Not only is this independently, individually produced piece more interesting than anything I’ve seen on broadcast television recently, but it’s also freely available to a worldwide audience (though he is asking for donations, so kick in if you can).
This illustrates both the ability for an individual to reach a wide audience without the help of the old business and distribution framework. But it also addresses those who think the Web is ushering in an era of mashups that threaten creativity and originality as artists borrow and appropriate from one another. First off, nothing was ever original. Second point, making something new out of existing material is also a form of creative expression.
I spent most of Super Bowl Sunday hiking in Finley Natl. Wildlife Refuge, avoiding having to watch the Packers win. The late winter cloud cover can be oppressive in this part of Oregon, but if you get a break in the weather between fronts moving in from the coast, you can witness some beautiful, somber skies.
We shot several scenes in A Country Wedding here a couple years ago. It’s one of those spots that has so many different settings packed into a few hundred acres. It can look like the Midwest or the deep South, with marshes and oak savannah surrounded by Doug fir forests. A few scattered farm buildings break up the skyline.
I hope we’ll be back there this spring for our next narrative project, a short film tentatively titled Slingshot.
I hate the telephone. Absolutely hate it. I’ve always sought ways to avoid it, whether it’s been using email, writing letters or driving dozens or even hundreds of miles to talk to someone in person.
I’m not generally an introvert. I’ve got no qualms about presenting to a large group of people or walking into someone’s house or place of business to interview them. But preparing for a phone call always sets my heart to pounding and raises the hair on the back of my neck. I unequivocally despise it. You’d think I was back in high school and was working up the nerve and trying to control the squelch in my voice before asking Tiffany Meyer out.
Still, even in this age of email, text, Skype, Facebook, etc, you still have to make phone calls. If you’re making a movie, you have to make a lot of phone calls. People talk about needing cameras, talent, the right mics. They tell you you need a plan or a story or a vision. You need money. You need experience or you need to go to film school. But none of that means anything if you don’t pick up the phone to line up talent, call investors, build a crew, ask people to interview, get directions, ask questions.
Filmmaking is picking up the phone. It doesn’t matter if you have a RED camera, Canon 7D, Bolex 8mm, brilliant script, amazing actor or a fascinating documentary subject. It doesn’t matter if you know After Effects or Final Cut. If you can’t pick up the phone and ask somebody to sit for an interview or help you finish the project in some way, by investing or lending support, then you’re never going to finish something worthwhile.
So the most important part of moving any project forward is the thing that I least like to do: pick up the phone. I don’t even like to call to make restaurant reservations and here I am about to phone a well-respected, award-winning winemaker and ask him to help me with a film project, giving up a couple days of his time, free of charge, doing something that most people hate even more that I hate the telephone: sitting in front of the camera.
“This time…while newspapers are suffering…was and continues to be this golden age of storytelling.”
The golden age of storytelling. I’ve been thinking about this phrase ever since I heard multimedia journalist Richard Koci Hernandez mention it in a video interview series. There has been so much pessimism with the decline of newspapers, the rise and popularity of amateurish user generated content on YouTube, the popularity of lowbrow reality program on television (as if there was ever was television programming directed at anything but the lowest common denominator), claims that young people no longer read, that college grads possess lower critical thinking skills, that the age of great American novelists is over, that filmgoing audiences don’t care to see anything outside of the latest comic book tent pole or Brady Bunch 7, etc, etc.
But like Mr. Hernandez, as I think about the web’s impact on the art and craft of telling stories, and when I look around at what has been and is continuing to be produced by professionals and amateurs alike, I can’t be anything but positive about the state of storytelling and the possibilities that exist for people who find some form of narrative as a calling.
I’ve listed ten reasons why I feel this really is a golden era. I’ll go into more detail for each reason later on, but for now here they are in short:
Mashup culture
The population bomb
Deeper audience connections
New forms of storytelling
Classic ubiquity
New ways for storytellers to make a living
New outlets for creative work
Technology adds new layers of quality and possibility to stories
Young people do actually read and write
You’re reading this
But before we go in-depth with these ideas, I should address some of the naysayers first.
Print media apocalypse
We’re in a golden age, according to Hernandez. I thought that was a dramatic and odd turn of phrase, especially coming from a newspaper guy. There have been apocalyptic prognostications coming from the print journalist quarter in recent years. After all, our region’s most respecte newspaper, with a 150 year history, has gone from a classic Hearst daily to a Web-only version with a skeleton crew, and has so far failed to find a profit model. Here’s a quote you’ll frequently hear from the doom-gloom quarter:
“The thing that kills me, as a lifelong journalist, is how much good, important work will be lost if newspapers and magazines go under. People really don’t grasp what’s at stake.”
Many news people feel that the advent of the massive amount of free, user-generated content on the web, the leveling of the playing field between NYT columnists and amateur bloggers, and the collapse of the paper/advertising-based business model of print journalism means dire things for our culture. Average readers won’t be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and we’re doomed to an era of wandering through the darkness of unskilled and uninformed opinion without the guiding light of journalism to lead the way.
And why wouldn’t they feel this way? They’re losing jobs and having to find new ways to apply their talents. I work at in a communications office at a state university. State jobs typically don’t make the list of glamourous vocations. But there are talented and working reporters lining up for every communications job we post. They’re jumping from listing ship of newsprint in droves. And that’s to our office’s benefit, because we’re landing some amazing talent on our team.
So how can we be in a golden age of storytelling with an ongoing exodus of storytellers from the newspaper world? Hernandez is a prizewinning journalist from The San Jose Mercury News, a photographer who loves that museum-smell of darkroom chemicals. So you’d expect him to be less optimistic. But then he’s also landed a teaching gig in higher ed, so with decent benefits and a regular paycheck, he’s not up against the wall like so many other journalists are. It’s easy to be a little more upbeat in this marketplace when you have a retirement plan and good health coverage.
But it’s not just working reporters who feel that print journalism is a sinking ship. Clay Shirky, who celebrates the the web-driven revolution in communications with the zeal of a Pollyanna, doesn’t see a bright future for print publications. And although he dings them for their failure to find an adaptive model, he also implies that there’s not much that can be done about that. “That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.” There’s not much to be done about preserving a dated model based on an antiquated distribution model sponsored by an outmoded funding structure.
Shirky doesn’t offer any solutions for the the publishing industry in general. Actually, he doesn’t see much use for any of it anymore:
It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
So how can this be a golden age for storytellers when the dominant vehicle through which stories have been shared, for generations, is dying a slow death? And it’s not just print journalists. There are others who also see the story in America as an endangered species.
End of the novel
And you see long-time publishing industry stalwarts, those who benefited enormously from the old model, lamenting this new reality with that familiar grandpa-style “back in my day things were better” refrain. Take Philip Roth, perhaps one of our greatest living writers. I love Roth. One of the first stories I read that made me fall in love with literature that offered more than just vampires and secret agents was Roth’s Goodbye Columbus. I just finished the rich and emotionally wrenching masterpiece, American Pastoral. Roth is one of our great cultural treasures. But he also is famous for having a negative outlook on the future of American writing:
Roth has long been pessimistic about the survival of the novel in a gaudy, short-attention-span culture, but his latest prophesy is one of his bleakest yet, predicting that the form will dwindle to a “cultic” minority enthusiasm within 25 years.
Sorry, Phil, but you’re just spouting the age old, garden variety grandpa rant a la Dana Carvey:
Are novels, or lengthy works of storytelling in general, threatened by the short attention span culture created by the internet-driven revolution?
Short attention span? Do you have any idea how long it takes to craft a humble blog post like this one? Or how much time it takes to create, say, a simple Web video, motion graphics piece, or a web-based novel? I don’t think attention spans are dwindling.
And it’s a fact that amateurs and pros alike are doing this sort of new storytelling in unprecedented numbers. Or maybe it’s just that the web has given folks the ability to share. Every day I see amazing works of narrative, from novels to films and hybrid works of investigative journalism, not of it blessed by the old guard of publishing or network television distribution. Many of those people who had the concentration skills to plow through Roth’s amazing (but dense) prose now also have the option of creating their own epic narratives and actually sharing them with a global audience. That might cut into some of Roth’s audience, but it certainly won’t kill the form.
With a burgeoning world population, in fact, I think that the “cultic” audience for novels will be, if anything, exponentially larger than it is today. And it won’t be limited to folks who stumble into it at a Greenwich Village bookstore. Anyone around the world could potentially be a reader. Maybe you won’t be able to charge as much for it. The profit model is certainly in question. And maybe that’s the main point of objection to this new culture of amateurism and free distribution.
And it’s human nature to lament the good old days. For someone of Roth’s notorious ego, predicting the demise of the novel in 25 years places him at the pinnacle of an era, it makes him the best of a historic period in the evolution of narrative. By saying in 25 years that the kids won’t know how to read or write means that he can pass on into the everafter without having to worry about competition. It’s natural for the older generation to predict or relish the failure of the younger generation.It’s about self-esteem, as this study shows:
…older readers who chose to read negative stories about young individuals actually get a small boost in their self-esteem, according to the results.
I see this tendency sometimes in myself as I cross the midpoint of my life, though I like to fight this urge with enthusiasm for the amazing potential that is arising out of this revolution we’re living through. I can’t wait to see what’s next. I can’t wait to see what the kids, like our office interns, do with these new technologies, and I can’t wait to try my own hand at them. I would counter the pessimism arising out of the floundering publishing industries with a faith that narrative and storytelling will become more complex, and audiences will grow more demanding and savvy. The web won’t kill the novel (or should we say the epic story) or journalism anymore than the television, film or radio has.
The top ten reasons I’m optimistic about the future of storytelling
That’s quite a long, winding road to my top ten list. But I agree wholeheartedly with Hernandez: we’re in the midst of a Golden Age of Storytelling, and a host of amazing new opportunities for storytellers are presenting themselves at every turn. Here’s why:
1. Mashup culture
Copyright is a sticky subject. Ever since beginning my career as a web communicator, I’ve fought off the creative spirit of the executive who wants me to create a multimedia sales piece that uses a Lenny Kravitz song. Digital technology allows us to make perfect copies of published material for free. In the old days, it was hard work to make a copy. That’s why we paid for them. But now copies are basically free to be had, and borrowing the work of another artist to incorporate into your own is easier than it’s ever been.
Rap music and sampling paved the way for this phenomenon, and the now the web has placed it in the hands of every single user. Now we see creative endeavors inspired by the works of others that take those pieces to a new level. Take this video in which an unknown (but talented) video artist named Matthew Brown takes the work of well-known composer Max Richter to new heights. Both pieces are stronger for this collaboration, even though I doubt that Richter is even aware of it. Incidentally, this appropriation by Brown has helped Richter’s case immensely…I bought one of his albums on iTunes after seeing the video.
Artists and writers have always been mashups of their influences. You can read Ivan Turgenev and Sherwood Anderson in the novels and stories of Ernest Hemingway. Director David Gordon Green’s debut masterpiece, George Washington, is replete with the stylistic techniques employed in Terrence Malik’s films. Technology allows us not only to find new influences, but it also enables us to directly collaborate with them in a way never before dreamed possible. Sure, plagiarism and copyright inhabit a grey area between originality and appropriation, but great artists have always interpreted timeless themes and classic works and reconfigured them in a new way.
2. The population bomb
We’ll soon be living on a planet with seven billion inhabitants. When I was born, there were four billion. It will double in my lifetime.
What’s more, these seven billion people will be technologically connected through the web. The potential audience for any storyteller or writer is growing exponentially. As the middle class emerges in developing nations, the number of potential consumers for creative work grows daily. Even if, as Philip Roth claims, the novel will be reduced to a cult practice. A cult taken from a sample of seven billion could still be a huge audience.
I’ve had folks from Africa, South America, Germany and other countries commenting on my videos and blog posts (actual comments and not just spam requests for wire transfers of cash to get my Uncle Zebulon out of a Turkish prison). So I know that connections can be made across national boundaries in a way that was impossible a few years ago.
Folks wring their hands, and understandably so, over the expansion of the world’s population, maybe even to a point that strains global resources. But stories need an audience, and a massive, global network of content producers and consumers creates amazing opportunities.
3. Deeper audience connections
One of my favorite writer/journalists over the years has been Roger Ebert. I remember watching him with Gene Siskel on PBS’s At The Movies as a child, hiding behind the couch when the screened clips of horror films like The Howling, in what probably helped to spur on a lifelong interest in film. I’m even involved in making films now, which we’ll tackle in a different section.
But now, thirty five years after watching Ebert on TV, even after he’s lost his ability to even speak due to jaw cancer surgery, I’m still as connected with him as I was when I was a kid watching his show.
That’s because I can pop onto Rotten Tomatoes and read his reviews after every movie I watch. I often do this while the credits are still rolling. What’s more, I can read his blog and connect with him on topics beyond film. I feel like he’s an old friend, and I know the details of his life and his passionate political convictions (with which I entirely agree). This is only possible because of our new hyper-connected age. A writer can connect with an audience in new and exciting ways.
Blogs, videos and collateral materials can accompany any work of storytelling. Any feature article, film or novel can have a host of dimensions never possible before, and all of this serves to deepen the audience connections.
4. New forms of storytelling
Including high definition video, text, high resolution photos, audio and graphics in a single project is something that the web has enabled and is close to perfecting. The quality of video delivery over an internet connection has reached the point of being flawless. Delays to receiving rich content have all been eradicated.
Projects like this one, a journalistic report which charts the advances of climate change across Wisconsin, shows the use of every form of rich media in brilliant execution. It’s a new example of a true multimedia journalistic experience. Each element, from the video to photos, is a stunning level of quality, yet each piece also contributes to a single unified theme. This is storytelling at its best, as good as any of the great investigative reports appearing on television or in print over the years.
A multi-platform media environment give storytellers a whole new set of toys to play with in the creative sandbox.
5. Classic ubiquity
The classic examples of storytelling still exist, just as they have for thousands of years. But now they’re even easier to access than at any point in our history. You can find free versions of everything from Dante to Dickens across the web. You can download Huck Finn for free to read on your iPhone or Kindle.
I recently started a long narrative writing project, and as I began the first sequences, it struck me that I might want to model it in part on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Instead of making a margin note to pick up a copy of the classic the next time I went to the library, I was able to immediately download an iPhone version and start reading it. I was also able to read a number of scholarly articles to verify if this was even a good idea. Now I’m crawling through it one canto at a time, reading it on my phone whenever I get a chance.
There are fewer barriers to consuming classic tales than there have been at any time in history. Just as Gutenberg’s invention made it possible for Europe to climb out of the dark ages by exposing a wider audience to the classics, the web has the potential to make classic works from multiple cultures breath new life into a new era.
6. New ways for storytellers to make a living
Creative types, those who endeavor in narrative or other forms of artistic expression, have always had a challenge when it comes to making a living off of the work that they love to do. But then Jim Harrison notes that “writers as a type tend to suffer greatly, but then so do miners.”
While I don’t see the road as getting any easier for most writers and storytellers on the pure creative front when it comes to making money off of their work, they do have a host of new ways to reach an audience.
But there are also new jobs for storytellers that never existed in the past. While we may be losing the print journalist role as a viable career option, writers, video producers, artists and multimedia storytellers can get jobs at just about any company or public institution out there. You can see companies looking for storyteller who can work on the web, in text, print, imagery, video, audio. There are titles like Interactive Designer, Web Writer, Multimedia Content Specialist. Creativity looks better on a resume than at any point in history. This amazing communications machine that has evolved into the internet needs feeding. And it’s got an appetite for artistic talent.
7. New ways to share creative work
In the old days, one of the only ways for a writer to get a novel in front of readers was to get the attention of an agent. That agent then needed to get the attention of an editor. And the editor needed to convince the publishing executives to invest in printing a whole bunch of copies and shipping them to distribution points throughout the country, an expensive proposition. The only other option was for the writer to take up the expense of the printing, which usually meant that some vanity press got a paycheck and the writer wound up with a trunk full of books that nobody would read.
It’s still hard to find an audience. But it’s actually possible. My friend Daren Dean made his book available for the Kindle. I read it on my phone. It was good. It didn’t cost Daren anything. In fact, I paid four bucks for the digital copy of his novel. I was happy to pay that amount because he got most of it.
Short films are notoriously hard to get in front of audiences. They’re not money makers even if they’re successful. Normally, they’re used to showcase a filmmaker’s talent. In the old days, your best bet was to get into a film festival so that people would see your work. That costs filmmakers at least $50 a pop to submit, and it’s tough to make the program. You send to ten festivals, it costs you five hundred dollars. And it might play in a midnight shorts program in a theater with only fifty people, if you’re lucky. But in the old days it’s what you had to do if you wanted someone to see your film.
Well, a million viewers saw this short. Here’s a brilliant short from Australia that’s been seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers from all over the world. The piece won awards. In the previous unconnected era, I would have never seen either film. Now I’ve been sharing them with others through social channels and email.
8. Technology adds new layers of quality and possibility to stories
The advent of adding 24 frame-per-second, high-definition video to hand held digital SLR (DSLR) cameras has put big screen, cinematic filmmaking imagery in the hands of amateurs. And what they’re producing is truly amazing. I can find DSLR video on Vimeo, produced for no budget, that rivals what professionals are creating using hundreds of thousands of dollars of gear. Look at the quality of this video, or this, or this. All of these were shot with a Canon 7D, a consumer-level DSLR camera designed for still photography. I actually find Vimeo more interesting artistically than anything I’ve ever seen on broadcast television. Sure they’re mostly small snippets, for the moment. But there is a layer of quality here that technology has put in the hands of the masses.
The internet has also added new tools to the writer’s toolkit. The ability to conduct research is so simple and accessible that it saves hours and allows you to add depth to essays, fiction, journalism or whatever you’re working on. I see blog posts (maybe even like this one) that are more laced with detailed research than anything I’ve ever seen in a traditional newspaper column.
In my own experience, I was recently involved in a project that used low-cost filmmaking equipment to resurrect an old short story that would have died a lonely death in my desk drawer. A Country Wedding, a short story that was part of my graduate thesis, was turned into a short film. We used web technology to recruit the crew and collaborate on the script. We borrowed video cameras that cost a fraction of what those the studios use cost, but still produce an outstanding image quality.
When I first wrote that piece, I would never have thought to turn it into a film. But low-cost filmmaking technology made it possible. Ten years ago, a video editing suite that rivals the $300 academic copy of Final Cut Pro on my laptop would have cost six figures. The camera would have been untouchable.
9. Young people do actually read and write
And not only do they read and write. They create.
Writing teachers, writer-types, journalists, publishing industry folks all love to cite studies that claim that literacy is on the decline and people just don’t read like they used to. Displaced journalists tell us that the decline of newspaper means the end of an educated public and puts our democracy in jeopardy. I’ve been hearing some (not all) academics, writers and writing instructors complain about the the plummeting quality of student work since I was in elementary school. I’ve always heard that, because of TV, Walkmen, movies and videogames, people just don’t read or write anymore. That refrain has been around as long as I’ve been conscious of narrative.
But when I was young, blabbing on the telephone for hours or sitting isolated in front of TVs with only four channels was how young people spent a whole lot of their time. We didn’t write a whole lot back then. And maybe the concern was justified. But now, people can choose to create and collaborate, not just consume. Clay Shirky notes, in his new book, Cognitive Surplus:
…young populations with access to fast, interactive media are shifting their behavior away from media that presupposes pure consumption.
Now, young people are blogging, writing emails, updating Facebook statuses with witty commentary (or more often sheer inanity). Hey, as little writing as that may be, it’s a whole lot more writing that I did when I was on the phone or in front of the TV. We’ve already established that pointing out the flaws of younger generations is just a manifestation of human nature. Pessimism is in our genetic makeup.
But I feel that young people are communicating on multiple levels like never before, combining text, motion graphics, imagery, video and audio. Actually, all generations in our society are doing so. In your pocket you have an HD video camera, a still camera, a keyboard, a library of every great classic ever written. Understanding of what makes a well composed photo or video is growing every time someone shares an image or link on Twitter. Creating content, even bad content, is a learning experience. I believe, that over time, as a society, we’ll all be better, more literate communicators. Humans have a natural inclination to showcase our individuality. And in a world of seven billion people, we’ll have to use all the tools at our disposal to do so.
People are writing. They’re making movies. We’re telling stories just like we have since the dawn of time as we sat in damp caves or around campfires. And we are on an increasingly equalized playing field that allows us to reach a broader audience as individuals than ever before without the monopoly once held by newspapers, major publishers and movie studios. This can only lead to more innovation in communications. Communicating is about narrative. We’re in the midst of an unfathomable revolution in the way that we share narrative. I can’t wait to see what’s being created when we emerge on the other side of this transformation.
10. You’re reading this
The last reason I’m convinced we’re in the midst of a golden age for storytelling is the fact that you’ve read (or skimmed) this far. In previous generations, there were few options for English majors to engage their narrative bent other than scribbling in some journal that would get stuffed into a box and eventually discarded or burned. The only hope of ever reaching a wider audience with a collection of thoughts like this one might have been an article in a magazine or some sort of essay collection. But now I can devote a Sunday morning to it, post it to my blog, tweet about it and be done.
So now it’s your turn to take a stance. Is reading, writing, storytelling and general literacy and creativity on the decline? Will the loss or reconfiguration of the print media put our society in jeopardy? Will the reading and writing of novels be an obscure “cultic” practice in twenty five years?
Or are you excited by the future? I’m sure there are a few of you out there who have some stories of your own to share. Let me know what you think.
I’ve stumbled across a new favorite blog by “multimedia journalist” Richard Hernandez who teaches media at Berkeley. He’s one of those storytellers who’s gifted in multiple mediums, from prose to video and motion graphics, and he’s got the energy of one of those rare and really good teachers who can convey an energy and enthusiasm for the craft of narrative. Check out this video. It’s 30 minutes long, but he covers nine ways of improving your story. This is geared toward video, but it can apply to any form of storytelling.
About six years back I figured I’d stumbled across the great secret to writing fiction, in particular to writing a novel. I remember I was sitting at a cafe on the north side of Chicago with my friend Bill, another struggling writer-type. He’d just read a draft of a novel I’d completed and had some kind words and solid critiques, and he asked me how I’d managed to finish it. “What was the key?” he asked.
Flushed with the victory of actually having completed something somewhat coherent after 140,000 words, I arrived upon an answer to his question: “The key,” I said, “is learning how to write bad stuff. Anyone can write the good stuff…the shit that flies across the screen when you’re accosted by the muse of literary pretension. But writing the bad stuff is hard. That’s the stuff you have to cut later, or rewrite. Or maybe you even get lucky and it turns out to be not as bad as you thought even though it was painful as hell to get down.”
Writers, even unsuccessful ones, are famous for aphorisms.
But I still think that’s largely true. Though I’m also now convinced that I don’t have the first clue about how to write fiction or a novel. I’ve got a couple that I’ve finished and like well enough, but the fact that they still exist solely as doublespaced, Times New Roman manuscripts gives me a clue to what the marketplace thinks of my literary greatness.
But to finish a novel, you do have to learn to write the bad stuff. Or at least write through the bad stuff. Take tonight, for example. Two hours ago I decided I’d sit down and write 600 words on this new project I’m trying to get through. It started as a short story, turned into a screenplay and now seems to want to be a novel. So I’ve given myself a goal of 600 words per day, good or bad, so that I’ll have a draft to look at in July to see if the first stab is good, bad or ugly.
But then I started writing and became completely dejected. The whole project fell into question. I reread some other passages, which seemed uninspired and vapid. I was certain that I’d never be able to get 600 words…even 600 bad ones.
But I started typing. The first two sentences took me 15 minutes. But then I found and followed an image of a woman pulling radishes from a garden bed made from old tractor tires. And the below passage is the result. I can’t say if it’s good or not, or if it will even wind up in the finished piece. But it’s 1,200 words long and it doesn’t make me cringe.
I don’t know any secrets to writing. But I’m pretty convinced that finishing anything of length requires you to sit down and beat your head against the wall and write a whole lot of stuff you’re convinced is absolutely lousy. If you have the discipline to do that, you won’t have a problem hanging on long enough to type “The End.”
WERE WE EVER HAPPY? I hold a vague recollection, something so distant and faded that it might be a memory of a memory. Or maybe it was even something I’d created in a dream. But it’s there, a warm bright moment in the light of a spring afternoon. For an instant we were happy: my father, my mother and I.
I was four. It was our second year on the old Richter farm, which had stood for a long while as overgrown pasture and blackberry thickets. My old man had leased the two hundred acre property adjacent to my grandmother’s farm. It was his bid to make a go of it on his own, and he’d planted corn and beans and then sweet sorghum on the poorer ground for silage and with the intent of making molasses to sell at the farmers market in town. My grandma had been selling off acreage to pay the medical bills from the kidney failure that had consumed and killed my granddad the year before. My dad wanted to leave her free to do what she needed to with her land.
He liked having his own place even if everyone said nothing would come of it. The soil was poor I think we were happy enough there. My mother had wallpapered the kitchen and bedrooms with money she earned cutting hair. She had a stool on the old shade porch, and women would bring their boys from town to sit on it while Ma ran the clippers over their skulls. She charged two dollars less than the barber shop in town for pretty much the same result.
She had planted winter beds in old tractor tires, and they were already lush with spring greens, beats and even a few strawberries. I remember the day clearly. It was late morning and I was helping with the garden, more likely just pushing dirt around, when I noticed the absence of the sound of the tractor running in the back fields for the first time in weeks.
I spotted my dad by the well spigot near the barn, and he was washing the dirt off his forearms and splashing the back of his neck. Ma looked up from the bundle of vegetables collected on the lap of her garden dress. She smiled with surprise.
“Let’s fix a lunch and go to the creek,” he said. He wasn’t quite smiling. I couldn’t say that I’d ever seen him smile in earnest. But there was a light in his eyes. He took off his cap and wiped his brow.
Ma sliced radishes and cheese and rye bread. She poured some cream in an old jelly jar and then filled the balance of it with strawberries. She wrapped slices of deer sausage from a March doe in waxed paper and bundled all of it in a bandana.
Dad brought along a heavy wool Navy blanket and a couple of cane poles, and we walked a path he kept mowed short enough that we didn’t have to work about ticks. It took us all the way to the back of the farm where there was a gate that let out on a stone county road, more of a twin-track that was used by the local farmers. We climbed up past my grandmother’s place and then down into a draw near the base of Carson’s Ridge where Bonne Femme Creek still ran clear and swift, eddies coiling into long, deep, rocky pools.
We found a grassy spot on the bank of our favorite pool, and I can remember the chicory and blue-eyed grass giving a splash of color. Ma found a warm, sunny spot near the rusted metal gates of an old family cemetery. I don’t know if anyone knew who those old headstones belonged to, maybe the very first family to farm this country after it had only been Osage land. The names were weathered off and weeds grew up inside the iron fence.
We ate the strawberries and cream first. Ma gave us each a spoon, but they left most of it for me. We ate sausage and sliced radishes on the rye bread and then dad laid back on the blanket and began to snore softly within moments. I stared at his brow and watched it twitch as a bee hovered close.
Ma and I took up the poles and dug for worms in the soft bank with driftwood. We cast bobbers into the pool and watched the sunfish expertly remove our worms, red and white floats dancing in the riffle and then gliding even once they’d removed their quarry. We didn’t catch anything. We didn’t speak. We just sat on the banks and smelled the turned earth and the rich, sweet green of adolescent spring leaves and the early wildflowers. It was nice because there were no hard words, no impatient questions from my old man or vacant responses from Ma. Even as a small child I could read there was little they cared for in one another. But this day none of that showed.
We came back to the blanket and Dad was cutting on a walking stick, notching lines on one end for the handle, scraping off bark. I hoped that he was making it for me, but I suspected that he wasn’t. Maybe he was just filling time, and he’d leave it when we packed to go, in which case it would be mine to take. Greed exists in the most basic form in children.
Ma lay down on the thick, coarse wool and Dad laid down next to her on his side, his head propped by one elbow, his chin in his palm. They weren’t touching.
At first I thought he might be staring at her hair as it was stirred by the balmy spring breeze, but then I realized that he was staring at the old family grave plot. He looked for a long time, and then I remembered that he sat up suddenly and shaded his eyes, staring into the tall grass between the weathered old markers.
“What is it?” Ma asked, and he just shook his head and lay back down, glancing sideways into the cool, tall grass as he did so.
That’s when I heard a plop and I rushed to a bank to see a huge alligator snapping turtle scoot into the depths of the pool. I watched the trail he’d made dragging his thick tail across the mud of the bank. When I got back Ma and Dad were wordlessly packing up the picnic. Ma smiled and hummed to herself and dad glanced at his watch and then the sun to see how much time he had left for tractor work.
I remember hearing a crow caw as we left the creek bank. “That was nice,” Ma said later as we crossed our property. She reached out absently and brushed the back of my neck. There was a gentleness underneath her calluses, and a strength in her fingers, and it was the kind of touch that makes a boy know that there is good things in the world.
That was the only time I figure all three of us were happy. Even my old man. The following spring the banks of Bonne Femme would flood the bottom ground well into planting season so that a few neighbors wouldn’t even get their corn in. By August, Ma would be dead. And a year after, my old man would walk past me into the kitchen to take down the twenty-gauge he kept on the ledge above the Frigidaire.
