Volume 1, Number 2, Spring 2000

In this issue of RIVER TEETH:

Tracy Daugherty / "Bakersfield"

The longest oil pipeline in the United States runs from Kern County, Calif., where thousands of hungry Okies decamped in the ‘30s seeking redemption, to my home desert in West Texas where, when I was a child, no shelter could spare you from the dust in the air, no meals came without slabs of fatty meat, and the only redemption possible, if you believed the Holy Rollers, was loud, fast, and painful. My Okie parents, who’d followed the smell of oil to Texas’s tumbleweed flats, cursed the dust, scarfed the meat, and feared the wrath of God.

After college, when I lived in Burlington, Vermont, and tended bar at The Last Chance Saloon, on Main Street only a few rough blocks above Lake Champlain and the tank farms and barge docks that are gone now, replaced by a tourist pavilion and a yacht basin, I got recruited to join a baseball team in one of the small outlying towns. We played other town teams, usually on weekends. Our home field was built on the edge of a granite quarry— beyond the outfield fence was oblivion. The first practice, as I trotted out to my position in left field, the centerfielder warned me: “Don’t go diving over that fence after a ball— it’s a long way down.

In his attic-workshop, Dan Sivalia plays a tune on a fiddle he made from scratch three years ago. The song is shrill and sprightly, decidedly Irish–a reel wound tight as a timepiece that unspools itself then circles back. Although his hands have cut countless cords of wood, turned pine trees into Windsor chairs, hammered, chiseled and lifted, they are gentle with a violin.

I’ve laced up hightop sneakers and walked wide-eyed out into the world, believing my fate lay in what I did with the round orange object in my hands. It was a basketball, but not just a basketball. It actually was a kind of weapon against all the curiosity and pain and hurt and confusion that coursed through me. If I made the right decisions about life on the court -- when to shoot, when to pass -- I convinced myself I could make the right decisions about life off the court. I sometimes hear stories of fishermen, and the names of the great lakes and rivers they have laid their flyfishing rods upon. I’ve never flyfished in my life. But for three decades now, I’ve bounced a basketball all over America, up and down the Mississippi River, inside Rupp Arena on the University of Kentucky campus, in an elegant Ohio gymnasium with a sky-blue tile floor, on the campus of Louisiana State University where the skinny legend Pete Maravich played. I’ve played through race riots and through family traumas. I’ve played with a broken heart.

When the Nez Perce arrived at the foothills of the Bear Paws in north central Montana in late September 1877, pursued by about 600 troops under Col. Nelson A. Miles, they relaxed and let down their guard for a few fatal days. Canada was only 30 or 40 miles to the north, and the 700 or so Indians, no more than 150 warriors among them, erected their teepees on little Snake Creek anchased buffalo. Many of the people, especially the elderly and the children, were exhausted.

Imagine a girl walking down a street in Paris. The Champs-Elysées. The Eiffel Tower rising, stretching its flexed frame to a golden tip, in the distance. No, it cannot be Paris. I’ve never been to Paris, which remains a dark bruise inside me because fifteen years ago my younger sister went to Paris with my parents and I was not allowed to go. My father had decreed that I had too much studying to do and couldn’t take the time, and he didn’t want the squabbling and hair dryer noise of two teenage girls in Paris with him anyway. So if it were Paris, the story I really want to tell would be crowded out by all those other things seeping in.

“Hurricane Hortense,” the weatherman breezily observes in the gray dawn, “heads north.” She’s climbing the East Coast and either will or won’t veer out to sea south of New England. Rain slats down on a beat-up white trailer, office of Bay State Towing. The trailer sits on blocks in a yard by Massport Pier One, beside the airport in East Boston. Russell Tripp owns five tugboats. He can see them out the window gleaming in the rain. He’s brought each of the to health through his own healing touch.

Like any mother, mine on occasion has an urge to cite the various ways in which she not only went to bat for us as children, but also walked the extra mile and managed somehow to get water from stones as well as blood from turnips. She was widowed when I was five years old: I’ve told that story often, left with five children, one more on the way, and ever dwindling resources.

In their marriage, my father got the premature berth at St. Patrick’s Cemetery across from the Moose Club in Chicopee.

He got the pickled adulation of a passel of children.

He got our prayers.

My mother got the house in Granby.

Reading Jon Krakauer is like shouldering your way through tangled undergrowth toward a stone-cold slab where a body cools.

You move carefully; you take your time. You think you’ve been here before: daredevils high on the mountain’s icy face or deep in the Alaskan woods. They hurl themselves against the implacability of nature and are found wanting. Their bodies await you: you already know that. But there’s something more here. Something you sense more than see. You part the branches and look for signs. The writer is out here somewhere: weighing himself against the scale of his task, testing his limits, carving his prose, working his ice ax into the fissures of history. And over there, over that rise, are the readers who have been wounded by his work.

In 1920 Virginia Woolf wrote an essay about the essay, in which she suggested the principle which controls the essay is “simply that it should give pleasure.”

“Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. In the interval we may pass through the most various experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation. . . but we must never be roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its curtain across the world.”

I have always felt detached from my body. I know this, of course, only from comparing notes with other people, who describe their connection with the flesh as something constant and vital. They seem to inhabit their bodies in a different, more sensual way than I do mine. They will notice an ingrown toenail before it becomes a problem. They actually get hungry and thirsty instead of gauging their needs by a clock. They can sense when a room is too hot or too cold, or when the light has grown too dim to read by. They feel colds coming on, and “listen” as their bodies “tell” them to eat oranges. Whenever I try listening to my body, all I hear is white noise, like radio static.

Guatemala, January 1997. Picking coffee berries (they call them “cherries”) for the first time, I struggle to keep my balance on the precipitous hillside. My basket, called a canasta, is tied around my waist, and I try to position myself so that the cherries fall directly into it as I pull them off. As Herman, my caporal (supervisor), requested, I try to pick only the rich red cherries, but sometimes I accidentally knock loose a green one. I’ll have to sort them later.

The wind was so strong it blew the American flag stiff, knocked over rows and rows of folding chairs, and sent the black caps of high school graduates spinning along the ground like tumbleweed. From our seats in the bleachers, we stared west, hoping that another kaleidoscopic Florida sunset would add symbolic luster to this most American rite of passage. But rain clouds roiled behind us.

We threw their basketball over the hill. Let them go search for it down in the weeds beside the creek. We had been whipped enough by their words in and out of school, so we snatched it out of their yard one night. Joey said it would be cool if the ball reached the creek and floated out into the river, orange rubber bobbing like a buoy to mark our feat. But I could see it lodged down there against a rock at the base of a locust tree. I remember thinking that some kid would come along and take it home, or maybe sensing its path, throw it out upon the waters.