Butter Churn

Butter Churn

So I’m sitting at this table with other musicians, and some of our audience, after our performance at a small mountain café, in a tiny town in New Mexico not far from El Paso, and I find myself a little impatient with their conversation. I’ve been working at a high school down in another town, down in the desert, and during the testing period I’ve found myself with some time on my hands, and started reading a ragged book, one of many biographies of Jack London. Here’s a guy who goes to Alaska, like I did, but he found out a lot more, about dogs especially, and he made a pretty good living off of it, and he walked around perpetuating this rugged image of himself, and he writes prolifically.

I don’t write prolifically. For one thing, I play music too. And also I have ten kids, and there are these kids around all the time, and they make a lot of noise, and make it so I can’t even play music enough. Once in a while I come out here, way out in the mountains, on winding mountain roads full of elk, where these folks play music, and I play with them, if I can, and they give us dinner when we’re done, which in my case is a chile cheesburger, really good. One of the musicians is a gospel singer, an excellent musician, too, well known in Texas and other places as well. The bass player is the local auctioneer. The banjo picker is a taxidermist. He can tell you how, if someone runs over a cougar, he can make it so it’ll hang on the wall of the barbecue restaurant. Or how some big elk head he mounted, with antlers and everything, looms over the propane guy’s shop. He stuffs them and mounts them, when he’s not playing the banjo, or running the cowboy church. That’s what he does.

It’s a spring night; leaves are budding on the trees and things are beginning to smell nice everywhere, especially since nature starts right the minute you get out of the café and across the road, where there’s a fresh-water river, rare in the southwest. There are elk and deer all over the road, but most of all, things are turning green and coming alive again. In the café they bring us our food, and the conversation turns to chance occurrences with, say, buying some old thing at a garage sale that turns out to be worth $30,000. The wife of the banjo picker, it turns out, is an antique dealer. The gospel singer says, when that happens, it’s the grace of God; he doesn’t care much for the money itself, or getting something for nothing, but does care a lot about the grace of God, it’s a common topic after our performances. The auctioneer has a twinkle in his eye, as he has some experience in this field, where some old dusty thing at an estate auction turns out to be worth a fortune. But he’s a little reserved about what he knows, because what he really wants is for people to come to his auctions, and bid on stuff, and perhaps turn over to him their aunt’s estate when the time comes. He doesn’t want to give the wrong impression, let us think he knows too much. He recently hurt his back; apparently he was moving some piano, and he didn’t even get all that much money off of it, he said, so he probably should have just refused, and made them wait until some young guy would come along and move it, but he didn’t.

My mind wanders a bit. The other day I was at the high school and got sick, and lost my balance. I started lurching in the hallways, worrying that the security guards, who were everywhere, would suspect I was drunk. In fact I was sick, not drunk, they could even test me if they wanted, but I was having trouble walking a straight line, a lot of trouble. And that triggered memories, being totally unhinged from the ground, in a fog, unable to keep my concentration on a straight line. It was not a good feeling.

Jack London, he’d write these stories about people dying in the woods, or dogs turning on each other, or some such thing, with extreme weather, or whatever he’d make up; he seemed to have no trouble coming up with things to write about. I find myself scraping the barrel looking for interesting things to write about. I’m reading about Jack London and the Arctic, and Jack London and his unhappy marriage, and then I get to the part where he’s taking a lot of morphine, and they can’t figure out whether he’d killed himself or just was getting careless treating his own pain which was becoming unbearable, in spite of everything. I’d actually lost a little interest in Jack London back at the point where he married somebody he didn’t love, but then, after a while, I figured, you never know about that kind of thing, how can some biographer tell about who loves whom and under what situation? A lifetime of being sorry he did it, yes, you can understand that, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t love her. Maybe that biographer was simply mistaken. And I say that partly as a romantic, one who could look at someone and in an instant be more in love than ever before. That makes me dangerous, of course. My wife worries about me.

All of a sudden, a memory overtakes me, and I think of this time I was a schoolbus driver, out in the country, in Iowa, lurching along and hitting all the potholes in the gravel roads, gravel dust flying everywhere behind me. Rural Iowa is quite beautiful, all green with corn, but I had no time to even look at it. The older kids sat not on the seat, but on the seat backs, way in the back of the bus, because they liked the adventure, the risk, the thrill of the bus bashing them back and forth, but there were some very young kids, the small ones, and they sat in front, scared to death, knowing both that the road had steep ditches right at the edge, and that I was not from around there. I tried to control the rowdiest of them, tried to get them all to sit in their seats; I had to tell one kid to never show me a knife again, not when I was driving, because I had to concentrate. I took my job seriously. I hit a chicken one day; I wasn’t the best driver. It was not the kind of thing you could take for granted, read a Jack London book, or daydream. It took all my concentration. It was hard, and I was not born to be so regular, so dull, so consistent.

At the café, the story turns to a certain butter churn. The antique dealer describes it. Somebody had this antique butter churn in their foyer for what, twenty years, and decided to sell it. It was estate sale time, time to get rid of the antiques. Some guy comes over and buys it for a few hundred bucks. But it’s attached solidly to the floor. They take a hammer to its base trying to get it loose so the guy can take it home. They pound at it from all directions and finally they crack its base, and out comes a hundred gold coins or more; apparently the grandfather, long gone, had been hiding them in there. No wonder the thing weighed a ton! Full of gold coins that dated back, what, a hundred years or more, back in the age of gold coins, and they don’t even make those anymore. The family that’s selling it has to split the value of the coins with the guy that bought the butter churn, because, they figured, it was half his at the time when they found the coins. But the coins way outvalued the churn itself, which was just your standard run-of-the-mill antique butter churn.

Again, my mind wanders. Not into the money, the $30,000, the gold coins, really, or even a butter churn, which I would recognize as a nice antique, pretty to have around, but it’s not like I’d make my own butter, or ever even did. On the contrary, I’m a writer, and sometimes a fiddler, although on this night my string had popped and I didn’t have a spare, and I was stuck just singing a few old songs, western songs, instead of my usual bluegrass fiddle. As a writer, though, I’d read the Jack London book now, and read it carefully, even though he’d married someone he supposedly didn’t love. And there was this other book, a book by writers about how to write, where writers told about writing, and how it healed you, and how the topic of a biography was kind of a victim, and how to write well and such. It had this chapter by some writer where he said, write the stuff that only you can write. That was his main advice. He could have written that in one sentence, but instead he wrote a whole chapter, because that’s what they needed, chapters. But that was his advice, and it stuck with me. Why I thought of it now, I have no idea.

So this one morning, in Iowa, it was foggy, the fog sat on the cornfields, and the kids were stone silent, having perhaps had some wild party the night before. The gravel roads wound around in their maddening way. I was out of sleep, having hitchhiked to Des Moines the previous day, and worked my usual night job; I’d had to go to Des Moines, or near there, to pick up an old ’50 Dodge truck which I’d bought from an old guy. All of a sudden, the gravel, the fog, and the steep ditch, and I’d blacked out, and flipped the bus; it landed upside down in the cornfield; the littlest of the kids landed in my lap. Everything was all right, in the end; nobody was seriously injured. They tested me for alcohol and everything, but that wasn’t the problem. I was sober. Out of sleep, maybe, irresponsible, maybe, but drunk, no.

The mountains are so beautiful, with their fog, their rain, real water coming out of them, the pine smell, and I remember sometimes the time I’d jumped a train, sat on top of it backwards, and almost got hit by a tunnel – after I’d gone through, and lived, that was my first experience with God’s grace, the school bus was the second. The wonders of the mountains, with the grass, the flowers, the elk, the deer, but you have to stop to appreciate them. You can’t go looking at them while you’re driving, or even while you’re on a train.

The mountain roads I drive on up here are precarious – on the way to work, steep cliffs on either side, hairpin turns, swerving this way and that, going down at least 5000 feet each morning to work and back up in the afternoon. The mountain cliffs have boulders that occasionally fall on the road, or on the cars, if the drivers aren’t lucky; I imagine sometimes, that these rocks are messages being dropped by the ancient people, who obviously lived right here, where there was access to water, deer, elk, caves, green stuff, everything they needed. Not a whole lot of money to be made, out here, they didn’t have corn, or soybeans, or all that stuff those Iowa farmers were making a living on. Out in this small town, these folks are ranchers, except maybe the musicians themselves, who seemed to be generally of another mold, maybe the only ones who aren’t ranchers. And I’m not sure how these folks, our audience, make it ranching; there’s so little rain, so much danger, so much to spend money on. Cowboy songs, and gospel, and just about anything else, they like their music; they are actually pretty open-minded, great people. They’ve been nice to me, even when I lost my string, humiliated, unable to play; they liked the entertainment, living way out in the country, they were appreciative. As a musician, you have good nights, when the bluegrass comes right out of the fiddle, everything’s on time, everything works. As a writer, the same is true, sometimes things flow, they go right on the page. Then you have other nights, and don’t play very well, or can’t find anything to write, you could get a million bucks, still not have anything to write. I’m not Jack London, I don’t do it for the money; I work for money, and play music and write when I can. I watch out for rocks when I drive up and down the hill; out in the mountains, I watch out for the elk and deer. I try to keep my eyes on the road. I don’t like losing my balance, or lurching this way or that. I’ve got memories of steep ditches and cliffs, being upside down, kids in my lap.

But I’ll tell you, there are a lot of stars out here at night. You want God’s grace, there it is, they’re all out there. You have to pull over to see them, of course, you don’t want to try to look up, and drive at the same time, the roads are too narrow and wind around too much, too many animals on them. Just pull over and get out of the car. Then you’ll feel like I do: the world has at least put me here, still alive under these stars, still able to write another story. And tonight, this is it.

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