Inland

by Gerald Murnane

  Trust me or not, reader, but whatever I write about myself having done, I will always write about places. I will name the streams on either side wherever I am; I will match landscape with landscape.

  I am writing about myself standing in a garden between the Hopkins River and Russells Creek. How can I show you the way, reader, from Ideal, South Dakota, to the few steep, coastal hills between the Hopkins and Russells Creek? Perhaps, you think, the way leads downstream along the Dog Ear, downstream again along the White, and then on down the Missouri. But that way leads towards the sea, as you well know, reader. And you in the place where Hinterland will issue from and I who first wrote to you from such an utterly landlocked place as the Great Alfold – you and I are not going so readily towards the sea.

  Perhaps the way ought to lead us across the Missouri before it widens. I have looked ahead, reader, and that way is promising. I have looked ahead and seen in Minnehaha County, at the eastern edge of South Dakota, the town of Baltic. From there I looked further east and into the state of Minnesota. I saw in Nobles County the town of St Kilian, and I remembered at once another town far away over my right shoulder: the county seat of Rock County, Nebraska. I remembered Bassett, and the church called St Boniface’s. I had found all of these places long before today. But only today I found for the first time still another of the dream-sites of America. I found in Lincoln County, Minnesota, the town of Balaton.

  Yet the way leads in another direction, reader. Look up from your Institute to the north, where Virgin Creek trickles into the Missouri in Dewey County. Or start again from Ideal, and look west along White River to the town of Interior. Or follow Cheyenne River upstream from where it joins the Missouri. Follow it past Cherry Creek and much further upstream into Fall River County, South Dakota, and all the way to the town of Oral.

  Yes, reader, the way leads upstream, but along much deeper streams than Virgin Creek or Cherry Creek or even the Cheyenne as far as Oral. Two hundred kilometres south of Ideal is the valley of the Platte in the state of Nebraska. By now, reader, you must be used to my looking for signs in districts lying between two streams. You will not be surprised if I ask you to follow the Platte upstream to Lincoln County, where two streams branch – one to the north-west and the other to the south-west.

  Reader, we will not follow the North Platte, as one of the branches is called. I have looked that way and seen no signs for us. Follow me, reader, south-west along the South Platte.

  You have suspected, reader, for some time, that we are drifting towards the Great Divide. Myself, I prefer the word watershed. We are a long way now from the grasslands around the Institute of Prairie Studies; we have come a long way from Ideal. We are almost within reach, we feel, of the watershed of America. In fact, reader, the South Platte will lead us, by a long and tiring route, to the state of Colorado, and into Park County, and almost to Climax.

  By some means or another, reader, we have passed Climax and we are no longer in Colorado. Alert as you are, you would have noticed earlier the word coastal in a passage connected with the place where I once stood in a garden. Having found yourself on the other side of Climax, and having read my word coastal, you expect to find yourself drifting towards the sea.

  And so you are, reader. Along with myself, you are drifting further away from the peaks around Climax – from the watershed of our huge land. But do not trouble yourself about the sea; do not ask for names of coasts or bays or such things. The land itself is so vast and so richly patterned with streams and towns and prairies that I will never have time for sea. Be content to know, reader, that our journey upstream from Ideal and over the watershed or, if you prefer, the Great Divide, has brought us at last to a coastal district or, as I prefer to call it, a district at the edge of the land.

  To reach this district from the heights of Climax we might have followed any of hundreds of streams. West of the watershed, the map of the state of Colorado is marked all over with the lines of streams: fine lines waving on the map like sensitive filaments of underwater animals.

  You may assume that we followed some of these streams on our way towards the edge of the land. Suppose, if you like, that we followed Gunnison River. Or suppose that we followed the river Dolores, which flows out of Dolores County and then through San Miguel County – where its waters are mingled with Disappointment Creek – and on past the towns of Bedrock and Paradox and Gateway.

  Looking, as always, for pairs or larger patterns of streams, I have come to think of us, reader, as having descended by way of the three broadest rivers in the northwest of the state of Colorado: the Green, the White, and the Colorado. The land between those rivers is mostly empty of names of towns, except for the lonely name, on the border of the state of Utah, of Dinosaur.

  I am going to write for some time, reader, about myself standing in the garden of a house with walls of white stone and a roof of red iron.

  The house belonged to the widowed mother of my father; she lived in the house with two unmarried daughters and one unmarried son. My grandmother’s house was the place where I spent a month of my summer holiday during the years when I thought of myself as changing from a boy into a man. My own house, where I lived with my parents, was as far from the house with the red iron roof as the junction of the North Platte and the South Platte is far from Ideal, South Dakota. My own house was in a district of swamps and heaths between Scotchman’s Creek and Elster Creek.

  I was left mostly alone in the white stone house, and by the time when I had spent my last summer there at the age of twenty, I had walked perhaps ten thousand times around the cracked cement paths and among the flower-beds and arbors and the islands of shrubs laid out in a pattern of fifty years before. I had walked perhaps ten thousand times from the row of agapanthus near the front gate to the fence weighed down with honeysuckle far back behind the house. And at some point on my walk that lasted for nearly a year of Januarys, I learned what sort of man I would be for the rest of my life.

  I learned that no thing in the world is one thing; that each thing in the world is two things at least, and probably many more than two things. I learned to find a queer pleasure in staring at a thing and dreaming of how many things it might be.

  But I was myself one of the things in the world, and I was not only the boy-man walking on the winding paths of a garden under a clear blue sky in summer; I was also a man who preferred to keep to his room. At one part of one path that I followed, on the shaded south side of the house, between tall fences covered with ivy and dark-green rainwater tanks with orange-red nasturtiums growing out of cracks in the stone underneath, I saw the window of a room where a man who so preferred could sit reading and writing about men who were out in the heat of the sun.

  No thing was one thing. Beside every path that I followed, some plant had the look or the feel of human skin. Parts of the flowers of plants had the shapes of parts of men and women. Each thing was more than one thing. The long green leaves bunched around the agapanthus were the grass skirts of women who were naked above their waists. But any one of those leaves, if I put my hand in among them, was the strap of leather that my teachers at school brought down with all the strength of their arms on the palms of boys for punishment.

  Some things were things I could not know about. I have never met anyone or even read about anyone who has my peculiar lack in his nose. After I had first learned, as a small child, that I could never know the scents of things, I took to biting off flowers and slitting them with my teeth and pushing my tongue inside them. Sometimes I tasted a drop of nectar but other people, I was sure, enjoyed something much more satisfying. For most of my childhood I went on stripping away layers of petals and grinding with my teeth into the one sour paste the dusty male parts and the sticky female and the hard white beginnings of fruits. But as a boy-man in the garden of the white stone house I no longer tasted plants. I had read in a popular magazine a list of garden plants known to be poisonous, and I had recognised more than one whose flavour was familiar to me. I had eat
en their flowers – and a hundred other sorts of calyx and bract and floret – because I was kept from enjoying their peculiar scents.

  As a boy-man I had already decided to tell no one in future that my nose was lacking. Some people had thought I was lying about my nose in order to make them curious about me; they had not believed a nose could fail in that way. Other people had pitied me, as though I could feel the loss of something I had never enjoyed. A few people had asked me what comes into my thoughts when I hear talk about scents. I had answered that I think about clouds. Invisible clouds drift through the air above gardens and countryside. Men with sound noses know when these clouds are drifting past, but I must often have stood unknowing under a sky filled with invisible clouds.

  Each thing was more than one thing. Nearly every day in January was fine and hot, but in the evening a cold wind blew from the sea. Each evening in the garden I wore sandals on my feet and shorts on my legs but a thick sweater to keep my body warm. My legs felt cool with the wind blowing over them, but they were hot to touch where the sun had burnt them during the day. The skin of my thighs was red from the sun, but if I lifted the rim of my shorts the skin was white.

  If I stood at the front gate of the stone house and looked south across the red iron roofs of houses and between the rows of Norfolk Island pines shading the streets, I saw the sea. If I looked north I saw, much nearer than the sea in the south behind me, the first of the paddocks of grass that formed a far-reaching plain. The provincial city with the red roofs and the Norfolk Island pines was called in summer a holiday resort. People in the streets of the city glanced often at the blue water in the south. I preferred to glance in the opposite direction, towards the yellowish grasslands that rose and fell for two-hundred kilometres from the sea-coast to the northwest corner of Melbourne County. The red skin on my legs allowed me to walk unnoticed through the streets of the holiday resort, but I was not interested in the sea. The white skin under my shirt and shorts had not been exposed to the sun since the days when my parents had compelled me to dress in a bathing costume and to sit on the sand of seashores.

  On every afternoon of my month in the stone house, except for the rare days of rain, I wore shirt and shorts and straw hat and sandals and I walked from the white house down through the streets of the city to the lawns of buffalo grass and the plantations of tamarisk in the foreshore reserve and caravan park just short of the beach.

  The caravan park was filled with rows of tents and caravans, and in every tent and caravan a family was on holiday. Most of the families included at least one daughter. The daughters of about twelve years and younger I considered children; I would not look at them. The daughters of about fifteen and older I seldom saw; they were old enough to wander away to the beach without their parents, or they had already been claimed by young men and had been taken into the milk-bars of the city, or they were even old enough to be alone in their homes far away across the plains while their parents were on holiday. I looked for girls of about thirteen or fourteen. The older girls had been claimed already or they were far away, but I still had some hope for the girls of about thirteen or fourteen.

  Every summer when I walked through the caravan park I saw perhaps thirty girls of the age I was looking for. Yet of the thirty I considered seriously no more than three or four. I glanced at each of the thirty girls from under the shade of my straw hat, but only three or four faces attracted me.

  Each summer for seven years I walked up and down the rows of tents and caravans among the rows of tamarisks, glancing from out of the shaded zone around my eyes at three or four girls who were too old to play with the children but not quite old enough to have been claimed by boy-men or young men. I glanced at each girl, and sometimes a face attracted me, but even then I went on walking past.

  Every summer for seven years I was waiting for a most unlikely event. The father of a girl was going to recognise me. The father of one of those three or four girls out of the thirty was going to call me over to the shade of his tent and to tell me that he remembered me from somewhere. Then he was going to remember that he remembered me from the days when his son and I had played in the same primary school football team on Raeburn Reserve in the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri.

  You are going to read much more, reader, about the district between the two streams that I named just now. I have named those streams already on other pages, but only as though I named two lines marked side by side on a page. Now I want you to know, reader, that I was born between those two streams. I was born in that district but I was taken away soon afterwards to a district as far from my native district as the district around Kunmadaras is far from the district between the Sio and the Sarviz. Ten years after I had been taken away I was brought back. I was brought back by my parents to live in the heart of my native district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. I lived there for two years, reader, and during those years I felt a queer mixture of feelings.

  But you may never be persuaded, reader. I assure you that the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri is a part of the same America that you have always lived in. But you, I suppose, can only suppose I have changed the names of streams in order to confuse you. You can only suppose I am still dreaming today, even while I write what I am writing, of the Sio, still trickling from Lake Balaton, and of the Sarviz, still wandering from the north.

  As for the unlikely event, reader, that I began to write about...In the years when I walked each summer among the tents and caravans, I lived with my parents in a district of swamps and sand at the opposite end of Melbourne County from the district where I had been born. But the father of the girl whose face had attracted me would have lived in my native district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. He had lived there, he would have told me in the shade of his tent, since long before the days when his son and I had played football on Raeburn Reserve, and he would go on living there all his life. He took his holidays each year between the Hopkins and Russells Creek, but he lived between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri, which was his native district and his daughter’s native district also.

  I would have sat with the father in the shade. He would have told his wife and daughter who I was. I would have spoken politely to the wife. To the girl, I would have nodded and smiled. She would have been too young to have remembered me from the two years when I had lived in our native district, and I would have had nothing to say to her for the moment. I would have been patient.

  I would have sat with the father under the awning of his tent. Just out of our sight, behind the tamarisks and the marram grass and the few low sandhills, the sea began. But even in my unlikely dream I would not have thought of the sea. I would have been dreaming of myself sitting with the father and with the son – my former football friend – in the shade of fruit trees on a hot afternoon in February. I would have been dreaming of myself sitting with the family I was dreaming of marrying into, in the native district of all of us.

  They would never dream of leaving their native district, the father would have told me, in my dream of him that I dreamed while I sat by his tent in my unlikely dream. And he hoped, the father would have said, that his son and his daughter would never leave – not even after they were married. The father would not have said so, but I would have known why he wanted to live always where he lived in my dream of him in my unlikely dream. He would have been thinking of the grasslands to the north and the west of Melbourne County. We would have been sitting among fruit trees on a green lawn in a backyard, but just out of our sight, behind a few streets of houses, the grasslands began.

  Each place is more than one place. Whenever the wind was from the north-west we sat under fruit trees on green grass, but our flat native district was on the grasslands where it had always been.

  Pardon me, reader, for that last sentence, which I wrote as though the girl and I and her family sat in fact under those fruit trees. My sentences have been growing more and more elaborate. It becomes harder and harder to write about things
dreamed of by the young man I had dreamed of becoming. How much easier it is to write that I often visited the house where the girl lived with her family in my native district, and that I talked quietly with the girl for a few minutes on every visit. How easy it is to write that the girl became my girlfriend after two or three years and that no one in the family was surprised a few years later again when the girl and I would sit under the fruit trees on hot afternoons talking about the house we would live in after we had been married.

  The house was north-west from where we sat. Out on the grasslands and approaching the house, reader, you would have seen all around you at first only the whitish grass under waves of watery haze. Then, at last, you notice a smudge of dark-green against the white. In time, the smudge appears as plantations and thickets of European trees, and within the dark-green a smudge of red appears. In time, the red appears as the roof of a large house.

  You approach the house from among the deep shadows of the European trees, reader. But you are not yet there. The trees are a park or an outer ring of plantations. Inside the zone of trees is one last belt of grassland – a place where the owners have carefully planted all the grasses that once flourished where this dream-place now lies. You cross the last grassland of all. The red roof and the white walls of the house are still partly hidden behind a garden of shrubs and lawns, all surrounded by a fence of tall pickets. On a path behind this fence I am walking in the cool of the evening.

  When I had returned from the foreshore each afternoon I sat in the living-room, as my aunts called it, on the shaded south side of the house. I looked through tall windows at a fence overgrown with ivy. The fence hid everything behind it except for a narrow view of sky. I looked into the deepest shade under the ivy. I looked at patches of moss on paving stones. I looked at the shallow cement saucer, brimful of water from the dripping tap. I wanted to stare at dampness and shade so that I could more readily suppose the tall fence had grassland on its other side.