Population 485 (17 page)

You belong to the land first. From there, your allegiances grow more fluid. I assemble anecdotes in the hope that I might wave my hand over the characters and say,
These are my people
. This is specious yap. One can hardly lay claim to one person, let alone an entire community. To say
my people
is to imply
my people
will be grateful for the dispensation, when in fact they might be wishing you’d just mow your lawn and get the rusty truck out of your driveway before it sinks through the blacktop completely. The term is presumptive, simultaneously implying ownership and membership. And how to establish standards of inclusion? Geography? And if so: one city block, the county, the northwestern portion of the state? Occupation? Avocation? Hobbies? Favorite beer? Loyalties wax and wane on a sliding scale. From noon ’til three on Sunday, Packer fans are of one accord; by evening they are flipping each other off in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

Unity delineates in a thousand ways. Red-blooded American conservative vs. red-blooded American liberal. Country vs. rock. Ford vs. Chevy. When the fire siren wails, two dozen of my neighbors and I act as one, on behalf of the community—
my people
acting on behalf of
our people
—but once the trucks are parked and the reports are filed, we diverge, filtering back to our personal tics and politics. Under the yellow helmets, we quite literally put our life on the line for each other. Out of uniform, we cancel each other’s vote on the new school referendum, question each other’s taste, engage in activities that would get us kicked out of each other’s respective homes. At some point, unity becomes utterly dependent on civility.

While living in Eau Claire, I was cast in a community theater play directed by a man named Laurent. Laurent grew up in a small rural town. He was gay and part Indian. Recess was a gauntlet of grim taunting. We often discussed the milieu of our childhood—battered pickups, bass fishing, guys bragging up their tractors—and at some point Laurent would puff up his chest, affect a hilarious heterosexual swagger, and declare, “Them’s m’people!” It was an entertaining bit. But it raises the question: If your people exclude you, are they still your people? What if they ignore you? In the wake of the controversy involving Indian spear-fishing rights in northern Wisconsin, a fellow over on Pine Street slapped a bumper sticker on his truck that said, You Spear Walleye, We Boycott Casinos. I guess we all know how that worked out. Take a run on up to Turtle Lake, or the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation, and check out the casino parking lots. Packed. The call to abstain has not been heeded. In fact, it is unlikely it can be heard over the ringy-ding of the slots. I should mention that the man with the bumper sticker is part Ojibwa. The singer John Prine has stated publicly that it’s a big ol’ goofy world.

With all due respect to the lady who wanted to put me on a float, I have a pretty good sense of the scope of my renown. I get some after-dinner laughs at the annual firefighters dinner, I make the odd regional public radio appearance, and though I blush to say it, my recent reading of an essay on the joys of spring was quite a hit with the Bloomer Women’s Club. I am a tiny fish in a puddle of a pond. In short, I am not float-worthy.

Still, I am as susceptible to ego as the next self-absorbed noodler, and honesty compels me to cop to the fact that there have been times—after, say, a particularly successful appearance on the Moose Country 106.7 FM morning show—when I posit myself as the most accomplished writer this village has ever produced. My ego was in need of a little tuning then, the day I stopped at a local yard sale, bought a New Auburn commemorative centennial plate for two bucks, flipped it over, and while reading the little mini-history printed on the reverse, discovered I was about 125 years behind the curve. In 1875, the same year he founded this village, David W. Cartwright also found time to complete the 280-page best-seller
Western Wild Animals
. Or, more completely, a:

Natural History

of

Western Wild Animals

and Guide for Hunters, Trappers, and Sportsmen;

Embracing

Observations on the Art of Hunting and Trapping,

a description of the physical structure, homes, and habits

of Fur-bearing Animals and others of North America,

with general and specific rules for their capture; also,

narratives of personal adventure.

According to the back of the plate, the book enjoyed “a considerable reputation.” Life has delightful ways of keeping us humble.

Humility in this case being a moot point, I can tell you I have written nothing of “considerable reputation.” I did slap together a booklet of otiose homilies entitled
How to Hypnotize a Chicken (Plus 30 Other Ways to Liven Up Your Life)
in 1991, and, sadly, it sold well enough on the greater Chippewa County arts-and-craft fair circuit that it still pops up now and again to haunt me at local readings, but there is little danger of your running across it in the stacks, of say, the Hancock Natural History Collection at the University of Southern California.
Western Wild Animals
you’ll find in the SK41.C33s.

Overtly and covertly, we stake out our persona. The Most twins load their pickups down with firewood, then park in front of Tugg’s Bar so everyone knows they’ve been hard at it. Some locals advertise their virility on bug deflectors. Once I saw a grim-faced man in a greasy ball cap hunched over the wheel of a four-door rust bomb with a bumper sticker that said, I Like My Whiskey on Ice and My Women on Fire. This is evidence of profound self-knowledge and deranged optimism. And not so far removed from the practice of strewing back issues of
Harper’s
across the coffee table. Guilty, by the way. The spring issue of
Varmint Hunter Magazine
provides the necessary balance and cultural ass-covering.

Here, there is always the danger that you will lose control of your persona. To pass the time during the drudgery of housecleaning, I am in the habit of playing old country music albums and singing along at volume. Once, while dusting the living room and singing along to
The Best of Donna Fargo
, I got the feeling someone was watching me. I turned, yellow feather duster in hand, and found the town maintenance man peering through the front door. He had come to fix my water meter and had been banging on the door for some time. I felt a little silly. Then the music registered, and a chill went down my spine. What does the maintenance man think of this fellow, new to town, armed with a feather duster, and singing, at the top of his lungs, “I’m the hap-pi-est girl in the whole U.S.A.!”?

I am thinking maybe I should make a preemptive bug deflector move.

I tracked down a copy of the Cartwright book. A rare book dealer in Cleveland charged me an even hundred dollars for it. I have no idea if I got gouged. I claimed it as a business expense. I have never seen any photographs of Cartwright, but the title page of
Western Wild Animals
is faced by an engraving tagged with the caption, “David’s Return to Camp.” He wears a white beard and a flat cap, and he is striding down a wooded trail, a rifle in his right hand and a dead deer balanced over his left shoulder. In short, he looks like a forbidding version of the Quaker Oats man. A selection from the preface seems a continuation of the furrow in his brow:

He is…not a professional book maker, and he knows that it is only by practice that there comes any great degree of perfection in any art or trade. What he gives you, he puts upon the basis of an experience of forty years, and gives it with that assurance that he believes should come of practical knowledge, as opposed to any hypothetical and visionary trash.

No dancing ’round the campfire with patchouli and rain sticks, then. All well and good. But here’s where my ears really pricked:

Since the author of this book claims for himself an incompetency to the task of putting it into shape, and the more exact wording of its pages, and has placed that part of the work into the hands of another, it is due to him to say that…

Just a cotton-pickin’ minute. Back to the title page.
Western Wild Animals,
etc., and etc.
By
David W. Cartwright. In much smaller print:
Written by
Mary F. Bailey. Turns out David W. had a ghost writer. Who did not live in New Auburn.

Perhaps I have a shot at reclaiming the Village Writer crown. On a technicality, but still.

I’m thinking maybe we’ll trim the float with some of that nifty silver foil.

The writer Thomas McGuane has said he worries about becoming “some horrid nancy with pink palms.” Growing up on the farm, I spent enough time on the wooden end of a pitchfork to keep my palms decently callused. The five summers I worked as a ranch hand in Wyoming, when I was at the peak of my limited mechanical powers, when I could swap out a spun bearing, or weld up my own sickle bar, I had laborer’s hands. Scabbed knuckles, thickened fingers, the palm-side nicks and whorls stained an indelible black. Your hands feel good like that. Sturdy and durable. Like you can handle things. I stop typing and rotate my hands outward. The dreaded pink palms. McGuane is grateful that years of cattle roping have given him a crooked thumb, enlarged knuckles and rope burns. I need to fight a fire. The water and soot and the canvas hoses leave my hands roughened and swollen. My fingernails become outlined in black. For a few days, I can put my hand out for change at the Gas-N-Go without shame.

Rough hands are a comfort. Like jeans and old boots. I love to attend poetry readings, to skulk in the dark, skimming words from the smoke. (Riffing on a line by Jim Harrison, I find smoke-free poetry readings the moral equivalent of chamomile near beer.) The right little conglomeration of words makes my heart pop open like a tulip, and no matter the venue or talent, you’re almost always going to get the gift of a good line in there somewhere. The whole scene makes me peaceful, although I throw a systolic spike whenever someone introduces a piece “given to me this afternoon.” As if poems drop from the sky pre-formed, like sparrow turds. In my experience, art is not to be awaited; it is to be chased down, cornered, and beaten into submission with a stick. This belief correlates to Tom McGuane’s and my worrying about our hands. Working-class prejudice never quite shakes the idea of art as frivolity, and frivolity has pink palms.

When Barry Lynn was a boy, he racked tobacco in North Carolina. The fieldwork made him hardy, and gave him a man’s hands, but he was never like the other boys, and childhood was not easy for a boy with no appetite for mud or baseball. He speaks fondly of an aunt, who even then, even in Carolina before the First World War, understood the boy was different. She’d sneak him bits of lace and ribbon: “pretties,” he called them. Like a scattering of bright feathers left by a flown bird, the pretties implied other worlds.

Barry is eighty-nine years old now. For the last two decades, he and his younger partner, Michael Doran, have been teaching and performing modern dance in a weathered schoolhouse up a dead-end road just off Highway 27, south of Ladysmith, Wisconsin. The area runs heavy to fishing, hunting, and logging, and the surrounding townships are salted with poverty and backwoods scrabblers. The studio sits at the edge of an abandoned farmstead, a lily amid a stand of pulp. It is an anomaly only if you think art belongs somewhere else.

The first time I met Barry, he was eating salad at the Old Country Buffet. With his velour top and sandals, his longish snowy locks, his shoulder bag, and his eyeliner, he was an octogenarian sprite among a herd of all-you-can-eat size XXXL roughnecks sausaged into size XL NASCAR T-shirts. Michael was wearing a blousy, tie-dyed purple pirate shirt with matching long-tailed bandana and tasseled neck pendant. The NASCAR crowd didn’t pay much attention. Disinterest is a form of tolerance.

I go see Barry and Michael dance sometimes. It isn’t far. Over the river and through the woods, basically. My knowledge of dance doesn’t extend much beyond what I can find in my copy of Microsoft Bookshelf ’95 and a
New Yorker
profile of Merce Cunningham, but sometimes, when Barry is moving to the rhythm of his breath or Michael arcs a finger just so, I want to run down to the local tavern league softball field and say, drop your gloves, your bats, your beer, and come and see this astounding, delicate thing! There are times in that studio when I feel the husk fall right off my soul.

When you come from rural stock, there is this tendency to overplay the rube. To swipe your toe in the dirt and reckon, well, shoot-fire, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no babies. Or shake your head in wonderment at the fripperies of city life. It’s a knee-jerk thing. I catch myself doing it all the time. It’s also a cop-out. Goodness knows, the worlds of politics, art, and intellect provide targets so obese you can nail ’em in the ass with aspersions cast from clear back here in the Chippewa Valley, but any behavior that excuses us from acknowledging the complexity of human experience resides one slim remove from smug disdain.

A little while back, I happened to be passing through Appleton, Wisconsin, on the same day the philosopher Martha Nussbaum was at Lawrence University to deliver the lecture “Global Duties: Cicero’s Problematic Legacy.” What the heck. A guy finds himself a block and a half from a woman described as the nation’s preeminent classicist, feminist, multiculturalist, and humanist, he figures he can stop to listen for an hour. I am not overplaying the rube when I say I understood only about 20 percent of what Ms. Nussbaum said. I felt more than 20 percent edified, however, and resumed the drive home with a sense of intellectual invigoration, which lasted maybe six miles, whereupon I began to mope over the idea of the rubber meeting the road as it relates to the gulf between theory and application. Part of the blame lies with intellectuals who are unable or unwilling to convey their ideas in terms that will play down to the café. But anyone who sits in that café and dismisses complexity by reveling in their own simplicity is no less pretentious. Civilization itself depends on complication. As a dyed-in-the-slop farm boy, I find I have an almost atavistic urge to poor-mouth anything more theoretical than a bag of feed. I have come to realize this is not always attractive.