by Jonas Eika
Even though she was already writing songs at the age of twelve in Tonopah, Nevada, after inheriting an accordion from her father, Karen Ruthio didn’t release her first album until she was thirty-nine. At that point, she was living with her husband, Henry Colberg, and their four children in Ruth, which was one of the few towns in Nevada to enjoy a relatively stable mining sector through the latter half of the twentieth century; for the first time in Karen’s life, it was possible to settle down for more than a few years. It was in Ruth that she first met the women who would eventually make up her band, and in Ruth that she saved up enough money to record their first three albums: in addition to the aforementioned debut from 1967, Reclaiming the Salt (1968) and Open-Pit Mining (1972). Thanks to their traditional instrumentation (violin, upright bass, upright piano, hammer dulcimer, spoons, etc.) and limited distribution—primarily at gas stations and roadside joints in Utah and Nevada—the albums received almost no critical attention but found a devoted fanbase in the neighboring suburbs, where Karen Ruthio started to be hired to play at annual town fairs. Proceeds from the shows went to the construction of a school in Ruth, and to keeping the town’s last mine afloat after the Kennecott Copper Corporation pulled out in 1977 due to falling copper prices. A year later, the band’s local popularity started to peter out, or at least the other towns in White Pine County, all in danger of going bankrupt, could no longer afford to pay them. The mines yielded only small quantities of copper and were eventually closed in November ’78. The members of the band dispersed across the desert with their husbands, pulled to the few operational mines left in Nevada, Utah, Arizona.
Karen Ruthio and Henry Colberg moved to Austin, Nevada. Founded during the silver rush of 1862—which reportedly erupted when a Pony Express horse kicked a rock aside—and abandoned by the thousands when the precious metal supply ran out, Austin had, by 1978, become a living ghost town with about a hundred residents. Houses, hotels and churches stood empty in various stages of disrepair. A small corner of town was kept afloat by a minimal amount of turquoise extraction. Henry found work in the mines, Karen made jewelry out of the supple mineral, their youngest son moved away. She was writing songs, but couldn’t afford to record them, and she didn’t want to without her band. She walked around town missing her friends. A mile east, there was a squat granite tower, which she occasionally climbed to play music in. In the summer of 1982, this resulted in her album Black-Tailed Jackrabbit, largely instrumental, recorded with a dictaphone and released in 2001 in bootleg. Long, chromatic stretches of accordion improvisation, which occasionally take the form of composed music, ring hard and sacrosanct in the high-ceilinged room on the third floor of the tower. The granite becomes a second voice. The echo of the room amplifies the sound of Ruthio’s movements on the chair and the sound of the chair being moved across the hard floor. You can hear her coughing and clearing her throat, and once in a while she sings a bit—sparse lines about longing and loneliness, about not having anyone to share her thoughts with, about the pain of having to read Hegel on her own. (The women of Ruth met weekly to discuss the literature and philosophy that they weren’t able to read with their spouses. While the boys became men at an early age and started working in the mines, many of the women of the town had gone to school, played an active role in their children’s education and eventually developed an inclination for novels and philosophical treatises, which they purchased collectively by mail order from Los Angeles. Typical readings included Southern Gothic novels and works of German idealism.) Six times over the course of the record, she invokes the black-tailed jackrabbit: three times in the form of sober descriptions of its physical characteristics and breeding habits; once as “mother”; once as “a meal of grandmothers”; and finally, as the “attentive ears” that will deliver an important message to longed-for friends.
Over the next ten years, Karen Ruthio lived in four different places in Nevada and Arizona, saved up and didn’t write any songs. In 1994, Henry passed away.
During the next few months, she managed to track down her old band members, almost all of them now widowed. In June of 1995, they gathered in Bonnie Claire, Nevada, ghost town since ’54, but still supplied with electricity and running water, and crucially located at the last exit on Route 95 before Las Vegas. The band renovated the old hotel in town, with a café in the foyer, a practice space in the dining room, and a room for each of them on the second floor. One of the people who stopped by the café and had a Karen Ruthio album thrust into his hands was Robert Doxey, Los Angeles Times music critic, who, after listening to Reclaiming the Salt, thought to himself: This is exactly what I’ve been looking for. It’s nothing like what I’ve been looking for. In a series published in the paper in March, April and May of ’97, he dubbed Karen Ruthio “Neil Young’s long-lost sister” and “country’s answer to Laurie Anderson: The mother of art-country.” None of the labels stuck.
This coverage prompted the rerelease of Ruthio’s first three albums from her time in Ruth, and a short-lived blast of attention, which peaked at a mediocre show at SXSW in ’99. Over the course of the next few years, however, Ruthio found a solid following in Utah, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada, primarily among women who lived in small desert towns or hailed from them, women from farming and mining families and those women’s children. With the money coming in from now-regular concerts in Las Vegas, Phoenix and Salt Lake City, the band built a recording studio in the basement of the Bonnie Claire Hotel, and from 2002 to 2009, another three albums saw the light of day. Inhabiting Ghost Towns (2002) tells the story of a town that has to be transported a hundred yards down a mountain to make room for the expansion of an open silver mine on the city limits, told over two unbroken, ambient compositions. Ark (2004) features ten pop songs about various plant and animal species native to the Bonnie Claire area and one about a spaceship that comes to pick them up. And finally, OreCore (2009) revolves around a cult, the worshippers of the “Sun-Sun”: the prophesized union of the sun and the fiery core of the earth, which the cult has been tasked to accelerate and prepare. They travel around, leveling houses, churches and crosses into the ground, “turning all erect edifices to dust.” They settle down and dig large holes, extracting and selling precious metals. The cult is rich, but they live a primitive lifestyle, sleeping on the ground (sun on my belly, sun on my back / and inside me the Sun-Sun’s chamber / The black flames of the plague in the manger)—all of their profits go to the development of digging and pumping technologies. Many are sacrificed along the way. The album’s long, monotone tracks and twelve-tone interludes drag with their heavy and distorted instrumentation, but Ruthio’s dark voice seems to drive them forward, making it difficult to discern pessimism from hope, productivity from ruin.
Karen Ruthio didn’t write any more songs after 2009, but she played live shows to the very end: “My veins may be all dried up, but my throat sure isn’t,” as she told a journalist in October 2015. Death took her by surprise two years later in the back of a tour bus.
ME, RORY AND AURORA
It was me, Rory and Aurora, back then they lived in a flat smack up against the tracks. Crawling back and forth between their living room and bedroom was like taking the train, Rory had punched a big angry hole in the wall one day while Aurora was at church, like the tunnel on that train line. Well, one day Rory said he didn’t love Aurora anymore, and looked at me with eyes I think I’d call turned around, I mean they were looking as much into his own brain as at me, and seeking affirmation both places. I said why and didn’t feel like talking about it when she wasn’t home, and in a way I was their child, so how was I supposed to talk to him about it anyway? My main interest, besides running away with Aurora, and I would never get her to agree to that, was to keep being their kid. She’s always out and about, he said, she’s not interested in our life anymore. Kiss my ass, I said, and went to bed with a rancid taste in my mouth because of what his our implied, that something like a his-and-my life could exist without her.
/> Luckily she came home and threw her puffy jacket on the floor. I could tell from the sound of fabric collapsing and the way she sighed, a drawn-out, useless whistle like electric signals moving through a burnt-out computer. Where have you been? Rory asked. At the church, Aurora said. What’d you make? Enough, she said, and dumped all the money on the table in the kitchen, where he was making leek soup. I could smell it by the sweet, oniony steam seeping toward me in bed. The room was nearly dark, bundles of warm light poked through the hole in the wall. Headlights slid over the ceiling that was shaking from the trains. Does it really take all day to sell your shit to the faithful? Rory said. Does it take all day to steal vegetables for your soup? Aurora replied. Who’s the one with a baby in their belly? I was lying halfway down the gap between the two mattresses, my shoulder blades against the wooden pallet, which I had found out walking one day and dragged back home—like how a cat brings in dead birds, Rory had said, and it was fair enough: I was quiet and cuddly and almost never in the way, I registered everything that happened in the flat. A little food was all I needed but I could easily go a day or two without. And every once in a while I’d come home, guilty and proud, with some sort of junk they hadn’t asked for but had to accept: a wooden pallet, a board game, a lump of amber. Ceramic shoulder pads Rory would put on when he got drunk. There wasn’t any shame in letting them take care of me, it was hot and sometimes turned us on, but it would have hurt if I couldn’t return the favor.
Later—I must have been sleeping—they got into bed all stiff and stubborn with the silence they brought with them from the kitchen table. The air grew hard between their shoulders where I was curled up, and then Rory turned onto his side and snuggled up to Aurora, saying hey or babe or some other conciliatory thing. I wanted to join in as usual, to wedge myself between their laps and start on both of them while they kissed, but it was their fight and I guess their make-up too. I wriggled to the foot of the bed, crawled out and lay down under the pallet. Rory rolled onto his back again, his bony body closing the gap between the mattresses. He pulled his butt cheeks that were above my chest up and away from me as his shoulder blades pushed against the pallet, so his lower back became an arched bridge of skin. It smelled like sweat loosening the dirt he had accumulated during the day.
And then it was Aurora on her belly between the mattresses, pressed softly against the crisscrossed planks. I laid the palm of my hand against one of them and could vaguely feel the weight of her belly through it. Involuntarily, and with a sense of irritation that exceeded the tenderness, I felt for a second entirely equal with the creature on the other side of the wood and the belly skin and whatever else was shielding it from me. Dropped into this cramped flat, it would have to find its place in Rory and Aurora’s life, between the furniture and piles of clothes, the way they’d been living for a while. Who knew why that baby had chosen to come here. Who knew whether the world you were in before you let yourself be sucked into conception was as barren and formless and freezing cold as mine had been the night I met Rory and Aurora at that bar eight months earlier. They were out drinking up the last of her severance check, celebrating her return from rehab, Rory was glowing. I had gone out hoping someone would buy me drinks and offer me cigarettes, and they did. They told me about their lives, that they had moved to London because Aurora got a job as a teacher at a local school, which she lost soon after when she lost their child in the sixth month and went to the dogs, and I loved sitting there hearing about it. I loved the lack that was so clearly part of their lives, since they were babbling about it to a stranger between giggles that made their martinis spill. It was paranoid and hot how they were getting closer on both sides. I followed them home because I was hungry. The sex and fun we had was so good that they let me stay, or maybe they were just sympathetic to my situation. Or maybe they were sympathetic because we had such a good time together, so in that sense I also invested some of my personality that night. I followed them because I was hungry. Next thing I was in love with Aurora.
Now I was climbing back into bed and falling asleep to her breath. Her hand on my shoulder shook me awake, did I want to come with her? Rory was still sleeping.
She preferred to work alone, probably knowing that we would never really do anything without her, so it felt special to be brought along. Sitting across from her on the train going backward, watching things disappear. A timid streaming orange light in the leaves and the rails and the rail workers’ bodies, like they hadn’t returned to themselves after sleep. Their hammering sounded daring and impossible so early in the morning, coming through the window with the cold air. And with the whirring of the train’s frozen axles. Aurora said, Hold your breath! and I blocked my throat as the darkness was pulled over us. The friction of the train on the rails sounded stifled and secret. In the light from the other side of the tunnel, she let her breath leak slowly out between her teeth, her hand slipping the pills into her coat pocket, and I coughed mine out with a gasp. A pair of coattails flapped out of the train compartment after the man who had been sitting next to her. Vowels, that’s what we called those pills, because they softened you up and made you receptive, starting with a round feeling and a light in your mouth, your throat, your belly and so on, until your whole body was a glowing processor just waiting for data, which was probably why City Church was the perfect market; affiliated with the rehab center, it was full of addicts who had turned to God or were trying to. The vowels, like the service, lasted for about an hour and were usually a prelude to acid, a way to prepare for the actual trip, so Aurora could get a bag of 100 for £50 and sell them on for £1 apiece. She would prop herself against the wall by the entrance, then push off with her shoulder and greet people as they arrived. She pulled them to her, calling them by name, and leaned into them with her voice. A kind of smoothing, a leveling of features into a dull plate of a face, marked the majority of these people, and from where I was standing it looked like Aurora was pulling them out of their sameness one by one and really seeing them. I thought about whether it felt that way for them too. Whether she could do that while selling them drugs.
What surprised me that day, and what I think Aurora brought me along to see, was how they remained seated when it was all over. From the moment I had taken the pill—in sync with a hundred other hands rising from pocket to mouth, a hundred throats stretching and swallowing when the prelude began—the service had seemed to be elapsing in parallel with my trip, expanding in time with the space being cleared out inside me. As if its composition were encoded into the chemical formula of the pill. Afterward, there was only the comedown. I was all tied up inside and couldn’t feel a thing. And that felt like an awful weakness in light of the service and the way the prayers, the organ music and the priest’s gesticulations had filled me up. Now it was quiet, the priest had left, and all around me people remained seated with the saddest faces or their eyes closed, afflicted by something they preferred to deal with in the dark. They sat slumped and shaggy, but seemed at the same time infused with a mystical will to be present in this after, a persistence that went far beyond what the pill could give them. But Aurora! She wouldn’t budge either, didn’t react to my elbow poking her side or my feet tapping the floor. Of course she sat through the service so people could see that she didn’t split as soon as she had milked them, and when the dealer is tripping too you know the product is good. But why was she still sitting there—and with that belly too, shouldn’t she eat something soon? Her abdomen was bulging in the light from the barred windows above, trying to get her attention, just like me. She stayed that way for hours. And the church actually wasn’t even a church, but a bare room without ornamentation, just concrete walls and ten rows of folding chairs set up for the occasion.
Back home in the kitchen, Rory had a roast in the oven and two homeless men at the table who looked up at us friendly and embarrassed when we walked through the door. Dave and Sully, he said, introducing them with an outstretched palm, we got to talking up by the corn
er store. Aurora hid her confusion, probably so that they wouldn’t feel unwelcome, went over to greet them with me at her heels and turned to Rory, who had his head in the oven: Food’s ready! Over dinner he tried to keep the conversation going, mostly talking about Aurora—only three weeks till she’s due but she’s still bloody working nine to five—while a tone of accusation crept into his voice. Yeah, things are a bit tight right now, Aurora said, looking at him, especially if we want to be able to afford a roast now and then. She ate very little. And now she’s taking Casey with her too, Rory continued. Yeah, I said, I’m not doing much anyway, so I get to go to work with Mum! And I’m here all day thinking about them, Rory said. Well, you’ve got friends up at the Park, Dave said, implying Sully and himself with an almost noble nod back and forth between them. I smiled, feeling really wretched, sad that they had to step right from the street into this family drama, probably the first home in which they’d set their wiry feet in a while. Rory had insisted they take their socks off and rest their feet on a stool under the table. They were sitting very awkwardly, unable to relax or give in to the reclined position their raised legs demanded. They reeked much worse than we did, everyone could smell them. When Rory offered for them to stay the night, something happened that went way beyond this covert marriage dispute and the discomfort of sitting in the middle of it. Dave, he was the one who did the talking for both of them, looked down and said, Thank you but we can’t. But it’s freezing cold outside, Rory continued, and the shelters, aren’t they all closed now, until Dave said, We wish we could accept the offer. You’re very nice people. But you see, it’s not easy being comfortable in someone else’s home—it can make us really sad, Sully added—we can’t do it for your sake.