Out in Places Like Wyoming [4,b]

PineBluffs, Albin, and Golden Prairie

For decades my Grandmother Nordstrom received the Pine Bluffs Post in the mail.  It would arrive, as I remember, in a roll with a paper sleeve, a band really, that carried my grandmother's name. In the years after we had moved to New Hampshire from Wyoming, my grandparents would come to stay for six or eight months at a time, splitting time between their daughter in New Hampshire, my mother, and their daughters in St. Paul, the twins.

Within two weeks of their arrival, the first Post would arrive with a yellow forwarding label pasted over the paper band.That small-format weekly newspaper carried mostly "local news" about the families and events in its readership area, which included Albin, where my grandparents built and served the Baptist Church. The Baptist Church and the Albin Cemetery were our furthest destination for the day.

After the Ames Monument, we drove out of the mountains into clear skies and warmer temperatures, we headed for Albin, via Pine Bluffs, a town of about 1,100. Some forty miles past Cheyenne the bluffs rise abruptly from the level plains and, sure enough, there are pine trees on its sides and along the top. I had an odd epiphany as we approached: despite knowing of Pine Bluffs for 60 plus years, I had never thought of the name in descriptive terms.

As I-80 reached the bluffs, we turned north toward Albin on state road 215, 17 perfectly straight miles of flat farmland. Huge fields of now-harvested wheat and fields of dried standing corn and sunflowers line both sides of the road. At the unmarked intersection where 215 meets 216 we stopped to inspect a small white frame church that we thought might be "the" church, but it was Roman Catholic not Baptist. It sat by itself among expansive fields. Albin, a small group of houses and buildings, is visible from that intersection, a half mile to the west.

On a list of Wyoming  towns listed by population, Albin ranks 130 out of 178. Dead last is a place called Lost Springs with four human beings. Size and scale are important factors out here.

We had wondered how difficult it might be to find the Baptist Church, but we shouldn't have worried. The town is about two blocks east to west with a paved side street running south and another, this one dirt, running north.  The Baptist Church is the last building on the west end of town.

The church lot was empty. We walked around the grounds a bit before I tried the door. It was unlocked so we went in calling "Hello? Hello-o!" We looked in the sanctuary and knocked on the door to the pastor's office. Above a flight of stairs to the lower level hung a quilt with "Welcome" in English, Swedish, and Spanish. The Swedish suggested we were on the right track.

Clearly someone had been working in the church during the morning and had, understandably, stepped out for lunch.

The wall to the right of the small foyer was full of photographs showing important stages of the church's history. The first of these photographs was one I recognized. It is a formal portrait of my grandparents with their four children taken in the early 1930s.

My mother and her older twin sisters are hard to tell apart at a quick glance, especially in a photograph of a photograph. [I believe my aunts were wearing dark scarves.] But this picture has particular significance for those of us who belong to this branch of the Nordstrom family; it is one of very few existing pictures of our uncle Dean.



It felt good to have found the right place, to have made this connection, even without someone to talk with.  Beside the photograph of my mother's family below a photograph of what I am guessing was the parsonage is a picture of the church building that my grandfather had built.  The current structure replaced the wood-frame sancturary in the 1951.

Beneath it is a photograph of the congregation gathered at the front of that church.


We took some pictures and then went outside for more. The view from the center of the street is nearly identical in both directions.

 Because the cemetery was not on church grounds as I had imagined, we needed directions to find it; so we crossed the street to the post office. It was 12:20. The post office had closed at 12:00, although we could see that there were two women sitting in a back room working at a table.  I rapped on the outer door until one of them came.  I introduced myself and asked about the town cemetery, where my uncle is buried. Turns out the town cemetery is not even in the town; it is 3 miles east of town among fields at a big bend in the road.

We drove out there and began our search.


The headstones are a roster of Swedish names -- Larson, Anderson, Sorensen, Palmquist, Pearson, and so on. It is likely my grandparents had known most of these folks or their parents.We looked at rows of these headstones reading the names aloud for about ten minutes before I found "Nordstrom -- Albert Dean -- 1923-1936" close to and partly obscured by a juniper tree.

We stood and looked at it for a few minutes. I was not sure what to think or how to feel now that I had found his marker since I knew my uncle only from a few photographs and from scraps of stories rarely told. He was gone long before I came of age.

Not surprisingly, I suppose, I found myself thinking not of my uncle at all but of my mother and of my grandparents, my grandmother especially. Dean is
the lone member of my mother's family to be buried here; the others are all in Minnesota or other distant places. He was a boy in another life -- a life before his sisters grew into women and married and had children of their own and grandchildren. Now, they are all gone after long lives, my grandfather in his 70's, then my grandmother and my aunts and recently my mother, all in their 90's.

I know I will have other, maybe better, responses after I process this small occasion.  But I think now I understand better why my grandmother kept subscribing to the Pine Bluffs Post all those years. She had known virtually everyone in town at one point and had wanted to keep up with their families, the graduations, the marriages, the births and death. She wanted to keep those things alive even if she could not be there.

But there was another reason I had not thought of before.  The Post was, in its way, a link of sorts, a connection with the boy she had had to bury so young and then to leave out on the prairie,so far away, in that earlier lifetime.

Out in Places Like Wyoming [4,a]

Heading East: The First Stop, Ames Monument.

On day two of our adventures in Wyoming, a Friday, we woke up early expecting to see snow on the ground.  We had been told it was overdue.  We had been told it was in the forecast. And when we came back to the cabin after dinner on Thursday evening, light rain was coming down as a kind of slush and temperatures had dropped into the low thirties. A part of me expected blizzard.

Though a thin film of ice coated the puddle outside our front door on Friday morning, there was no snow on the plains.  In the predawn light we could see snow in the Medicine Bow Range to the west and on the Laramie Mountains to the east, but not on the flat lands between.

The sky was still largely overcast except for a slight gap along the eastern horizon. So as the sun came up we had a brief opportunity -- five minutes or so -- to take pictures.

After breakfast we headed east. Our plan was to visit the two churches my grandfather Nordstrom had pastored and to stop at several spots along the way that my family had frequented when I was very young. Time permitting, we would drive into Cheyenne either coming or going. My father had lived in Cheyenne most of his years until he graduated high school.  My own solitary memory of Cheyenne was attending Frontier Days with my grandmother in July, once upon a time, although the exact year or my precise age is now beyond recall.

We took I-80 around Laramie and then after a drive through that the Laramie Mountains to the east we headed for Cheyenne. In the pre-Interstate era, those dark days of two-lane travel, the highway went through every town along its main street, which is why they are often called Main Street. In Laramie, the main street is called Grand Avenue.

When we traveled to visit my Nordstrom grandparents at their last church in Golden Prairie, driving through Cheyenne slowed the trip considerably.  I have vague recollections of stopping along a night darkened street at a particular store so that my father could buy various kinds of popcorn as a treat.  It is the popcorn, especially the caramel popcorn, that I remember, not the town. On drives like that my parents would sing together.

On one occasion I recall my parents having a sudden, hushed conversation about a sign they had seen in a store window that apparently said that Indians were not welcome. I cannot be certain about more details from that distant evening, but the fact that the sign created such immediate and deep concern for my parents made an impression on me that has not diminished. This would have been, perhaps, 1953 or 54, when I was four or five.

It had not snowed at the ranch, but it had snowed in the Laramie Mountains overnight. I estimated 3 or 4 inches where the wind had not swept it away. Temperatures recorded on the car thermometer dropped from 39 near Laramie to 33 as we reached the summit. The sky to the west and north was very dark and the wind was blowing. To the south was clear sky.

Just east of the summit we turned off  I-80 to see the Ames Monument, which is close to the interstate on a muddy unpaved road that had a serious washboard surface. The Ames Monument is a 60 foot granite pyramid built by the Union Pacific Railroad to honor the Ames Brothers, who were instrumental in the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 19th Century. It marks the highest elevation (8,247 feet) of the original route.

The Ames brothers, Oliver and Oaks, like many industrialists, especially from the 19th Century, were heroes to some and villains to others. While the brief accounts I have read all tell pretty much the same facts, the story is pretty much that the triumph of the transcontinental railroad was offset by the greed, corruption, and influence peddling that brought it into being.

A railroad town called Sherman was built near this spot; but when the railroad was rerouted several miles to the south in 1901, the town disappeared. Today the monument just seems to rise from the ground out in the middle of nowhere, fitting perhaps for the Ames brothers.  A telling footnote here: the plaques atop the monument intended to honor the brothers offer relief busts of Oliver and Oaks on opposite sides; in both cases, from what I could see, the noses have been shot off.

I remember the Ames Monument from childhood. We had stopped there on occasion although I cannot imagine why. Apart from its historic importance, which is fairly singular and would have been lost on small boys, all I remember is squinting for family pictures on the sunny side of the monument.

Stefan and I did a little picture taking as the pyramid is such a distinctive feature in this winter-bleak landscape.

A short distance away, on the other side of I-80 is a better spot for little boys, more fun and more memorable. Vedauwoo is an area of rock formations that offers incredible possibilities for climbing and exploring.

But as the weather was discouraging and we had planned to head toward the Nebraska border to see if we could find my grandfather's churches, we decided to catch Vedauwoo on the return trip. We got in the car and headed east.

Out in Places Like Wyoming [3]

Cowboy Culture

Stefan is in the final year of his MFA program at Syracuse, for which he is completing a senior project and writing a thesis. The project is a body of work, newly made art in his case. And the gist of the thesis is that the artist is constructing an artist's statement about that work. It can be fairly difficult to articulate what a body of work is intended to do, to provide theoretical underpinnings, and to explain methods. Even for representational art, paintings of landscapes, say, or portraits, the artist must translate layered emotions and impulses, as well as conceptual complexities, into common language, while trying to avoid reducing the work to over-simplification. It is no wonder we often find these statements difficult to understand.

But Stefan is not representational; he is an abstract painter.  The task of making an abstract artist's statement that will pass muster for a master's thesis has to be convincing as well.

When Stefan first suggested the trip to Wyoming, he noted that at some point he became aware of the family connections inherent in his paintings. His current work is suffused with these connections, and he wanted to find more, to research, if you will, by learning about a grandfather he had never met and by visiting places he had heard about but never seen, principally the old Zoller family stomping grounds out in Wyoming.

A few months later, I showed him some notebooks and drawings his grandfather had done as a young man in Wyoming, material that I had been keeping in a box. Stefan's grandfather had a long history in Wyoming and Colorado.  He was born in Boulder, Colorado, but raised principally in Cheyenne.  He had not only been a student at the University of Wyoming, where he met my mother, but he had also returned there  to teach Engineering after his war service.

From those years, what few things of his remain include a number of schematic drawings and a number of topographical elevations from his time as a surveyor. Stefan was excited by the prospect of incorporating elements of these line drawings and mathematical equations into his work. His first efforts clearly embodied the connections he was hoping for in a way that made representational explanations unnecessary and insufficient.

[See more at   stefanzoller.com  under 2015]

The trip to Wyoming would provide a different kind of material for this on-going project that I will characterize as narrative (mine, mostly), environmental (landscape and geography), and informational.

Once we arrived, the environmental and narrative elements of this material began to unfold.  We needed to be a little more intentional about gathering information, so we decided to spend the first day at the University to see what we could find concerning my father and his work there.

As we did all of our days on site, we got up early to see the sunrise. But there was no sun on the horizon, no long and haunting shadows.  It rained off and on the entire day.  Of Wyoming's three days of annual rainfall, we got two. I made this comment to our host, the rancher, who good-naturedly responded with a corrective about annual rainfall in eastern Wyoming. I'm still not sure whether he knew I was joking.

About 9:30, after a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, we headed into Laramie.

Following a city map we drove onto campus and found the Engineering building without any trouble. It is situated next to the Geology Building,where we decided to begin our search for information. I had assumed any records related to surveying would be housed there. Everywhere we went we found people eager to help us.  But information was not forthcoming. We learned two things at the Geology Building: that the surveying records it held pertained to the Wyoming Geological Survey and not to the US Geological Survey. No mention of J. Harold Zoller appeared in the state data base.

The other thing we learned is that there is a rock type called wyomingite. A box of samples sat on the counter for visitors to examine or to take, which I did.

Our tour of the Engineering Building had similar results.  We found people eager to help, but literally no mention of my father. There was considerable information available about the recent era in UWyo engineering but almost nothing of any help prior to the modern era.  The modern era apparently began in the 1970s. The Zollers moved from Wyoming in 1958.

But while the visit yielded no immediate information about my father, it did provide, via a cornerstone to the Engineering Building, a commentary on the nature of engineering, circa 1926, in the form of a cornerstone. The saying advances an aggressive posture toward the human struggle with the environment. We found evidence of that struggle everywhere.

The engineering folks sent us to the University archives, located on the top floor of the University art museum that stands within sight of the football stadium.  I remember that stadium, or a smaller version of it, from my early years. The stadium is three or four blocks from the house we lived in on Custer Street.  On occasion we were taken to the game on Saturday when my parents went.  They sat on the "home side" of the field with the other Cowboy fans. We boys sat for free on the small bleachers in the north end zone, in what was known as the "knot-hole" section. When the home team scored, the ROTC cadets fired a howitzer in the south end zone and a student dressed like a cowboy rode a brown and white spotted horse around the field, whooping and waving his hat. At the end of the game my parents collected us to go home.

On game days when we couldn't attend, we could tell by the noise of the crowd and by the boom of the howitzer just how well the home team was doing.

The archives proved just as disappointing as our endeavors in the engineering building had been. Yearbooks from the years my father taught at the University did not even carry pictures of faculty, so even that baseline source proved unhelpful. We spent a number of fruitless hours sorting through a box of papers and folders that "might" hold a clue, but found none.

When we reached the bottom of the box the archive staff had brought us, we decided to stop the search.  Outside it was raining harder.  We had lunch, visited a University themed store, and then headed back to the ranch.  On the way we stopped at the Wyoming Territorial Prison, which had once housed Butch Cassidy and other, less famous inmates. We learned that the territorial penal system was both harsh and, often, unfair. Not all deserved the punishments they were given, and few were as lucky as the young man below, who was free to leave after he had taken the self-guided tour.

Back at the ranch we spent the rest of the afternoon working. Stefan set up his water-color kit and began painting. I reviewed the day in my journal.  We hadn't made the information breakthrough we had been hoping for.  We learned what we already knew: it is tough for any individual to leave evidence of his journey. What we would hope now to gain would have to come from the environment itself.

On the other hand,  we had seen where Butch Cassidy had done time to pay for some of his crimes.  We were certainly starting to learn about cowboy culture.

Out in Places Like Wyoming [2]

360 Degree Horizon

Ten miles west of Laramie on highway 130 we turned left onto Brubaker Lane.  If your frame of reference is British, where "lane" refers to "a narrow way between hedges, walls, buildings," or if you live east of the Mississippi as we do and imagine lanes to be tree-lined country byways, you would have shot past Brubaker Lane without slowing.

But ten miles west of Laramie on highway 130 a little sign points left, so we turned. Brubaker Lane is a hard-packed red-dirt road that heads in a straight line toward the horizon, its rain-damped surface pounded into washboard by truck tires. Driving slowly in our small Hyunai rental, we were impressed with clear, flat line of the horizon and with the ruler-straight road that led toward it.

Five miles down this lane, according to our directions, we would find number 445, our ranch destination. It did not seem likely to us that we would find 444 addresses -- buildings, lanes, driveways, or turn-outs -- prior to 445. Clearly our eastern frame of reference wouldn't work here.

As we drove slowly, bouncing along the miles of ribs, what was immediately impressive to us was the magnitude, the scope, the abundance of both land and sky. In every direction, the land simply opened itself; it both drew us in and filled us up. Perhaps it was our eastern frame of reference again, where horizons are usually close and broken by hills and trees.

How can one be here and not stop to stare?

We did a lot of stopping and staring in those few days.  And snapping photographs. We had come in part to see the landscape, which the photographs can preserve after a fashion; but being on the open plains demands more than seeing.

In terms of Stefan's initial objectives for traveling with me to Wyoming -- to discover family connections -- these first views and impressions were more than confirmation that we were on the right track.  For him it was all discovery and first impressions. For me, it was rediscovery and affirmation.  It has occurred to me that my ability to find beauty in austere places and seasons may come from here.

Emptiness, which is part of this experience, is largely an illusion. 

In this environment, you find your eyes distinguish things that in other circumstances you would tend to overlook. It is in part the overwhelming dominance of the horizontal, in part the interplay between the expanse of sky and the expanse of land, in part the subtle complexity of colors, in part the constant restlessness of light.

It is also the prominence of objects that in other settings do not necessarily call attention to themselves, that are perhaps muted, insignificant or unremarkable.  Or maybe just harmoniously inconspicuous.

 

Once you see it, a horse grazing at sunrise, for example, is more than horse and pasture: it is an affirmation. 

Barren though it may appear, this is not a desolate, barren landscape in the way that, say, an urban street or a blighted neighborhood can be desolate.  Take fences as an example.  Wooden anchoring posts along a barbed-wire-and-steel-post fence have a certain gravity; they have a visual purpose as well as a practical, physical one, a meaning that is both obvious and elusive.

They are, at the very least, a reminder of human attempts to tame and domesticate and control the high plains.In places those attempts appear reasonably successful.  In other place, less so.

One of the conclusions I drew quite quickly is this: What appears to undifferentiated flatness is to some degree just a matter of distance -- the further your vantage point, the flatter the landscape.

What is, in fact, true, is that the landscape has plenty of ups and down, plenty of undulation. But to see it requires proximity; moving close to the ground changes one's illusion about what is barren and merely flat.

Even before we reached our cabin at 445 Brubaker Lane, we knew our journey was a success. To see this landscape is to be inspired.  To be there, to be in it is to be possessed, another dimension entirely.  Then you turn around for a look.  From the other end of that five mile drive, the view back is something else altogether.

Out in Places Like Wyoming

Coming in out of the rain

It had been raining in Wyoming and more rain was forecast. Through the little windows of the plane even as we descended in sunshine for landing, our view was of clouds, irregular and continuous.  Here and there the clouds opened and we glimpsed the broad, nearly flat, immense plains. Then as if by slight of hand we dropped and the clouds were above us.  Below, the grasslands, the black cattle, the pronghorn we call antelope, the long straight fences, and we were settling onto the runway of the Laramie Regional Airport. Drops of rainwater streaked the windows, blurring the view as we slowed, braking hard, and taxied what seemed like miles back to the small group of small buildings that comprise the terminal.

The trip to Wyoming, to Laramie, my home town, had been my son Stefan's idea. He had expressed his interest early in the year and proposed that he and I do a tour of places he had never seen. Laramie is background that figures into much of my extended family narrative. My parents were both UW graduates, and UW is where my father taught after he returned from the Pacific theater after the war. Three of my four brothers and I are Wyomingites by birth. The landscape is part of our DNA, as it were.

Still, I confess to being a bit surprised to actually walk out of that little airport in Laramie into the wind, toward our rental car.

The wind is different here, as strange as that may sound.  As is the sky.  Even overcast with rain clouds the Wyoming sky is impressive.

Traveling to Wyoming is chancy near the end of October. The rain that had been forecast for our first full day, Thursday, could be, might be, should probably actually turn out to be snow. The woman at the Hertz counter said as much. She wanted to know if we wanted to upgrade our rental to a 4-wheel drive jeep. The rancher from whom we were renting a little cabin said, "we are overdue."

Originally we thought to come in August, before the school year started. But that plan had not worked out, so we settled on the third week of October, which we figured ought to allow us to see what we wanted to see before winter settled in.

Because it was early afternoon and because we had not eaten since very early in the morning, Eastern Standard Time, we decided to drive into Laramie to look around, get a feel for the town, eat lunch, before driving out onto the high plains where Stefan had booked us a cabin on a working cattle ranch.

So we did that.

I had picked up a street map at the airport, but once we crossed the bridge (the viaduct) over the railroad tracks on the western edge of town, the streets opened up for me pretty much as I had remembered them, even though we moved to the east coast when I was nine.

We followed Third Street for a few blocks and then turned East onto Grand Avenue, which still appears to be the main thoroughfare through town. Like most towns in "the west" Laramie was laid out in a grid, with streets running north-south or east-west. Follow Grand Avenue east and you eventually wind up in Cheyenne, after climbing through the Laramie mountain range and crossing lots of prairie, of course.  Follow it west and you wind up in the rail yards. Look to the horizon at that point and you can see the Snowy Range in the Medicine Bow National Forest some fifty miles away.

North of Grand Avenue from about 10th Street on is the University.  Another nine blocks down Grand and three or four blocks south is the street I knew as a kid, where the house my father built is located.  We found it easily and then found the park where my brothers and friends and I played and then drove by the school we all attended during our first school years. Because it was still raining sporadically, we decided to explore on foot another day.  Besides we were starved.  So we went to lunch and then drove out to the ranch, fifteen miles west of town, across the grasslands.

When we got out of the car, finally, all my senses told me we were back in Wyoming -- the wind, the smell of sage, the sounds of cattle a half-mile away, the visceral sense of distances, and the incredible play of light everywhere.

Speaking Poems

Speaking Poems

While I have no clear exit strategy and am not working with a fixed timetable, it is safe to say that I am in the last phase of my teaching career.  This phase may last for some years or I might get a late career burst of energy and want to keep going.  I just don't know. But what I can say for certain is that the 40 years I have spent teaching and the nearly 50 practicing the craft of poetry now affords me the luxury of taking the long view back toward what has transpired during that half century.

One of the sure things that has emerged as I consider where I have been and what made me who I am is that I owe a great deal to people who served as teachers and mentors to me, especially to people from my own father's generation. Poets don't generally have patron saints; but if we did, William Stafford would make a strong candidate.

I don't know where I first encountered William Stafford although it was likely during my graduate school years in San Francisco in the early 1970's, and it likely involved his poem "Traveling Through the Dark." That poem, much anthologized and much loved, reappears from time to time as if it were an answer to questions I had been harboring. It is one of a handful of poems by a handful of contemporary American poets that crosses nearly all the barriers posed by "modern poetry"; it works almost as well for those who do not often read poetry as it does for people like me.

In "Traveling Through the Dark" the narrator finds himself miles from town or from human habitation, faced with a minor crisis: a doe, recently struck and killed, is obstructing one lane of the narrow canyon road Stafford has been navigating. The car that hit the deer is gone.To one side the canyon wall rises sharply; to the other side, a precipice. The road itself, one imagines, hangs precariously on the canyon wall.

The narrator, perhaps Stafford himself, can just drive around the deer, so he might have kept going himself. Instead, knowing the carcass poses a problem to the next driver, he gets out of the car to appraise his dilemma, only to discover that the doe is pregnant and the unborn faun has apparently survived the collision that killed its mother.

Those are our details. What should he do?


As readers discover so often while reading his poems, Stafford puts his finger on exactly the point where our certainties are most vulnerable.

"I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;/ around our group I could hear the wilderness listen," he writes. "I thought hard for us all -- my only swerving --,/ then pushed her over the edge into the river."

The temptation for readers, frequently, when they reach this stanza, is to fasten onto that last line without considering the implications of the three lines that precede it. In these lines Stafford is doing his best work. To judge too quickly is to mistake the narrator's last action, pushing the dead deer over the edge, for a cold heart and a lack of sensitivity. But his hesitation, his asking of questions, is weighted with the responsibilities and implications of his decision.

Before I actually knew much about him, and shortly after I moved to begin teaching at Houghton College thirty years ago, William Stafford came to our campus to read. This would have been in 1984 or 85. I must confess I was not so much impressed as puzzled by the man and his manner.  He was dressed, if memory serves, rather casually in a flannel shirt, Dickeys slacks, and a sports jacket that I remember as shapeless and dark. He played down the reading aspect of the occasion, and he played down his role as a visiting poet. He brought no folder of poems-in-progress nor, to my memory, no books to read from, although he had written many at that point.

Instead Stafford leaned against the lectern on his forearms and chatted after being introduced as if we were all old friends and he just happened to be in the neighborhood.

He was grateful to be asked to come to Houghton, he said. He was happy to see those of us who had come out that evening. He hoped we would not be disappointed. About when I was concluding he had arrived unprepared and was filling time with chit-chat, Stafford pulled a bundle of folded papers from his jacket pocket and spread them open on the lectern in front of him. He told us, almost as if he were asking permission, that he would like to "speak" some poems.

I do not remember what Stafford read on that occasion, but I have read his many volumes of poems over and over in the intervening years.  Every time, I find myself delighted, as if I were discovering his work anew.What I have learned about the value and impact of poetry, about the qualities of direct language from reading his poems has been invaluable in my own work. Although I have scarcely been conscious of it, it would be fair to say that I have served a valuable apprenticeship with Stafford the poet.

Ten or twelve years into my teaching career I became aware that Stafford had written and spoken about his own approach to teaching -- and that I had begun a second phase of apprenticeship under his guidance, my apprenticeship as a teacher of writing. Here, too, his many books on writing, writers, and teaching -- often collections of interviews and essays -- have directly informed my own approach and strategies. Here, too, he has influenced me in ways that would be hard to number or to name.

Chief among these ideas, to choose but one, is the idea of permission to fail. Permission to fail, odd as it may seem, allows the writer to take risks necessary to discovery, to take risks that permit success. Like my other teaching mentor, Donald M. Murray, Stafford taught students so as to empower them; that was his aim and objective. He thought a teacher's primary role was to remove obstacles for the apprentice writer, obstacles that too often include the teacher.

Learning is not a competition in Stafford's view, whatever benefits we might derive from knowing how to distinguish good from better from best. Each student brings something important to the task of learning; the teacher's role is to help the student find ways to identify and develop that important thing.

The third phase of my apprenticeship under Stafford's mentoring must have begun a long time ago too, although, as with learning to write and learning to teach, I have only recently become conscious of what I have been absorbing. It has to do with living a principled life.

Stafford served his country during WWII by performing alternative service. That is to say, he declined to join the Army for reasons of conscience. Instead he spent the war living in Civilian Public Service camps, first in Arkansas and later in several west and mid-western states, and working on public works projects. It was a decision filled with considerable consequences.

It was a dangerous thing to be a pacifist, a conscientious objector, during a war that virtually everyone thought we needed to fight. Discussion of those beliefs will have to wait for another occasion; but for my purposes here, it is enough to note that Stafford's stand was both costly and courageous.  The personal risks were great.

More importantly, for me, Stafford's commitment to his beliefs is reflected everywhere, in his positive and encouraging attitude toward his students, and in the humble stewardship of language evident in his poems.

Maybe the most valuable lesson I have derived from William Stafford is the lesson of "Traveling Through the Dark." In that poem, Stafford, the narrator, stands on that little-traveled canyon road and ponders what he ought to do. He weighs the antagonisms that exist, the forces that pull in opposite directions. He weighs moral implications, and he thinks of both broadly and narrowly. The point is not that he pushed the dead deer over the precipice, however necessary that may have been.  The point is that he accepted responsibility for the situation he found himself in, a situation not of his own making;  he considered the consequences of his options, and he did his duty.

Life on the Space-Time Continuum

What's New, What's Old 

While it is likely any book with "enigma" in the title would attract my interest, re-reading V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival has been an energizing experience; not least of all it has energized me as regards my blog, this blog, which has been languishing for many months following an eighteen month focus on our visit to China in January 2013. Thus, I hope to re-imagine the blog as well as revive it along lines that will gradually become clear.  The Enigma of Arrival, a book about many things, is especially about how literature, and our ideas about literature, shape our understanding and appreciation for where and who we are.

Nearly a year after our trip to China, on Christmas Day 2013, in the evening, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren gathered in the day room of my mother's nursing home in Leesburg, Virginia, to sing Christmas carols.  A woman of dignity, grace, and unfailing good will even in her present confusion, my mother directed our singing from her wheel chair. She was not entirely sure of who we all were, but she energetically connected with music she has known for better than 90 years.We sang each carol until we ran out of word to finish out the familiar tunes.

This experience was, I suppose we could say, enigmatic, embracing as it did the bewildering landscape of my mother's mental state and the hope and sadness we all felt keenly. It was one of those occasions where the past and future, and a world of colliding emotions, are compressed into a single moment.

An hour later we were back at my brother's house, catching up with nieces and nephews, cousins, assorted family. My nephew Jameson, an English teacher himself with children in high school, asked me whether I found life in Houghton, my village in western New York, boring now that I have become a world traveler. He had lived in Houghton himself during college, so he had some notion that life there might seem tame after months lived in Korea and in England and for shorter periods in China.

It was, and is, an interesting question, although I must confess I was unprepared to hear it and, more than surprised that I had no good answer.

I was prepared for other questions. Had Jameson asked, as others have, whether it is sad to see my mother, his grandmother, in a nursing home, I would have answered, "Yes, of course, it is sad to see my mother this way."  That is the only possible quick answer.

On the other hand, a more complex, considered answer would pass over the "yes" quickly into the landscape of aging.  Despite being saddened, I am also happy and relieved that she is content and well-tended. It is not her present confinement I lament so much,  her displacement from her home of many years, but the loss of her mind to Alzheimers.

Thus, the question about boredom is both easy and complicated. For those of us with freedom and choices, boredom is a condition of the mind more often than a consequence of physical circumstances. Both boredom and restlessness, boredom's frequent companion, can be enemies of contentment, a most rare though enviable state of mind.

That said, now that my wife and I have had opportunities to travel to China and other opportunities to live for extended periods in Busan, Korea, and in London, I must confess to a strong desire to do it again, to see more, to live where the environment is unfamiliar, where I am called upon to figure out the landscape.  I feel restlessness, yes; but I hope it is a restlessness of curiosity -- a wholly different animal from boredom-produced restlessness.

I want to travel more now that I have lived, however briefly, in Europe and in Asia because travel has given a specific shape to my curiosity. Like education generally, a little knowledge of elsewhere spurs greater curiosity. We might call our time in London and Busan and southern China threshold experiences. I have had just enough of an introduction to Asian cultures to learn how much I don't know, just enough to want more.

I understand the assumptions people naturally make about small towns, rural villages, tiny communities surrounded by cows and corn fields.But it would simply be incorrect to imagine that my desire to travel is somehow related to where I live, to the small town where "nothing happens" and where the real world is held at bay.The truth is more like this: places are not necessarily boring, nor are other cultures necessarily better than our own. The capacity for curiosity, like the capacity for boredom, resides in the individual.

Naipaul spends 350 pages exploring this complex relationship between people and place. An immigrant to England, he examines his new rural home at first with "new" eyes. As months and seasons and years pass, as his new eyes gain the longer, deeper vision of the permanent resident, he understands in new ways both landscape and its human occupants.

He describes it this way:  "I had slowly learned the names of shrubs and trees.  That knowledge, helping me visually to disentangle one plant from another in a mass of vegetation, quickly becoming more than a knowledge of names, had added to my appreciation.  It was like learning a language, after living among its sounds." This does not sound like boredom to me. This learning to distinguish is what living anywhere -- geographically or chronologically -- is all about. A little later Naipaul continues, "Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself.  Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memories."

Although it would be unfair to my nephew to suggest that he sought more than companionable conversation with an often distant uncle, the question that has been bouncing around my brain is a question about smallness, about limitation; it is a question about the issue of living a diminished life. In this way, then, perhaps boredom is passive, where contentment is active.  My mother, for all that the years and her disease have taken from her, is still herself; she is learning the landscape of her world, however diminished it may appear from the outside.

And in her lucid moments, she has chosen contentment. It is not my landscape yet, but I recognize the journey.  I have read about it.