At least once a week I go into town for supplies. And I’m always surprised by what I find. Civilization seeps in somehow. There was a time when Moab was a cultural black hole. Now people and customs from across the world often appear, even in quiet seasons, and when I come home from town I usually bring back more than groceries and hardware . . .
35
Half a Conversation
If you were one of my distant neighbors from up the valley, and you dropped by for coffee-and-catch-up, and you asked me the “What’s New?” question, I’d say I was in town yesterday, and you’d say, “And so . . .” and I’d share these experiences with you. Local news.
In The City Market, a voice over the public address system announced “We have fresh sushi in the meat department.” Sushi? Oh sure. Probably frozen—not even Japanese—direct from Shanghai, China. Wrong. Miss Lucy Begay, a young Navajo Indian woman, was there turning out salmon rolls from scratch—much to the amused dismay of three Japanese visitors. Miss Lucy learned to make sushi from a Mexican guy in Albuquerque.
_________
Farther up the aisle, I found that artesian water was on special—bottled in the Fiji Islands a thousand miles out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and hauled all the way to Moab. Of course I bought some. This coffee is made with water from Fiji. Why not? And there’s a bonus: Hold the empty bottle up to your ear, and you can hear the ocean and the sound of the surf out on the reef.
On my way into town I passed a long line of bikers riding in a fifty-mile bike tour for charity. On their way up and over the La Sal Mountains. The Halloween Lycra Brigade. Tight bodies, tight outfits, and nobody’s wearing much underwear. Sexy. Even the former inhabitants—the Indians—couldn’t have matched the ceremonial biker costumes.
At the first pit stop, the bikers were being urged on by the throbbing sound of the Moab Ladies’ Taiko Drummers, pounding sound out of big Japanese drums. (Fueled, no doubt by fresh sushi from City Market.)
On the way back from town I stopped in at the annual Gem and Mineral Show held at the rodeo arena. Cultural subgroups fascinate me. All these people whose lives revolve around fossils and rocks, for example. One guy was selling what he swore was reptile coprolite—fossilized turtle feces 150 million years old. Yes. How does he know? But I didn’t have any so I took his word for it and bought a piece. Look. And now you can say you know a guy who has some. And the next time I go in for my annual physical exam, I’ll take it along as a stool sample.
A young man at the show was demonstrating flint knapping—the art of making arrow and spear points out of flint and obsidian. He’s way beyond doing what the local Indians did. His expertise includes making museum-quality Clovis and Folsum points of superb quality. Even more, he was selling a video of his shaping Danish weapons from stone. A dagger was on display. The Vikings probably used these as a sidearm.
Genealogists say my family originated in eighth-century Denmark, so I was drawn to the dagger. It must have vibrated something in my DNA because I left thinking about going pillaging this afternoon. If I only had a bronze helmet . . .
I noticed in the paper that next week in the same rodeo arena women on horses will be racing in a clover-leaf pattern around fifty-five-gallon drums—barrel racing. And the cross-country unicyclists will be in town. And a convention of jugglers. And a traveling tattoo-and-piercing show. And on Saturday night, a performance in Star Hall of a bluegrass band all the way from the Czech Republic.
Who knows what’s next?
That would be my report to my neighbor—the answer to “What’s new?” As I say, I used to come here to far Southeast Utah because not much was going on and the world seemed so far away.
Now, well, this is the world. As it is.
Not so very far away at all.
As amazing as it always was, I suppose, if one stays alert.
And late last night, after the sky cleared following a lightning-thunder-and-rain storm, I heard the sounds of the tail end of a party at the ranch in the valley below my house. A voice cried out, “Oh, God, Where Are You, God?” and an echoing voice replied, “Coming, dear.”
How about you? What’s new?
36
Cowboys
Four generations of the men in my family were horsemen.
As we say in Texas, where I grew up, I have “cowboy” in my genes/jeans. In my youth I worked on ranches and rode in rodeos for seven summers. My cowboy gear is in a trunk in the basement: big black hat, worn jeans, leather chaps, beat-up boots, rusty spurs, well-used saddle, and even bull-riding gear. Now and then I still get cowboyed-up and ride around on a horse.
Sentimental pleasure. But nobody’s fooled. I’m not for real.
I saw a real working cowboy recently on my way into town. He was pushing a small herd of pudgy cows from winter pens onto leased grazing land. The angle of the sun said spring is not far off, but the barbed-wire wind insisted winter’s not finished. So the cowboy was hunkered down deep in the saddle on his mud-spattered brown mare.
The hood of a dirty gray-down parka covered his head. Underneath the hood he wore a red-plaid wool baseball cap with earflaps tied under his chin. Under the parka I could see a ratty army-surplus wool sweater over faded brown-duck insulated overalls. No chaps. No spurs, either, because they wouldn’t fit on his insulated rubber tundra boots, all slimed up with manure and mud.
Scratched sunglasses hung on his sunburned nose and brown stains dribbled down his stubbled chin—the overflow juice from the cigarette butt he’s just chewing on because it’s too windy to smoke.
John Wayne he’s not. He looks more like a war refugee than a cowboy. If they used him as a model in a cigarette advertisement, more people would give up smoking.
I stopped to talk.
“Where’re you headed with this sorry bunch of mud-balls?”
“I’ve a mind to drive ’em all the way to Miami Beach.”
“Won’t that take a long time?”
“Sure, but what’s time to a cow?”
We laugh. But not much. It’s an old joke.
“I thought you were happy cowboying right here in San Juan County.”
“Are you crazy? Cowboying gets meaner every year. Price of beef is going down and the price of feed is way up. And mad-cow disease—that’s a laugh! You don’t get it if you eat ’em, you get it if you try to make a living off ’em.
“Worse, if you raise or sell or even, God forbid, eat beef these days you’re looked upon as the devil by all them activists. Somebody put an ‘EAT BEEF AND DIE’ bumper sticker on my pickup truck. I covered it up with another sticker that says, ‘SAVE A COW, EAT A VEGETARIAN.’”
“No more glamour and romance?”
“Nah, cowboying’s gone to hell. It’s nasty, hard, poor-paying work. You got to be an idiot to want to do this for a living.”
“Why do you keep doing it?”
“I’m an idiot!” he shouted, as he rode off after his cows.
Still, he is the real thing—a real cowboy. But not for long, I think. I saw him a few days later in a local café. Says he’d like something else to ride. Something that won’t buck—something he won’t have to feed. He wants a motorcycle. A Harley. And he’d like to look like one of those black-leather, bad-ass biker dudes, wheeling free down the highway in the wind. To hell with cowboying!
The only people I know who are still serious about horses are the weekend indoor-arena buckaroos. Their game is calf roping and two-man steer roping. It’s a wanna-be sport. Most of these guys are construction contractors, ostrich farmers, car dealers, plumbers, and bankers with town jobs who want to be cowboys. They wear baseball caps and low-heel, round-toed, lace-up athletic boots made for walking and running. And they bathe every day. Cowboy? Home on the range? Fat chance.
Sometimes in town I see men dressed like they think real cowboys dress. Handlebar moustache, clean-shaven, sweet-smelling. Wearing high-heeled, pointy-toed, snake-skin boots, pressed jeans, horse-hair belt with a buckle the size of a coffee-cup sa
ucer, a green-and-black-striped silk Western shirt with pearl snaps, a fringed-and-beaded buckskin jacket, and a great big white cowboy hat. Cowboys? No. Probably interstate truck drivers or German tourists.
When I see a swarthy man with black hair wearing a black felt cowboy hat, white Western shirt, Wrangler jeans, belt with a turquoise-and-silver buckle, and black cowboy boots, I know he’s not a cowboy, either. He’s an Indian. Native American. Navajo. The conservative cowboy look is now standard dress code for Indians. Go figure.
A semi-final fashion note. All the cowboy and Indian kids dress alike. Basketball shoes, baggy pants, oversize athletic shirts, and baseball cap on backward. They don’t want to be cowboys or Indians. They want to be Black Homeboys. Maybe this is social progress—a sign of integration.
The ultimate fashion step away from real cowboying can be seen in the clothes in the fancy Western boutiques in Moab. I tried on a black-and-white leather jacket, fitted with silver conchos, bone beads, and about five feet of leather fringe. On the back were stitched the words: BAD BANDITOS. It’s the ultimate in macho—a combination of cowboy, Indian, and motorcycle gang. Locals call this garb “rooster suits”—clothes to strut around in. A truly manly piece of apparel. (That’s good.) And I could wear it out of the store for only one thousand dollars. (That’s bad.) Of course I tried it on. I’m a guy. Cock-a-doodle-do. But strutting is not my style.
I bet my cowboy friend will want one of these outfits when he gets the Harley Davidson motorcycle he’s saving up for. The screwball truth—the final fashion irony—is that the only real cowboy I know yearns to ride a hog, not a horse, and dress like a Hollywood-Indian-Biker-Dude.
All this is harmless enough, I suppose. Life is a costume party. And if part of who we really are is who we’d like to pretend to be, then we might as well have the right outfit for it.
37
About Water—Poem Left on the
Pillow of a Houseguest Who Seemed
Lost and Confused
Are you are reading these words
Because you’ve been looking
For something?
Something to hold onto?
A talisman for this day?
Reading this, like walking
Up a dry streambed in September?
Looking for something for your pocket;
A keepsake for taking home;
Kindling to start the fire of memory;
Looking for whatever the flash floods
Of August have picked up, polished,
Washed down and offer you now:
Smooth stones, sanded sticks,
Feathers, bones, seeds,
And unspeakable sounds
That break the logjam of being.
Are you are walking up the dry bed
Of this poem looking
For something like that?
To have, to hold, to keep?
Stop.
Go back.
Wait until the big storm comes in you.
Be here when the flood flashes through.
Stand in the water as deep as you dare.
If what the water does is lost on you,
Then you are truly lost.
Wait.
Stay until you know
What water does.
Hold onto that.
Finder’s keeper’s.
38
The Train to Birmingham
Place: Sunday morning at the Moab Diner, where the clock on the wall runs backward, the waitresses call you “Hon,” and the eggs, bacon, potatoes, and toast are all served up dry and crisp and fast.
Four men sat down in the booth next to mine. Big men in camouflage hunting fatigues. They looked so much alike I asked if they were related. Yes. Four generations, actually—son age seventeen, father thirty-eight, grandfather fifty-eight, and the great-grandfather, eighty. A rowdy, outgoing quartet.
Over breakfast they told tall tales and jokes and laughed a lot.
Going elk hunting, they said. Not to kill anything. Just to spend one more week in camp in the mountains. To see the aspens turn yellow, to walk in the first snow of the season, to hear the elks bugle, and to sit by a fire as night falls. But mostly just to be together.
Lucky men. I envied them.
_________
My thoughts turned to a man named John Howard. He lived in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a small town in the northwest corner of the state, on the banks of the upper Tennessee River. He came there in the late nineteenth century after the American Civil War. It was said that he was descended from the English Howard family. The title of Duke of Norfolk, the oldest dukedom in England, passed to a John Howard in 1483. The Howards retain the title to this day. Anne Boleyn, mother of Elizabeth I, and Catherine Howard were both members of the family—and both were beheaded by their loving but frustrated husband, Henry VIII.
John Howard of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, was an un-royal druggist, married, with two sons and three daughters. He must have been unhappy with his life. One morning the burden finally became unbearable.
He dressed for work as usual, stopped by his drugstore to empty the safe of cash, and went out the door headed for the train station. The assistant druggist went with him. A young woman. Witnesses said neither Mr. Howard nor his companion carried a suitcase. It must have been a spur-of-the-moment decision. He actually did what a lot of us think of doing in a hopelessly miserable situation: Just get up and go—now—disappear.
This John Howard was my maternal grandfather. Until I was well into adulthood I thought he was dead. That’s what I was led to believe. But I also thought it odd that he was never ever mentioned by my mother, grandmother, or aunts and uncles or cousins.
No memories.
No photographs.
Finally, an aunt, her tongue loosened by one too many bourbons, blurted out the truth. Or at least the minimal story. “He caught the morning train for Birmingham . . . and the son-of-a-bitch never came back.”
What became of him? Nobody knows.
What was his side of the story? Nobody knows.
I wonder what he thought about on the train to Birmingham.
Maybe he considered running away to be a better solution to an unhappy marriage than Henry VIII’s homicidal choice. I wonder if he thought about what he would miss by running away. I wonder if he ever imagined the possibility of somebody like me. A grandson. Sitting in a booth in the Moab Diner one fall Sunday morning wishing he had a grandfather.
The men in the booth next to me joked with the waitress as they left. Their tip for her was generous. I watched them pile into their big truck and head off down the highway. Oh how I wanted to go with them.
I thought about John Howard of Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
If he had missed that train, he might be here this morning. And I would take him with me to the mountains, a long way from Birmingham.
39
Meditation on the
Death of a Fly
The first warm day of onrushing spring rallied the dormant bug population of my house. As school locker rooms spill teams of amateur athletes onto practice fields at this season, the egg sacs in the darkest corners of my study burst forth legions of tiny spiders onto the floor and launch waves of minute flying midges onto the wall. No cause for exterminating action for me. Experience has taught me patience. Within hours the baby bugs will be lunch for a small team of freshman lizards.
On a slightly larger scale, the Dispersal Committee of the Housefly Commune has already assigned one juvenile fly to each room of my house. These newly licensed pilots move with maniacal speed, zooming erratically here and there, practicing upside-down landings on the ceilings, crashing into the clear window glass, and corkscrewing through the air in acrobatic shows of skill—but seldom landing long enough for me to get a shot at them with my Great Yellow Swatter of Death.
There are also a few tenacious survivors left over from the end of winter. For two days now a fat, elderly fly has lived out his last hours on the top of my desk. His airbor
ne adventures seem to have ended. Slowly he walks from one end of the desk to another, pausing at the edge, and walking back again to the other end and another edge. He does not bother me. I do not bother him. It is in his favor that he has lost the urge, the will, or the ability to launch himself into the air. As long as he does not enter my No Fly Zone, I am content.
Once he even heaved himself up onto the Great Yellow Swatter of Death, walked its length, tumbled off the end and walked on. Fearless. Dignified. Senile.
This morning he is still present, though moving ever so slowly, a centimeter or two at a time. At this moment he rests between me and the computer screen, scratching and patting his head with his two front feet. Perhaps he is reflecting on the distance to the far away edge of the table. He sighs and plods on.
I worry about him.
What is there for an old fly to eat or drink on the hard brown desert of my desk? Will he fall off the edge the next time he gets there and break his neck? Or try his wings one last desperate time before he nosedives into the tile floor? Do his children know where he is, or care? Can he see me, the possible agent of his fate, and is he afraid? Does he anticipate the coming of the Great Lizard, or is he comforted by knowing that, like mutton, he is too tough and stringy to be eaten now?
I can’t ignore him—there he is, creeping back and forth.
I can’t push him off the table—too cruel.
And I can’t quite bring myself to smash him dead—too easy.
So I put a jar over him and peered at him through a magnifying glass. Unlike other insects I’ve investigated, he did not panic—no mad rushing about or trying to escape. He looks tired and gray. Slowly he wrings his hands. When I removed the jar, he resumed walking toward the edge again with great dignity and purpose. Just before I turned off the light to go to bed, he was walking in circles, slowly, slowly, slowly . . .
This morning I found him lying on his back. Dead.
What On Earth Have I Done? Page 7
