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| Anastasia and Joe |
I write this now because Joe died suddenly last week. His wife Anastasia was beside him throughout his final moments. I had planned to dedicate the presentation of my critical paper to him in Santa Fe, NM this coming August. But now, it seems most appropriate to say it here, now. I owe ya Joe.
There's a bit of back story here. Joe's wife Anastasia has been a fellow traveler in my MFA program. I visited with them at their home after I'd presented on HIV and Mobility at the 2009 American Public Health conference in Philly. I'd only seen NJ from the cab of a semi truck, and I'd never been friends with real live northeastern types. It was on this first visit then that I met Joe in the flesh. I'd not only traveled to NJ to bond with my friends but also finally planned to have a face to face with my agent Adam Chromy of Artist and Artisans. Aside from pissing Anastasia off by looking like a tourist in Grand Central Station, Joe's assessment of my critical paper topic is what turned my world upside down and stands out as the most memorable moment of the trip.
Think I lie? Exaggerate? Oh no. Do read on. It's not one bit pretty.
Scratch that. Let's call it what it really was--this is among thee most memorable, embarrassing, you are such a dork, moments of my life. This coming from a guy who has shut down freeways, been nearly decapitated by airplane wings and who has spent a decade of his life linked to a man that doesn't exist. Despite all these achievements, I really can't think of too many other moments that stand out as equally disastrous. Oh yes, to me at least, it was that bad.
I'm not sure how it came to be, but Joe did not lurk on the perimeter of my conversations with Anastasia. He genuinely loves his wife, and what she found interesting also intrigued him. He'd also trusted her in my home, on the road with me, and I'd scared the shit out of her on several occasion. So naturally, before I met Joe we had a certain bond.
Normal people try to avoid writers when we talk about "craft". I think people just know it's like witnessing anal wart eradication. They sense it needs to happen, but just don't want or need to know the details.
But Joe, he's not like that-- indeed he was surprisingly engaged. I'd just gone through a living hell thanks to additional medical diagnosis related to head injuries, and was struggling to stay current in the MFA program and I'd yet the only thing I came up with to write about other than HIV/AIDS and the trucking industry was this broad undefined topic: Western Writing.
As the three of us sat in a NJ Ice Cream Parlor, I announced this topic, and began to glowingly flesh out how much the world needed to hear about Western Writing as a legitimate genre. Gregg Wolfe, the brains behind Image Journal goes on and on about Beauty Saving the World, and so obviously that falls on the shoulders of Western Writers, because no one knows real beauty like we do.
You see where this is heading, don't you.
It all made perfect sense to me. I felt so smart and talented and my chest puffed out like one of those birds about to do a belly butting with gravity or an airplane propeller.
Joe immediately interjected. Oh yes, he found the possibility of such an endeavor intriguing. But, first one question. He didn't quite get it. "What is western writing"
Oh how simply he put it out there, vverbalizing his confusion with a little, beautifully unanswerable theoretical question. Which he followed with two others.
"Whats so special about western writers?" What's so special about western writing?"
And I sat there, stunned. What did he mean? I was special. Couldn't he see that? Wasn't it obvious?
A mouthful of coffee tummy tuck explosion froze my face. I looked at him. He was so completely serious. I found myself completely unable to respond.
Anastasia who'd recently allowed me to terrify her in Wyoming, specifically on the Bear Tooth Highway, well, she'd physically experienced the west and how it changes everything. Anastasia had touched our earth, faced into the wind, and she'd gazed out over thousands of square miles of landscape that is best described as God's jawbone after an unfortunate encounter with a black hole. She'd witnessed dancing Northern Lights over the Hi Line, seen her reflection in our clear waters, and held in an embrace a giant ancient cedar tree that came to life long before Christ's birth. Anastasia knew the silence, the desolation, the open sky that extends into several states, and that we file flight plans when we drive at speeds that veer near three digits and that when conditions are right, that there are few fellow travelers on these highways, and that no passing zones are suggestions rather than explicit. All that space is dangerous when writers fall under it's influence. It hath ruined me.
Anastasia got this context and as a poet, I believe it has already moved her soul to a new perspective embracing the possibilities found in the natural world.
Joe, did not have a similar context. He'd never been to this Western Landscape. He had not, like his wife, embraced the fetal position, terrified at the scope of mountainous switchbacks and flimsy guardrails, and he'd not yet been stilled by a sunset that takes three hours to finish or a splash of color defined by wildflowers that can be seen from space.
And he, also being the smart guy that he is, had intentionally not been on that trip with us because I think he sensed that somewhere between the 7,000 foot and 11,000 foot elevations, near the Montana and Wyoming state lines, things would go badly. Joe is intuitive like that.
But in the ice cream parlor, six months later, as I sounded so smarty pants and full of myself, and kept looking to Anastasia for reassurance, waxing poetic about all this Go West for imagery bullsh*t, I just assumed that of course he would get it. I could see it in my mind, visually, and physically, but even though he'd heard the stories, he had no reference point. I might as well have been overdosing on granola and rodeo stats.
I was not preaching to the choir. And, as I tried to field his questions, I realized I could not assume anything because to assume was to deny him the full meal deal, to cheat him out of a proper literary experience. I needed to, as they say in the dying gene pool of capable western writers, "show, don't tell".
And do you know what? I couldn't show. All I could do was tell. Poorly.
I sat there stunned into silence, blinking into Ice Cream and seeing little sprinkles and saturated fat chocolate monsters, and lactose explosions and yep, these were delicacies I could describe in intimate detail. But I could not get language--you know words-- to work for me in describing the West. I could not explain to Joe how we are so dang "special" and that the landscape we encounter is like a birthright, and that it changes us, deeply and forever.
And because I couldn't find words to describe Western Writing and Western Writers, I entered what my friends Daniel and Joanna have coined the eternal land of the Base Moron Mind. I became it's President.
Joe even sat there, patiently, for a really long time. Northeastern men I've learned are not normally patient. And as he was waiting for an answer, he wasn't mocking me, nor was he trying to be confrontational. Hee wasn't doing anything other than fielding curiosity, engaging my mind, and at least at that minute, finding that as he knocked on the door of enlightenment, no one was home. My mind, along with my paper, seemed headed toward foreclosure. The western writer real estate bubble had burst. It was all downhill.
I finally sweat through some references to big sky and open space, tripped on a few references to universal themes of limited resources and don't fence me in, but all in all I failed him. I could offer Joe all kinds of crazy about our no boundary writers and my fellow meth'd out, trailer parked, laid-off mill worker residents but none of it made a lick of sense in this context. This was just inner city repackaged as downward high elevation mobility.
I never made it to referencing the inspiration of our vast landscape, that a sky like ours frees visions of possibility because I was so embarrassed to realize I'd become so good at being a base moron the words failed me. I sat there blinking away brain freeze and as much as I wanted to blame it all on the ice cream, I could not. I'd hit a writers block of my own making, and it was as tall and impenetrable as the mountains surrounding my home.
Joe saved my butt that night. He, in as gentle a way as any northeastern dude can, called intellectual bullsh*t on my Ansel Adams inspired happy dance. Joe confronted the lazy, taking-it-all-for-granted writer within me, and said in no uncertain terms, this is only going to fly if a guy like me, whose never been there, will see it as well. Show me the West. Don't show me the moron.
Last weekend as I walked along Seattle's Waterfront with a former leatherbar drink slinger-- a handsome dude named Alex-- he stops suddenly and announces, "That's my rock." Pointing toward Mt Rainier, which after the longest winter, finally emerged to model the new post Memorial Day "White on White" Collection, I recognized the "rock" Alex pointed toward as representing no mere pebble. It dominates everything, holding more ice than any other surface in the lower 48 and rising over 14,000 feet from sea level, this is among the most massive protrusions, breaking open the sky from earth's hostage and towering over all of the Seattle harbor and the Northwest. At sunset the mountain casts a shadow so vast that the peak's form darkens the sky clear to the Montana Bitterroots, and like a sundial targets Pendleton, OR, Moscow ID, and Washington's Palouse country.
The Poet Denise Levertov became so moved by Mt Rainier that she moved from England to final out her days in Seattle, yet so transfixed by the mountain, she would only gaze on it from a distance. She feared that to approach it's summit up close would ruin the effect and diminish the power of the mountain. I wonder how many people move all the way across the world, or the country, to live under the shadow of a mountain? Alex did. Denise did.
So see? I do owe Joe. And I did, somehow eventually scrape up my pride and continue on with that paper, and have since penned several other essays. It was if Joe he was always sitting besides me, challenging me as he looked over my shoulder, daring me as the words passed from my windshield to a restless mind-- only to land on a sterile computer screen to tell him by showing. I worry through revision after revision if Joe would get it. If I've painted the picture in words. As I attempt to tell the world about this amazing place, the west. I hear him, asking gently, "Oh yeah? And tell me again, what's so special about this? How about you show me. Let me see it on the page. Don't assume I can read between the lines. I want to feel what you feel."
The best way I can think to honor this wonderful man, and the gifts he gave me, is to write the west in this, my ode to him. My final farewell to Joe.
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