River Journeys Podcast
03. ❝ Empty Spaces
Descripción
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces | Between stars—on stars where no human race is. | I have it in me so much nearer home | To scare myself with my own desert places. —Robert Frost Now what? First house. First job. The house was in an almost new tract miles from charming homes we couldn’t afford around the university. The job matched Jim’s research interests in business and labor relations. He had his hands full at work unraveling the byzantine mysteries of academic communities. At home, I faced my own mysteries. Far from the crowded Los Angeles landscape we left, the house was a one-story, three-bedroom rectangle with a triangular roof pitch jutting over the front door, interrupting the flat elevation like a droopy umbrella. The house had been painted in just two colors. The exterior was pale beige; the interior a collection of Navajo white walls, white metal closet doors, white window frames. Inside reminded me of a person trying hard not to be noticed in a crowd; the outside, of KOA campground tent signs jutting above highway billboard advertisements. Tucked in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, it sat midway on a street where every third house looked like ours. The interstate winding through the northwest was lined with towering Douglas firs. The unfortunate, sparse neighborhood saplings were anemic cousins. Standing in the vacant rooms, I thought of Willa Cather’s pioneer stories of life on the Nebraska plains. In a wild leap, I imagined myself on an empty road like the one in the Jules Breton painting “Song of the Lark” Cather used as the title of her 1915 story of a woman seeking a more artistic life. My quest wasn’t so grand but the road was unfamiliar. Where should I begin? Looking for a way to soften the white box in which we found ourselves. Looking for a meaningful life outside the formal workplace I had left. Looking for ways to soothe the fatigue and insecurity of new parenthood. It wasn’t a question of being busy. That’s easy. Yet activity, no matter how layered and intense, doesn’t guarantee keeping emptiness at bay. Sometimes just the opposite. I found an answer in a Eugene library display for a brand new publication, Early American Life. A cross between an academic journal and magazine, it announced its intention to devote itself to stories featuring architecture, decorative arts, period style, and social history from colonial times to the mid-nineteenth century. Every issue featured homes, antiques, histories of crafts, biographies of forgotten Americans, heritage plants and all things devoted to a “traditional, comfortable, warm sense” of America. Traditional. Comfortable. Warm. It was a start. I subscribed and devoured every issue. Formatted in tiny print in two narrow columns, I poured through not just stories of how our ancestors had gone about creating homes and communities, but instructions for projects they undertook. Early American Life was the unlikely catalyst I needed to begin making sense of a new life chapter. Thoreau was right when he said, “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?” Many topics I dismissed — blacksmithing, using lye for soap-making, woodcarving, plant propagation and recreating Martha Washington’s Christmas dinner. Others looked intriguing — pinecone wreaths, cornhusk ornaments, rag dolls, cranberry garlands. I tried them all. Bookbinding was first. Our blue-collar neighbors and the young academics we socialized with thought such pursuits were unnecessary, even frivolous. Who cared about old-time-consuming arts when modern life made buying everything, including books, as easy as shopping? I cared, more than I thought I would at the start. And besides, look what shopping has done to us. I remembered a phrase my high school French teacher used when we complained about his tedious assignments. Squaring his shoulders, he would quote dramatically from Voltaire’s 1736 poem “Le Mondain” — “Le superflu, chose tres necessaire.” The superfluous is very necessary. The trick is figuring out what is superfluous. None of us imagined paper books would become needless for many people before the next century was a decade old. Today, we are awash in e-readers, Nooks, Kindles, iPads and of course, phones. At the same time, scientists tell us the sun has entered a cycle of powerful flares and eruptions. They are catapulting to earth high-energy particles capable of wreaking havoc on electronic and communication systems that support our high-tech civilization. The result may be damaged transformers, orbiting satellites and global positioning systems. While not catastrophic, temporary computer glitches are commonplace. We have all been inconvenienced in banks, medical offices and stores when clerks mournfully stare at blank screens and then at us, mumbling, “The network is down.” Temporary outages are one thing, satellite crashes another. The tangible may not be as relevant as the cloud, but as necessary. Over time, I grew more comfortable with roads I wouldn’t have chosen earlier in life. Change is inevitable. I began to see my goal of “traditional, warm, comfortable” in a new light. White wasn’t always cold. Traditional is not always desirable. Comfortable might be stagnation. Arts and crafts I undertook at the outset helped me navigate a tangible road. Willa Cather’s heroine started down a well-worn path. At the curve in the road, she saw her life in new ways. Turns out I was more like the girl in the Jules Breton painting she wrote about than I imagined. What is extraneous and what is essential changes depending on what kind of box we are in. Voltaire knew that. Now I know too. 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