Plain voices

By Randy Koch

On the day the rain started, Sunday, June 30th, I left Laredo in my '83 Honda for Minnesota, a place I hadn't been in nearly five years. Behind the backseat set a toolbox, tent, sleeping bag, air mattress, and a bag of clothes. In my backpack on the passenger seat were two books, the latest issues of a couple of poetry journals, a new road atlas, a hunting knife, and a cheap, blue, spiral notebook in which I planned to write during the 17 days I'd be on the road. A small cooler packed with sodas, grapes, bottled water, and ice and a cassette case filled with music by Sheryl Crow, Neil Young, Pete Yorn, U2, REM, and Maná set on the floor. With my left arm hanging out the window, I drove I-35 as far as Devine -- the last I'd see of the interstate until I reached South Dakota -- and then headed northwest on 173 into a steady drizzle and the Hill Country; I hoped to find some clear skies so I could camp that night in north Texas. The drizzle, of course, turned to rain, and the rain turned into a deluge that tested the speed of the wipers, filled low spots on the highway with broad pools of water, and eventually made me get off the road to wait an hour at a convenience store until it subsided. Gradually it did, though it never quit, and I sloshed north through the afternoon to Graham, where I checked into a Roadway Inn. There I read a few pages of Road Song, one of the books I had packed, and flipped channels from the Mets-Yankees game to a Stallone movie to the Weather Channel, where I learned that San Angelo got five and a half inches and that my only hope for sunshine was to cross Oklahoma and make Kansas tomorrow. I've discovered on other trips that the first-day excitement of being on the road gradually gives way late in the afternoon to the blues, and this one was no different. The endless rain, the distance from either of the places I called home, and the strangeness of being alone on this trip made me uneasy and strangely unwilling to gather the courage to write. While I knew there would be more to this trip -- though I didn't know what exactly the "more" would consist of -- it was hard to convince myself of it at the time.
Carlos Flores suggested, before I left Laredo, that I stop in Archer City, which is just south of Wichita Falls and the home of Larry McMurtry. Of the 22 novels that the Pulitzer Prize winner wrote, I've only read one -- The Last Picture Show -- and honestly I don't remember much of it, but Archer City seemed a good place to have breakfast, gas up the car, and look for books before heading north through the gray, damp morning into Oklahoma. McMurtry owns and operates three bookstores in town -- Booked Up #'s 1, 2, and 4 (#3 was dark and empty when I walked by). I browsed in #4 for a half hour, snapped a couple photos of the narrow, little movie theater which is the model for the Royal Theater in McMurtry's novel, and around 10 a.m. wandered down to #1 to inquire about the author. The young woman working behind the counter said that typically he didn't come in until noon. I explained that I wanted to say "hello" but couldn't wait around since I had a long way to drive before nightfall. I left Archer City without meeting Mr. McMurtry or realizing that I had, in fact, stumbled upon the question that I would carry with me during the next two weeks.
In Hutchinson, Kansas, the squat woman at B. Dalton looked up at me, smiled politely, and asked, "William Stamford?"
I shook my head. "Stafford," I said. "William Stafford. The poet."
She shrugged. "I don't read much poetry." She turned to the taller, middle-aged woman at the cash register behind the counter. "Do we have any poetry by William Stafford?"
The woman paused with one-dollar bills in each hand, seemed to make a mental note about the money, and looked up. "I don't know," she said. "Check in the poetry section."
The first woman, who had wavy black hair that fell to the middle of her thick back, glasses, an indelicate face, and a blue smock that tied at each hip, led me between stacks of books to the far wall. She pointed to the shelves near the floor.
I looked down.
"All the poetry we have," she said, "is on those two shelves."
I nodded. "Thanks," I said, and she turned and disappeared between the tall racks of books. I bent over and tipped my head sideways to see the spines -- major poets, like Frost, Dickinson, Eliot, Plath, and Sandburg; a volume called One Hundred Best-Loved Poems; and there, near the end of the bottom shelf, Stafford's Crossing Unmarked Snow, a gray hardcover edition with only the author's last name and the title in silver caps on the spine. It's good that the B. Dalton in Hutchinson -- the town where Stafford was born in 1914 -- had at least one copy of the 60 books he wrote during his lifetime. It's unfortunate, however, that the people who work there don't know that one of the finest American writers of the 20th century was born and lived right in their midst.
The next morning at Willow Creek State Park near Pierce, Nebraska, I lay inside my tent and watched the gradually brightening sky and the dark leaves and branches of a young maple where my towel and washcloth hung since I showered last night. In the reeds along the lake a redwing blackbird sang, its voice sounding like a jack-in-the-box gone bad. The first three notes seemed cranked from its throat, a sort of tinny plunking of music that started high, dropped abruptly, and rose again. But the notes were followed by a coarse trill, as if a boy raced by the picket fence of its throat and rattled a stick across the boards. The sky grew brighter as I dozed and listened, and I thought about how last night the fireflies filled those same reeds with flashes of light, the shoreline a dark, long stadium, the Sugar Bowl at halftime, and in the west lightning, so distant the thunder never reached me, broke in electric cracks across the dark sky and back-lit the towering clouds with flashes of light. It's obvious out here in the broad, green bottom of the Great Plains who the poets are, and we should do so well as to sing like the meadowlarks, redwings, goldfinches, and even the bullfrogs.
During the nearly 30 years I lived in rural Minnesota, I never sensed that the people who lived in that flat expanse of farmland -- myself included -- ever heard the vast, insistent sucking sound that surrounded us, the one made by the vacuum of a place that has no voice. I thought about this as I drove north through the middle of the country; began to understand the twinge of jealousy I felt as I passed through Archer City, Hutchinson, and Pierce; and feared that the things I had tired of in Lamberton years ago -- the tedium of gossip, the monotony of agriculture and alcohol, and the degrees of gray in winter and of green in summer -- predominated and that the place was still mute.
On July 3rd I arrived at my older brother Ken's home in Walnut Grove, just ten miles west of Lamberton, and toward evening drove about 20 miles with my 17-year-old niece Ann to a cabin on Lake Shetek, where we'd meet the rest of the family later that evening. On the east side of the lake on a point that curves into Armstrong Slough -- the same place my parents took my brothers and sister on the Fourth of July when I was a kid to fish for bullheads, splash around in the green water, watch the men get progressively more drunk, and leave for home before the fireworks started -- sets a loose cluster of mobile homes, trailer houses, small three-room cabins, and portable outhouses. Ken's in-laws, Bill and Mavis Pfarr, rent one of the lakeshore cabins, a white clapboard house with a water-stained plywood kitchen floor, a fishnet hung in the corner of the small living room above the second-hand hide-a-bed couch, and, next to the TV and VCR, a curtain hanging over the doorway to the bedroom where a bunk bed stood on one side and a single bed on the other. When the sun went down around 9:30 and the mosquitoes bit us into submission, we went inside and squeezed around the kitchen table to play Crazy Eights or Who's the Prick. Insects ticked against the screen door, orbited the light on the ceiling, and often wheeled out of control and landed on us or on the table scattered with cards, a pan of Special K bars, pickle-flavored chips no one would eat, and brown Hauenstein beer bottles. These were the people I drove for three days to see -- Ken; his wife Paulette, who works as guardian ad litem for area minors; their two children, Michael, who hates baseball but loves professional wrestling, and Ann, who can strike up a conversation with anyone; Mavis Pfarr, with whom I worked for nearly ten years at the nursing home in Lamberton and who intended to make the cabin more homey with new paint and carpet; wild, white-haired Bill Pfarr, who farms several hundred acres, runs an appliance shop in Lamberton, and is running for county commissioner under the slogan "By Pfarr the best;" and their six-foot-three-inch son Brian, who, now in his mid-20s, loves to party and crack jokes and during the time I was there constantly imitated Leonardo DiCaprio's character Arnie in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?. We laughed, gossiped, accused one another of cheating at cards, squashed bugs on the table, drank, and laughed some more. I was home and, for the time being, grateful that little had changed since I left for Texas five years ago.
Independence Day brought more friends -- many of whom were considerably grayer than the last time I saw them -- and their grown-up children to Armstrong Slough for a hog roast, horseshoes, beer, fireworks in the evening, and the main event -- Chicken Shit Bingo. This was the brainchild of Bill and Brian, a variation of a game they had seen played some time ago with a cow instead of a chicken. It required a three-foot-square piece of cardboard, all 12 cards of the same suit from a deck of cards, a wire cage, and a chicken. The cardboard was marked off into a grid of 12 blocks, inside each of which was written a number from one to 12. Bill sold chances on the board for a dollar apiece; the number you received on the board was determined by drawing one of the 12 cards from the deck. When all the chances were sold, the game began. Bill pulled one of the four chickens from the crate behind the cabin, and carried it out to the shade of an oak near the horseshoe court where the cardboard laid on the ground with the wire cage over it. When those who had placed wagers on the game and all other interested spectators, children and adults alike, had gathered, Bill tipped the cage back and placed the chicken inside on top of the cardboard. Then everyone bent forward, watching the chicken, and waited -- usually no more than ten or 15 seconds -- until the magical moment when the fowl shit on the cardboard. Then a shout went up and Bill got down on his knees, peered inside the cage, and made the official announcement of the winning number. When the holder of the number came forward, the prize money was paid and Bill warned everyone that a new game with a new hen would be played in one hour. In the midst of the laughter and wagering I forgot about Stafford and McMurtry and wondered whether the featured performer in the next game -- a brown banty -- would look kindly on my one-eyed jack.
On the fifth, Ken, who has always been interested in history, and I drove to the End-of-the-Line Railroad Museum, which had recently opened in Currie, just south of Lake Shetek and about 35 miles southwest of Lamberton. We walked through a series of immaculately neat and clean buildings, imitations of a one-room schoolhouse, a general store, a train depot, the two-story home of a railroad employee, and a tall pole shed that housed horse-drawn equipment used to maintain the railroad, hand tools, a hand car, maps, etc. There we also found framed on one wall in a section about people who used to hitch rides on the rails the lyrics to an old song that Dad sometimes sang as he drove us home from church -- "The Big Rock Candy Mountain." It's an old hobo song by Harry "Haywire Mac" McClintock, who wasn't from Lamberton or, as far as I know, even from Minnesota. However, the chorus is one of the few memories I have of verse while growing up in this area:

Oh the buzzin' of the bees
In the cigarette trees
Near the soda water fountain
At the lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
On the big rock candy mountain

But I still felt that it was as unlikely that a hobo would find that paradise as it was that I'd feel poetry or any other literary presence in Lamberton and saw again why, despite my affection for the people there, I left years ago and probably would never be able to go back for good.
A couple of days later I drove 150 miles east to Rochester, which is set in the Zumbro River Valley in southeastern Minnesota amid bluffs covered with oaks and maples. I taught at Rochester Community College for six years before moving to Laredo, and I've stayed in touch with a few friends and colleagues who live there. As I drove from traffic light to traffic light along Civic Center Drive just before 6 p.m., I stayed in the left lane, knowing I'd turn north toward Silver Lake once I reached Broadway. Reception from the Rochester affiliate of Minnesota Public Radio was clear and resonant, and a familiar voice from the speakers in the doors of the Honda suddenly took me back to those dark winter mornings when I lay in bed and listened to The Writer's Almanac. It was Garrison Keillor, who, in a deep, melodic voice, read "Infidelity," a poem by Stanley Plumly. In it the persona recalls a scene from his childhood in which his mother hangs "half / out the door" of a "two-toned Olds." "She's being / pushed or wants to jump," and her "face was covered black with blood." At the end of the poem he says that he "screamed that day she was almost killed, /...choosing at last between / parents, one of whom was driving away." He's ambiguous about which parent was guilty of the infidelity and which parent he chose, but the power of the poem is in the implication that even after all these years he still can't admit to himself that they were capable of doing those horrible things to each other. My departure from Lamberton years ago was much the same -- was I pushed or did I jump? -- and in my criticism, I feel my infidelity to the place and the people who live there.
The next day I backtracked west on U.S. Highway 14 to Mankato, the home of my alma mater, Minnesota State University, Mankato, where I first sensed what was missing in and around Lamberton, 75 miles west of there. At the bookstore I bought The Invisible Wedding, a collection of poems by Rick Robbins, a local poet and former professor of mine. I flipped it open in the car and because of all that was on my mind, stopped at "Coming Home." As I read it, I heard right from the first line echoes of Richard Hugo, the Montana poet who was Robbins' creative writing teacher years ago -- "Something of a morning turns you pilgrim" -- the second-person pronoun, the short declarative sentence, the simple language, the way the line gallops at first and then settles into a steady trochaic rhythm. There is, of course, comfort in recognizing things familiar. But it was the last two lines of the poem, about the persona writing letters, that resonated most for me: "letters bearing home like ships / that script you're never sure belongs to you." I guess that's at least part of what I was feeling, the uncertainty as to which of the two scripts I had written and lived really belonged to me.
After overnight stops with friends in White Bear Lake, a suburb of St. Paul, and with my younger brother Steve and his family near New London in central Minnesota, I drove back to Walnut Grove on Saturday. I spent the night with many of the same people at Lake Shetek again, playing cards around the kitchen table, laughing, joking, and arguing about where everyone would sleep. On Sunday morning Ken fried eggs and sausages outside on the deck, and Paulette, Mavis, and Sara Shaffran made toast and potatoes in the kitchen. We sat on plastic lawn chairs with our plates in our laps and ate under the oaks. After I packed a few last things in my car and snapped several pictures, they wished me luck on the trip back to Texas and we said goodbye. By one o'clock I was headed south toward Iowa.
I sat on my folding chair on a patch of grass that juts into the Lake of Three Fires in southern Iowa, about 15 miles from the Missouri state line. Trees surround the lake on all sides except for a broad inlet at the south end. Cicadas buzzed, bullfrogs trumped from the west side and then a second and even a third chimed in, sometimes their voices on top of one another but at slightly different pitches. Fish -- probably bass -- constantly kissed the surface and often turned and kicked the water with a tail fin. A sliver of moon hung halfway down the southwestern sky. A blue heron -- a slim shadow of itself against the dark trees beyond -- stroked a couple of feet above the still, dimpled water and through the inlet and out of sight to the south. But the most incredible part of this lake was the lilies. Covering the entire north end of the lake and so thick that they completely hid the water were these broad green trumpets of leaves, all turned toward the now-absent sun in the west like satellite dishes fixed on the same orbit. The leaves stood a foot or two above the water, and over them on separate stalks were greenish-white flowers, the closed ones as big as baseballs and others yawning open like onion blossoms at The Outback.
A bat skimmed above the water in front of me, and nearly half of the lake was covered by the black reflection of the trees in the west as the sun had been gone now for 40 minutes, and the moon and Venus gradually grew brighter. A whippoorwill sang from the far side, and the indistinct voices of a boy and a girl carried down here from the campground behind me. The reflection of Venus quivered and stretched like a nervous eye three feet from shore. And in the midst of a chorus of bullfrogs and the deep croaking skreak of the heron as it disappeared in the darkness of the trees across the lake, I was happy again to be among poets and content that night had nearly fallen on the eastern edge of the plains.
Three days later on I-35 south of San Antonio I felt like a character from Gabriel García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. One of the characters from the novel, Mauricio Babilonia, a mechanic who worked for the banana company and who was seeing Meme despite her mother's insistence that he not, was always preceded by clouds of butterflies:

"The yellow butterflies would invade the house at dusk. Every night on her way back from her bath Meme would find a desperate Fernanda killing butterflies with an insecticide bomb. 'This is terrible,' she would say. 'All my life they told me that butterflies at night bring bad luck.' One night, while Meme was in the bathroom, Fernanda went into her bedroom by chance and there were so many butterflies that she could scarcely breathe."

Dark clouds of bottlenose butterflies swept across the highway from just south of Pearsall all the way to Laredo, their brown bodies smeared in yellows and whites across the windshield like paint thrown at a canvas by Jackson Pollock. The temperature gauge gradually rose, and even when I slowed to 55 miles per hour, it threatened to stab the red zone at the top. When I arrived at our apartment, I got out, walked to the front of the car, and bent over to look through the grill at the radiator. So many butterflies were plastered against the dark metal fins that the car could scarcely breathe, but I felt relieved that I was home again and hopeful of the possibility of poetry all across the Plains, even in those places where I hadn't seen or heard it before.