The Daily Brief

So, Sgt/Cpl Blondie (as of this Monday to be College Freshman Blondie, hopefully over the next seven years to metamorphose into Dr. Blondie, DVM) and I were in the main post office this week to return unopened, some book club selections that I swear, I swear I had gone on line and said I declined but which turned up in the mail anyway and I only hope if I return enough of them refused they’ll cancel my membership anyway because I only signed up to get the four books at 50 cents or a dollar, or whatever, and I’ll sign up again next decade to get some cheap books….oh where was I? Got it. Post office.

There was a young man in line behind us with two small children at their most totally charming stage of life… which is at about 4 or 5. Old enough to be over the terrible twos, and damn grateful are we for all of that, and not old enough to begin laughing at your lamentable taste in oldies on the radio. The two children, a boy and a girl, were teasing their Fond Papa, trying to make him turn around and look out through the plate glass window-wall of the area where everyone lines up for stamps. Someone in the parking lot, they insisted to their Fond Papa, was trying to steal their car! And of course, he was teasing them in return, by not looking… which reminded me very much of what an awful tease my own father was.

I imagine it was because Dad was an only child; not only that, the only adored child of Granny Dodie, who could give the proverbial over-protective Jewish mother many valuable, and guilt-inducing lessons. Perhaps if Dad had been able to tease younger siblings… at least, it would have watered down Granny Dodie’s motherly instincts to a degree somewhat less overwhelming. I am fairly certain many of her own friends must have gotten damned tired of hearing her talk about Dad. On the other hand, Mom said that the one of the most wonderful things about marrying Dad was the fact that Granny Dodie and Grandpa Al instantly and unquestioningly accepted her as a daughter; she was theirs by virtue of marrying their son, the focus of unstinting adoration and approval— heady brew after her own parents’ difficult marriage, and the death of their own oldest child during WWII.

But Dad still was an awful tease. The little scene in the post office reminded me of the time at Redwood house when my little brother Sander was a toddler, on one of those evenings when we sat out on the terrace under the grape pergola and watched the reflected sunset fading off the mountains opposite. My younger brother JP and my sister Pippy sat on the shallow stairs that led up to the terrace, while Sander played on the lawn below, and Dad relaxed on one of the chairs on the terrace… maybe the canvas butterfly chair. We had one of those huge, canvas butterfly chairs, then. He looked out over our heads, at Sander on the lawn with his toys and remarked casually,
“You know, there is a very large tarantula, crawling across the lawn towards the baby.”
This had all the hallmarks of one of Dad’s teases. Of course, he was trying to make us look, so of course we didn’t.
“There is a large tarantula on the lawn, and it is crawling straight at the baby,” Dad insisted, with a perfectly straight face. “Really.”
Umm. Yeah. Sure, Daddy.

But eventually we broke, and looked over our shoulders, and oh, my god, there was a huge tarantula, all hairy legs and science-fiction googly segmented eyes, about four feet away and crawling straight at our baby brother. I flew off the steps and snatched him up, and JP flew straight into the kitchen for a mason jar and a tight-fitting lid.

As I was relating this to Blondie, the postal clerk begged me to please stop talking about nasty things like this, spiders and small children, she was deathly afraid to step out of her own house on most days, thanks to tales like this… although the children and their father did seem vastly amused.

I think it may have been a good and charitable thing that I waited to tell Blondie about the other spider story and Dad, until we were out in the parking lot. That would have been the time when he was in the midst of a craze for skin-diving, and used to go with certain of his friends to shallow-water dive, and had a rubbery black skin-diving suit, with a breathing mask, and long black flippers and all the accoutrements… and we often visited some of his friends’ houses, and watch our fathers melt lead to cast diving weights … why did they have to do this themselves, I wonder now? This would have been in about 1960 or so, when we were living in the White Cottage, in an era when anyone wishing to indulge in odd hobbies had perforce to resort to D-I-Y, I suppose.
Anyway, he came back from one of those diving excursions, driving the Plymouth station-wagon that was our main car then, with a great salt-water scented heap of sea gleanings in the back, covered with a couple of wet burlap sacks. He always brought back interesting things from these trips; abalone shells, and cork floats adorned with shell encrustations, this, that and the other.

“I have something to show you!” he said, enthusiastically, to JP and I. I would have been about six, JP about four… just the totally gullible age, and we followed him eagerly to the back of the Plymouth, while he undid the window and the gate, reached under the burlap… and brought out a huge black, many-clawed, many-limbed spidery-looking thing. It was a spider crab, of course, but it looked like the world hugest, most menacing spider imaginable.

He chased us with it, twice around the White-Cottage’s half-acre backyard, JP and I screaming every step of the way. Amazing stamina, when you think on it, really. I still do not care for spiders, although I can cope with them as long as they are smaller than a quarter… which might have been Dad’s inadvertent point.

The postal clerk would be screaming still, I think

Being that I am writing away on the book every moment that I can, this means a lot of computer time, building intricate castles of conversations and descriptions. Or leafing through my own books, or googling for bits of authentic and corroborative detail to lend convincing detail to the narrative: like, what would have been used in a makeshift humidifier in the early 1800s, or what would a teamster done to have treated an ox with sore feet? What would Ft. Laramie of 1844 been constructed of (adobe and timber, actually, there are paintings of it, too), what were all the names of the children and the wives in the Stephens-Townsend party? That and a thousand other questions send me back to the books constantly, since I really need to write about them with authority, and dislike the thought of being nibbled to death by the ducks of absolute authenticity.

It all does remind me though, of what most Europeans tend to forget or don’t realize in the first place… that the continental US is really, really huge, and terribly empty, and not much like most of Western Europe, although I think maybe the Russian “outback” might come close. There are bits of Scotland, that if you squint and pay no mind to the stone walls, can look sort of, kind of a bit like Appalachia. No wonder the Scots-Irish got off the boat and headed for the hills and hardly ever came down out of them again.

That part of Southern Spain called the Extremadura can pass as a small scrap of the Southwest all dry scrub and red dirt, if you can ignore the occasional fortified hill-town, so the hard-fighting poor noblemen from Trujillo took to Mexico and the southwest like ducks to water, if they were ducks and there were water, of course. This vast emptiness must have come as a horrible shock otherwise, to those who came as immigrants, from the 17th century on, especially once over the coastal mountains, and once out of the cities along the coastline fringe: Boston, and Charleston, and Savannah… which at a squint could look like the newer parts of a European city.

As any baffled American on their first trip to Europe will tell you… gee, everything is pretty dinky over here, isn’t it? Ceilings are low, the old houses have teensy tiny rooms, the streets are narrow, and everything is really, really close together. (Unless you’re staying in a palace or a stately home, someplace, where the dining room is a good quarter mile from the kitchen.) I have always been convinced that Copenhagen, a charming and welcoming city to me as a teen-aged Girl Scout, was entirely built at 3/4th scale, somewhat like Disneyland. The Lake District to me looked like a twee and dainty pocket wilderness, carefully manicured and groomed to look like a wilderness without actually being one. And driving across Europe fifteen years later, the next town was always three or five, or at most, ten miles on. It never seemed that gas stations were more than a couple of mile apart along the major roads. As Bill Cosby pointed out, in half an hour you’re in a whole ‘nother language! No, I can very well imagine that in the middle of the 1800s the most common reaction of someone straight off the boat from Hamburg, or Bergen or Liverpool to being plunked down in the Platte River valley, or the Great Basin of the Rockies would have been to assume the fetal position underneath the nearest piece of heavy furniture.

It was big and empty then, empty of all people but a scattering of nomadic Indian tribes; no established roads, other than printed on the land by iron-wheeled wagons, and what fortresses and settlements which did exist, with the exception of a scattering of adobe towns in what is now New Mexico and California, were new and raw. No terraces of grapevines or sheep-folds, no crumbing Roman or medieval ruins poking up from the grass, like bones of the land. No castles or cathedrals, with a thousand years worth of architectural accretions, or towns with a similarly aged collection of traditions, rituals and feuds. No, none of that, just the sky and the wind, and the land beneath it all, empty to the farthest horizon. It would have taken a particular sort of daring to venture out into that vast, indifferent wilderness, stepping away from the security of the known and knowable, and going… well, somewhere.

And it’s still pretty empty… there was a stretch along I-15 in Utah where it was fifty miles to the next gas station, and there’s another out on I-40, out east of Kingman: a hundred miles to the next one, and not a damned thing constructed by man that you can see except for the road itself, and the power-lines along side.