the equipment, coupled with limitations in depth of field, requires the photographers to slow down, to focus intently on subject and composition. The imperfections and metallic characteristics inherent in “historic” development processes infuse the images with artistic power and substance. Finally, by incorporating elements of modernity (harsh electronic flash, stark urban backdrops), Shimon and Lindemann charge their subjects—elderly artists, small-town strippers, backwater punks and junkies, clean-scrubbed farm kids—with an iconic immediacy, at once timeless and contemporary.
Freewheeling discussion of any “alternative” movement is inevitably gummed up with qualifications, asterisks, and aspersions. Like alt-country, alt-photography spans a spectrum ranging from hard-core purists to outright gimmickry. Some artists—the duo of McDermott & McGough, for instance—remove themselves completely from contemporary life, to a place where flashbulbs are heresy. Others grab a wooden view camera to focus as much attention on themselves as their subjects.
Those of us looking and listening are a skeptical lot. We will not slap the “authentic” label on something just because the artist used vintage tools, be it a Telecaster or an 8 × 10 Deardorff. I like the work of Shimon and Lindemann because I feel they have struck the balance. They respect their audience by respecting their subjects, who, while forced into extended poses out of deference to the archaic nature of the equipment, address the camera full on, often with stark intensity. Whether their subjects are plain or eccentric, strong or downtrodden, you get the sense they are standing there under their own power, in every sense of the phrase. Alternative in their own way, they are a reminder of the well-remarked irony that “alternative” can in fact be euphemistic for “authentic.”
In a parallel sense, the most “alternative” element of the Shimon and Lindemann self-portrait, Re-Ringing the A, is not that Julie is mechanicking in her black vinyl bra, but that John is truly putting new rings in his grandfather’s A-model tractor.
It helps, I think, that Shimon and Lindemann work among their own people. After a valuable postadolescent stretch in dislocation—art school, pink hair, punk band (Hollywood Autopsy), music zine (Catholic Guilt), a stretch in New York City’s East Village art scene—they have been working out of hometown Manitowoc, Wisconsin, for the past thirteen years. When they pull the black hood over their shoulders and peer into the Folmer & Schwing, the image on the glass is upside down and backward. By now, it just seems natural.
Credits/Permissions
Portions of the introduction previously appeared in Publisher’s Weekly Daily and on the “Latest News” page of www.sneezingcow.com.
Some of the essays in this collection were drawn from the author’s two previous volumes published by Whistlers and Jugglers Press: Big Rigs, Elvis & the Grand Dragon Wayne (1999) and Why They Killed Big Boy…and Other Stories (1996).
Essays in this collection previously appeared in the following publications:
College Lives: An Anthology of Higher Learning (Prentice Hall, 2000): “Scarlet Ribbons.”
Hope: “A Way with Wings,” “The Fat Man Delivers Christmas” (appeared as “The Bus of Dreams”), “The Roots Remain,” “Taking Courage,” “Catching at the Hems of Ghosts,” and “RSVP to the KKK” (appeared as “Take This Personally”).
Men’s Health: “Rock Slide!”
No Depression: “Farther Along,” “The Road Gang,” “End of the Line for a Depot Man,” “Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown” (appeared as “Sittin’ on His Dock with the World at Bay”), “Ramblin’ Jack Elliott” (appeared as “On the Road”), “Steve Earle: Hard-Core Troubador” (under the byline Michael Ryan), and “About the Photographers” (appeared as “Authentically Alternative”).
Orion: “Swelter,” “Houses on Hills.”
Road King: “Rolling Thunder,” “The Haul Road,” “Aaron Tippin: A Holler Full of Trucks” (appeared as “Aaron Tippin: A Workin’ Man’s Workin’ Trucks”), and “Sara Evans” (appeared as “Three Days on the Road with Sara Evans”).
Salon.com: “What We Want” (appeared as “Belize in the Dark”).
Troika: “The Fat Man Delivers Christmas,” “Fear This,” and “RSVP to the KKK” (appeared as “RSVP to a Racist”).
The Toastmaster: “Hirsute Pursuits” (under the byline Michael Ryan).
Utne Reader: “Fear This” (appeared as “Bumper-Sticker Bravado”).
Wisconsin Academy Review: “Manure Is Elemental” (appeared as “Manure Happens”).
Wisconsin West: “Life in the Fat Lane” (under the byline Michael Ryan).
The World & I: “Big Things” (early version appeared as “Larger Than Life”), “You Are Here,” and “The Osmotic Elvis” (appeared as “The Unshakeable Elvis”). All versions within are reprinted with permission from The World & I magazine, a publication of the Washington Times Corporation.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to:
My parents—anything decent is because of them, anything else is simply not their fault.
…the editors who white-knuckled this collection into existence, using their red pens less to cut than to teach. Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock—for your vision of Whatever That Is, and for standing beside the scribbler when tangents were not universally loved. Matt Marion, eagerly awaiting my next infirmity. Karen Croft. Joan Fischer, Faith B. Miracle, and staff. Craig Renner and Stephen Osmond, for springing me from behind the Howard Johnson razor wire. Amy, Lane, Jon, Kim, and crew, for letting me tromp around your hopeful place despite my clunky boots. Bruce and Patti, for friendship, mentorship, editorship, and a prime fireworks spot. Hudge, for assigning a road trip that lasted for years and hatched a friendship that still rolls on—send that salad back and I’ll get the check. Becky, Lisa, Michelle, Renee and Wayne, for the Wisconsin West start. The Utne crew, for revivals. Celia Meadows. Amanda Gardner and H. Emerson Blake. Rose Kernochan. Alex Heard, Brad Pearson, Ilena Silverman, Adrienne Miller, Peter Flax, Dan Ropa, Bill Foy, Liz (then) Wolf and Rina Cascone, for work not published here but essential to the trip.
…Frank. Editor, poet, friend, master of the wax ring. Jayne, Chris, and Mister B in memory of Audrey. The McDowell family. Racy’s. John Hildebrand. Kris and Frank, for a place to type away from home. John and Julie, Germanic hipsters in the Twi-Lite. Mags, in a tuck. Wilda. ALR—friend, mentor, voice coach, spiritual advisor (“There would never be a better tim
e to start drinking…” ). Krister, for spirits in the typing machine. Lisa Bankoff, Alison Callahan, Patrick Price, Liz Piranha Farrell, Tina Dubois, Cesar Garza, Jen Hart and crew (coast-to-coast) and the man who got me pulled over by the Iowa State Patrol on I-80 for crossing the fog line while talking on my cell phone, Tim Brazier. Thank you, Scranton, from phones to forklifts.
…Uncle Stan and Grandpa Pete, for teaching me about the road via Mack and Greyhound. Alex, for memorizing semi logos. Theater friends, musician friends, poetry reading friends, cycle racing friends, “Nobbern” friends and neighbors. People all along the road and at readings who share a smile, a handshake, and a kind word.
Even after all that, I walk to the next room, look at the stacks of boxes representing fifteen years of typing and apologize for leaving scads of good turns unremarked. If I missed you, swing on by, but do announce yourself…
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