Old Songs in a New Cafe: Selected Essays Read online

  Harriet figures it would have taken $10,000 a year to keep the rescue center open. That would have allowed her to buy the proper equipment she needed, hire an assistant, and provide food for the birds and animals. But the money wasn’t there. It’s never there for the important things. I thought about that as I walked along the streets of Cedar Key on a quiet morning in February of 1993. I thought about it while I watched pelicans coming in from the islands and saw new condos going up along the shore.

  Brokerage

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  Stanley Walk and Allen Kru-ger, proprietors of the Sportsman’s Lounge and related enterprises in St, Ansgar, go unbounded. They subscribe not to limits and are unmoved by small-town demands for convention. Moreover, even in our darker times, they believe in Iowa and have little patience with those who feel otherwise. So, to them, it seemed perfectly natural to have an autograph party at the tavern to celebrate the publication of a new book dealing with Iowa.

  Now, those of delicate, patrician tastes might see contradictions, or at least curious impropriety, in this idea—books and taverns and all Not Stanley Walk, not Allen Kruger. “Get the author to commit, and we’ll handle the rest,” they said to the Iowa State University Press. “All right, let’s do it,” the author replied. Up went the flyers in the grocery stores of Worth and Mitchell counties. Arrange a radio interview on one of the local stations with the author. Get announcements on television and in the papers. Post signs, talk about it, plan and promote.

  The weather turned rough in early November. Snow squalls throughout the day of the signing. Cold, and windy, and wet. The boys playing cards at the big circular table in the back never did figure out what was going on. By ten in the morning, there were piles of new books in plastic shrink-wrap stacked on a table. Some guy with long, gray hair—probably a liberal, the card players guessed—showed up with a pen and started signing copies of the book for people from such alien civilizations as Osage, Mason City, Fort Dodge, smaller Iowa towns, and southern Minnesota.

  At lunch, a choice of beef or chicken, the author read an essay from the book to forty people who had paid $7.50 to eat and listen. One of them, a veterinarian, said, “It was a religious experience.” The author’s mother sat at the head table and recognized all the people in the story, herself included.

  By afternoon, on a Saturday in early winter, it was a tableau straight out of everybody’s vision of how America ought to be. Part Norman Rockwell, part Thomas Jefferson. In booths along the wall and tables down the middle, people were sitting quietly, drinking coffee or sipping a beer, reading the book.

  For some reason, a number of political figures, elected and otherwise, had shown up. Their presence resulted in a kinetic discussion of what those folks like to call “issues,” along with an impromptu strategy session for last-minute campaigning. Proponents of keeping Brushy Creek just the way it is, in the face of threats to build a dam in the wilderness area, arrived, commandeered a booth, and argued their cause to all who would listen. Next to them, other folks were planning a conference on rivers. The author signed more books, and the boys playing cards at the big circular table in the back were getting even more confused, swiveling around between hands just to keep track of things.

  Among the guests was the author’s high school typing teacher. While signing her book, he reflected that she probably had as much to do with getting the book finished as anyone else. An Osage man claimed that he and several other hunters had sworn off goose hunting after reading one of the author’s polemics on the subject, Upon hearing that, the author offered to print “Civilized Adult” across the man’s forehead, but that was judged to be unwise, somewhat overdone,

  KGLO television, from Mason City, clanked in with cameras and cords, requesting an interview with the author. The man with the questions wanted to talk about economic development and computers; the author wanted to talk about shooting pool and rivers.

  Snow blew down the main street of St. Ansgar as a fortyish woman with silver hair and a nice smile pur-chased a book and covertly inquired, “How can I get you to read the rest of the book to me?” The author replied, “Just ask, I’m easy.” Mike, whose last name disappeared along with a scrap of paper, wants to show the author secret places along the Cedar River. Great. Spring will be perfect for that.

  Stanley Walk beamed, served the customers, and carried more books from his office to the signing table. Allen Kruger argued politics. Stanley and the author talked about a poetry reading at the tavern, with maybe some music to go along with it. Sounds good. It’ll get done sometime. By 3:30, the demand for literary sustenance was tapering off. The author packed up his pen, and his mother, and drove south along blacktop roads, while the politicos stayed behind to discuss issues and, in Shakespeare’s words, figure out how to “circumvent God.”

  Stanley calls with the tally. Ninety-six books were sold that day. That’s nice, but slightly irrelevant, not what’s important here. The point is there are people out there who write or play music or do theater or create visual beauty or have problems to discuss. And there are people out there who want to read the words or listen to the music or see things of beauty or participate in the solving of nasty dilemmas. The predicament is one of brokerage, of getting all those folks together.

  It can be done. Stanley Walk and Allen Kruger did it, and life became a little richer for everyone concerned because of it. The ideal of a literate, caring, sensitive, and participative society is attainable, at least in Iowa. All that’s required is a little brokerage. We proved that on a snowy November day in St. Ansgar.

  Running into Perry

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  Do you remember Perry Burgess? Pm his brother.” I had just autographed a book for a man in a Marshalltown, Iowa, store and looked up.

  Of course I remembered Perry. Instantly I could see him, forty years back along the cambers of my recollections. Dusty flatlands afternoon, high summer, Rock-ford, Iowa. Perry in work boots and cutoff jeans, shirtless, red bandanna tied around his head, good muscles. Slightly untamed and pretty close to what the counterculture folks looked like two decades later.

  Perry, though, was permitted his quirks. Even in the hairy-chested culture of rural Iowa, where short pants on men were considered a telltale sign of unsteady masculinity. He was special, you see. He could handle the pounding heat of the kilns at the brick-and-tile plant in summer. As I recall, not many could. Maybe just him. He monopolized stamina. And that counted for something. Allowances could be made for Perry.

  He carried his head at a slight angle; a bad eye might have caused that. Perry grinned a lot in those days, grinned at kids like me on the street in my old sneakers and jeans. I grinned back. I liked Perry. I liked his toughness and his style. I liked his good humor in the face of the brutal days he spent in the kilns. My mother has always remarked that my heroes were, well, a little different from those of other boys. I liked Kenny Govro, cat fisherman; Sammy Patterson, billiards player; and I liked Perry Burgess, kiln stacker.

  When the annual softball game between the local merchants and the plant workers came around, it was understood Perry would be on the mound. “Perry ‘The Dipsy-Doodler’ Burgess.” That’s what he liked to be called in the weeks preceding the game. That’s how the cardboard signs advertising the game listed him. That’s what the local newspaper called him in announcements.

  “Satch.” He also liked to be called “Satch.” I think that flowed from his respect for Satchel Paige, the great baseball pitcher. “Hey, Satch!” we’d yell at Perry Burgess. “Ready for the game?” He’d cock his head and grin.

  Actually, he wasn’t much of a pitcher. Given Perry’s style, that was not the point. Under the lights of a country ball diamond, he pitched wildly, wheeled and dealed with seventeen different motions. Threw the ball behind his back, between his legs, the crowd roaring in approval Old men in the stands whacked each other on the back and croaked, “That Perry Burgess, he sure is somethin’
isn’ he?”

  On the mound, way out there in the dust with Satchel Paige riding his shoulder, Perry cocked his head and grinned at the applause, careened into his windup, and delivered another dipsy-doodler in the general direction of home plate. From kiln stacker to softball jester in three hours. Perry had range, that much was certain.

  “Sure I remember Perry,” I said out loud to his brother, Albert Burgess. “I’d love to see him again.” “Well, he’s right over there, sitting on a bench.” Albert motioned, and across the floor of an Iowa shopping mall came Perry Burgess. Small, old, head cocked, grinning. I loomed over him, tall, taller than he’d ever been back there in the dusty days.

  We shook hands. I grinned and told him about my feelings: “You were one of my heroes.” Grabbing the book I had already signed, I wrote Perry’s name in it, along with something about the esteem I held for him back down the years. I wanted to talk more, but there were books to be autographed, a stack of them. The holiday traffic was heavy. Christmas music over the sound system. Perry and his brother drifted off, politely.

  But I was warmed by seeing Perry again. Old feelings, good feelings. In my boyhood. Perry Burgess was one of the eagles and made those days better in ways still undefinable. Maybe it had to do with style, with flaunting convention and getting away with it. I don’t know; it doesn’t matter. The years run, but some of the old heroes are still out there, and I am comforted by that.

  A few months later, in the summer, I wandered through the ruins of the tile plant. Weeds and trees have taken back the spaces where hard men worked the clay. There are spirits in that place. You’d have to be less than a quarter sentient not to feel them, to hear the shouts and footsteps, hear the freight cars rolling down the spur.

  I came to the kilns. Three of them, with doors open, round and domed and thirty feet in diameter. Hornet nests in the cracks, dust blowing across the floors.

  Sweating, August hot, I stood in one of the kilns for a moment, thinking of Perry. The image of an old man in a Marshalltown shopping mall was gone. That’s not the way I see him. Nope. Not at all. This way: boots, cutoff jeans, no shirt, red bandanna around his head, good muscles. “Hey, Satch! Ready for the game?” Head slightly cocked, grinning, on the street outside of the beer joints, on the mound. That’s how I remember Perry.

  The ol’ Dipsy-Doodler, out there under the lights, sliding into his windup, delivering. Darn right I remember him. He was important to me. Still is. It was good running into Perry.

  The Lion of Winter

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  Felis concolor, middle-brown in the thin light of a winter afternoon, comes out of the scrub thirty feet ahead of me, three hundred yards from the Pacific She crosses the old Park Service road in easy strides and, without hesitating, takes her one hundred pounds into a soft curving leap over a patch of low brush on the other side, like a house cat arching into a cardboard box.

  Instinctively then, I am into a crouch and turning to the woman behind me. “Did you see the lion?” I say quietly. “What?” she answers, confused. “The mountain lion, the cougar, did you see it?”

  For a moment she doesn’t believe me. I can tell. Another of my little stories, she thinks; the outdoor man teasing the indoor woman again. From my shoulder comes the knapsack, and I dig frantically within it for a camera. “A what? Where?” the woman asks again, earnestly. I tell her and begin to move slowly up the narrow and abandoned road, toward the place where the cat has gone into the brush.

  Only two miles behind, the van rests on a highway’s edge. Back there is air-conditioning and speed, concrete and the road to cities. Here, the technological ground is different, tilted a bit in favor of the lion. And, in some curious way, I relish that. She is at home, and I am the stranger. A kind of interspecies democracy has taken hold, and my place in the food chain seems less secure than it did a few minutes ago.

  Staring hard, my eyes watering from the energy of focus, I reach the brush and look into it. Nothing. Farther up the road in quiet steps, I stop and look long into the grass and brambles. Nothing.

  Disappointed and turning toward the woman, I catch the breath of her whisper on the wind of late afternoon: “It’s here. It’s right here.” She looks back into the tangle, then at me, partly confused, partly afraid.

  Carefully, I go back along the road, my boots silent on old dirt, until I stand beside the woman and look where she is looking. And there is the face, a young one but old enough to be on her own, looking back at me from ten feet away—the eyes yellow-green, white fur around the mouth and chin, whiskers silver-gray in the mottled light, ears pointing up.

  For a moment, just a moment, the eyes of order Carnivora and order Primates come together. I look at her. She stares back, unblinking. Then, perhaps catching a faint and lingering smell of the spear, she is gone, not even as a shadow, but rather like the dream of one. No branch flickering, no crackling of brush, no sound at all.

  In the ways only cats are given, she just swings her head, moves off, and leaves us standing there along a road, by a river, near the sea. The one frame of film I remember to shoot as she goes eventually develops into a brown, out-of-focus blur. I will throw it in the discard box. The memory of such things is always better than a photograph, anyhow.

  The woman and I move on toward the sea, talking of lions and yellow-green eyes and the wondrous good fortune of seeing the cat. Just the night before we had been driving along a mountain road, headlights sweeping thick forest on the curves, and I had said, “There are only a few things I need to do yet in my life; one of them is to see a mountain lion in the wild.” So we talk about that and other matters of chance.

  As we walk toward the beach, I am silent about the fact that big cats have been known to follow humans, if only out of some passing curiosity. Now and then, however, I glance backward along the path and into the trees. Truly, though, we have little to fear. The number of attacks on humans by mountain lions statistically is low. But, as one biologist has pointed out, mountain lions can’t count. Later, I tell an official from the Mountain Lion Coalition about our meeting with the cat, and she says, “Do you realize how special that is?” I do. The probability of such an encounter is incredibly small. The big cats, nocturnal and secretive, are twilight figures even to those who seek to study them.

  Except for thirty or so Florida panthers, and their survival is tenuous, the eastern lands are pretty much empty of lions. Killed as vermin or game or their habitat destroyed, they have gone. Though some believe that the cougars or pumas or mountain lions or catamounts, all of them the same animal, are moving back into remote areas of New England, northern Minnesota, and Michigan as forests regenerate and the deer population increases.

  Aside from the perverse human tendency to destroy anything that offers the least bit of threat, the loss of range is the true vandal of the cougar’s world. They are the ultimate individualists, loners except at mating time, and the consummate travelers, requiring a space of forty to two hundred square miles for their hunting.

  Their range, particularly in the Far West, unceasingly falls to the saw and the highway and the condominium. California alone has lost 7.7 million acres of lion habitat since the 1800s, 4.5 million of those acres since 1945.

  Moreover, as with all cats, the lions are uncooperative, even when humans are trying to help them. Estimates of the lion population are disputed vigorously among various groups interested in the cougar’s preservation. The truth is that nobody knows for sure how well or poorly the lions are faring, and the big cats aren’t talking.

  Still, I had that moment. And I claim as much for it as any of the things I have seen. I have looked into the eyes of a starlight traveler whose lands recede steadily now. So, like the wild spaces themselves, I also grow less in contemplating a world too small and too selfish and too beset upon the trivial and transitory for the allowance of freedom, freedom that is colored middle-brown in the light of a winter day and carefully must keep to ever-diminishing cover.


  I sigh within myself at the losses we sustain, the cat and I, for each of us understands in our own fashion that range, free range, is the way to the center of things. To take that from a traveler is to take all—from the traveler, from ourselves. And freedom thus becomes not even like a shadow, but rather like the dream of one. Like a dream I once had out along the edge of the great ice, a long time ago, before wisdom came and, along with other childish things, I put the spear aside.

  One Good Road

  Is Enough

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  Autumn in 1949, night, and the geese are moving south. I hear them talking, toss the covers aside, and scramble to the foot of my bed, looking out the window. Low they are, coming down the river valley and passing over town. On unsleeping wings they ride, long necks extended, with sober eyes that see only time and far things and space… and me, I think.

  They know I’m here, I’m sure of that. Ten-year-old boys have not yet succumbed to a world counseling consumption in place of laughter and duty in place of wings. The geese understand. I clutch the bed covers to my face, responding to some curious mixture of delight in their coming and sorrow at watching them pass.

  Celestial reckoning. That’s how they go… by the stars. That’s how they find the ponds of Texas. Scientists study their ways, dissecting and inducing. The answers will elude them. It’s magic, and no one can argue me otherwise, at age ten or four decades later. Logic and data have their place, but not in the night, not out along the roads of wonder, where the music rises and the Cana-das fly and a wizard waves them onward with long sweeps of his arm from tall grass in the river meadows.