airplane parts, then the fear became palpable and we wore it like a second layer of skin to make us invisible, using guerrilla fighter tactics inspired by books on Lawrence of Arabia or Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox. Down there sniffing iron rich Indiana dirt did something to the voltage coursing through my spine, changed the chemistry of my saliva, and whispered to my cells a deep, deep secret held in the silences of soil. Down there in the dirt and bush I’d hear a cricket scraping out its washboard tune when, suddenly, without a hint, the dimensions of the world would shift and time popped like a soap bubble and the secret was revealed as the force of nature within every living thing, within me and you, within the mystery at the heart of mud. I loved you then Hammond. There remains a fondness, a sense of grace and freedom in the memory of my heart for the days spent nose down in your glacial deposits. The earth I knew then, like the Earth everywhere, wrapped me in the throbbing currents of its lifeforce, made me hungry to exist, pure and primeval, breathing with a power that is fecund and rare. My blood flowed beneath flesh that flashed and sparked blue arcs, my mind hummed like a tiny generator, and I grew into the dream of myself. I know now that there was more to you than the gray groins of millworkers and old hags in overcoats and babushkas. I still possess the type of attitude you spawned common to Mid-West realists. It’s an attitude that takes teen-agers for swims in Lake Michigan during raging thunderstorms while funnels by the dozens nipple electromagnetic skies above. It’s chasing those funnel clouds half way to Ohio in a Chrysler bomber, or wading thigh deep through mud puddles so mineral rich you wouldn’t be surprised if they underwent spontaneous generation, leaving some dripping, living thing to rise from the swirl and bubble and run off grinning into the vortex of a tornado. I am so much of your dirt and storm Hammond; I hardly know where you end and I begin. . . . But then there are many years and many changes between the two of us. I have lived in the Northwest for a decade now, slowly shedding the skin of working class tensions, coughing up the memories of Mid-West melancholy and depression. Living in a land of lushness, a land ringed with mountains that are not on a postcard from a distant cousin, where the trees in my own backyard dwarf your coke oven smokestacks, was so astounding that it took me almost five years to comprehend that I was not on vacation, that this was my home and I needed only to open the curtains to see snowcapped volcanoes, walk a few blocks to swim in water bearing herons and cormorants- salmon and seals, or hop a bus to a nearby park where a wild cougar was • once found hiding in the dense woods. Walking down the streets of Seattle, streets that actually curve up and bend around, was unnerving and exhausting to the pedestrian newcomer; and try as I did I never was able to find a ghetto like yours. The people here all seemed fresh somehow, as if the Nelson family lived in every house. Black people seemed to get along with white people, there seemed to be Asians everywhere, and they could even be seen, in public, dating one another! And when I rode the busses the drivers often said, “ Have a nice day,” whereupon I would turn with a suspicious glare, wondering what the joke was. Don’t get me wrong, Hammond. I don’t mean to imply that this place is paradise; Seattle is flirting with its own brand of desolation. We allow many people, living humans with feelings just like anyone’s, to litter the sidewalks. Seattle has always had its street people, but they used to be Indians and hobos; now they are the victims of the death of the industrial class, of madness, of booze and drugs, or they are street kids slowly twisting into the contorted larvae of a future urban infestation. Men and women in tan trenchcoats carrying three-hundred L iving in a land o f lushness, a land ringed with mountains that are not on a postcard from a distant cousin, where the trees in my own backyard dw a r fyour coke oven smokestacks, was so astounding tha t i t took me almostf iv e years to comprehend that I was not on vacation. dollar briefcases pass them by, issuing sidelong glances of contempt, loath as they are to look in the mirror of their souls as they hurry to meetings in skyscrapers that engulf the few remaining strips of property fit to human scale left in the city’s center. This part of Seattle, like all of you, is lost forever, a winning contestant in the manic race to match the shoulders of Chicago. But it remains a smaller problem in proportion to those of the great concrete giants. The sense of place is still quite powerful here, and ten years ago Seattle was even sleepy. . . . Strange things would happen in those first few years. Occasionally, a sunny summer day would become infused with magic, much like the days I used to spend on what was left of your rolling sand dunes; every once in a while I would have a dunes day, only I’d be in the middle of the city, traffic here and there, people and tall buildings all around, and as I walked the hilly streets a glimpse of a grove of cedars or a monkey tail tree would do what your dirt once did, and I would drift free of my moving body and into the infinite flow of nature, the boy of me again feeling my heart the way it felt the times I felt your fields. And oh Hammond, out beyond our urban core the air is like a sacred tonic and the trees are bigger and older and wiser than the whole of humanity, and beyond the rain forest is a rocky, wild coastline and an ocean that rivals dreams; too much for this strictly city heart to hold. Once in a while I’d have a day of spectacular vision, then another and another, until I realized I wasn’t having visions at all. I was living the life of someone with a young boy’s soul again, 28 Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1987
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