BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 76

JUNE 2012

DAVID

The marked site has my interest. Of all the things I might think about—my health, for instance, less so the annoyance of Kali leaking in from my past—this, the most trivial, has my attention. I am excited.

And then I excoriate myself.

This is a conundrum, and a greater one envelops it. It's hard to explain. Complicated. There is the "treasure", for starters, but wrapping it is my excitement about the site. There are those two levels of the problem, then the third: me squashing the excitement. It's like kneading bread, punching the past with the present to knock it down but still the dough rises.

All humans have an unsolved theme to their lives, a riddle akin to a Zen koan—'why is a mouse when it spins?' is a famous one. When solved, the koan propels one past the pains of everyday life into enlightenment. Our lives ARE koans, tearing at logic every minute. My koan? Just trying to verbalize it befuddles me. It is like trying to gift-wrap water. But isn't that life, inexplicable and slippery, two DNAs spiraling in opposition to each other? Let me start there, at the helices of my upbringing.

Though otherwise sane, my father echoed a trait common at the fringe—at the edge of society, the borders of a village, the cusps of accepted thought—by freeing his imagination of any tether. My mother reined him in when she could, her method to squelch all his urges and notions, the binary method of yes/no being the easiest method—and 'no' the more efficient choice of the two.

He insisted, for instance, that large boulders on my grandfather's farm were a meteor's remnants. Reading that bumblebee venom brought half a million dollars an ounce, he spent hours devising methods to collect it. The notion of perpetual motion fascinated him—a turn of the century contraption at Thousand Springs, which used a two hundred foot natural fall of water from a cliff to propel it back to the surface above it, tweaked my grandfather's imagination, and he passed it to his son, my father.

He "drew out" arthritis with a copper bracelet, bought alfalfa pills for his discomfort and suffered hives as a result. Populist books found their way to his bedside, talk radio wackos provided entertainment and just enough strangeness to pique his interest—and sometimes, his belief. My mother let his thoughts simmer but quickly quelled them if they threatened to escape into physical reality.

Her proclivities, mainly her need to throttle any possibility, may have stemmed from natural inclinations or, more likely, emerged as a result of her experiences. A second-class German in pre-Nazi Czechoslovakia, then propelled to status of ubermensch upon Hitler's arrival, she knew the effects of adrenalized ideas. When the Reich collapsed, in the war's rubble-strewn aftermath, she felt the fall from such heights. Scrambling for crusts of bread to survive, being the object of demonization, threatened by starvation should she make a single mis-move, wariness became the rule, not the exception, and she came to consider any instance of hope to be dangerous, therefore needing to be extinguished. 
 Marrying my father seemed a godsend, an answer to her own koan, until she came to impoverished Idaho, no improvement on war torn Germany—so she oft repeated. The following years—I was born eight years after she arrived—unloaded more disappointing events, even when dispersed in small increments diminishing any thought beyond survival.

When a family lives near poverty, when any moment poses a threat, any nonessential item becomes a taxing luxury. The nature of life being to acquire experience if not goods, all her children's instinctive urges and efforts, their wants and requests, were—as luxury—thus inherently burdens. "No," most efficiently ends such reaching, an occasional slap stops any resistance. In this way the nexus of hope and disappointment buried itself in my being—you might call it a Lamarckian evolution—, became the center of my world. An 'axis mundi" not unlike the Shoshone Sundance pole that provides the focal point of their ritual.

A child of the Depression, when nothing was thrown away and anything could be transformed into something usable, my father came up with the idea of retrieving and selling old bolts from the long abandoned equipment—hay rakes, mowers, combines, choppers—rusting in our yard. Those bolts were something-for-nothing, and there was a cavity in his consciousness aching to be filled by just that—manna, a gift from Heaven.

The bolts going to waste seemed a sin, seemed an opportunity, re-purposing them and earning money an illustration of life-changing magic. A man of few words and spare emotional display, the possible proximity of this "reveal", when the magician's rabbit comes out of his hat or the dove comes out of his sleeve, fully transformed him, as if it were taking him on a different life-path. His pace quickened, his alertness heightened, his interests widened and his attention lengthened. Now, when I see someone stricken in the manner he was, I shy away. I fear that standing too close to that cultishness might pull me in—some people, perhaps most, instead gravitate to such energy, eager to bask in its penumbra. Revival tents come in many forms, not all of them religious.

He floated the bolt idea sporadically, never in my mother's range of hearing, until on a still, hot day well into a dry, sweltering summer, when the air sang, the brittle grass further shriveled, the insects chirred, the sun hammered, and the power lines hummed—all of it a constant mosquito-like drill of monotony with no beginning or end—I took up his challenge. Unless you've been lengthily imprisoned, literally or figuratively, in unending stillness, in a place yielding no possibility, you won't understand the erasure of logic or the inclination to seize anything that moves. I was in such a place.

Perhaps I dwelt in a world of possibilities—at this stage of my life I can see that everyone always does—but none of them could be perceived from my position. To some degree, that was because I was already outside the flow of the societal present—I was of an earlier world, of a different way.

Born with the desire to help, to serve, to work, I was also born into a world that had evolved to one where not tasks but one's time provided a living. Ninety percent of the populace were entrepreneurs at the turn of the twentieth century, I have read, fifteen percent are now. This change, for me as for Marx, confused the meaning and dignity of labor. Living according to the needs of crops and livestock, which I learned, requires a different mode of being than living by the modern-day clock.

I never lacked energy to do. To make. I scoured borrow pits for pop bottles and cashed them in, trapped gophers and sold their tails to the ditch company, picked potatoes for ten cents a sack, but I did not understand selling blocks of my time: the hourly wage which made you servile for a period of hours. Somehow I knew this was a cage. A trap.

My mother would call that sensation torchlusspanic—"the fear of the gate closing'"—even as she berated the notion that working for wages was demeaning. Her use of the term, however, was exactly opposite its original meaning—finding oneself locked out when the medieval gates of the city closed. She applied it when we were chasing cows—not to when a cow realized it wouldn't get in but when it understood it wouldn't get out. She found it humorous, you could see a secret glee in her that otherwise you'd swear was missing.

My torchlusspanic, like the cows', came from the fear of being trapped inside, not outside. I knew one could quit a job—have that figurative gate close, but still open it at any time and leave— yet a transparent wall held me away from entering any new world I might not escape from. Furthermore, I knew my sense of duty, my willingness to commit, so if no one locked me in I would, subservient to virtue, do it for them. Even more importantly, I lacked the secret handshake, the proper demeanor, the right use of language, the correct clothing to move into a new milieu. All those things required to get from here, this context, into there, that one. I needed a yegg—a safecracker—to assist me, a mentor or a teacher, all which I lacked.

Had I assessed my father's enterprise as an outsider would, I would have seen that old bolts would never fetch the price of new ones. Particularly these, most of them being square nuts with square heads, some of them with carriage heads. Neither kind appeared on the market.

As an outsider, too, I would have considered the difficulty of freeing a rusted bolt from decades of inertia, stopped before I started. But buried in desperation, having experienced repeated failure and facing a futureless future, trying (rather than not-trying) seemed a solution, a way out—I see now how the destitute resort to crime, how they fall into insanity: anywhere, to them, is better than here; anything is better than nothing.

I approached the task outside the regular framework of logic, then, embracing possible rather than probable, attacking the unlikely with willpower, having framed it as a conduit from a lingering despair to some sort of promise, however minute. I knew desperation well, had scouted its corners thoroughly, but I considered my father's offering, though a futile one, to be a possibility. It only took three bolts for hopelessness to leak back in, for possibility to leak back out—aptly, the word futility evolved from the Latin word for leak.

I'm looking toward the very place, a half mile to the east, where that shaming event occurred. After having, about twenty-five years ago, made peace with my somewhat shapeless koan. Not given by a Zen Master, it requires me both to ask and to answer it—by just knowing it rather than solving it. I am once again far too close to it. In it. Minute hopes slip in, censure takes over, and they join failed wishes, stoppered plans, denied requests of the past—but also join a secondary (or is it tertiary?) wrapping set of experiences: the over-reactions to failure, the assimilation of self-punishment. Dormant for decades but apparently ready to erupt at any time, they all have started to trail again through my consciousness. They are mosquitoes, taking advantage of perfect conditions.

For years I beat my soul against my koan, flailing like a trapped bee against a car window on a hot summer day, flying into every place and method I perceived as escape: addiction, for years; love, randomly brought as gift or curse. Only knowledge finally provided some sort of solace—though it gives no answer. It showed me surrender, it is sufficient for me. After having blamed my parents for years, I feel I fully understand them—at least, the position in consciousness they came to and how they arrived there.

But their legacy remains: I imagine big things, treasure, buried in the spud field across the road, then beat myself up for having that notion.

And still, still I hope.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston