Traveling Sprinkler

by Nicholson Baker

  I sent Peter Davison the manuscript of my first book of poems. He’d recently published Stanley Kunitz’s The Poems of Stanley Kunitz—a book I loved and carried around with me—and he’d bought me leek soup at the St. Botolph Club in Walter Cronkite’s presence, and he’d said encouraging things, and he’d published “Knowing What to Ignore.” I’d left out “Misery Hat” because I knew he didn’t like it. I thought it was a good bet that he would publish my book. In the end, though, he rejected it.

  But he was a genial, intelligent man—a bit of a name-dropper, perhaps, as are we all, but a nice man and a sharp-eyed editor. Oddly, the main thing I remember about him was that he wore a beautiful tie and pronounced his first name “Meter.”

  • • •

  I LIKE WRITING in the car. I can drive somewhere, park, put my notebooks and my papers on the dashboard, clamp on my headphones, and think hard in all directions. Sometimes I put the white plastic chair in the back seat, so that I can sit beside the car when it gets too hot. The air-conditioning doesn’t work anymore, and I’m always on the lookout for a place to park with dappled shade. I live for dappled shade. There’s a corner of a parking lot near Planet Fitness that is particularly dappled. I thought I saw Gerard Manley Hopkins there once, in his car, muttering over a dictionary of Anglo-Saxon.

  One of the small great moments in Crazy Heart, the movie with Jeff Bridges, comes early on, when he arrives somewhere after a long drive and the first thing he does is open his car door slightly and pour the urine from his travels onto the parking lot. It’s not hard to do once you get the hang of it.

  My power steering has a leak—the fluid dribbles out uncontrollably. I had it fixed once and I’m not going to fix it again until I get things settled with the IRS. So I have no power steering, and I have to struggle to maneuver into a parking space or turn a tight corner. And the brakes are getting worrisomely soft again. But it’s my car, my Kia Rio, and I love it. I really love this car. No car has ever been this good to me. I will be faithful to this car forever. I will nurse it along. If, when I’m a wobbly old man wearing young man’s blue jeans, the University of Texas asks me to sell them my correspondence, which they probably won’t, I’ll say to them, Forget the letters, forget the manuscripts, what you want is my green Kia Rio. And maybe my traveling sprinkler, too.

  Four

  I’M OUT IN THE GARDEN, Maud, and very fine clouds have, without my noticing, moved across the moon and collected around it like the soft gray dust in the dryer. I want to scoop the gray clouds away and see the moon naked like a white hole in the sky again, but it isn’t going to happen.

  About an hour ago I had a little scare. I was listening to Midnight Star playing “Freak-A-Zoid” on my headphones, that eighties standby, and I was remembering a time in music camp when a green-eyed cellist and I wrote “1976” in the sand. And then, through the music, I heard a very weird short barking sound.

  What in the holy Choctaw Nation was that? I tore off my headphones. It was not a normal dog bark. Maybe a coyote bark? Not like that. Coyotes go ooo-ooo-ooo from miles away, mournfully. I said, “Hey there.” It was quite close—it came from behind me, in the overgrown area. Did porcupines bark? No. Once at twilight I walked up to a baby porcupine near my compost bin. It screamed like a petulant child, and its mother hustled over and turned her back on me, showing her fade haircut. It sounded nothing like this. This was a definite bark. Probably the wild animal, whatever it was, had seen the glow of my computer and been frightened by it. I turned the screen to reflect its eyes, but I couldn’t see any eyes.

  I looked up at the moon and the squinting stars and the black masses of the trees. There was no sound except the distant chirring of crickets. I didn’t want to go inside, because it was very cool outside and there were no mosquitoes and it was a perfect night for thinking, except for the unseen animal that was disconcerted by my being out here in the yard when he or she thought the world was his, or hers. I didn’t want to let my dog out, because he’d smell whatever it was and go crazy barking—he’s a very full-throated barker when he feels it’s necessary—and wake the neighbors. Do raccoons bark? I don’t think so. Somebody said they’d seen a bear near Dead Duck Beach. Do bears bark?

  I heard it again, closer, still behind me. Three short loud rattling barks. Was it dying? Did it hate me? Did it care about me at all?

  I was spooked. I went inside. I looked up “bark bear” on the Internet. Very little. Also “bark wolf” and “bark moose” and “bark deer.” There were lots of hits for barking deer. I watched a murky YouTube video called “Barking Female Deer.” The sound was exactly what I’d heard. Then YouTube wanted me to watch—and I did watch, twice—a video blooper compilation with ninety-seven million views in which a news anchorwoman mistakenly said, “Georgia is the top penis-producing state.” The fallibility of newscasters was comforting. I decided to go back outside because I wasn’t sleepy yet.

  • • •

  BACK OUTSIDE, I looked around and noticed that Nan’s kitchen light was on. Then I saw her. She was in her bathrobe, walking slowly back from the chicken hut. Her hair was undone. She usually wore it up.

  I went over. “Nan?” I called.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “The barking deer?”

  I nodded. “It totally freaked me out. It was right behind me.”

  “Yeah, I heard it about a month ago, too.”

  I sensed something in her voice and asked her what was wrong. I figured it might be trouble with Chuck.

  “Oh, my mom’s not doing well. She was allergic to the painkiller and she got something called Emergency Room Psychosis, and she was having delusions, and now she’s got pneumonia on top of that. It’s just endless.”

  “Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Chuck’s away consulting in Korea, which is frustrating. And Raymond’s been in Boston a lot visiting his girlfriend. I miss having him around.”

  “Of course,” I said. Raymond is Nan’s son, a tall amiable long-haired young man of about nineteen who’s into music. Nan invited me to his high school graduation, but I couldn’t go because I was giving a reading at U Penn.

  I thought maybe I should hug Nan, but I didn’t because it was late at night and she was wearing a bathrobe. I said, “I’m right here, as you know.” I gestured toward the henhouse. “I can easily do the chickens.”

  “Thanks, I really like doing the chickens, but yes, if I have to go back to Toronto, I’d appreciate some help. I’m sorry to lay this on you. Nice moon.”

  “Very nice moon,” I said. “Also, I was thinking I could water your tomatoes with my traveling sprinkler. If it would help in any way.”

  “That’s very kind of you, but Raymond should be coming back tomorrow,” she said. “I guess I should go in. Nice to see you. You’re up late.”

  “I like looking at the sky,” I said.

  “Me, too.” Then she reconsidered. “Actually, there is something you could do that would be very helpful.”

  “Sure, what?”

  She said that Raymond had been working like a fiend on some songs and he seemed happy about them and he’d been writing the lyrics in a little notebook, but he didn’t want to play them for her because they were inappropriate. “I guess they’re hip-hop or something,” she said. “He likes the fact that you’re a poet, and I think he’d like you to hear them. Or I’d like you to hear them.”

  I said sure, I’d love to hear his songs. “I’m no expert on Biggie Smalls, but I just got a guitar and it would be fun to hear what he’s been up to.” Then suddenly I had a thought. “Why don’t you and Raymond come over sometime and we can have dinner and then he can play me his songs and you can put your fingers in your ears. I could get takeout sushi.”

  “That’s a nice idea,” she said. “Raymond loves California roll.”

  “Great,” I s
aid. So Nan and Raymond are coming to dinner. Fortunately the downstairs bathroom’s still clean from the video couple’s visit. I’ve got to get some songs together to play for them. Casually available for singing, if it comes to that. I’ve got to be able to hold my head up.

  • • •

  I’M OUT IN MY KIA RIO with the door open at eleven in the morning, the day after the barking deer episode. Get back on the horse. Today there is only one agitated bird. A nice thing happened to me last night—Nan asked me for help. I feel honored. I wish there was something I could do to help her, or her mother. All politics is local. I wish I could write Nan a song. I gave it a try, using some of the chords I’ve learned, an A minor chord and a D minor chord and a seventh chord. The chorus was: “I wish there was something I could do for you.”

  My fingertips are profoundly numb from too much guitar. They feel like little white islands.

  • • •

  HEY HEY HEY. Let me try to get it together. Deep breath now. Hide the things that you’re most embarrassed by. Nobody’s going to care, but hide them anyway. I have so much in my head that’s screaming to get out. Politely requesting passage. Sometimes knowing things and knowing that you’ll never unknow them, unless you say them, is really unbearable.

  Here’s my Traveling Sprinkler file. It’s fat with patent records that I’ve printed out from the patent office. Some people call them walking sprinklers. I talked to a man in North Platte, Nebraska, named Ed Saulsbury, who restored traveling sprinklers. Back before I got distracted by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I was going to write a poem about Ed, and I bought two very interesting vintage sprinklers on eBay. I wrote part of the poem and then I put it away, and then a few months ago, I thought I’d call Ed and see how he was doing, and it turned out that he’d died in 2007. He’d been a utility pole climber, servicing power lines.

  In New and Selected Poems, Volume Two, Mary Oliver has a prose poem about a black jet flying over a hummingbird. “All narrative is metaphor,” she says. Or is it “All metaphor is narrative”?

  • • •

  I GOT OUT OF THE SHOWER this morning and didn’t want to go to Planet Fitness, so I put a pillow under my bottom and hooked my feet under the bed and did some sit-ups while reading a poem by Léonie Adams. There’s a scene in one of John Wayne’s last movies, where he’s puffy-faced and sick from cancer, which he got either from playing Genghis Khan in a radioactive valley downwind of the Yucca Flat nuclear test site, or from smoking four packs of Camels a day. In the movie, Wayne dies in a big shoot-out, with Opie of The Andy Griffith Show looking on sadly, but before he dies he rides for a long time on a horse-drawn streetcar. He has a talk with a fresh-faced young woman and remembers his love for Lauren Bacall. Then, just as he’s about to disembark from the streetcar, he gives the conductor a fancy whorehouse pillow that he’s been carrying around with him. “These old bones surely thank you,” says the conductor, sitting on the pillow.

  I thought of John Wayne’s red pillow as I did my sit-ups and read Léonie Adams. I got to the second-to-last line of the poem: “My every leaf leans forth upon the day.” Good line. Adams was influenced by the Elizabethan songsters. She wanted to sing densely, like Campion and Dowland. She taught at Bennington and had a brief affair with Edmund Wilson. Wilson, who was married, got her pregnant, and she had a miscarriage and grieved over it. He was such a low, mean, drunken bug of a critic. He jeered at Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and wrote a vicious but accurate parody of Archibald MacLeish for The New Yorker called “The Omelet of A. MacLeish.” MacLeish was never the same after Edmund Wilson’s parody. He began writing urgent bad speeches in favor of intervention in the Spanish Civil War, and then Roosevelt asked him to be Librarian of Congress.

  I’ve been reading about protest songs on the Internet. Somebody recommended one called “Living Darfur.”

  • • •

  BEST BUY GIVES YOU one free lesson if you buy a guitar, so I signed up with a man who teaches progressive rock. When I think of beginning lessons again, though, it really hurts. All those years of bassoon lessons I took. All those Milde études I learned. All those years of soaking my reed in a baby food jar and croaking it to see that it was still healthy and hearing the tick tock of my red plastic Taktell metronome perched on the edge of the piano. My teacher, Bill Brown, was a student of Norman Herzberg, the great studio bassoonist in Los Angeles. You can hear Herzberg’s bassoon in E.T., in Jaws, in Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons, and in the theme music to The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Herzberg was a Zen Buddhist of bassoon, and Billy Brown taught me his method of meditating while practicing. The meditation was called “long tones.”

  A long tone was a note that you played for sixteen beats of the Super-Mini-Taktell metronome. You started as softly as you could, at pppppp, the way you would start the low E in Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie Pathétique, and you held that for four beats and then you did a very slow and very perfectly graduated increase in sound, letting just the right amount of air into the reed and never varying the pitch and never adding any falsification of vibrato, and eventually you were playing as loudly as you could and yet with perfect control, for four more beats, squandering all your lung air, but you still had to keep steady and do a perfect diminuendo for four beats and go all the way back down to an extreme pianissimo for four beats. One day you’d do long tones on a low E and the next maybe you’d concentrate on a middle A flat, and you would do this for every note in the full range of the instrument. This was discipline. And while you did it you emptied your mind of everything except that note—which you were hoping would become, would truly achieve, the fully rounded bassoonistic sort of note that you’d heard the great virtuosi play, men like Herzberg, or Bernie Garfield in Philadelphia, or Maurice Allard in Paris, or Simon Kovar, wherever he was. Simon Kovar had edited a number of practice books for the bassoon, including the Milde études and the Pierné études, and he’d recorded a performance of Mozart’s bassoon concerto. He was one of our minor deities. Gabriel Pierné was a conservatory friend of Debussy’s and a sometime conductor. He conducted the first performance of Stravinsky’s Firebird, which has a brain-melting bassoon lullaby in it.

  Debussy liked the bassoon a lot, although not quite as much as Stravinsky. Debussy once judged a woodwind competition at the conservatoire. He’d been feeling very low, he wrote to a young composer, feeling as if he’d prefer to be a sponge at the bottom of the sea or a vase on the mantelpiece, “anything rather than a man of intellect.” This was in 1909, a year before he finished his tenth piano prelude, “The Sunken Cathedral.” But the student woodwind players cheered him up mightily. The bassoonists were assigned a fantasy by Henri Büsser, a piece written, Debussy said, as if Büsser had been born in a bassoon—“which is not to say he was born to make music.” The bassoons, according to Debussy, were as pathétique as Tchaikovsky and as ironic as Jules Renard. And then Debussy judged a piano competition. The best player was a thirteen-year-old Brazilian girl whose eyes were, he said, “drunk with music.” Debussy’s own daughter, whom they called Chouchou, was a genius of a girl of twelve when her father died in 1918, with the sound of the long-range German guns booming outside Paris. “I saw him one last time in that horrible box,” she wrote to her stepbrother. “Tears restrained are worth as much as tears shed, and now it is night for ever. Papa is dead.” A year later she died, of diphtheria and medical malpractice.

  After Debussy died, Henri Büsser, born in a bassoon, orchestrated “The Sunken Cathedral,” kitsching up the score with harp glissandi. It was a hopeless thing for Büsser to try to do, because the real sunken cathedral was Debussy’s own Blüthner grand piano, with its ineffably soft tone. He liked to play it with the top down.

  Five

  HELLO AND WELCOME to the Paul Chowder Hour. I’m your host, and I hope by this time that I’m your friend, and I want you to know something. When you have me as a friend, you have somebody you can count on. If you need help, I’
ll be there. Like if you need me to help you dig in some bulbs, or water your tomatoes, or carry your groceries, or tend your chickens, I can do that. The only thing I can’t do is I can’t call you up and be hearty and affectionate and cheerful if you’re mortally ill. That I can’t do. I’ve done it several times, but I don’t do a good job of it, because when I know somebody’s dying it’s just so sad and awful that I can’t pretend that it’s not.

  Today we’ve got a couple of important things to talk about. I woke up at one-thirty this morning and I thought, This is the perfect time: one-thirty in the morning. Is there a better time of day or night to explain whatever seems to need explaining? No. It’s all there in that time: one-thirty. Half past one. It’s not that late. Lots of people are up at one-thirty. It’s not insomnia. It’s not early rising. It’s just that you’re up at one-thirty. I bet Bach was often up at one-thirty arpeggiating away at his freshly tuned harpsichord.

  I went outside and sat in the green metal chair and tried to further my understanding of the problem of metaphorical interference. It’s a serious problem, at least for me. What is metaphorical interference? Okay, well, it’s when two or more strong metaphors are podcasting in the same room together and they mess with each other. They mix, but not necessarily in the very same sentence the way a classic mixed metaphor mixes. They mix structurally. Say, for example, that you’ve decided to mention the traveling sprinkler in your poem. The moment you mention it, it starts to twirl and hiss and spray water everywhere. It becomes a controlling metaphor. There’s no help for it, you’re going to get wet.