Traveling Sprinkler

by Nicholson Baker

  You never applaud or say “Amen” after someone’s spoken in Quaker meeting. You’re not supposed to compliment someone after meeting is over, either. You’re not supposed to say, “I liked your message,” although it’s a very human urge and people do it. I did it myself after a woman talked about seeing two sparrows frolicking in her birdbath. She said she looked away and then looked back and there in place of the sparrows was a huge wild turkey. She talked about surprise and wild turkeys. Afterward, I said to her, “I liked your message.”

  And now I want to show you a book. Here it is. It’s a novel by Theodore Dreiser called The Genius. I have not read it. It’s Roz’s book. I saw her—I heard her voice—and then one day I knew I loved her. I’ve never been able to read novels the way she does, though. I get about three pages in and I say, Where’s my Merwin? Where’s my Kunitz? Where’s my Debussy? I can happily read memoirs or diaries or collections of letters, but not novels. Roz has read hundreds of novels. It didn’t bother her that I didn’t read them, but maybe I should have tried.

  I’m going to open this book. I’m going to pick a page at random, and I’m going to read a sentence. Here we go: “He wore an old hat which he had found in a closet at Mrs. Hibberdell’s, a faded, crumpled memory of a soft tan-colored sombrero which he punched jauntily to a peak and wore over one ear.” Page 330. Of The Genius by Theodore Dreiser. Thank you. That is all.

  • • •

  “HI, SWEETIE,” said Roz, when I called. Her voice was soft and perfect—one hundred percent Roz. I could hear her smiling. She said she was doing better. “They sent me home with Vicodin and it gave me some very lurid dreams and made me forget to breathe, so I’m not taking it anymore. The pain came back, but it’s bearable and better than the not breathing. Lucy’s taking very good care of me.”

  “Good. When can I come see you?”

  “Give me a few days. I need the fog to clear.”

  “Take it very easy,” I said.

  “I am,” she said. “It’s so nice not to think about the show. They’ve got a new person who’s covering for me.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I’m going to sleep now.”

  “Okay.”

  It’s been hot and dry this week, and I thought it was time to set up the traveling sprinkler and water Nan’s tomatoes. I stood watching it chuff in its slow and steady tractorish way around her tomatoes as the chickens pecked under some rhubarb leaves, unconcerned about the strange Sears machine in their garden. I’d bought an extra hose at a garage sale—better that than anger the yellowjackets. The sprinkler sprays in steady sixteenth notes. You can whistle Rossini to it if you want. Maybe I should tell you more about it.

  The traveling sprinkler is a heavy metal slow-motion techno-dance-trance device with two white cast-iron toothed rear wheels that dig into the turf, and a sort of baton or helicopter blade on top that spins. The hose screws in at the back. The hose water flows at full pressure into the tractor’s anus, or rectum. Up through the tractor the water goes and out the little holes at the end of the spinning whirlies, flying in a glittering bagel of sinusoidal shapes out over the garden. From certain angles it makes a close-range rainbow, and that’s all very nice. But here’s where the wizard mind of the innovator comes in: The spinning rotates a central post fitted with a helical thread, or worm gear, that engages with the sprockets of a driving gear that pulls two floppy hooking levers forward against the teeth on the rear wheels. First one lever pulls the right wheel forward an inch, and then the other lever pulls the left wheel forward an inch, and in that way the tractor alternatingly propels itself slowly forward, like some sort of very deliberate water clock—or like Stanley Kunitz’s tortoise, “ancient and crusty, more lonely than Bonaparte.”

  But that isn’t the really beautiful part of this invention, this three-part invention that Bach would have loved to water his Lutheran tomatoes with. The beautiful part comes in front, where there is a small, seemingly atrophied wheel. This wheel is curved so that it can fit over the hose. Thus the tractor, as it moves along, is compelled to follow the route of its own motive force. The hose becomes the guidance system. Consider for a moment the power and the glory of that.

  You may say, well, obviously it’s propelled by water, and obviously it follows the hose. But it wasn’t so obvious in 1909, when Benjamin Sweney got a patent for his sprinkler. Sweney’s sprinkler sprinkled and moved forward at the same time, but it didn’t do anything with the hose except drag it behind. Not enough. Viggo Nielsen, an Australian, got his tractor sprinkler patent in 1933. It sprinkled and moved and it rolled the hose up on itself. Not quite right, either. Then came a Nebraskan freethinker, John Wilson. Wilson got two water sprinkler patents. His first sprinkler looked like an old-fashioned bicycle, with a large wheel in front and a small wheel in back. The large wheel was a gear, pushed by a pawl—a word later made famous by Richard Eberhart, in his poem “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment.” But Wilson wasn’t satisfied. The second patent, applied for in September 1941, was for a sprinkler that looked the way the traveling sprinkler looks now. That’s when it all came together. Just before World War II, Wilson disassembled a piece of dairy equipment called a cream separator and used a piece from it as the driving gear in the middle of his machine, while in front he put a small loose wheel that wanted to go wherever the hose went. Now the source of the sprinkler’s power was the route it took: the link back to its past was also its future. You could buy more hose and make long twisty routes for it to follow, even up slight grades if you wanted. As long as you didn’t set the hose up so that there was too sharp a turn, the sprinkler would go anywhere. It was the trustiest little hardworking machine. And if you got tired of watching it, and went inside after a while, as I used to do, to make a sandwich, the tractor, this Great American Invention, would finally arrive at the moment when the two universes of forward and backward time would collide at the faucet by the house.

  National Walking Sprinkler of Nebraska made Wilson’s machines, and they still do. They made them for Sears and that’s where my father bought his. Everything about it is immediately understandable. It’s what America did before it threw itself wholeheartedly into the making of weapons that kill everyone.

  I have been trying to write a poem about this sprinkler for years, because I like it so much, and I’ve never managed to do it. What a joy now to wind it around Nan’s tomatoes and watch it, in all its intuitive clumsy ungainly beauty, do some good.

  • • •

  RAYMOND TURNED in the driveway while I was standing watching the sprinkler. “Hey, hey,” he said. “That’s a handy little machine.”

  “Isn’t it? I don’t often get a chance to use it. I’m terribly sorry about your grandmother.”

  “Oh, thanks. It’s very sad.”

  “How’s your mother doing?”

  “She’s okay, I think.”

  We looked at the sprinkler twirl. I asked him how his music was progressing.

  “I’ve got a new song,” he said.

  “Can I hear it?”

  We went up to his room, which had a poster of Bob Marley on the wall and a corner filled with a multileveled shrine of musical machinery. There were two important-looking squarish studio speakers with yellow cones. Raymond played me his new track, called “Promises Burn.” He played it loud, but even so I couldn’t make out all the lyrics, which went by fast. I heard the chorus, though: “Lips say words and promises burn, so can we.” It was a genuine brainworm, and I said so. I suspected that Raymond had been through some recent unhappiness with his girlfriend, but we didn’t talk about it. He showed me how he’d used three vocoder tracks to mix pitched synthesizer sounds in with his singing, and he revealed a neat trick for reversing a piano note using a virtual guitar pedal, so that it plays backward: yeet, yeet, yit!

  “There’s so much to this software,” I said, shaking my head. I told him I’d been working on some danc
e songs, but they weren’t finished. “If you ever want to try making a song together, just let me know.”

  “Sure,” Raymond said. “You could email me some chords and I could email you some beats and we’ll each work on what the other person began. How about that?”

  I said that sounded good.

  “If we end up with something usable, I’ll play it at Stripe. I’m guest DJ’ing there next week. I’m going to drop some Diplo on them. ‘Shake it till it pops out.’”

  “That sounds great. What’s Stripe?”

  “It’s a dance club. It’s on Chapel Street.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. Suddenly I remembered Nan’s tomatoes. “Shoot, I better go check the sprinkler now.”

  I went outside. My tractor had made almost the full circuit around the tomato bed. The chickens were flapping their wings just out of range of the spray. The rooster crowed.

  Thirty

  I’M DRIVING HOME NOW from Federal Cigar with all the windows open and the air shuddering through the car, and as you can see it’s one of those days in which visual beauty has been laid on—lain on?—has been laid on with a trowel. There was a new man at Federal Cigar, a serious chap with a zip-up vest. I asked him to recommend some cigars that were like Faustos but different. “I might try the Skull Breaker,” he said. “Or the Bone Crusher.” I bought both of them—they were cheaper than the others—plus eight Faustos and a fourteen-dollar top-shelf creation with a pointy tip. This could get expensive. On impulse I drove down Chapel Street past the gray-and-pink-striped door that leads into Stripe, the dance club that Raymond told me about. I had a moment of thrilled apprehension. It’s not really for fifty-five-year-olds, I don’t think. I’ve hardly ever been to a dance club. Even back when I was writing dirty poems I was more of a dance-at-home kind of guy. I had some good twirly moves, though.

  I just listened to Cormac McCarthy—not the novelist, the musician—sing one of his songs, “Light at the Top of the Stairs.” He’s got a voice that can do everything. I met him once. He lives near here. He writes songs that tell whole stories, the way Pat Pattison wants us to. He plays at the Press Room sometimes. I’m jealous of him.

  I’m going to park and try a Bone Crusher. I’ll save the Skull Breaker for later.

  • • •

  AMY LOWELL, queen of the Imagist poets, said that you prepare a cigar for smoking the way you seduce a woman. First you unwrap its tinfoil wrapper. That’s like removing her dress. Then you take off the label—that’s like the shift. Finally you’re down to the nude cigar. Amy Lowell would have enjoyed smoking this Bone Crusher. It’s true to its name, good gracious.

  Archibald MacLeish paid court to Amy Lowell in Paris. He was an assiduous suckup—he wrote her, “I have even seen your long library in my dreams, & in my so-called waking hours I spend hours there”—and with Lowell’s help he got Harriet Monroe to publish some of his poems in Poetry. Then later, when he’d become a hotshot Pulitzer man and had fallen under the spell of Eliot’s Waste Land and Hemingway’s marlin fishing, he dismissed Amy Lowell as a self-publicizer who wrote tinkly verse. And then came the CIA, which began rewarding Jackson Pollock for painting meaningless paintings. Nicolas Nabokov, a minor composer who was a friend of MacLeish’s, was the CIA’s liaison with the musical world. Nabokov used the CIA’s money to fly the entire Boston Symphony Orchestra to Paris—in the company of crateloads of abstract paintings—where the orchestra performed The Rite of Spring and other advanced works, to prove that American democracy was more hip than Communism.

  The Cigar Inspector has a long and thoughtful review of the Bone Crusher. I’ve just read it on my phone. The Cigar Inspector loves it. He wrote that initially he’d assumed it was a descendant of a memorable Viaje limited-edition cigar called the Skull and Bones, but it isn’t. It’s made from Nicaraguan weed, grown in volcanic Nicaraguan soil and wrapped in a broadleaf wrapper raised in the wilds of Connecticut. “It starts out pretty tame,” he says, “with its power kicking in near the end.” The power kicked in for me about halfway through. Wowsers. Shit on a Popsicle.

  Terrible things happened in Nicaragua when Oliver North sold drugs and weapons for the CIA and used the money to fund the Nicaraguan contras, with Reagan’s blessing. Thousands of people, including many children, were massacred in the fighting in the highlands near Esteli, where the good tobacco grows. Once the CIA stopped arming and training the contras, the country calmed down. Now it makes many good cigars, including the Bone Crusher. Peace reigns.

  I have a strong craving to read a book that doesn’t exist, called The Manic Factor, which diagnoses the heads of corporations who buy up lots of companies, one after another, as men in the grip of straightforward manic sprees. They’re people for whom normal human spending levels are insufficient. They want to go to the big corporate tent sale and spend in the millions or billions per purchase. They don’t care that they’re accumulating an enormous debt, because they’re manic.

  I want to read a book or an article in which someone goes around and talks to board members and people in the investment business, and psychiatrists, and tells the whole story of each of these corporate self-destructions from the point of view of the buying high of their leaders. Maybe it’s been done—probably it has been done, and I’ll never know it because I don’t read business books, or even Forbes.

  Mania is the best way to explain the CIA, too. The manic high of knowing that you can change the history of a country by selling crack and arranging killings and handing out weapons like peanuts, all the while calling it “intelligence.”

  I’m eating Planter’s trail mix and I’m not killing anyone. Like most people, I live my life and don’t have any interest in spending secret government money trying to overthrow inconvenient regimes. I like this trail mix, although it’s a little too heavy on the peanuts. We have to forgive Planter’s for that—they’re a peanut company, after all. The peanut guy with a monocle and spats. But the peanut taste is, to the tongue, a cliché. What you want from a trail mix are tastes that are a little less familiar—more cashews, more dried pineapple, maybe some almonds. I don’t like raw peanuts, frankly—they make me feel slightly sick. Peanut butter crackers are a whole different ball game, though.

  • • •

  AT QUAKER MEETING the clock ticked for thirty minutes before anyone spoke. Then the wild-turkey woman got up. She said that before meeting she was out near her well, at about eight-thirty, when she saw about seventy goldfinches clinging to tall weeds with many yellow flowers. She didn’t know what kind of weeds they were, but they were very tall, maybe seven feet tall. She wanted to tell us about them. There were long spider filaments stretching between them, shining in the sun, she said, and fleabane flowers below them that had still not opened for the day, and then in among the yellow weed flowers were all the marvelous goldfinches, which looked like things you’d find in cages, but they weren’t caged. They were just there because they chose to be there.

  Twenty minutes of silence followed. Everyone in the room was thinking about birds and weeds and the color yellow, but nobody spoke. I listened to the clock ticking, and suddenly I wanted to tell them about the click track in Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird.” Gabe, who volunteers at the prison, shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. I thought he was going to speak, but he didn’t. It’s a little like To Tell the Truth, the old game show, in which the contestants had to guess which of three guests was not an impostor, and at the moment of revelation one of the impostors would pretend to start to get up but then wouldn’t. I began to feel the nervous fluttery feeling that meant I was going to have to say something. Finally I stood and got my balance and said that I’d heard my next-door neighbor sing the Beatles song “Blackbird” recently, and that I’d been struck by how perfect and simple a song it was, and then I’d listened to Paul McCartney sing it. It was about a man who hears a broken-winged blackbird singing at night, I said, and it’s a very short song, as
all the Beatles’ songs were back then—just a guitar and Paul’s singing. Except for one unusual thing. In addition to the music of the song, the Beatles included the click track, which is a private audio track that plays metronome clicks that the musician can hear on his headphones, so that he can keep to the beat. Normally the click track was removed in the final mix of the song, I said, but here they seem to have left it in, and in that way the song became the blackbird of itself. Its wings were broken—i.e., folded—and then comes the moment it’s been waiting for, and it takes off and flies through the night forest, which is silent except for the click track of the trees. I said, “The bird has to negotiate, singingly, syncopatedly, around the trees—not hitting them, obviously—and learn to fly given the steady beat, the clock, the click track of what he’s been given. We have something small and broken and we just have to wait for the right moment and make something of it and allow it to fly, and that’s what Paul McCartney did, and did for us.” I sat down, feeling shaky and stupid because the end was too pat. There was more silence, and then meeting ended, and everyone shook hands.

  Donna said, “Thank you for choosing to come here today.” There was a visitor from Saratoga, New York, who introduced herself. We said, “Welcome.” There were announcements. And then the wooden wall came up and I dropped a twenty in the wicker donation basket. The woman from Eliot, Maine, was there, and she said to me, “I used to listen to my parents’ record of ‘Blackbird’ over and over. You forgot to mention my favorite part, though. He says, ‘Into the light of the dark black night.’”