BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 62

MAY 2012

DAVID

I am becoming my father. A screw is loose. But what the hell. It's in my mind, the only way to get it out is to let it roll out of the first hole it finds.

I park above the United Canal to the side of Highway 39, get out. I look furtively around me as if I am committing a wrong. It's a habit I have to live with, I won't be outgrowing it now.

The membrane starts here.

I'm not stupid. I understand that no such membrane—the skin of a psychological bubble, more likely—exists, that it's just a subjective impression. But—what if communal consciousness lingers and the past holds beyond its present, if when it burns it leaves a smoke that may not dissipate for decades or centuries?

I noticed the boundary decades ago. My breathing had altered. I inhaled more deeply, a general ease seeped in. The changes mildly startled me. I started nosing around in my head, an alerted retriever on the trail of a pheasant. I could only find accretions of personal memory. The tensions that institutions feed, the erosive qualities of social interaction, the alteration of local space—buildings are further apart once you get outside the membrane, traffic lessens, the visual scope widens, in the winter the roads are icier, ignored by the County government. All of these things contributed to leave reminders, I surmised, that translated into physical reactions, the sensation of a membrane separating one place from another.

It was comforting to be eased after passing that border, but upon reflection it became discomfiting: how susceptible had I been to the habits of urban life; did my rural upbringing determine, like a form of social DNA, my existence, my self? Those questions begat the bigger question: just what was a self, my self—the part stripped of outside influences or instead the sum of them? If the latter, was it really so unformed, so ephemeral—so weakly bordered?

Out of the truck, I walk to the canal bank, but traffic, minimal as it is, takes my attention, makes me self-conscious. I decide to walk north, upstream—there's a home to the west on the hill, a home to the east at the bottom of the slope, and I hope those living in them aren't like me: too easily disturbed by the presence of strangers. In less than a quarter mile I come to the United's First Terminus in sight of the railroad bridge—I had never seen the term until I read the Canal engineer reports Doyle left —courtesy of his ancestors' holdings. It's quieter here, the traffic muffled and the sound of the canal's rushing water a comforting lull. I can just barely see the top of the Big Southern, the rising elevation of the nearby hill obscuring the Butte's lower portions.

I stop, take a reading of my inner sensations, step here, step there, like a boy on a school sidewalk at a line that delineates a game's place of safe and not-safe. It's a watched pot, though, because it never boils. After repeated attempts I—correctly—feel like a fool and make my way back to the pickup. Even if the membrane existed, it would do so stochastically, feathering out in some places and retreating in others.

Lacking scientific mapping, I still have a mental map of the territory. A more visceral one of its contents. These two maps, as if painted on water, sometimes violently roil and at other times are calm, their surfaces occasionally so glassy as to induce you to walk across them.

Our school district, Snake River, was the central component inside the imagined membrane. The district should have been named The United, because it was a receptacle of the culture dragged in along with that Canal's construction: the Mormon sense of superiority, its siege mentality, its clubbiness. Less evident to a stranger but acutely obvious to anyone involved, its omnipresent doubleness: presenting a public face while acting out a private one. That trait of inauthenticity occurs in all of us who deal with multiple contexts—we dress, speak, conduct ourselves one way at the bar, another at the workplace and yet another at church, and suffer a consequent dissonance when the ways overlap. But Mormons, it seemed, felt no such dissonance in presenting multiple masks, seemed in fact to cherish it, polish it, making every interaction with them a suspect, tiring exchange. My mother recognized this trait in Mormon men who she called "oily"—a mistranslation, I'm sure, of a German word but her meaning clear: smiling faces sometimes tell lies.

The borders of the school district, while embodying the United Canal's spirit, extended beyond the Canal's physical coverage. Due to population pressure (how do you pass on an acreage to multiple children and keep it financially viable?) and the need for bigger farms, the United's people had spread desert-ward, toward Taber when sprinklers were invented—over a half century after the United's first shovelful was moved. They weren't the first claimants trying to conquer the desert's aridity, but the earliest dry farmers, of disparate ways and communities, disappeared decades before the Mormons appeared, leaving hardly a physical trace. I assume a membrane exists with their pasts contained inside it, too, as a metonymic nugget of all their hopes, dreams and despairs.

The desert provided room for us teenagers to roam in our cars. We drove the section line roads, their intersections at mile intervals, drove the two Arco Highways, more often the less-traveled older one. Both cut a diagonal across the desert, southeast to northwest, the old version hugging the Mackay Branch railroad, a ninety-mile spur which skirted the Big Southern's north side.

Twenty-some miles out on the old highway, near the Butte, a little town called Atomic City straddled two counties having differing liquor laws, Bingham on the east Sunday-dry and Butte, to the west, Sunday-wet. The east end's bar closed on the Sabbath, the west stayed open, thumbing its nose at the Mormon influence—a lingering remnant of a century long animosity between Saints and Gentiles. There was so little business that the bar owner gladly sold to those of us who were underaged.

The desert area served as other entertainment, too. We busted snowdrifts in the winter when the wind made temporary dunes across the roadways. Like most gambling efforts, it was a losing proposition, drivers misjudging their chances and getting stuck. It was a long walk through icy wind and snow for help.

Desert sunsets drew an audience to watch the light show—often aided by alcohol or marijuana. After sunset, the stars and moon revealed themselves, with the Big Butte as a grounded, dependable companion. An abandoned, decrepit labor camp of twenty or thirty boxcars at Taber made an eerie sight when a full moon appeared, the light veering through the angular spaces between the deteriorating structures. My last time there was unforgettable and not one I want to remember—though it is one I can't forget.

Up the road a mile from the membrane's end there's a little cafe at Rockford, a speculator's town associated with the Skeen canal, operated by a cranky old lady. I can stop there and avoid recognition if I avoid the early morning hours. I frequented this cafe, when it was under different ownership, in the eighties for a time, got to witness a sample of the community: LDS farmers thinking themselves bad boys for slipping away for the demon cup of coffee, a few hired men, other random elements. Once, the unacknowledged king of the County, in agricultural terms, a Japanese-American farmer whose rise to one of the ten biggest farmers in the United States, stopped in and I wish I had a film of the moment just to check my impressions for accuracy.

The coffee mix turned from jostling herd to fawning sycophancy in an instant. I had of course seen children acting in such an animal manner but it was a first for me to see adults, who otherwise pretended to be self-made, rugged individuals, kowtowing so obviously to the surprise visitor. It appeared to me that the attention made him uneasy. My prejudice suggested he just wanted to stop at a local place to be a regular guy for a moment, but upon seeing that wasn't going to happen he made ready to leave from the moment he sat. I never asked anyone else to confirm or disconfirm my observations, but no one else would have been paying attention to his agitation, however slight, his hurriedness, however minimal, his deflection of conversation, deft and "Japanese", as the other farmers would describe it. They were all interested in jockeying for attention, for position, not so unlike nursing piglets in a litter too numerous for the available teats.

The cafe shares the townsite with a hardware store that hangs on by a thread, and there's a mill with granaries and a fertilizer outpost across the highway. I went to the grade school, fourth through sixth grade, here but it's been gone for quite some time.

I stop for a cup, seeing no one parked outside, to get a feel of—just what, I can't say. I guess I'm just sucking in impressions. Sitting at an empty diner is the equivalent of meditation, though mindlessness rather than mindfulness better characterizes my activity. Situated on a stool alone at a counter makes everything still.

But then my mind is a field of startled geese, all aflight at once. The preliminaries of museum setup drop over me like a circus's Big Top canvas, its tent poles pulled. Reality is imposing itself.

I had wanted to convey the sense of each historical individual's depth, hoping to give museum visitors an intense, complete experience, provide a little depth and drama. But I am abandoning that lofty project. Big dream, little result. This is the way it always starts, this is the way it always dissipates.

Everyone already has a stereotype of the cowboy, the Indian, the settler, the trapper—I'll not convert them to change their views in a short museum stay. And, to be accurate, any alternative stereotype I made, if thought of as a map, would need insets that expanded particular features. Accustomed to phone screens, computer screens, television screens and their two-dimensional aspect, people aren't trained for that third dimensional depth.

Those insets would require further insets showing changes as time progressed. Within those insets more insets yet, differing for each individual. Buddhism's term, vijnana, best denotes this ever changing process, a "river of selves"—the person at this moment is not the person of the prior one, nor the one before that, ad infinitum.

A desert-dweller would have to object to Buddhism's river metaphor—his moments of consciousness are filled with space, he might argue, filled with time, so "desert of selves" better describes his experience. His sense of time's flow reveals itself in discrete parts—long stretches of open space, then SOMETHING; wide areas of time, then SOMETIME. Water, unlike the desert, evades such particularizing scrutiny, all of a river being visible but no separate piece of its current fully graspable.

Desert and river, I knew them both. The Snake's main channel flowed within thirty yards of my childhood home—I still dream of its banks overflowing, cutting into the road, into our homestead—but desert surrounded us. On areas too elevated to irrigate or too rocky to farm, the desert appeared like furtive predators or worms emerging after a storm, the random, mottled result keeping us aware of civilization's recentness. It was unavoidable to slip into an imagined, pre-historic past.

From across the highway a memory wafts in—I had ridden into the mill with my father, who was selling a load of grain. I must not have been school age yet, little enough to be terrified when we dropped the tailgate to let the load out to sift through a grate. Like a cattle guard, it rested on a pit, but a much deeper one, and the absence of solid ground sent me into a crazed frenzy. No wonder my father didn't spend more time with me

It was late in the fall when this occurred, long after most farmers had harvested. But dad was a tail-ender in many ways—he may have had an obsession, as I do, with peripheries in both time and space. He wasn't much of a farmer, either, again leaning toward the edge of the profession's practices, closer to the past than the present.

He wasn't avid about his calling. Had opportunity arisen to leave it he'd have taken it. Selling the farm, in fact, was a regular background topic in our home but no serious action was ever taken. Dad did once place an ad in a California newspaper, hoping to snare a dreamer, but he got no response—wrong wording, not enough effort. He would stop in town to speak to realtors after a particularly bad harvest, a rough work week, or a slackening of the milk price but no listing came of those meetings.

But a buyer chanced by when I was a senior in high school, asked how much. My father gave him what he thought to be an outrageous price, and the farm was sold in an instant. Life was one way one moment, a much different way the next. At the time it struck me as strange but not monumental, I barely noticed it. Now I think otherwise. It had its effect. It was, in a sense, an instant of syncope.

In a desertlike context moments are more precious, less disposable than those in an ever-changing river. Each possesses a more complete character. The new owner removed all indications of the desert by installing sprinklers. He eliminated any remnants of our existence, save the house, and established a new present that was wholly his own. We moved a mile away to our other property and watched the lobotomizing process at a short distance—the property I look at from the museum's front window.

The waitress fills my cup, nudges my attention with a question about the museum. News travels relatively fast—I imagine her asking 'who was that?' after one of my prior visits, and the regulars shuffling around like a host of private detectives ferreting out the answer. Oleva, down the road, may have provided it. I tell her it will be opening soon but not to expect a big bump in business. It's a joke she doesn't quite get, her expectations leading somewhere else, so I explain that I don't think I'll be too busy for some time.

She leaves me alone and I finish my coffee, leave a tip matching the price of my purchase.

***

At the trailer I take a break from Henry's papers, which I've been careless with. Countless coffee cup drips have left their mark on some, including the treasure map which I keep hoping will inspire me. It has developed a texture all its own from the repeated, if minute, dowsings—a kind of torture, were it animate.

A coughing fit overwhelms me and I can't seem to stop it, but after a spell it does sputter out, leaving me exhausted. I put on a jacket to go for a walk, get a little exercise and outside air. It seems to help. A quarter mile up to the highway and a quarter mile back every day, a half mile to McTucker Creek's head and a half mile back. 12, 13, 14—I catch myself counting my steps, a habit I can't overcome. It's a default mode, acquired from a decade moving sprinkler pipes.

From the age of fourteen to twenty-two I moved seven or eight thousand lines, each with thirty-two pipes, each of them requiring twenty-one paces—fifty feet—to move from one location to the next. That counting is imbedded in my brain. I used to get angry about its presence. In the University hallways, in a hotel lobby, on the Walmart parking lot, the count continues, imbedded in my psyche for a lifetime.

Once I return from my walk, get maybe a hundred feet from the front of the new deck, I look to its side, away from the parking lot. There, a scout project is nearly completed. One of Doyle's church troop members is getting a badge by installing bird houses. Juncos, finches, cedar waxwings—the boy has researched what size holes and houses that each species needs, has labeled for future viewers the name of the bird likely to nest. He has also installed bird feeders at each corner of the property, which I try to remember to fill, and the birds are taking turns at them. Species vie, individuals fight, too fast for me to identify what occurs. A blackbird occasionally hits the feeder, has a hard time staying upright, and a downy woodpecker keeps coming to sample the seed—I thought they only ate insects.

I wouldn't call it a fetish, but I have an affinity for parking lots and I'm acquiring a fondness for mine. I imagine much of that interest stems from hours at Humpty's Dump—some pseudo-scientist wrote that it takes five thousand hours of practice to become adept at a skill, and I believe I reached it there. Joe's' parking lot has something to do with it, too, and I know for certain I made the five thousand hours there. I won't make five thousand here, but Doyle has made it look good, gravel being close and cheap, a gift from the County. He claims he'll pave the lot soon. I have my doubts.

A parking lot is promise when it's built, a painful eyesore after failure—what can be more desolate than an empty lot or one surrounded and punctured by weeds? School parking lots mark potential, on the one hand, but suck attention when empty: something should be there, and something is not. A single child on a summertime parking lot speaks loudly of a specific kind of desolation and abandonment. If I see such a scene I have to look away.

The boy scout claims I might see tanagers, jays, grosbeaks, thrashers—I lived here for twenty five years and didn't know such birds existed. Robins, magpies, crows, various raptors—of these I was aware. And meadowlarks, which I heard just the other day for the first time in decades. 'David is a pretty little girly', Wulf said was its call, ridicule being a common tactic in our family.

The Humpty's Dump parking lot, though nothing but asphalt and fast food trash, discarded eight-track tape reels and broken beer bottles, seemed attractive, it altered my relationship to time by adding distractions which I mistook as possibilities. I have heard women joke about being drawn to anything shiny, but I didn't even need shiny, difference was enough. Ambush or pursuit—some of us toyed with both methods of hunting, some of us used only one.

Time's weightiness influenced me at that time, but so did my character—if I'm being honest. An example: I went on just two dates—that was enough. Getting wishes granted through a series of steps was unrewarding and difficult. Just as I had no idea of how to overhaul an engine, I lacked the skills of interaction between the sexes. Dating seemed more ordeal than exercise in joy or playfulness. It was a math problem.

Another character quirk, somewhat associated with my failure to launch—as it's now called: I liked working, disliked working for something—getting this for doing that seemed not just distasteful but greedy and manipulative. It still does. I have never gotten over it. In part, the weaselly aspect of climbing the academic ladder kept me (if I disregard my own character flaws) from tenure. As soon as this-for-that began, I shied away, headed for other parts.

But, I liked getting well enough. Or at least I liked receiving—getting seemed a factual, dull process, a long trudge through muck, whereas to have something surprisingly bestowed upon me elicited pleasure. Call it manna from heaven, no strings attached, no fine print to sour the gift. Get, by the way, derives from a word for prey—fodder for thought.

Randomly received pleasures are admittedly math, too, but of a looser, statistical sort. Not 'A plus B equal C', they instead inhabit the world of probability. You are, for instance, more likely to get what you want if you go after it than you are if you wait for it to simply appear. But that unlikeliness makes the latter more valuable—an exhibition of a law, supply and demand, from a different discipline.

I never had to teach economics, praise be to God.

Surprise derives from threat but also from success, drives us much more strongly than the trudging drudgery of mastering methods. Cheaters, gamblers and thieves don't get enrichment from their earnings of their respective pastimes but from their attendant surprises. Surprise drives garage sale junkies—a good deal's unlikelihood is a gift, a triumph over an opponent (I'm smarter than him!). A find makes them feel blessed, even sacred, gives them the impression of being on the path they were meant to follow, one without everyday life's typical friction.

Suddenly, right here before me, survival of the fittest shows itself, destroying my intellectual reverie: a small hawk swooping down, taking a small bird right off the feeder; the prey's feathers rise like a smoke ring and then drop slowly to the ground. The other birds scatter, but are soon back, their mourning period brief.

I need to refill the feeders already, I see, foraging must be tough at the moment—unless my visitors are all avian welfare cheats. I wonder if they prefer getting their sustenance or finding it given freely by me.

***

Today's tasks include setting in native plants out back. A local nursery made brass nameplates for each species and has given me directions for maintaining them. Though I grew up on a farm and then worked on a much bigger farm, I am not much of a farmer, so this should be interesting.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston