Off Main Street

by Michael Perry

  My people are farmers and loggers and hunters. I grew up slinging manure—the metaphorical basis for a writing career. Thousands have died, bombs are falling, and in response, here I sit composing an essay: I feel as if I am throwing cotton candy at a steamroller.

  I cherish my spot on our little fire department because if something is burning, we put water on it. Action over postulation. A week after the first attacks, we were alerted by Naval Intelligence that terrorists were thought to be targeting fire trucks for theft and use as car bombs. The intelligence was later revised, but we took some measures. One of us can sit down there with a deer rifle, if need be. I will say it’s a heck of a thing to have Naval Intelligence briefings arriving in rural Chippewa County, Wisconsin. A shame and a comfort, really: The tremors spread.

  By morning, the woodstove is dead cold. It takes a little internal dialogue to get me to unzip my army surplus sleeping bag. I stow the Smith Corona under the bunk and shoulder my backpack. When I come out of the woods, I hear Osama bin Laden say there is fear in America. So be it. Courage does not arise out of comfort.

  2001

  Houses on Hills

  The good building makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before that building was built.

  —Frank Lloyd Wright

  It was the ship-shaped house that finally did it. In the space of a few short months, it came plowing over the crest of a formerly mapled hill, the beveled two-story prow of the living room looming into the skyline like a grounded destroyer jammed atop a sand dune. During my weekly comings and goings, I watched it take shape, and wondered what had moved the owner to choose this particular site. Ego, perhaps, an ostentatious hankering to let folks know that this particular American dream was charging right along. But if conspicuous consumption explains the view he’s given us, it hardly explains the one the owner has chosen for himself: a glittering, bi-level bank of garage-door-sized windows affording an unobstructed, panoramic view of…the freeway. On any given summer weekend, the owner of this nautical monstrosity can chill a drink, retire to the balcony, and review an endless parade of Illinois tourists pellmelling their way north.

  In his recent book, Mapping the Farm (Knopf), author John Hildebrand refers to this new trend in home building as the “look at me” school of architecture. By my definition, look-at-me hill houses are largish new homes constructed on former farmland, atop hills. The trend seems to be to hack a square out of the tree line, deposit the house, and dam the horizon. In even more egregious instances, there are no trees at all; the house squats solo on the skyline, subtle as a gopher mound on a putting green.

  People are entitled to displays of bad taste. Heck, I’m the last person to judge someone on matters aesthetic—me, sitting here in my sweatpants in a one-armed office chair at a discount-chain desk constructed of particleboard and wood-grain contact paper. But at least I’m not perched on a hill beside the interstate, big as a house. It’s one thing to exhibit a complete lack of style and grace in the privacy of your own home. It’s entirely another thing to do it at the expense of everyone’s landscape. These people don’t want to be part of the horizon, they want to be the horizon. Why nestle in the valley when you can frame your success with the sky?

  Let me take another tack. There is a river near here that is corralled for several miles on one side by steep pine bluffs. Recently, the bluffs have become studded with so many look-at-me hill houses I am reminded of Germany’s Rhine Valley and its range of cliff-topping castles. Which might give the owners of today’s ersatz chateaux pause for thought, as the castles along the Rhine were stormed at fairly regular intervals. Most of the ones I’ve visited had been torched or shot up pretty good. Often more than once. At a time when the gulf between the haves and have-nots gapes wider yearly, the day may not be so far off when making what you “have” as obvious as a castle will be unwise. Something to ponder while sitting in your A-frame at eye level with the eagles.

  Of course, all of this is little more than amateur armchair grumbling on my part. The topic cries out for a more informed opinion—the opinion, say, of a renowned landscape architect.

  Now, I’m no renowned landscape architect, but I read an article about one once. In The New Yorker, no less. His name was Dan Kiley. According to the article, he was eighty-three years old last year, and has been described as “the reigning classicist in landscape design.” It has also been said that he “has done more than anyone else in his field to lead American landscape architecture back to its classical roots: to formal geometry; to the axis, the allee, the bosquet, the terrace, the tapis vert…”

  I wouldn’t know tapis vert from Diet Squirt, but I do know ugly when I see it, and so, when I saw the boathouse, I fired a letter off to Mr. Kiley. Can you spare me a note, I asked, detailing your thoughts about this disturbing trend? I would love, I wrote, to compare my reaction (no doubt a sort of visceral parochial protectionism on my part) to your more artistically and professionally informed opinion.

  And I’ll be darned if he didn’t write back. A one-paragraph note, but it did my farm-boy heart good:

  Office of Dan Kiley

  Landscape Architects and Planners

  20 November 1995

  Dear Michael Perry:

  It does not take an esoteric professional to explain the observation that you make. Simply stated, people are disconnected from the land; there is no tradition to guide them to do the right thing by the land.

  Inappropriate and insensitive developments are not restricted to country areas, they are also found in the suburbs and cities.

  Sincerely,

  Dan Kiley

  And so, my amateur grumblings validated, I feel bold enough to issue the following appeal (I don’t mean to speak for Mr. Kiley, but I reckon we are in agreement on this): If the American free enterprise system has been good to you, by all means build yourself a dream house with all the doodads. I’m all for that. But do Dan and me a favor:

  Stick it behind a hill.

  1996

  P.S. Rereading this piece nearly ten years later, I remain unmoved on the subject in general, but feel the tone I took with the owners of the “ship-shaped” house was frankly snotty. What did I know of their hopes and struggles?

  I did find that an essay like this pretty much guarantees you will meet people who own houses on hills. My ophthalmologist, for instance. He usually waits until my eyes are dilated and I am unable to drive or negotiate hallways before he starts in on me.

  Dan Kiley died February 21, 2004.

  Swelter

  Bits of this essay appeared in the opening chapter of Population: 485.

  I was young when the streaking fad hit. Mid–grade school, maybe. Sinful, I thought. But I had a go at it. Dropping our clothes beside the sinkhole in the sheep pasture, a friend and I took off across the field, chasing his horse, Daisy. Daisy had been trained for the circus. You could vault to her back from behind. We never tried that with our clothes off. It seems ludicrous now, the image of two hairless children capering through the fat alfalfa, forty acres from the nearest road, with no one to see us but my younger brother. Even then more sensible than I, he sat at the edge of the sinkhole, nibbling a bird-legged stem of canary grass. He knew we weren’t raised that way. And we weren’t. So after a lap or two, my friend and I put on our jeans, adjusted our T-shirts to our tan lines, and ascended the lower limbs of popple trees, jackknives open, to mark the day in the bitter bark. I haven’t disrobed in public since.

  But I know why we stripped that day.

  Blame summer.

  Summer is a seducer. After bundling through another tight-lipped winter, after enduring the mounting frustration of spring’s titillating dance of veils, we gape as summer comes sliding down her blazing ecliptic like a woman down a bannister. She laughs with her head thrown far back; she throws her hands high in the air, releasing fistfuls of butterflies. She belly dances through the cornfields until the dust rises like a charmed snake, hanging in fat curls, leaving you cotton-mou
thed. She makes the fox pant, she drives the hawk to thin air. Weaker creatures curtain themselves away to complain.

  “Can’t stand this,” say people who only months ago chattered and whined in the cold. “It’s not so much the heat…,” they mewl, their humidifiers sagging and worn to a frazzle, tattered after cranking out a ceaseless fog against winter’s moistureless air. Give me summer. Give me dappled cattails sashaying under a breeze so like hot breath it stirs unclean thoughts; give me warm ditches all clotted with frog eggs, sunning turtles, wheezing nights. In the summer we live dangerously, driving fast with our vulnerable elbows out the window. We loosen our clothes, make love with the screens open. Summer makes us fearless. One summer I was twelve hundred miles from home. I wrote a brave letter to a girl I didn’t know. When I returned, a few hot days of August remained. Beneath a moth-clogged porch light, she took my face in her hands and kissed me.

  In the summer, sweat is easily earned, rising at the slightest provocation. In the haymow, alfalfa chaff with the scent of toasted tea plasters at the hollow of a farmer’s neck; his forearms ripple shiny and green. Over dishes in the kitchen, his wife turns her wrist, runs it across her brow.

  Summer taunts the weak. Morning glories rise early like pious old women to prayer, pale purple and cool to the touch. But by midmorning faith fails them; they purse their lips and retire frowning to their clinging vines. In the meantime, summer has taken over the day, driving sheep to shade. Sparrows wallow in the dust, and horses stand wide-legged and motionless, heads down. She has built a heavy heat, summer, a heat with momentum. Momentum to carry well into the night, where it will pad the air, squat above the sheets, dim the stars.

  Like any decadent creature, summer shows her age prematurely. As early as July the greens assume a harder edge. Blight stains the popple leaves, the timothy grows stalky and thin. Like a thickening woman, one halter top strap off the shoulder, like a man adjusting his thin hair while his sports car idles, there is evidence that summer is going to seed, leaving you to nurse regret through the fall, the season of penitence. Fall is penitence. Winter is abstinence. But the cycle is a circle, and fasting sharpens hunger. By springtime, you are ready to sin again. And summer will oblige you, whistling like a torch, flaming and shameless, with the power to make young boys strip naked and dance for the sun.

  We grew apart, my streaking friend and I. He graduated, and a year later I left town. There were rumors of trouble, then rumors of his being born again. One humid day a year ago, I drove by his house and there was nothing out front but a rusty truck. His windows were tightly shut. I thought it symbolic: summer, heavily made up and waiting in the yard; him having none of it. I was overreaching, of course, imposing metaphor to serve my own purpose. It turns out he runs a business reclaiming concrete silos—exhausting, dangerous work performed high above barnyards. While I hunker beneath a roof, rearranging words in an attempt to capture summer, bring it inside, he is out in it, the sun hot on his bare back, baking him like the unpicked stones in the fields below.

  We ran into each other at the local gas station recently. He tossed a carton of cigarettes through his truck window and came over to talk. We caught up a bit, him with his sunburned, work-skinned arms folded across the front of a sleeveless T-shirt, me in my clean jeans. I didn’t bring up the streaking, didn’t ask him to comment on my attempts to characterize summer as sensuous seducer. He did mention that he sometimes travels to South America in the winter. He didn’t say why. I’d like to think summer draws him down there. The temptress, that sort of thing. But I suspect he has other reasons, and another metaphor withers.

  And so in the end, summer is simply warm weather. For all this pungent talk of sweat and seduction, I believe summer is understood only by the child too young to be troubled by the adult inferences of nakedness and heat, unfettered by metaphor and allusion, content simply to sprint through the grass and get about this business of growing old under the sun.

  1998

  You Are Here

  Any pilot who has gone off course while “flying on visuals” knows what it is to dip from the clouds to reconnoiter the earth. To search for an orienting feature in the landscape below, a landmark that says, “You Are Here.” Imagine then, how welcome the sight of a water tower, standing out like a giant pushpin stuck in a topographical map, clearly labeled with the name of the community arranged about its base.

  We most commonly see water towers from ground level, often while traveling, but they are no less a source of orientation to us than they are to the pilot. From the perspective of the road, a water tower becomes a giant sign-post representing a community. “Here we are,” say the residents of Richmond, Indiana, all day and all night, thanks to their illuminated roadside tower. “Here we are,” say the residents of Beebe, Arkansas, adding in painted epigraph, “Your Dream Home-town.” Here we are, in spite of everything, declared Florida City, Florida, in 1992, after Hurricane Andrew peeled the F and C from the silver skin of their water tower, but failed to topple it. Here we are, if you look closely, says the water storage tank in Bedminster, New Jersey, its walls camouflaged with trees in silhouette.

  Even when the road you travel is cybernetic, many of the towns you approach choose to introduce themselves via their water towers. Journey to the Hartington, Nebraska, Web page and you’ll see a simple, captionless photo of its colorful tower, looking overdressed and lonely on a plain. Denison, Iowa, presents a thumbnail photo of its million-gallon tower, and explains that the painted caption, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” is in honor of Denison native Donna Reed for her most famous film appearance. Go north of the border to Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, select the water tower page, and while no picture pops up, you will be able to learn from the text that the tower is “big” and “green.” Moreover, “you may be interested to know that the water tower has never leaked.” Knoxville, Illinois, shares a photo and the information that the water in its tower is “naturally fluoridated and slightly radioactive.”

  “Here we are,” say water towers on behalf of a community, “and this says something about us.”

  My hometown water tower stands just off Main Street, along the soft descent leading from the freeway overpass to the old, underfed highway at the center of town. Built in a style the experts refer to as “double ellipsoidal multicolumn,” it exhibits a solid stance, the four slim legs angling outward a bit as they drop from their attachment at the convex belly of the silver-gray tank. Simple block letters, spare and black, follow the curvature of the sidewalls, peeking from behind the wraparound catwalk: NEW AUBURN. The cap, a meniscus of steel, is crowned with a small American flag. During the holiday season, a star of lights joins the flag. A black-and-white picture of the tower, taken shortly after its construction in 1950, hangs in the village hall. It might have been taken yesterday. When I roll up the exit ramp from the freeway, I enjoy the thought of people approaching town back when the old highway was in its heyday, seeing the same water tower, albeit from the opposite direction. More than the houses, more than the streets, more than the small green sign at the outskirts, it has always been the sight of the water tower that has told us, “here you are.”

  No less an authority on American culture than Garrison Keillor has reinforced the image of water tower as icon. Winners of A Prairie Home Companion’s “Talent from Towns Under 2000” contest tote home a trophy modeled after the witch-hatted steel towers that dot Minnesota’s plains. Keillor himself chose the image and sees it as symbolic of small-town America.

  Keillor’s frame of reference is Midwestern, and that frame of reference is telling. For someone raised in the heart-land, it’s easy to think of the old silver water tower as definitively iconic. Of course, this is not so. In Ypsilanti, Michigan, water has been stored since 1891 in a 147-foot-tall stone and concrete tower. A tower standing in Coral Gables, Florida, is disguised as a lighthouse of Spanish-Moorish architectural extraction, with a sundial attached to its south face. In Mendocino, California, a tower constructed in 1857 to se
rve the Carlson City Hotel still stands. Constructed of redwood, it has the appearance of a tall rectangular box, capped with a flat pyramid of shake shingles. In 1870, the hotel was destroyed by fire, but the tower endured. One year later, the Chicago Water Tower survived the Great Chicago Fire. Constructed of limestone in a style referred to as “naïvely Gothic,” the tower includes turrets, battlements and slit windows with architraves. Topping it all off is a green copper cap. In 1969, the American Water Works Association chose the Chicago Water Tower as its inaugural American Water Landmark. Consequently, one of the first water towers officially designated as classic had no legs; it was crenellated, not witch-hatted.

  In 1895, Jacob Miller built a limestone water tower in Clinton, Wisconsin. The tank was made of wood; when fluctuations in the weather caused leaks, residents turned out to hand-tighten the turnbuckles. Wooden tanks were still being constructed in the 1950s; you’re most likely to spot one in New York, Philadelphia, and on the Chicago skyline. Early steel towers were patched together with riveted panels. But by 1930, welding had replaced riveting.

  The smooth surface of welded tanks is easier to maintain, and welding allows a versatility of design not possible with riveted construction. The intricate detailing of the 100,000-gallon pineapple that stood atop the Dole Cannery in Honolulu until it was dismantled in 1993 is all the more remarkable for the fact that Chicago Bridge and Iron constructed it in 1927, using the riveting method.

  Today, water storage vessels are classified in three configurations: reservoirs, standpipes and elevated tanks. A reservoir is generally a tank with a diameter greater than its height. Relative simplicity of design keeps fabrication costs low; however, reservoirs must be constructed on high ground if water is to flow by gravity.