by Rick Bailey
There’s the recurring airport/travel dream. I’ve missed my flight, the airport morphs into a foreign city I vaguely recognize. I feel like I should know my way around as I wander from room to room, from street to street, invariably at night. It all looks familiar, in an Escher-like way, as if I’m in a dreamscape I’ve crossed in the past, yet I am hopelessly lost. Then there’s the sitting-on-the-toilet-in-the-driveway dream, and, inexplicably (but what’s truly explicable in a dream?) the recurring Jimmy Carter dream.
The first time I dreamed about Jimmy Carter, he had been out of office for years. In the dream I was in my hometown, at a party at the Coy house, on the corner of Fifth and Church Streets. It was a summer night. There was a volleyball net in the backyard, though I do not remember the Coy family as volleyball enthusiasts. No one was playing volleyball in the dream. I was standing outside, swatting mosquitos, probably looking for the beer keg, when Jimmy Carter walked around the corner of the house and across the backyard. He walked right past me.
“Hello, Mr. President,” I said.
He looked up and nodded at me. He didn’t answer.
In later dreams of Carter, when I have greeted him, always with the same, “Hello, Mr. President,” he still doesn’t answer, even though I feel like we’re kind of getting to know each other.
Now that I think of it, it seems like no one talks to me in my dreams. I talk to them. I greet them, I ask them questions, sometimes I beseech them. No one answers. I guess they don’t know what to say.
The problem with dreams, Richard Francis Kuhns has pointed out, is it’s hard to get out of them. “Dream constitutes an inescapable story,” Kuhns says, “which must be attended to. As the dream is dreamt the dreamer cannot be distracted from the dream as one might be in listening to a story that is read or spoken out loud.” You can’t change the channel; you can’t even lower the volume. You can’t ignore a dream that’s happening to you. You’re trapped in it.
A few weeks ago, my wife had a minor episode of night terror,1 crying out in her sleep. When he was little, my son went through a phase of night terrors. We would hear moans and muffled screams in the dead of night. When it happens, you have the uncanny feeling the person you know and love is far from you, unreachable, almost someone else, as if possessed. Even waking them, you can’t quite get to them. And for a while they can’t get back to you.
A loved one’s night terror is your family’s own sci-fi or horror show, a disquieting, homey mystery.
On the other hand, I tend more toward night humors, find myself waking up thinking, What was that? And: How do I go back?
Sometimes we know we are dreaming. We’re in it, the way Kuhns has it, but we know we’re in it. We have distance, perspective. But no control. In dream literature this state is referred to as “lucid dreaming.” The term was coined by a Dutch psychiatrist named Frederik van Eeden. The definitive text on lucid dreaming seems to be Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys’s Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger: Observations pratiques (Dreams and the Ways to Direct Them: Practical Observations, 1867). It sounds like an instruction manual. Those who develop skill at lucid dreaming are called oneironauts.
I probably won’t read Denys’s guide.
The Lucidity Institute offers a course in lucid dreaming. On the Institute website we are told, “The two essentials to learning lucid dreaming are motivation and effort.” That sounds like work.
I don’t want to become a oneironaut. For one thing, it’s an ugly word. For another, what if becoming a oneironaut diminished the dream, undermining the element of surprise? Even my recurring dreams are not re-runs. I want to keep them that way.
1 I prefer the term night terror to “nightmare” because the latter seems needlessly sexist. (Nightmare, according to Oxford Living Dictionaries: “Middle English denoting a female evil spirit thought to lie upon and suffocate sleepers: from night + Old English mære ‘incubus.’”)
21
Chemical Neutral
“What you do,” the tree man says, “is get some Great Stuff. Fill the tree up with it to keep the water out of it.”
We’re standing beside an apple tree. Well, half an apple tree. We have three of them left, all senior citizens feeling their years. Our house sits on property that was part of a large orchard in the nineteenth century. Gradually most of our neighbors have cut down their apple trees. The one now reduced to half its former self has looked haggard and dry for a few years—part of it, anyway. This spring I was going to lop off a dead chunk of it. Then a wind storm came through the area. There were enough leaves in the tree for it to resist, but it lost its worse half. When I got up Father’s Day morning, there it was, broken, half the tree bowing to the grass. A deep hollow in the trunk yawned out of the gap, a void four inches in diameter and twenty-some inches deep. Before cooking lunch that Sunday, I cut the dead wood into pieces with my chain saw and hauled them to the road.
I’ve got a guy over to look at the tree.
He says, “Keep the water out, it’ll last a while.” He looks up at the tree, nods, and says, “Great Stuff.”
I do not love an apple tree. We had one in our yard when I was growing up. One was enough. Every fall my brother and I picked up rotten apples and trundled them to the garden in a wheelbarrow. Our parents grew a big vegetable garden. They also had rows of backbreaking strawberries and a long stand of thorny, obstreperous raspberry bushes that grew rampant and were frightfully prolific. Relatives would come or townspeople would stop by for a visit. Our mother would hand us a bowl and say, “Go pick Vernon and Matty a couple quarts.” When the misery of nature’s bounty had passed into fall, there remained the apple tree. It was tall, craggy, and usually loaded. The grass under the tree was thin and sickly. All my hatred of the garden could be invested in that beast. Eventually the tree came down and a basketball rim went up.
Great Stuff is a Dow Chemical product. It comes in a yellow can. It’s under pressure. You screw a six-inch tube onto a tip in the top of the can, bend the tip, and a stream of goop the color of a pastry chef’s egg cream comes squirting out. The active ingredient in Great Stuff is Great Stuff, plus air. And it is lively. I emptied a can into the tree, watched it expand and fill the void, and saw I would need reinforcements. I went back to Ace Hardware for two more cans, emptying both of them into the cavern. Then I went in the house. When I looked out the kitchen window, I saw the tree vomiting Great Stuff in slow-mo. Great Stuff stuck to the side of the tree. Great Stuff puddled on the ground.
There should be a sign on the can. In large letters: DON’T TOUCH GREAT STUFF.
I grabbed what I could find—a paper bag, some newspapers, a piece of cardboard—thinking I would just trowel a nice finish on Great Stuff.
It was not a friend to the trowel.
By accident, I touched it. I think it touched me on purpose.
It was sticky.
Forget soap and water. Only gasoline would take it off, which I poured over my hands at the edge of the driveway, cursing the Great Stuff stuck to my fingers, to my flip-flops and shorts.
That day a headline caught my attention, about the oceans being near death. The oceans, too vast for the mind to contain, a symbol of infinity. How do we succeed in exhausting and murdering infinity? Fished out, polluted, their ecosystems destabilized by temperature change and increased carbon dioxide levels, the oceans, it is said, could be dead within a generation.
Lake Erie came to mind. The dead lake. And, spoiled by Dow Chemical, the Tittabawassee River—its stench, its spectral clouds of steam rising in subzero temperatures, its hideous population of grimy carp we fished and dragged up on the banks as kids, monstrous fish we recoiled from and kicked with disgust back in the water.
I’ve sailed on Lake Erie and eaten its perch. It’s made a comeback.
The Tittabawassee too has experienced a rebirth. Walleye run up the river to spawn. I can’t quite take it in, the walleye, the river’s rebirth without birth defects. My brother said not long ago he put a boat in t
he river north of town and by accident (any physical contact with the river was, would be, and must always be an accident), stepped in the water. His foot broke the surface tension of the muck in the bottom, he said, and what came up was a dark, smoky cloud of disturbed sediment and the smell. The smell of dead river, the smell of Dow.
We were ten years in this house when we lost the first apple tree. It was the biggest of the four, and it was beautiful, the color and texture of its bark alternating between slate and coal, its herculean branches rising gracefully and powerfully above the yard. Mowing the lawn one day, I noticed business around the base of the tree—ant business. When a big branch later dropped off, I saw in the hollow of the tree more than just business. I saw ant industry, hunting and gathering, a diverse thriving economy predicated on the destruction of the tree.
We’d had ants in the house—big fellows—long-bodied, lusty black carpenter ants that crunch when you step on them. Every spring and summer, we’d find them with a jolt of surprise, on the floor behind a door, on the kitchen counter. Sitting on the couch, you’d feel a tickle across your arm as one jogged over it, heading for a sofa cushion.
When I told my wife the big apple was full of ants, she was resolute.
Within a week, we had a crew in the yard. The guys came out at the end of the day. They must have figured: one tree.
The top branches came down and then the lower branches, all of them full of ants.
When the workers cut the base of the tree four feet above ground, a crater was opened, and from it black ants poured—a geyser of ants, clouds of them fuming down the sides of the tree. Even the tree guys were shaken.
As an adult, I grew to tolerate the apple trees. Come fall, I had to clean up after them, filling plastic grocery bags with apples, bags I then lugged to the road to be carried away on Thursdays. Apple waste. Every year my mother-in-law would look up into the trees and ask why we didn’t eat them.
“Because they’re wormy,” I said.
She would point way up in the tree. “That one,” she’d say, “looks good.”
Yes, it was red. But no, I’d say, they’re all full of worms. We would have to spray. Our neighbor sprayed his peach trees, valiantly trying to keep away the bugs, trusting the poison to do its work, but eventually he gave up on growing perfect, bug-free, poisoned fruit.
But they had become beautiful, these old, infested trees. Some summer evenings late into dusk I’d walk the yard, enjoy the deep liquid green, stand among our trees—silent, dark hulks that seemed more than present. They seemed to give off something. I liked to think of them as possessed by spirits. Or as receptacles in which wandering spirits could reside. Maybe the spirits of our loved ones, near us. Maybe just the spirits of other trees. There was a vibration. You were with them, the trees and their occupants. You did not feel alone.
The day after I inject my apple tree with foam, I awaken to a tree with a goiter. Great Stuff has continued to boil over, though the rate has slowed and the pressure has subsided, causing the tree to form a protuberance the size of a volleyball on the side of the tree. The growth looks like a giant meringue. Or a tumor. At first I’m horrified and sickened, but then I’m excited by the possibilities this thing offers. I could paint a face on it and call it the spirit of the tree. Or I could just leave it as it is, see what happens to it over time. Judging from the efficacy of Dow engineering, I might have to wait a few thousand years to detect any change, as I’m sure it is heat-, cold-, rain-, snow-, bird-, and squirrel-resistant. The only thing to do is cut it off.
The ideal tool for this blobectomy is a drywall saw, which makes a clean excision. There is some blobdust.
I’m left with part tree, part cannoli. To discolor the foam, I spray it with gray Krylon primer. “No drips, no runs, no errors,” it says on the can. As I spray, Great Stuff begins to tick, and I’m afraid that Dow and Krylon do not make nice, but in the end, nothing happens. That’s my goal, to hold the tree in chemical neutral, give it a chance to live and die a modern death.
22
Pure Corn
My daughter has come home to put the finishing touches on wedding plans. This means periods of frenzy, elation, and angst. Lists, invitations, dresses, music, food, flowers. Suddenly the time to decide is now, or yesterday. But today she is calm, which means I am calm. She’s been tasting cakes and has found one she likes, made with corn.
“It was delicious,” she says. “And so unusual.”
I’m standing at the kitchen sink, peeling a carrot. A few weeks ago I let a TV foodist lecture me about the benefits of natural carrots. I’m peeling a virtuous carrot.
“No one eats wedding cake,” I say.
“Because it’s always so bad,” she says. “I want mine to be good.”
She’s just finished culinary school. To watch her prepare a meal, even in our kitchen, is a little like going to the ballet. All that art. Her grub is so good, I want to stuff my bouche.
What she’s thinking, what I’m thinking, is that corn cake is edgy. But neither of us will say it. Some words, when they’ve been repeated billions of times in speech and in print, and repeated with that knowing wink (it’s edgy to say “edgy”) totally lose their little jolt of electricity. At the end of the day, even if we’re both on the same page, neither of us will ever say “edgy.”
This baker, from Ann Arbor, makes cakes that will please the locavore. All natural ingredients, preferably local; whole wheat flour. These are correct cakes.
“What was your cake?” she asks.
Rum torte. I would have been happy with one those white monstrosities that look like a drum set, preferably with an edible bride and groom on top. My wife worked with the baker, an amiable German immigrant named Peter, telling him exactly what she wanted, something simple, none of that sugary frosting, a cake people would want to eat. So we ended up with these little brown rounds of cake, all arranged in a circle, like a diorama of huts in a sustainable village. At some point in the evening, we posed and nudged slices of it into each other’s mouths. It was good. A year after we were married, my wife produced a shrunken hovel of wedding cake from the freezer, which we thawed and ate. I detected no rum. It tasted freezery.
It’s not news. We’re on the threshold—all of us, you too—of a long, silent scream. What’s happened to food production in this country? Whatta we got to eat?
My first awareness of this skittishness about food came years ago. My grandmother brought home a frying pan coated with Teflon. My grandfather, a cast-iron-frying-pan man, was skeptical. In the first plate of eggs he ate, he said he could taste the Teflon. “Daddy gets notions,” my grandmother said.
Bad eggs, he said. Bring back the old pan.
He shaved with a straight razor and patted his cheeks with alcohol when he finished, emerging from the bathroom with a shiny chin, smelling clean and flammable. He farmed and drove a rural mail delivery route. He milked six cows year-round, calling them home every evening, tending to them in a manner both businesslike and loving. They stood in their stalls; he sat on a stool next to them and milked. I remember wondering how something as good as milk could come from a space both sweetly redolent of hay and reeking of piss and cow pie. But it did.
I became suspicious of our milk a while back. Modern milk, store milk. Industrial milk. This milk didn’t taste good in a glass, in cereal, in coffee, anywhere. I paid $1.99 a gallon at Kroger for a plasticky, hormonious imposter. The color was right. Nothing else.
Home from college one Friday night, my daughter asked why I didn’t buy the good stuff.
“What good stuff?” I said.
In time I was converted, not without a fight, to organic milk. I hated the idea. I hated those happy cows on the carton, cows that mooed “just say no to druggy, industrial milk.” I hated the phony celebration of Farmer Families, which I saw as a crock of advertising bull on par with Amish chickens (some of those birds, I happen to know, are Presbyterian). Mostly I hated paying even more for milk, for something that was suppos
ed to be good and cheap and inviolable.
The first milk I bought, in elementary school, cost two cents a carton and made sandwiches, cupcakes, and cookies taste better. Do kids even drink milk now? Does milk go with Gogurt and Doritos?
Corn cake. Why not?
Corn is local. Corn is sweet. Corn is a tidy food: eight hundred kernels in sixteen rows.
Corn has wide appeal. It’s every kid’s favorite vegetable. (Except corn is not a vegetable. My sources tell me, “Every kernel of corn is a fruit.” Whatever. All the better for cake.)
Read up on corn, and you’ll be charmed. Maybe because the corn plant itself is so tall and stately. Unlike meager beans crouching in their fields, corn has stature. Corn becomes a forest you can get lost in. Read between the lines, and you’ll see there’s romance in corn. Not us romancing in the corn. The corn romancing in itself. It grows its own silk and has tassels that release pollen. On warm July evenings, given a light breeze, a great green orgy takes place in those corn fields, a love-in that Purdue agronomist R. L. Nielson says can last for up to fourteen days. All those midwesterners sitting on porches long summer nights: they’re not watching the corn grow. It’s way better than that.
But corn cake? I’m locavore enough to know that for a January wedding, someone’s importing her corn. And what corn is it? Corn in the can? Corn in the freezer? Long-lasting corn that, like an industrial tomato, can wait forever if need be and still be fresh? No food produced today is more messed with than corn. It’s Frankenstein in the fields, an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Or maybe already happening. Or maybe it’s just corn.
The next night my daughter comes home with another box of cake samples. These are from a different baker. We eat dinner, push back from the table, and turn our attention to sweets.