THE GREAT DEPRESSION AS HEROIC AGE

Heartbeat takes me forward, stories take me back. Waking on the midnight train, or wakeful in my bed at home, in orbit memory I hurtle past the houses where my people grew. I ramble the vagabond circuit, the foggy geography of time, and glance through windows lit by a pincushion on a table, a book in hand. In this Kansas house my father will live. At this Nebraska farm my mother will arise. Tornado wants them dead. Fear wants them sad. I batter with the moth on screen doors, sipping a rusty fragrance, wanting in. My wings dissolve, I wake. I travel locally. In Oregon back home, when we gather for tea, I listen hard. In stories from the Great Depression and the ribbons of experience it sent outward, my kin live simply. By their telling, hard times trained them to be happy. Their hardship stories work on me. Before dawn, alone at my desk, I try to sift it all, to give it all a shape. On this computer screen, my words spin green from light. How shall I live?

One winter day on the bus bound east through central Oregon, just as we dropped over the rim to the reservation at Warm Springs, I glanced across the aisle at a Wasco boy. He cradled a book that devotion had worn to tatters: The Incredible Magic of the American Indian. Late sunlight struck the page and lit his face, his eyes that hunted as he read. One seat back, in the hands of a ski bum about the same age, I saw Kerouac’s On the Road. He traveled the kinked road twice: once by body, once by mind. The bus geared down. Outside, the steep sage hills tapered into darkness. I put my hand to the heart-pocket of my coat, where I had tucked away a tiny notebook to write down what I heard and saw and remembered—my own chosen stories of magic and departure. Traveling alone, each of us carried a book as medicine bundle, as survival kit of stories, as possible sack of belief and remedy to help us through the world.

Late that night, when I arrived in Burns, I learned my shirts and socks and sleeping bag had all caught the wrong bus in Bend. Surely now they traveled toward Los Angeles. The woman at the station counter, sleepy and ready to close, would put a tracer on my pack, she said, in the morning. Her hand on the counter flicked open, then slowly folded shut to show her regret and her fatigue. Beside her hand, in a rusted coffee can, a spindly tomato vine still grew—her pet and a February miracle. Marooned in Burns, I would grow beyond my custom, too. I turned away, starting off for the all-night Elkhorn Cafe. Outside, wind pumped snow and newspapers along the street. When the station lights had flickered out, the stars shone bold.

When you lose everything, what do you lose, and what do you keep? When you move with short notice, what do you take along? That night in Burns, I thought of the people of Sugar City, Idaho, the people told by bullhorn the dam had given way and they had minutes to abandon their homes and scramble for high ground. One man grabbed his electric razor and ran. A woman gathered only her Hümmels with one loving sweep of her arms, and lurched away. The last man out just had time to snatch his cowboy hat before clambering into his nephew’s wading pool and spinning away on the flood down Main Street. Before the water went down, it erased the town with a smear of mud, but everyone had a story.

I had to leave like that, and now I travel, an exile at a distance of thirty years from childhood. I carry stories from the old country, the point of origin, the central decade of the family’s hard times. The Great Depression of the thirties makes our heroic age, our Iliad, our Odyssey, our trickster Coyote’s time before the world was changed. I travel by bus, by foot, by dark, with a heart-pocket bundle of stories that light the road.

By habit I carry this notebook in my pocket, and travel as professional eavesdropper, because of the training I bring from home. When I played student there, my mother had a beautiful listening ear for our stories, and my father had a teacher’s fine trick that made us feel part of something big. When one of the four wild kids would mention a fugitive thought, an idea in infancy, no matter how small, my mother would draw us out for more, or my father would stop the talk to savor what we had said. Often, they would match our saying to a line from literature or a story from the family lore. The literature flavored our lives then, but the stories stuck for good.

“Daddy, when I held the bow and arrows this time, I thought how Bobbie Elliot can hit a baseball better, but I know how to shoot.”

“You know,” my father would say, “Milton had the same idea.” He would reel out a grand, soothing passage then from Paradise Lost, a stretch of line from Shakespeare, a chanted reverie from Wordsworth, from George Eliot, Willa Cather, Thomas Mann. He would knot our feeble syllables to the cadences of the great. The exact words of the poetry did not stay with me, but the feeling of being companion to Shakespeare struck like a bell in my heart. Child, parent, and saint of the language joined as fellow pilgrims on one road.

It happened the same with family stories, but I remember the stories. In the teaching episodes from my parents’ memories, customs from Kansas and Nebraska where they grew might get linked to any detail from our lives. Packed in my parents’ granary minds, stories sprang from seed. When we made small complaints, our whine could sprout a story from that golden void.

“My milkshake’s all plugged up. I need a bigger straw!”

“In Kansas,” my father would answer, as if citing scripture, “my father would take us in the Model T to a wheatfield at the edge of town, and we’d each cut a real straw the mowing machine had left. Then at home in the evening, my mother would make strawberry milkshake—strawberry jam dropped in a quart of milk and shaken. Sure the seeds got stuck in the wheatstraw. That just slowed us down enough to taste it.”

Maybe the way he told it made our lives taste pale. Every Nebraska day and every Kansas story had a flavor like that. Exotic black cars lived there, and mysterious fathers taking kids out for a spin. A wheatfield bristled close to home, and beyond it, we knew, ran Cow Creek, and monster catfish, and nights of shenanigans trapping, tramping about, camping out, being alone. You could sip on a real wheatstraw, not this plastic. You could stand in that trim kitchen Ruby brightened, not this drive-in blacktop spotted with gum.

My father’s father, Earl, traveled for the power company, taking great sweeps to the southwest from Hutchinson, from El Dorado, from Liberal. He dropped the boys off one time near Capulin Mountain in New Mexico.

“I’ll be back through in ten days,” he said. “Can you make it north by then to Cottonwood Canyon? I think so, too. So long.”

The boys traveled cross-country, slept in caves, and licked flat pools after rain. They shot quail, rabbits, and doves with a deadeye twenty-two. They could strike a match with that gun, my father said, if they ever had to. One day they ate only a robin, sharing it wing by wing over the fire. Once at a ranch, they traded the story of their quest for a meal. They met a plowman in a dry canyon, and he took them home for stories and peaches dried in the sun. In ten days, sixty miles north from their starting place, Earl met them. He had given them a test and freedom.

“Did you face danger then, wandering around like that?” I asked my father on his birthday once.

“The world was all attached,” he said. “If only we could get lost.” As always, the story sent an invitation to us.

In the thirties, poverty gave our people a test and freedom. My father took a string of difficult jobs, and a few dangerous ones—fighting fire at the oil refinery, and holding the steel shaft of a star-drill with his hands for a clumsy roustabout to drive and drive with the sledge flashing over his head. Tornadoes came through on a binge. The Klan ran rife. Diphtheria struck. When his sister lay near death, my father burst into the room, boisterous from play.

“Is she dead yet?” he shouted. She lived, but his bright shout spun from the same family pluck that carried her through. That pluck made the heroic time. Did our small troubles deserve the name?

“Don’t pay any attention,” my father said to our blackberry scratches or sidewalk bruises. When we whined over small defeats, my father came back with a Kansas joke.

“They asked the boy, ‘Are you full yet, son?’

“‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m not full. I’m just down to where it don’t taste good no more.’”

From Nebraska, the story-testament from Brethren farmers on my mother’s side speaks most of change. The Frantz family must have webbed the whole southern quilt of Nebraska. They kept moving, preaching, homesteading around. In the books that come down from that time, the names on the flyleaves read the same, but the places keep hopping about. They farmed or studied or took the interim pastorate in Illinois, then Nebraska, then Wyoming, then Nebraska again, Kansas, Colorado, California, Pennsylvania, and Heaven. For me, these stories winnow down from my mother, Dorothy Hope; from her older sister, Helen; and from their mother, Lottie, the grandmother my brother named forever “Boppums.”

The Bible held the public secrets of those days. The palm-sized New Testament that belonged to child Lottie burrows into my hand, soft as a favored doll worn ragged with affection. Back home in Oregon, I take it up this week to learn the code I saw painted on a car, a moss-green Dodge slung low. The driver before me at the stoplight, a prim and vintage woman, had drawn this message fine as embroidery gold on the black ground of her smashed rear bumper: “Jesus on Reagan—Matt. 23:14.” In my notebook, I took that down. At my home desk, I open to that verse: “Woe onto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.” The Bible spoke her mind.

The brown spine of that book lingers threadbare. The cover falls open easy as a hand releasing prayer. But if that book held the public secrets, another held Boppums’ own. We found it in her drawer—a slim, brown notebook locked shut with melted wax and a ribbon. Above the wax, writ faint in her black scrawl, this line: “Sealed till Finished.” No one would read it until she died.

Looking back by orbit memory, which window shall I trust above all? I have an account of my grandparents’ wedding from the Beatrice, Nebraska, Semi-Weekly for June 17, 1902:

       A little before 7 o’clock about fifty guests assembled in the parlors to witness the ceremony. Promptly at 7 amid the strains of the wedding march, rendered by Miss Daisy Wardlaw of Pickrell, the bride and groom entered the parlor and took their places under a beautiful portiere of green vines and roses. They were preceded by little Evelyn Miller, who acted her part well as flower girl, strewing roses before them.

The news account tells it sweetly, but has no heart. When Boppums died, we cut the ribbon on her book, “Sealed till Finished.” Under the ribbon, she had written, “The New Life of Lottie.” The new life bloomed there, now so old it lived in us. The cover had been closed so long, it held shut, reluctant to bend away from these first words:

       This then is to be the day of days. How I shall feel when today is over and I am no longer my mother’s baby but—Harry’s wife. Wonderful words. It is to be a full day for a hundred things or two must be done —

At nineteen years, Lottie wrote that much, then went down to do her hundred chores in a daze—to hang the rope of greenery, arrange the oranges in their bowl, slip down to the cellar to see to the fixings for supper, run to the gate to meet her Harrison, and scramble through all the small emergencies of change. When the day had finished, darkened, she came back to her book and wrote all down, somewhere later that night. A few hours launched on her new life, already she looked back. The future tense had changed.

       Then Sadie motioned us to come, and I taking the strong arm that I was hereafter to lean upon walked slowly through the crowded room into the parlor keeping time to the beautiful music. Then Aaron stood before us; I can just feel again like I did at that moment.

Thus the New Life’s first day ends. Harrison, the groom, lived devout, a farmer, carpenter, preacher, yet I have never heard or read his words. The diary of Lottie, the new life of this quiet woman half my age, stands for all. After her description of the wedding day—whether for joy, terror, confusion—the next stretch of pages in the book and six months of her life run blank. Did she mean to come back someday and fill this blank? Someday, with greater wisdom, she might understand such changes that first darkness brought. I know they lived with her mother then. For a time, one story says, they inhabited the barn, stacking sweet bales of alfalfa hay for walls, tables, chairs, and bed. In a photograph, their wedding gifts rise up in a great mound of crockery, linens, and glassware. Her book says nothing of these.

After this twenty-five page gap, the next entry in her book names January 1, 1903, and the tone has changed: “Thursday morning this is and we must pack. Thursday evening this is and we have packed.” Again, she writes from both ends of a day, but she has entered the rush of straight chore, whim, custom, and hope of the world. That rush includes Harrison selling the farm, a neighbor killing himself with fire, meetings for prayer and hymn, depression, moonlight, comfort, and toil.

“Harrison built our house today,” Boppums reports from their Wyoming homestead. The next day, “Harrison sawed a hole for a window in the wall.” Then, after a storm, “Harrison propped the house with a pole to keep it standing through the night.” They went broke, won back their stake, and crossed the Mojave west to the Promised Land. In the thirties once, at their little college in La Verne, California, the faculty voted to go all year without salary to save the college from ruin. This would only take a slight acceleration in their habits of thrift and cooperation. Somehow, they made it through. Somehow, even in that year, they still gave a meal whenever a tramp knocked. Not content with sufficiency, Boppums joined the weekly Ladies’ Aid Society to piece and quilt coverlets to give away for charity. Like her stories after her time, somewhere now those quilts warm others, strangers, travelers.

In the first years, the traveling years, Boppums found her own way by stories. With child a third time, she followed a particular belief to my mother’s making. Someone told her she must spend each day of her pregnancy looking on beautiful things. Flowers, a pleasing shadow on the lawn, sunset, the moon over water—these the child within would need. Each evening, Boppums would put down her work and stand on the porch to help the colors of the sky nourish her child. She put the secrets of new life in her sealed book, and the secrets of beauty in her children.

At the end of their life together, Harrison and Lottie went back to live among the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. A kindly woman took them in for years there. They reaped what they had sown, the sweet hospitality of the heroic age.

At my desk, I put down the Bible, take up her diary with the broken seal, and ask myself, what should I quilt and hide, and when will I finish? In this city, what secrets, what new life should I now tuck away, so children may break the seal, and witness nourishing ways?

Boppums keeps a little room upstairs in my head to do her ironing and storytelling, to mend and recite, to suffer horizontal her final illness, and then to stand up breathless the morning of her wedding when Harrison came riding on his horse, bent down at the gate, and kissed her on the mouth in front of everyone. In her room, glass curtains billow inward. The door swings open, lit by lilac and flat sunlight, then by kerosene. Threadbare travelers of grace tap at the door, drift through the house, leave their names in the Bible, and pass on. Alone, she looks up from the hem she stitches to watch a moth batter the lamp. Then she looks down at me, drawn up by light through the small wick hatch to stand at her knee.

“Tell about the fishermen,” I say, “and the storm.”

“Nebraska?” she mumbles. The straight pins between her lips wiggle and gleam.

“Yes, Nebraska, please.” My elbows rest on her knees. The apron, safety-pinned to her bosom, hangs up a blue meadow busy with pockets. Here her thimble clatters like a little bell, and there her scissors twinkle and snip. Between finger and thumb, she spreads the pins from her mouth like a tiny fan. Her hymn-voice trembles. Pins to the cushion, story to me.

“One time, Kimney-pie, we all went out to the lake—threshing done, the barn full. The men took up their net and waded in. August, so the water ran mild. The Lord stood by us. They made a great catch of fishes, and everyone, even the children, stepped into the water to help them haul in that net. We had cottonwood fires to prepare the fish. Then men laid their black coats down over bundles of straw, and women spread a white cloth on the earth. Can you imagine—a white cloth, and everything washed by hand? We broke open the bread, and read from the Book. We prayed, we ate, we talked of the year. But as we sang, a great storm came up. I remember the lake rolling gray, and thunder. I can see lighting pricking the horizon like that.”

She pricks the back of her hand with the silver needle, red thread trailing.

“The men cried out. ‘Aaron, does lightning fall on your house there? And there, Miley, yours?’ But the storm passed over us. No tornado then, no blaze. We calmed the horses. The moon rose to show us our way home.”

In my head then, Boppums bends down. She sews and hums. Her story ends, but not the sewing. Not ever.

Once, when I came home from college, I learned that story had never happened. No lake, no black coats, they said. At least no one could remember it. Did I confuse the time Jesus called the fishermen from the Sea of Galilee? Did I stitch the New Testament story to a Nebraska storm? The saints of the family fit the Bible better than they fit my first world of the 1950s. In my small head, it seems, the heroic age had snatched a story from Bible culture and pinned it to the family lore.

After Boppums died, when I lay down for sleep one night, in the fragile trance between light and defeat an odd sentence spoke to me: “If my grandmother were alive today, she would be ten feet tall.” I snapped back wakeful, wondering. Surely logic pulled that sentence out. Once I stood only tall enough to climb her lap, and listen to stories. Now that I am grown, she stands above me like ripe corn or moon, heroic goddess of age.

The family stories took on starch when I first came across Depression photographs by Walker Evans. In his images of poverty’s troubling elegance, I got smuggled back alive, and saw the vague evening glow of heartland stories brightened to noon. Taken by daylight, his photographs stare nevertheless like lit night windows, and I stare back. I see through them to hidden summer, to the Great Depression where a grand, spare order of hard sunlight blooms, a secret flavor of cool interiors. In that tranquility, the human face becomes a hieroglyph for persistence. A father feeds his children by the sheer mule-pull of his face. A mother stares flat at the camera, as if it has said to her what no one ever said: “Will you rest a moment, please?” The plainest object shudders in a sacramental glow: table, broom, churn, bowl, bed. By foglight, the pool hall façade flexes its cathedral splendor. In the sanctuary, Sabbath light on the Sunday-school organ unfurls a tool for justice. In a farmer’s room, the wicker chair mended with wire stands as a throne sufficient for an afternoon of eternity.

What his camera loved, I love. Through these windows, I stand in attendance there. I wait upon my people. Evans and his companion of rumpled inspiration, James Agee, drove south to Alabama in July of 1936. What Agee called “the object of our traveling” was to form “an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.” Their traveling brought them to three families in the hills, and to the making of the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. That book delves by the blade of light and the tools of dreaming deep into the local habits of day and night, toil and praise. Few have read Agee’s night-writ prose, but every family must write such a book. By such chapters, every family lives: “A Country Letter,” “Money,” “Shelter,” “Clothing,” “Education,” “Work.”

What they did by traveling, we do by memory. We travel back by stories, forward by the hope those stories teach. We center our account where Evans and Agee set out, the heart of the thirties. What they did by giving order to a book, chapter by chapter, we do by telling troubles in the rich, thankful light of the voice. We make stories of stories by changing them. Stories from other times get pruned away from chronology and grafted onto that hard decade’s stump. When Boppums hungered and wrote her Wyoming homestead diary in 1915, she rehearsed a part for our heroic age. When my own baby bottle froze solid in 1951, but I survived beside it on the back seat of the family Dodge hurled across Iowa, that story fit backward into the decade of light. We lived in a Quonset of tin. Have we done better since? At the age of eight, I tried to convince my parents we could buy an abandoned chickenhouse, trim away the blackberry vines, build a wood floor on the earth, and all move in. That house wrote my greatest dream.

History names “The Great Crash of 1929,” and history names “The Great Depression,” as if only money could give backbone to a mood, and the human spirit must lie sickened by the slack thermometer of the price index. It may have seemed so then, but family stories have it otherwise. Somehow, bitterness, if it lived then, died later. By family stories, our spirits rose up in those days and boldly walked the Earth.

What made us bold, in stories? What made us up and about when others were down and out, according to the news? For one thing, families simply do not follow the same chronology as history. The growth of calendar years, the summer-wood rings in a tree, the concentric rim on the flat scales of salmon—all play out sequential and exact. Families never do.

One night, across the mountains from home, we sat by candle-light with Mrs. Bell, a family friend. We launched our cabin through the night with stories. We told Kansas. We told Iowa. We told chickenhouse. When her turn came, she set the full spread of her family tree beside the little sapling of American history.

“Take my grandfather,” she said, sipping red wine. “He was alive when George Washington was President. Think not? Hah! I know it’s hard to believe.” The fire rattled and the wind bent low. How many winters could fill a man’s life? You had to do more than die to fit the pantheon.

“You see,” she said, “he was born in 1796, grew up on the family’s New Jersey farm, but he was not in haste to marry. His parents died, he ran the place alone. The Civil War came, and the story says Grandpa was working his hayfield when two blue soldiers came riding by, whipping their horses to foam and shouting the alarm.

“‘Lincoln dead—shot dead by assassin!’

“‘Fine!’ shouted Grandpa back. ‘About time someone got the old buzzard!’ And he swung his scythe with happy spite. Oh, he was an odd one. But with the War done then, and Grandpa ripened to seventy, he courted and won a young lass of twenty-three. She planned, no doubt, to inherit his farm and live on past his timely end. Not so. She bore three children to him—my father the third—and then she died.”

Mrs. Bell sipped again. Out across the meadow, a coyote lingered howling on a word, and soon others joined in all along the creek. In her story, the middle of the nineteenth century seemed closer than the coyote’s frosty message. Abe nudged us. George gave us his firm grin. Our candles burned low.

“Well,” she said, “Grandpa tyrannized the children four years past his hundred, before they laid him under the hill. Father was fifty when he married, in 1920, and that puts me here before your very eyes, never mind how old.”

Her face startled the candlelight, bold as wine. She sipped. We sat back marveling. Statistics proved her story probable. How do things go? In our simple daze of wine and midnight, the family table between us billowed wide as a century, and contracted to a coffin pod. Story by story, the lips of Mrs. Bell made the proud scroll of the calendar dwindle away.

Stories work to make us more than citizens. A story does to history what a nickname does to a friend. Nothing can stand quite so proud without constantly proving its worth. “What are Indians used for?” my brother asked when small. My parents wrote that down in the family notebook called “Lost Words,” but later changed to “Voices Remembered.” Then, curiosity spoke. Later, he studied anthropology. He tried to learn why the question was wrong and true. Saved stories make us flexible. A good story makes a tool handy as that famous device patented in 1862, the “Improvement in combined house, bridge, boat, and wagon body.” We inhabit, cross over, drift away, and haul stories home. In the Walker Evans photograph of the sweat, sorrow, and tenacity of the Gudger family, August 1936, light bit silver black and saved them for eternity. In our stories, conviction bites my soul.

On a hot August day in a strange town, I reached back for the strength of family ways. I reached back for the decade that brought balance to the world—the balanced trade of shriveled possession for a swell in the power of being. When I approached an apartment building, stern matriarch of brick between Main and Arthur streets in Pocatello, Idaho, I saw it all by the heroic flame that lit so many family travels: to move, find, celebrate. The lettering above the door shone gold on black, but dark gold burnished with decay, mottled by the sun: THE FARGO. The steps to the heavy glass door took a grand, chipped sweep, and the knob polished my hand green with brass. Then the long carpeted hush of the hall unreeled my shadow like a rope, each door a varnished lid for the particular joys and desperations of one life.

Halfway down the hall the wide stairs rose, the carpeted spiral of the stairs a four-sided cage of dark wood climbing into the past. My hand on the banister touched the spot where everyone, living and dead, had gripped this silk wood for the first heave upward. Even the young men courting, taking the climb three steps at a time then skipping back down, grabbed here. And the railroad pensioners, the old women with their laundry duffel, tramps looking for a carpeted sleep in the hall took their hold on the same palm-sized bump of mahogany. Down from the skylight, a pillar of sunlight stood cool with dust.

For me, that three-story box of stairs held the holy hush and honest age of the thirties. I climbed that chamber of human time, surging upward in the wing-harness of family myth. I climbed counterclockwise, in the spiral gyre not of progress but of sloughing off, of shucking prosperity for happiness. In such a place, Utopia would rise up, a neighborhood among us: the kindly, jabbering Toombs sisters in 101; Rex the railroad handyman always on the prowl to help; and the man everyone called Old Holy Socks camped in the cellar.

That first day, on the landing of the second floor, where the purple weave of the carpet frayed out brown, I knew where to step. Other travelers had left a path that showed in each bald palm of carpet, under the pillar of sun and the candlelight glow of small bulbs. I put my feet down where they were meant to go, where I could feel the real floor not softened by plush, and hear the crack and flex of oak flooring that came by rail. I held the key Doris Garner, the manager in apartment A, had given. I let my eyes go dim from focus, and shuffled down the corridor toward the door of 202. The key in my hand shot a hot blue spark into the lock, and I slipped inside.

How can I see that apartment now? The bright shock of our daughter’s subsequent birth has rinsed any dingy shadow from the room. Old couch sags comforting in mind. The skeleton bed that greeted me then has dressed since in my wife’s early labor, the counting breath by breath through pain to joy. A quilt softened by a thousand nights of our life now covers every rusted squeak of my first touch. Didn’t that dust-pocked and cracked window speak only of sunlight dazzle then?

Outside, in the heavy glint of August, my wife wilted in the car. We had come to Idaho to take a one-year job and have a child. We traveled poor, but knit by lore. Story by story I had been schooled for this. In the thirties, hadn’t my father dressed in harness and pulled a plow for ten cents an hour? Hadn’t my mother traveled in her Sabbath best to trade hymns for meals? They had met and said simply, “Shouldn’t it always be this way?”

That night, from the high, cracked windows of The Fargo, we could see the red glitter of the Dead Horse Saloon, and the neon wagon wheel on the Yellowstone Hotel, where rumor said the manager moved from room to room, using them up, leaving them locked and cluttered like our nation moving through the decades. Slipping out for work before first light, I stepped carefully around sleeping drunks stretched warm on the carpet of the hall. After November, I didn’t drive our buried car for three straight months of snow, but walked everywhere—past the smoky Harlem Club, the cemetery filled with Japanese names, the Bannock County historical shrine of local knickknacks. Coal dust billowed out from empty cradle-cars. I cut across the railyard to haunt the Old Timers’ Cafe like a kid loose in the toolshop of history.

In a winter of Pocatello life, I saw the ways familiar to me from family stories out of another time. An Idaho bumper-sticker has it that “Idaho is what America was.” I saw this in the Pocatello custom of the underground house. By this custom, a family will scrape together the money to start building, get the hole dug by June and the basement in, lay down the floor for the actual house, cover the floor with tarpaper, and batten down for a first winter. Only an antenna shows above ground for the television, and a stovepipe, and a boxed little set of stairs sprouting from the earth like a turret with roof, door, and hand-painted house number. After a few winters, the antenna turns rusty, and they have mopped down tar to make the roof last. The family has decided to quit building toward respectability, and call her good. They all live snug and quiet in the earth. Out the slit windows at ground level, you can recognize visitors by watching their shoes come up along the path.

Up on the bench of sage-ground west from town a vacant house shows another way to wrestle with thrift and necessity. There the log cabin of telephone poles holds a lid of earth, a pelt of blond grass swaying. Whoever left this place, left in a hurry. Several dozen television sets frost the yard in a wizardry of disrepair. A hole in the door once let the cat slip through, with a flap of red carpet nailed in place to keep out wind. Inside, the stove looms out of all proportion to the size of the room—they kept it warm. Religious literature covers the floor, and self-help guitar lessons, farm journals, amateur electronics digests. That first day I visited, I picked up one book in the fading snow-light of evening: New Heaven and New Earth. In the closet, a blue wool coat hung like new.

One cold night, at the west edge of town, my moon-tailored wife and I climbed the two hundred and seven concrete steps to the old community dance floor—a half-acre of packed earth surrounded by sage. To the west, not a single house-light burned, clear to Kingport Mountain. East, we looked back down at Pocatello glorying in her lit streets, the throb of her trains, the haste of cars on Main, a shout and an answer now and again. In two days, our daughter was due and the world would change.

“Hold me. Hold me now and dance by starlight.”

After Idaho, back home in Oregon, I heard my mother and her sister laughing in the other room, laughing so they couldn’t stop. They had found a magazine Boppums had saved from the first years of her marriage, and in it an article on how to keep your family small.

“Take your husband to a film,” my mother read aloud, “or to the theater. This will take his mind off you.” And then laughter, joyful laughter of the survivors—those of us who live to laugh because of our ancestors’ lucky foolishness. Hard family stories thrust into my heart this one unspoken fact: children, oh children, our strange ways result in you.

And so it goes. Two of my friends use their expensive college educations to make pottery and have twins and live in the oldest house and be poor. They walk everywhere, swinging through the neighborhood with that long-distance tramp’s easy gaze on our opulence. They scrounge and mend, rather than buy and install. They ramble among us lean, magnets for sympathy. They furnish their house with a fraction of what their neighbors throw away. The roof shingles curl, and the walls craze with cracked paint. The small yard shows puritan grass clipped flat, and a lush garden where cucumbers flourish, and corn, tomatoes, butterflies.

They live some desperate days, and take tough jobs for small pay. They inherit a conscience from their parents, and are strong. By this conscience, they have traded away security for freedom. They try to live right. By night, their curtains show the soft light of kerosene.

“Why do they do this?” the husband’s father asks his friends. “They live in voluntary poverty. They could do better if they wished.” Yet I know that father taught them to live this way. When he tells about his own first car, when he brags how he reached out the window in the rain to jerk a cotton string to make the wipers flail, his voice takes a jump of laughter that flattens over the decades of prosperity. He taught them too well, as my parents taught me, that hard times make good stories, and good stories make rich lives.

Oklahoma taught Woody Guthrie this, and Guthrie taught Bob Dylan this, and Dylan taught my generation this. When I heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” tamed to muzak at the shopping mall, I felt a rage for truer ways: not a loudspeaker, but the honest rasp of a familiar voice. Not a good job, but good work, important work—the kind you take when what they call “recession” pinches off the end of a national binge. How many lives of quiet desperation will it take till we know this? The answer, my friends, makes our life work.

When the Tsimshian dancers of the Northwest coast lowered their masked faces and came to rest, they would end their singing, and speak by custom to those who watched.

“You do not see us dancing today—you see your ancestors dancing today. And now you will wear their stories. You will wear their stories that never grow old.”

We build out lives of some adventures simply to make stories. My life, my story packs its bags for time. At supper, my daughter says, “Papa, we have a cuckoo clock instead of a television, right?”

“That’s right,” I say. Exactly right.

When May comes blossoming toward us, when the bees spring to their furious toil, and garden earth speaks with its own fogged breath, I will climb into the loft of the barn to fetch the Maypole ribbon wreath. Up there, beside the rickety highchair I outgrew so my daughter might use it thirty years later, beside the drift-wood cedar spall I hope to carve for a bear-face mask, the wreath lies coiled of grapevine and palm-width ribbons the colors of wine, deep water, ripe pear, moss.

When I teased the old barn apart to build the new, I found a rad shaft spared when the harrow it pulled had rusted out of use. In Salem, at my brother’s house, that shaft shall stand, our pole guyed with rope two fathoms upright in the yard. Once the pole is planted, and the wreath slung at the peak with ribbons trailing, each of us will take a strand and dance—in and about as the flute tune from my wife’s mouth turns us round:

       Round and round the village, as we have done before.

       In and out the windows, as we have done before.

       Stand and face your lover, as we have done before.

       Round and round the valley, as we have done before.

Turn, father, mother, brother, sister, child, Katie take green, Rosemary blue, each to your story’s end take hold the stories braided inward as the family learns to bump, trip, spin, divide, converge. Confusion and delight will swirl us through doors in the dance that shut, and windows that bloom, through the quick jive of elbow and knee, some bold eyes of the children finding a burrow through their elders to daylight. Then we’ll all let go. Unravel the ribbons, take down the shaft, coil the wreath away. The lawn will scatter tousled where we turned. “We’d best to in,” we’ll say. After all, May will arrive again in the old sap-rush habit of trees, in the vines’ hungry zest and hurry, in that bold ribbon of starlight lengthening out as darkness comes.