The Jeep is not a jar, but its presence in this isolated desert canyon raises some of the same questions posed by Wallace of the East’s empty vessel. To inquire into the story of the wreck is to ask for its meaning, which is a question I prefer not to ask out here—a question I never ask of granite or sage. As Stevens’s poem seems to predict, though, the Cherokee has become a landmark in my imaginative cartography, a location I frequently visualize and seem magnetically attracted to. Now, when I set out to visit the spring or collect blue quartz or track pronghorn or search for owls’ nests, I often find that the arc of my walk is deflected toward the wreck. The wilderness of the desert does seem to rise up and surround the blasted Jeep, much as Wallace of the East claimed that the wilderness of a Tennessee forest once encircled his jar.
Stevens is right that the presence of this cultural artifact has altered my relationship to nature in this place. But I believe he is wrong to suppose that any jar or Jeep can deprive this land of its wildness, for if the Jeep has been deserted, in the sense of “left behind,” it is also becoming desert-ed—made a part of this spectacular arid landscape, into which it is already beginning to vanish. Here is no antiseptic placement of a hollow jar but, rather, a stunning site of wreck and abandonment—one infested by rodents and bleaching to pink bones in the sun. In some sense that I do not yet understand, this perforated chunk of industrial waste confirms my sense that wilderness, which not only surrounds the Jeep but swallows it utterly, remains undomesticated here. While the wreck adds a dot to the imaginative map of my home territory, it also reaffirms that this is a vast, unforgiving, wild country in which our absolute freedom and our eventual abandonment remain equally certain.
WE NATURE WRITERS do a lot of windy sermonizing about the value of staying put. We celebrate the decision to strike roots, encouraging readers to inhabit their home landscape with a commitment and passion that will allow them to resist the transience that has characterized American culture since the first prairie schooner set sail for the sunset. And it is clear enough that in the West this frontier mentality has resulted in the sorts of problems you’d expect from folks who see their place as a temporary stop on the way to some imagined better place just beyond the next ridge or range. I myself have staged a quiet rebellion against transience, digging in and making my stand out here in the remote Great Basin. In fact, once the Amazon drones start delivering whiskey to these arid hinterlands, I may never go to town again.
The problem with this bioregional evangelizing can be summarized with a single word: October. When the wind picks up an autumnal chill and the nights turn cold, when the clock falls back an hour and the stove wood needs hauling before the snow flies, when the World Series comes to an end and the long winter looms, I experience an irresistible restlessness. In the opening lines of his wonderful poem “How to Like It,” Stephen Dobyns captures perfectly the feeling I experience each October:
These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
In praising rootedness, we environmental writers have chosen our central metaphor from the plant world. But what if we derived our core concept from fauna rather than flora? We might then adopt a metaphor of movement or migration rather than rootedness, for everywhere around us we see animals passing through. October in the high desert is the time when mule deer and pronghorn move downslope to avoid blizzards and mountain lions. Critters of every stripe are in high gear, driven by the shortening days to cache the supplies necessary to survive encroaching winter, while seasonal birds are stopping by on their way to warmer climes. Perhaps the most natural thing for me to do in October is not hunker down and strike roots but instead make contact with my animal self, get on the move, and light out for some unknown territory.
A rare visitor who has recently joined us on Ranting Hill has me thinking about these issues of rootedness and transience. Although the northern mockingbird is so widely distributed as to be a regular neighbor to many Westerners, in more than a decade out here we had never before seen one. The first appearance of this remarkable guest occurred several weeks ago, when out of nowhere an unmistakable flash of white-barred wings appeared in the sagebrush. The bird has remained with us since then, and I wonder if it has come to make a home in this remote desert outpost or, as is more likely, is passing through on its way to a more hospitable place. For now, we are enjoying the bird in the same way we enjoy the final days of fall, with no certainty about how long the pleasure might last, and with a haunting feeling that it will soon be shut from our view as the doors of winter swing closed.
Unlike other desert birds, most of which are fairly retiring, our Ranting Hill mockingbird is gregarious, loquacious, almost fearless. It struts around on its tall, skinny legs, proudly holding its long tail up high behind it, acting like it owns the place. It perches on the lawn furniture and appears bothered when we head outside to check on the weather. It snags insects on the bare ground and in the low scrub but also visits our woods rose and silver buffaloberry bushes to diversify its diet with native, autumnal fruits.
The main thing Ranting Hill mocker does is sing. First described by Linnaeus in 1758, the mockingbird’s modern scientific name is Mimus polyglottos, which means “many-tongued mimic.” It is a name the mockingbird richly deserves, as individual birds routinely have thirty or more songs, and in some cases even up to two hundred! While these many melodies most often mimic the songs of other birds, the mockingbird’s repertoire also includes mimicry of the sounds of insects, frogs and toads, and even mechanical noises. I first became aware of our visitor when I heard a bird song that was unfamiliar to me. Before I could solve the mystery of this new song I discerned a second tune I’d never heard before, and then a third. If only one new bird had appeared, many new songs had arrived with it, as if a flock of exotics had come to our home, like a visiting circus. Our mockingbird is a one-bird band, an avian karaoke machine, a multilingual messenger who hails from distant lands, carrying with it all their varied music. I’ve even tried to communicate with the bird by playing it blues riffs on the harmonica. While it hasn’t yet consented to jam with me, it does seem interested, and I have not yet given up trying.
Because mockingbirds are now so common and so widely dispersed, many of us are unaware of how rare they once were. During the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a flourishing caged-bird trade decimated populations of many songbirds in America, including the cardinal, indigo bunting, and that most impressive of singers, the mockingbird. A 1904 issue of Bird-Lore, a publication of the Audubon Society, celebrated the passage of new legislation protecting nongame birds, while also reminding readers of what was at stake: “A few weeks since the [Audubon Society] Chairman visited the store of a bird dealer in New York, and in one large cage saw not less than sixty Mockingbirds, some of them so young that when the cage was approached the poor birds hopped to the wire netting fluttering their wings and opening their mouths to be fed.”
The most famous American to keep a mockingbird as a pet was Thomas Jefferson. In November 1772, Jefferson purchased his first mockingbird from a slave for five shillings. At that time the wild mockingbirds that now grace the woods surrounding Monticello were still decades away from expanding their range to Virginia, and so the species was a true novelty. Jefferson would go on to own at least four mockingbirds, several of which were able to mimic the woodland birds of Virginia and also sing American and Scottish songs. In 1784 Jefferson even took a mockingbird with him to France and back, a trip during which the bird learned not only to sing French songs but also to imitate the creaking of the timbers on the ship that carried it across the broad Atlantic. Jefferson also has the distinction of being the first US President to keep a pet in the White House. His companion mockingbird, Dick, not only lived in the presidential mans
ion but in fact had free range within it. Jefferson routinely left Dick’s cage open so he could fly around, perch on the president’s shoulder while he worked, even sing duets with Jefferson as he played the violin. Jefferson’s appreciation for this unique species is apparent in his suggestion to a friend that he should teach his children to honor the mockingbird as “a superior being in the form of a bird.”
Jefferson’s idea that the mockingbird is “a superior being in the form of a bird” is also present in many Native American cultures. The Cherokee embraced mockingbirds as the embodiment of cleverness and intelligence, while Hopi and other Pueblo peoples told stories in which the bird was the bringer of language who taught the people to speak. Further west, Maricopa Indians believed that dreaming of a mockingbird was a sign that the dreamer would soon receive special powers. Shasta Indian culture considered the bird a sacred guardian of the dead, while Papago and Pima folklore figured the mockingbird as a mediator whose song functions as a bridge between the human and animal worlds.
The most prominent reference to the bird in Anglo culture appears in the late Harper Lee’s 1960 classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, a book much beloved by our daughters, as well as by their mom and dad. In the novel, Atticus Finch tells his kids that “it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” When Scout, the young girl who is the novel’s narrator, asks her neighbor, Miss Maudie, for clarification, this is the reply she receives: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
I like to think of the Ranting Hill mockingbird as being in a kind of temporary artist’s residency, the way a visiting writer, painter, or musician might be. This bird has come from elsewhere to warble its unfamiliar tunes, and perhaps also to gather things: insects, berries, western meadowlark song, this bittersweet, late-season, low-angle shaft of high desert sunlight. I suspect that this remarkable bird, whose appearance here is unprecedented and unaccountable, will soon be moving on. A messenger between seasons and between worlds, the mockingbird is a transient whose existence is rooted in the air, a fleeting gift of autumn that makes its stand on wings.
LIKE ME, David Sedaris is a literary humorist. Unlike me, he has sold around eight million copies of his books, which have been translated into twenty-five languages and counting. (Several of my essays have been translated into Estonian; I may not be big in Japan, but the Estonians find me hilarious.) As any insanely jealous fellow writer would, I have been busy finding reasons (which Eryn unkindly refers to as excuses) why Sedaris has been a bit more successful than I have. Why do I reckon Sedaris is outselling me? Well, though raised in North Carolina, he writes from an estate in England, while I write from a remote hilltop in a sparsely inhabited western desert. His neighbors are intelligent, cultured, literate people with beaucoup leisure time and disposable income. My neighbors are less interested in a good laugh than you might think. This is because my neighbors are scorpions, rattlers, and libertarian survivalists—the latter of which can be dangerous.
An actual incident involving David Sedaris visiting my town bolsters this theory while also supporting my corollary assumption that Sedaris, who must certainly be fearful of competition from me, is out to discredit those of us here in the Intermountain West. It all started after Sedaris did a reading in Reno while on a sixty-city book tour. Soon after his stop here in northern Nevada, Sedaris appeared on the satirical television news program The Daily Show, where host Jon Stewart inquired about the many cities he was visiting. “Which one did you hate the most?” quipped the host. Sedaris replied with a story about his observations at a recent reading in Reno. The humorist observed, wryly, that “the icebreaking question when I was signing books was, ‘Why did you choose that T-shirt?’ ” He went on to criticize the Nevadans’ attire, which he claimed included sweatpants and cut-off shorts. The punch line of the anecdote concerned a woman in her sixties who approached Sedaris to have her book signed. “Is that your good Count Chocula T-shirt?” Sedaris asked the woman. “I didn’t think anyone was going to notice,” she replied. The anecdote was masterfully calculated and timed, and Sedaris had Stewart and his New York City audience in stitches. So that’s the story. It made the usual cyber-rounds and was soon enjoyed by folks across the nation.
I generally subscribe to the ageless principle that there is no such thing as bad publicity, but the Sedaris-in-Nevada incident went largely without scrutiny, and so I feel the need to examine it more closely. First, let me say that I do not blame Sedaris for stooping so low to get a cheap laugh, since this is something I do at every possible opportunity. Second, I have no interest in defending the informal dress of Nevadans, because it strains my imagination to think of anything less interesting or important. Finally, I certainly will not spill any ink speculating about the veracity of Sedaris’s anecdote, because, as a humorist myself, I know very well that whether any of this actually occurred is immaterial.
No, my objections are different than you might suspect. First, I believe a person should know what the hell he or she is talking about when making fun of something. As a single example, consider this gem from the late Robin Williams: “Do you think God gets stoned once in a while? Look at the platypus. I think so.” If you know, as Williams clearly did, that the duck-billed platypus is an egg-laying mammal—that is to say, a total oddball in the animal kingdom—then this joke will be funny to you, even if you aren’t stoned. Sedaris, by contrast, clearly doesn’t know Reno from his other fifty-nine whistle stops. Exhibit A: in chatting with Stewart, he doesn’t even pronounce the name of our state correctly (it’s NevAda, not NevAHda).
Equally egregious, the comic who offers this excoriation of how we dress has chosen, for his national television appearance, thick horned-rim glasses that make him look uncannily like that cartoon dog Mr. Peabody, a shirt in a bright pink reminiscent of cheap cotton candy, a tie the color of dung, and, as the pièce de résistance, black dress shoes worn with white socks. Seriously? Sweatpants would have been a clear improvement on this get-up. Apparently, though, the outfit is to Jon Stewart’s taste. “You look terrific,” he tells the humorist. “Very nice suit.” Sure, so long as it’s Halloween, and you’re costumed as a pseudo-intellectual Woody Allen. Stewart’s acumen is on further display when Sedaris describes folks at the event wearing cut-offs. “Was it a particularly hot and humid environment?” asks Stewart, without a whiff of irony. I went to college with Jon, and he is the smartest funny person (or funniest smart person) I have ever met. That said, humid in Nevada? He was never that daft around our freshman dorm.
Even if I could get past the idea that a comic, of all people, would be so pompous as to imagine there should be a dress code at his gigs, I am still deeply insulted on behalf of the truly innocent victim in this story: Count Chocula. In this Halloween season, it seems only right that I should stand up for this slandered hero. General Mills debuted Count Chocula, Franken-Berry, and Boo-Berry (the “Monster Cereals”) back in 1971, which put me at just the right age to love them, and to join the ranks of kids who experienced a condition actually called “Franken-Berry Stool,” in which the heavy red dyes in the strawberry-flavored cereal turned our feces the color of David Sedaris’s shirt, when they would, under normal circumstances, have been the color of his tie.
Nineteen seventy-one was none too placid a year. The Charles Manson murder trial was nightly news, Ku Klux Klansmen were arrested for bombing school buses, Lt. William Calley was found guilty of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and the Nixon administration arrested thirteen thousand antiwar protestors during a single three-day period. Closer to home, Operation Grommet proceeded apace, as the United States spent the year continuing a decades-long program of attacking Nevada (which they probably pronounced NevAHda) with nuclear weapons. It was a moment in which some unnameable innocence was being lost, which is another way of saying that we needed Count Chocula. TV com
mercials even reassured our parents that the cereal was “so full of nutrients, it’s scary!” Not as scary as the A-bomb, or even the fuchsia poop induced by Franken-Berry, but you get the point.
As for the count himself, he could hardly have been less frightening. He was, in fact, a sweet little vampire, with his single fang (like a kid who has lost one of his front baby teeth), huge doe eyes, comically pointy ears, long puppet nose, and friendly, silly grin. (Actually, I detect a slight resemblance to Sedaris.) One of the unique personality traits of the cartoon vampire was that, although he had the power to scare the other cereal monsters in his posse, he was often terrified when he came face to face with children. Yes, you heard that right. We children, in an age of fear, had the power to scare a vampire! It was a delicious feeling, knowing that we could turn the tables on terror simply by lifting our spoons.
Now that I am a father, the proposition that children are more terrifying than vampires seems obvious enough. Each fall, when the monster cereals are sold for a short time leading up to Halloween, I become unapologetically nostalgic. That the cereals have been successfully rereleased in special edition retro boxes suggests I am not alone in this. Count Chocula? Come on, Sedaris. He’s one of the good guys.
So here is a summary of how the notorious incident with David Sedaris and the Reno T-shirt lady appeared to the national audience of The Daily Show: Sedaris hilariously satirizes Nevadans’ attire, building to a punch line in which the sixty-something T-shirt lady is comically exposed as ignorant and provincial. Indeed, she is figured as doubly stupid, first for wearing the shirt, and then for failing to realize the humorist’s joke is at her expense.
Here, instead, is how I characterize the incident: While dressed like a cross between an editor at The New Yorker and a boozed-up birthday party clown, a comic who is raking large coin in our community mispronounces the name of our state on national TV while failing to answer the host’s inane query as to whether it is unusually humid in the high desert. Finding it amusing to insult an older woman who has paid handsomely to see his show, purchased his book, and waited in line to meet him, he delivers a sarcastic crack about a T-shirt bearing the image of sweet old Count Chocula, whom anyone who was a kid in 1971 would now support for president.
Rants from the Hill Page 11
