BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 50

PART FOUR

DAVID

MARCH 2012

DAVID

Entrusted with three year old David, his two sisters walk him through the ten acre wasteland where the cattle roam freely, walk him past the fence that separates it and the oat field, walk him to the pump at the lowest spot in the field. There, excess ditch water from the ridge above collects, after first flowing down forty yards of corrugations—down the hillside, slowly offering the oats a drink. The wastewater ponds around a sink well, an open pipe eighteen inches in diameter. It drains any water reaching higher than twelve inches, letting it find its own way into subterranea and keeping it from inundating and destroying the pump's inner workings. The basin bottom is nearly dry though small pools remain, each crowded with tadpoles. The soil floor has started to crack, almost symmetrically. As the polygons shrink, the edges curl, the separating crevices slowly spreading. The white surfaces of the tesserae feather out at their edges, reveal a chocolate-colored underlying layer, moisture still evident.

David sees the broken soil floor and freezes, refuses to go on. He prepares his body to scream though he wants not to, lifts one foot and then the other, again and again, faster, faster, his body demanding action. He has seen ice crack and break, he has seen glass crack and break, he assumes the cracking earth will break, too, and cannot imagine what lies beneath save an endless sensation of falling.

The sisters laugh at his tantrum, at his reticence, at his fear, at his relative lack of language preventing him from revealing anything more than a primal emotion. This fright they recognize. The oldest sister walks on the dry pond surface, assuming David doesn't want to get muddy. The other jumps up and down on it to show he won't sink and get dirty. The older girl kicks at a polygon, breaking its white surface away from the moist undercarriage. He calms, still holding his youngest sister's hand, steps gingerly into the area with one foot and presses down, still expecting the surface to give way as ice does to reveal water—of a depth unknown. Nothing happens so he brings his other foot forward. He jumps up and down, laughs, but will always, foremost, remember his terror.

Consciousness is a terrain. One encompassing both time and space, two concepts Immanuel Kant claimed as the only two we were born with. Those two things provide a framework on which to attach all other ideas, words and experience. When-ness and where-ness, for Kant, form the base of our existence.

I never taught Kant or, for that matter, any philosophy class, my master's degree in American Studies a makeshift thing that makes me an academic jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Architecture. Religion. Social Trends. I am an itinerant. Or was (I may not get another job). I am not unlike the Western settler who, because of meager means and isolation, needed to know how to do many things and consequently knew too little about way too much.

My work history sprawls across four states. It spans two and a half decades teaching whatever a university found itself in need of. I am the fire extinguisher encased in glass, set in every dean's office wall, 'IN CASE OF EMERGENCY' written above me. This earned me the moniker of 'the peculiarist' from Bud Wigginton, an Oxford wannabe-professor who dressed and acted the part without actually ever visiting that university.

I taught classes without any expertise to do so, sometimes fudging the truth to secure a position. But I was also coerced by deans anxious to fill spots vacated by death, dysfunction or misdeed. Among my classes: "Grammar Hacks," "Fringe Art History," "Sociology of the Workplace," "Wartime Psychological Afflictions," "Lost American Religions," "The American Flaneur," and a slew of introductory classes normally reserved for Teaching Assistants—or used by malicious department heads to punish full professors.

That resume didn't get me this job as Bingham County museum curator, an inflated title for what I'll be doing. I wasn't even the best applicant—I didn't apply. Instead, I received a serendipitous phone call that coincided with a—how do I say it, what's the word used these days for 'nervous breakdown'? The museum adjoins my just-deceased (one year ago) mother's property, where she lived for her last thirty years. It is just a mile southwest of the farm I grew up on for the twenty years before that. You might say I'm well acquainted with the area, if not its history. I assume I'll be getting acquainted with that.

The County Commissioner, a grade school classmate, made that call to me. We hadn't spoken in decades. Maybe I was the only one he knew with a college degree. Disarmed, I accepted the job offer, having just been the first to fall in a university job-cutting binge.

My new job? Manning a newly installed trailer full of County artifacts: a barbed wire collection, maps, papers, and eventually, according to Doyle, a selection of farm equipment, a display of native plants, birds, animals, insects—and whatever else pops up in his head. It's not a well thought out enterprise, which fits me just perfectly. And it is, after all, the museum's first year operating.

I will have to deal with the public, but how many visitors will I have given the museum's location (twenty miles from Blackfoot's ten thousand people) and its minimal importance (who, in the era of the instant, cares about obscure rural history). Doyle has mentioned giving tours, which can only mean viewing places where forts, old schools, homesteads once were but no longer are. This requires storytelling and imagination—not a talent I have, just ask any of my students, but I can fake it. There just won't be many return customers.

The County, officially less than a century and a half old (the first white men came through a half century before that), has already lost trace of the original European trappers. The cowmen that came after them didn't leave much, either in document or infrastructure. The first schools have been taken by time and climate's erosive effects. The earliest settlers died long ago, their homes rarely lasting a generation beyond them. The flats where the cattlemen grazed are inundated by a reservoir. Fort Hall, briefly the home of the Hudson's Bay Company, was swept away in 1862 by a five hundred year flood. The stage routes and the Oregon Trail sub-routes are plowed under, maps and surveys the only means of locating them with any accuracy. Early fauna? Pushed out. Early flora? Locally extinct. Native population? Put on a Reservation.

I won't introduce the idea to Doyle or include it in a display, but the museum is about terrain and time, about consciousness. Its artifacts are just the proverbial tip of a conceptual iceberg that, if struck, would reveal individuals who passed through a particular area in a particular time, an eclectic bunch of people from dozens of countries with equally eclectic motives—desperation, greed, wanderlust, and curiosity among them. Entrepreneurs wanting to make their mark or to grab wealth. Settlers—some tired of poverty and attached to hope, some with appetites they thought might be sated—wanting to prosper but satisfied to just survive. A host of others just flitting from place to place and moment to moment, moving like water to the nearest low spot until a yet lower spot—one more easily exploited—developed.

Kind of like me.

***

"Crack-ler," the female voice says. It blasts from the Pingree post office window, ending my staring bout with a sprawling floor to ceiling mural that fully covers the C-shaped foyer. I turn to see Glenola, though when I calculate how many years have passed I know she can't be the postmistress here of fifty years ago. A granddaughter, perhaps, bearing the same visage and rotundity but lacking her smoker's voice.

"Crack-ler," she repeats, a little louder this time. "It's intentional. It's not worn out like it looks. Though it is worn out." She laughs. "Ain't we all." She regains her thought stream. "It's an artist thing."

I nod. "Ahh," I say. Since it will sound like I'm lying, I won't explain that I taught about craquelure (not crackler) in a community education class—I had been given free rein to modernize art history when, inconveniently, the scheduled instructor died. I ran across the technique in my hurried preparation, and since my teaching method concentrates on anomalous material, I utilized craquelure, a (very) minor subset of the art world, to take up a full hour of class time. The alternative, droning on about Dutch Masters or the Renaissance Era, didn't feel attractive. I wasn't asked to teach the class again.

Craquelure—cracking, basically—is the effect seen when centuries-old oils irregularly dry over time. A few modern (and minor) painters intentionally picked up craquelure as an interesting twist for their work. It is no more a gimmick, I told my skeptical class of four, than pointillism, which uses dots to fool the eye. Or tromp l'oeil, that three-dimensional effect that makes a two dimensional painting look 3-D—a painting of a door looks so like a door that you might try to walk through it. They didn't buy my argument but all answered the question correctly on the test.

Potters sometimes fire their works to create a similarly shattered look. Rice paper, when crumpled and then painted upon with watercolors, likewise exhibits effects that mimic craquelure. The technique jars the viewer's perception, gives it uncertain depth, taking him from what he expects.

"It's our claim to fame," the Glenola lookalike says. "The CCC did it in the thirties. Once a year a van load of the college students comes out to see it." She pauses, waiting for me to take another look. When I do, she says, "While they're here they study the store, too. Tyrolean something-or-other architecture. Ranch, maybe. I forget the exact style. Something to do with the Germans, there were lots of Germans here early on." She sets her substantial forearms on the counter, reminding me, in both color and size, of the local butcher's quartered pigs that hung from his shop's rafters. "Now, what can I do for you?"

I introduce myself, state my business: I need to get the museum a P.O. box. When I say my name, a voice from the farmer roundtable in the corner repeats it—at a decibel level aimed to draw my attention. John Walther. His voice, though gaining a gravelly undertone since I left decades ago, still carries an unbreakable, derisive character. The same as his brothers', cutting into all it touches. That belligerent burst removes the illusion that I might return to a place sans the baggage of its past—though I read "You Can't Go Home Again", the title proscription didn't take root. Here's the consequence of slow learning.

Upon entering I had espied the local wags against the wall but knew enough to ignore them. These men, like men in country stores anywhere in the nation up until smart phones dragged them away, wait like lions at the savannah watering hole. Today, I suffice as prey. "John," I turn and say, giving him the most subtle nod possible while still conveying no inclination to converse.

Lacking an appropriate response to his cue, he proceeds to plan B and gives my life synopsis, as he remembers it, to his entourage. I am in the defendant's stand, listening to a list of offenses that I'm about to be tried for. Alternatively, I stand in a seance penumbra, expecting to be conjured into action as any of my prior incarnations. Luckily, pseudo-Glenola has my forms ready to sign. "I'm Oleva," she announces. "We'll be seeing each other, I guess." She pauses. "Sorry about your mom. She was an elegant lady. Always dressed up, every time she came in. I loved her accent. Some people didn't understand her. I did."

"You're so kind, Oleva," I say, my smile weak. "I may have known your grandmother."

"Sure," she says. "If you grew up here, you knew her. I get that all the time."

I nod, turn away. "Gotta go," I tell John after he invites me to sit and participate in the morning lallygagging. "Things to do." I hurry toward the door.

"A man with a plan," I hear him say as I head out, a chime on the door indicating my parting.

***

A pretty poor Buddhist in terms of practicing, I nonetheless have garnered shards of wisdom from my Eastern readings—"letting go" being one of them. Still, memory clings to me, sticky as cellophane. Events as minute as that just experienced linger long beyond their expiration dates. Old faux paus resurface decades after they occurred. And no recent action, however trivial, escapes recapitulation—I compare what I did to what I should have done, measure what I said with what I should have said. Remembering—and its bastard offspring regret—is an exhausting process.

I pass the abandoned railroad depot where the Walther boys got cut up and ended Joe's Bar's post-sixties magic. The depot was, like the store and its twin—a hotel that burned sometime in the 1980s—built a century ago in a time of surplus enthusiasm. It then, after the auto subsumed both horse and rail, served as the local bar. I haunted that bar for—let's see, three years? four?—so it emanates enough of my past to actually provoke a smell. Beer. Cigarettes. Dust. But also something else, something yet to be named.

My mind strays to the post office mural, which as a child I walked by hundreds of times on the way to the pop cooler. I'd paid the mural no heed—it was just part of the framework of consciousness, static background scenery. There were more important concerns: soda pop. And maybe ice cream if my dad felt generous.

Older now, wrenched from the context of youth but returning with a new perspective, I see the mural freshly. The awkwardness of its scenes—awkward but skillfully portrayed—likely came from government-commissioned restraints: a list of micromanaged demands by those lacking artistic vision and ability. The artist had been compelled, I conjecture, to include Indians, cowboys, farmers, canal-building, the locally grown crops, a cow, a buffalo, a deer, a bear, sagebrush and, of course, the Big Southern Butte and its twin siblings to the northeast. And that's just the items coming immediately to mind. It couldn't have been easy to maintain a cohesive perspective, a proper scale being impossible to maintain with so many disparate components. Consequently, the artist (so I imagined) diverted the viewer's attention from incongruities with a diversionary tactic, craquelure. He sought to break one aesthetic discrepancy, that between size and distance, by creating a more encompassing one.

Or so I determined. I like to theorize. It's a trait born in places and times of dearth and isolation—which is how I would describe my upbringing.

Off the short side street and out on the highway, a tractor passes. A green John Deere (as opposed to its cheaper, lighter, red International counterpart, the two brands the farmers' equivalent of the Ford-Chevy dispute)—pulling a disk that spreads over its full half of the road plus a little more. The oft-repeated joke was that if you drove a disk out on the road a month before it could be used, every farmer within miles would head to the shop and gather the laborers, who would then prepare equipment around the clock, thinking themselves already behind.

The LDS Church on the east side of the state highway, on the west Grace and Ernie Johannson's place—an ironic twist, a stark dichotomy, to just a few of us insiders, the Johannsons having sold the land to the Church but themselves being anything but Mormon. Grace, in fact, had to petition the Church to get excommunicated, the only way to get her name off the rolls. Their boy, John, married my sister, and I worked on his farm off and on for a few years during a time I'd like to forget, but rarely a day goes by that I don't start a conversation with him—he passed away, a tragic story in itself—that brings me back to that era.

A minute and a mile later, a semi truck, tarped and filled with potatoes, heads into town for either processing into fries or to be sorted for fresh use. Half a mile further another truck bearing the same logo waits in a muddy parking lot to be loaded. I'll be finding out the market status by osmosis—it seeps into any conversation, the current potato hundredweight price expressed in the level of optimism or pessimism. It's the rural stock ticker, and everyone from school teachers to car dealers watch it.

Each time I return here, I notice fewer unfarmed areas remaining. The trend approaches its end—so little desert land remains that it nears extinction. Fences, ditches, homesteads—little evidence of the past exists. I once considered the area akin to an English countryside. Farmhouses, small fields and interspersed copses of trees. But that pastoral ambience has morphed into a blanket of quadrangles and circles. Measured by the quantity of differences, it appears more desert-like than it did before civilization appeared—the dearth of diversity is reminiscent of the barren Salt Flats.

Fifty years back, the original arid landscape, its fauna and flora, held on in odd places unreachable by furrow irrigation, on knolls too rocky to farm and too expensive to remove. They were the last refuges of sagebrush, rabbitbrush, a few wildflowers and other species (including the invasive cheatgrass, a latecomer). They survived as a reminder of what had been and what, with a couple slip-ups, could again be.

Now, all is overtaken by the sprinkler era's geometric needs—a circle for a pivot, a square or rectangle for a wheel line. Elevation no longer plays the part of antagonist, pumped water having kicked gravity's insistence down the road. The rockiest areas, once forbidding, are being removed, no longer a pocketbook impediment—just another tax deduction. Canals have been straightened wherever possible. Century old trees have been ripped out or are dying from lack of water from a nearby open ditch. The landscape is an abstract painting, just geometry and broad swaths of color. The change, dramatic to me, probably seems slow to those dwelling here, receding to the background just as the post office mural did for me. That mural artist would have had an easier time painting the current landscape.

Another art term comes to mind from that one-off night class. Pentimento. Painting over an old painting, a new fresco over an old one. The original depiction hides behind the new artwork. You see it in the old countries where a new regime has to piss on the post to establish their territory, make the present all their own by reconfiguring the images on old frescos. Simultaneously remembering and seeing as I drive, I get that pentimento sense—haunting to the generation that witnesses both images but to others meaning nothing at all.

I say I'm not superstitious but I still rub my figurative rosary beads: a nod to the Big Southern Butte off to the distant northwest. Without that talismanic gesture, memory might surprise me with sudden fury or immediate shame, either as powerful as the volcanic forces that created the cone-like feature. The coupled emotions attach to the same incident—or series of incidents—and, though they can be teased apart to elicit understanding, they can't bring forth forgiveness—either for her, if fury arises, or for myself, if shame erupts. Understanding the rites undertaken by the religious acolyte and the superstitious, I thus offer the Butte my attention, my virtual offering of food to the ancestors or to God. We are, all of us, warding off unwanted, threatening emotions. We use what tools we have.

I make that cursory sacrifice, make it the sacred, religious background for John Chaney's profane voice. His appearance has punctured the nostalgic purity I had indulged in regarding my return—I imagined a place cleansed of its distasteful elements. Against all reason suggesting otherwise, I believed my return, to the spatial context of an unpleasant past, would be stripped of destructive power by time's passage.
 Here I am, though, back in the jumble, driving past Stecklein's, past Hoagland's, past Edwards', past a place now erased that was but a ghost of a house even fifty years ago. I come to the end of a field I plowed, disked, planted, harvested, irrigated—not once but many times. A half mile to my east, up on a hill, my parents' place, soon the County's, stands, a doublewide trailer alongside a cabin that was rescued a century ago from an encroaching reservoir.

To my right a single-wide trailer stands. My home for the next year, a dwelling doubling as the County's homage to its past. I suspect omniscient onlookers might pity me, but my one-year contract is short enough for me to bask in irony. I am accustomed to playing the fool, and like the court jester can transport myself outside the context, view it as theatre.

In the small gravel lot, rutted from construction vehicles challenging winter's melt, the Commissioner leans against his pickup, awaiting me. His Australian Shepherd has its front paws on the side of the pickup bed, its morning thrill—harassing cows during feeding time—mostly done. Doyle lives just up the road a mile or so, making it convenient for him to run his cattle on the bottoms and on the Reservation not far away. I suspect the museum is his pet project, a little diversion. It's also intended to honor his relatives—his great-great-grandfather was instrumental in building a major canal, the United.

He opens my pickup door before I can shut off my outfit. "Buddy!" he says. "Long time no see! I didn't know if you'd make it."

He shakes my hand as I emerge from the truck—I was assuming rural men weren't huggers yet, and I appear to be right. I smell hay leaves on his clothes, hay silaging in the pickup's bed—fermenting where hay fell, got wet, froze, thawed, repeated the process throughout the winter months. I remember the odor well, remember it fondly. "Commissioner," I say, exaggerating reverence. What have I done, I ask myself. The same question I've asked a dozen times over the years, each time, in fact, that I entered a new milieu and found it short of the scenario I'd imagined.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston