How to Cuss in Western

by Michael P. Branch

  This was a new angle, and I was nonplussed. Eryn, who is considerably more intelligent than her husband, quickly pointed out to Caroline that Santa communicates regularly with parents, and that there is practical collaboration even in the magic that is Christmas morning.

  Caroline stared back defiantly. “Santa knows my heart,” she declared. And with that she spun on her heel and returned to her room, where she planted her shoulder against the side of her dresser and, like a football player driving a tackling dummy, began shoving it away to make room for the hedgehog’s cage. Nothing we said made a lick of difference. This feisty little mule saw her new pet as a fait accompli, and so she remained perfectly resolute. “Santa knows my heart,” she repeated firmly.

  I have written that parenting, like jazz, is the art of improvisation, but it might just as well be glossed as an interminable series of Catch-22s. Eryn and I now faced a choice that felt epic. Through pure stubbornness, Caroline had placed us at a checkmate in which our “choice” was reduced to getting a hedgehog or blowing the lid on the Santa myth. How is it that parenting so often provides us only with this kind of “choice”?

  Eryn remained respectful of my desire to live a long, happy, and entirely hedgehog-free life, and it pains me to confess that ultimately it was I who caved. One night, over a tumbler of sour mash, I told Eryn that I was not prepared to be remembered as the guy who murdered Santa. “I don’t want the blood on my hands,” I said, in a moment of profound cowardice. “Please help find us a damned hedgehog.” And with that I poured another drink.

  Arrangements were made, money changed hands, and, on the morning of December 25, there was, beneath the tree, that most precious of Christmas miracles: an unwanted pet. When Caroline raced out to the living room to see that, indeed, Santa knew her heart, the look on her face conveyed a sublime combination of pure joy and “I told you so,” which, I suspect, is the only way pure joy can be improved upon.

  Having learned just enough about the captive-bred hedgehog to suspect it would make a terrible pet, especially for a kid, I tried to lower Caroline’s expectations without dampening her enthusiasm. “CC, I’m really happy for you. But you need to know that this isn’t a warm and fuzzy pet, like a bunny. This guy is spiny, reclusive, and nocturnal. He might be hard to love.”

  Eryn looked at me and smiled. “Well, Bubba,” she said, “there’s somebody else in this family who is spiny, reclusive, and nocturnal.”

  “That’s right,” Hannah chimed in, “and we still love you.”

  I soon found myself not only reconciled to “Uncle Hedgie,” as Caroline had named the little beast (though it might have been Aunt Hedgie, for all I knew), but fascinated by him. There was no denying that the thing was, to use a word I’ve tried in vain to scrub from my personal lexicon, cute. He was a spiny, little ball—larger than a baseball but smaller than a softball—with handsome salt-and-pepper coloration on his long spines. His tiny ears were delicately cupped and jet black, and his small eyes, glossy and bulbous, were also deep black. His face consisted of a long, narrow snout, which, although not very porcine, had given rise to the “hog” part of his name. The tip of the snout was polished black, with small nostrils, and graced with long, downward-curving whiskers. Hedgie’s nose twitched constantly, suggesting an intelligent suspicion of the lumbering apes that gawked at him.

  Most fascinating was the little beast’s remarkable running ability. I had read that hedgehogs will climb onto a play wheel at night and run for hours, and that it is common for them to cover an incredible six or seven miles in a single night. This seemed unlikely for an animal with legs about the length of toothpicks, but Uncle Hedgie turned out to be a champion ultramarathoner. Each night, shortly after Caroline fell asleep, he would scamper out from hiding and jump onto his large wheel, on which he ran so hard and so long that I could often hear him racing away without pause until just after dawn.

  I also admired Uncle Hedgie’s bad attitude. He spent most of the day hiding under a piece of cloth, he did not enjoy being handled, and he never hesitated to prick up his spines when he was grouchy, which was most of the time. In a world full of pets bred to be affectionate and loyal—a saccharine world of kittens and puppies—here, at last, was an honest misanthrope. His best trick, which he performed at the slightest irritation, was to hiss loudly and convulse forward into a perfect ball of spines—one in which it was impossible to locate his face or his ass, or even to know whether he was in possession of either. This ability to become utterly spherical is why, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the White Queen commits the indignity of using hedgehogs as croquet balls. Back on this side of the looking glass, I can only imagine that a predator, upon seeing this prickly ball of trouble, might just cock its head and walk away. I envied Uncle Hedgie this unassailable form of self-protection, and found myself wishing I had the capacity to deploy it during meetings at work.

  The Ancient Greek poet Archilochus observed, “The fox has many tricks, and the hedgehog only one, but that is the best of all.” But Archilochus obviously lived in a time before toilet paper, because our hedgehog had a second trick, and it was his best. Uncle Hedgie loved to stick his snout into a cardboard toilet paper core (which I slit with my pocket knife to prevent it from becoming permanently lodged on his noggin), after which he staggered around waving it in the air like a tiny, spiny drunk. How could I not like this little guy?

  I did not confess to the family that I had been secretly nerding it up by researching hedgehogs. It turns out there are no living species native to the Americas, which is why we Yanks celebrate Groundhog Day in place of Hedgehog Day, a holiday that in Europe has inspired saturnalian revelry since the time of the Romans. What intrigued me most was the ancient pedigree of the species. Despite his weird appearance and even weirder behavior, this animal has not changed much in the past fifteen million years. Given my own notably idiosyncratic behaviors, I was filled with hope by the idea that weird had been working so well for so long. Hedgie wasn’t as ancient as a sponge or a jellyfish, but fifteen million is a lot of evolutionary birthdays for a mammal. Compare this to local desert critters like coyotes and bobcats, which are a few million years old at best.

  In fact, the hedgehog is so old that his resemblance to the porcupine and echidna is simply the product of convergent evolution, which is a fancy way of saying that, because this is a harsh world in which we might all do well to be covered with protective spines, different species arrived at this physiological defense mechanism through completely unrelated evolutionary paths. Uncle Hedgie is a mammal, just like you and me—only he has been around forty or fifty times longer than we have. I could not help but respect how antediluvian this little guy was, and I came to feel that having Uncle Hedgie living with us on Ranting Hill was the equivalent of sharing our bathtub with a sturgeon or coelacanth.

  If Santa knew Caroline’s heart, she knew her mind. She honestly wanted nothing more for Christmas, and, having received Uncle Hedgie, she was entirely thrilled. Unlike most grown-ups, Caroline always knows what she wants in life; also unlike us, she is satisfied when she gets it. She loves to play with her unique pet—at least, such play as is possible with a cranky, nocturnal pincushion—and she takes good care of him. For my part, I like the way having a hedgehog forces me to remember how ridiculously young we humans are as a species, and how few of our current, mostly infantile, behaviors are likely to be sustainable for the next fifteen hundred years, let alone fifteen million.

  When Uncle Hedgie looks me in the eye, I detect in his glare an unmistakable message: “Back off, sonny. I’ve been doing my thing since you were in evolutionary short pants.” If, in the impossibly distant future, humans are still around—and can do things like convulse into a perfect sphere of spines—then we will have earned the right to cop an attitude of superiority. In the meantime, Uncle Hedgie has earned not only Caroline’s affection but my respect.

  WHEN ISAY THAT American writers have ignited
fires, I do not mean only that they have fired our imaginations or that they have sparked changes in the way we understand the world. I also mean that many of my favorite American authors actually burned stuff down. Not on purpose, of course.

  In her poem “Verses Upon the Burning of Our House,” the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet described the harrowing experience she had in July 1666, when she awoke to discover her home ablaze.

  I wakened was with thund’ring noise

  And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice.

  That fearful sound of “Fire!” and “Fire!”

  Let no man know is my desire.

  The power of Bradstreet’s poem is in its inquiry into if and how her stuff—the material possessions destroyed by the fire—should be valued. She knows that her love of God must triumph over her love of the things of this world, and yet the poem is rich with genuine regret, because although she is relieved not to have lost her life or her faith, she also knows that material things often tether us to who we are and to those we love. Even as she resolves herself to God’s will, we can feel the pain of her loss of those things to which her fondest memories are attached:

  Here stood that trunk, and there that chest,

  There lay that store I counted best.

  My pleasant things in ashes lie,

  And them behold no more shall I.

  A century later, in February 1770, Thomas Jefferson’s home at Shadwell, Virginia, burned in a house fire that resulted, lamented Mr. Jefferson, in the loss of “every paper I had in the world, and almost every book.” When Jefferson returned to the smoldering ashes of what had been his home, his first question was, “Have my books been saved?” I can only imagine what went through the mind of eighteenth-century America’s greatest bibliophile upon being informed that his library had been lost in the blaze but that a fiddle had been saved. “A fiddle?” he must have thought, “Are you fucking kidding me?” This fire may have been for the best in the long run, since Jefferson later moved up the hill from Shadwell and built a decent little place he called Monticello. I lived in Shadwell for a few years back in the mid-1980s, before I came both to the high desert and to my senses (which, for me, amounted to the same thing). Each day I would drive past Jefferson’s famous neoclassical mansion on my way to my own place, which was a wood-heated, green-board shack slung low in a soggy, shadowed, hickory-choked and poison ivy–filled hollow. My digs contained an ancient woodstove, a foot-pumped bellows organ, and a giant, pulleyed candelabra, but no toilet—though I did have a borrowed goat named Melville who cropped the stinging nettle that grew along the path to the outhouse.

  A century after Jefferson’s Shadwell fire, the misadventure of a truly incendiary American literary figure occurred in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, the hotbed of American Transcendentalism. In April 1844, Henry David Thoreau made a campfire on the banks of Fair Haven Bay. As usual, he had been hiking and fishing while his neighbors were living those pitiable lives of quiet desperation back in town, and now he wanted to fry his catch. Instead, he accidentally fried the neighboring woods, burning more than 300 acres of forest, threatening the town with destruction, and contributing to his already bad reputation as an irresponsible ne’er-do-well. It did not help that Thoreau remained unremorseful, later writing in his journal, “I once set fire to the woods….It was a glorious spectacle and I was the only one there to enjoy it.” As with Bradstreet, who turned her fire into a moving poem, and Jefferson, who turned his Shadwell loss into the architectural monument that is Monticello, art was also born of Henry’s conflagration. In the wake of the fire, his neighbors so often ragged on him for his near-criminal negligence that he decided to take shelter at a nearby pond, where he had the transformative experience that produced Walden (1854). In this sense, fire may have indirectly inspired the creation of what is among the most influential and provocative of nineteenth-century American books.

  Much closer to Ranting Hill was the wildfire accidentally ignited by Mark Twain during his visit to Lake Tahoe in the late summer of 1861. In Roughing It, the 1872 book in which he relates his adventures in Nevada, Twain explains that his lakeshore campfire escaped to the forest floor, where it touched off the pine needles that carpeted the ground before spreading quickly into the manzanita chaparral and raging out of control. “Within half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of flame! It went surging up adjacent ridges—surmounted them and disappeared into the canyons beyond,” wrote Twain. “[A]s far as the eye could reach the lofty mountain-fronts were webbed as it were with a tangled net-work of red lava streams. Away across the water the crags and domes were lit with a ruddy glare,” he continues, “and the firmament above was a reflected hell!” Even though Twain was personally responsible for this hellish conflagration, he follows Thoreau in admiring the beauty produced by his carelessness. “Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the lake! Both pictures were sublime, both were beautiful,” he writes admiringly, “but that in the lake had a bewildering richness about it that enchanted the eye and held it with the stronger fascination.” And, with that perceptive aesthetic appreciation, Twain joined the ranks of American literary firebugs.

  Then there’s my cantankerous fellow desert rat, Edward Abbey. In the hilarious, heartbreaking chapter of Desert Solitaire called “Down the River,” Cactus Ed tells the story of his two-week raft trip through Glen Canyon in June 1959, shortly before the Colorado River was dammed to create Lake Powell. Soon after passing the mouth of the San Juan River, Abbey accidentally started a brushfire in a side canyon. He combines excitement with his signature droll humor, writing that his river buddy Ralph is “all ready to cast off, when I appear, about ten feet in front of the onrushing sheet of fire, running. I push the boats off and roll in; we paddle as hard as we can away from the fiery shore….‘Hot in there,’ I say, though Ralph has asked no questions.” Art also rose from the ashes of Abbey’s fire. As he notes in Desert Solitaire, “you can see a photograph of what I did in Eliot Porter’s beautiful book on Glen Canyon, The Place That No One Knew.” Canyon blazes notwithstanding, Abbey’s literary art and Porter’s visual art have given us a visceral understanding of what was lost when Lake Powell inundated one of the most magnificent canyon systems in the American West.

  Finally, I’m reminded of the devastating 1991 Oakland Hills fire—a literal “firestorm” (a blaze so intense that it ultimately produces its own wind) that was driven by hot, dry, northeasterly Diablo winds that blasted the Oakland and Berkeley hills at more than seventy miles per hour. This fast-moving fire killed twenty-five people and destroyed more than 3,000 houses and apartment buildings. Among those who lost their home in this wildland-urban interface conflagration was the gifted Chinese-American novelist Maxine Hong Kingston, who writes beautifully about her loss in The Fifth Book of Peace. Kingston shares the painful story of returning through burned-over neighborhoods to the site of her home in search of the only manuscript copy (and backup disk) of a book that she had been working on for several years. Among the incinerated remnants of her home she at last discovers the remains of her book manuscript: “I touched the lines, and they smeared into powder,” she recalls. “I placed my palm on this ghost of my book, and my hand sank through it. Feathers floated into the air, became air, airy nothing.” Standing amid the ashes of her home and possessions, Kingston at last confronts the fatal loss of her cherished work: “My Book of Peace is gone.”

  We have more than our fair share of wildfires out here in Silver Hills, blazes that are usually attributable to bad mufflers, illegal off-roaders, or drunken plinkers—or, in one notorious case, the bad muffler on the illegal off-road vehicle of a drunken plinker. During the past decade, I’ve done countless hours of fuels reduction work on our property, removing more than a hundred dump trailer loads of sage, rabbitbrush, and juniper snags. I have maintained my firebreaks with vigilance, and I even installed perimeter hose bibs in anticipation of someday
having to fight a brushfire. But, this past Valentine’s Day Eve, I was reminded that the threat of fire exists within our home, as well as out on the wildlands interface. On the evening of February 13 (Ash Wednesday, ironically enough), I joined the ranks of famous American writers when my house caught fire, which at least proves that I am willing to do whatever it takes to break into the literary pantheon.

  Eryn and I had just put Hannah and Caroline to bed when the smoke alarm went off, which I assumed was nothing more than a battery issue. But when a second alarm went off upstairs, I ran up to have a look. Although I smelled no smoke, I discovered a helpful indication that there might be a problem when I observed flames shooting several feet out of the floor adjacent to the sheetrock chase containing the woodstove’s chimney stack. I yelled downstairs to Eryn to call 911, wake the girls, and evacuate Ranting Hill immediately. While she was doing that, I emptied both nearby fire extinguishers into the ever-expanding hole burning through the floor, but to disturbingly little effect. I then sprinted down to the kitchen and garage and grabbed the other three extinguishers in the house, dashed back upstairs, and blasted all three of those into the flaming floor. Having exhausted my store of extinguishers, I now began a wild shuttle run from the bathtub to the fire, where I dashed five-gallon buckets of water onto the glowing floor and wall in an attempt to contain a fire that was spreading quickly. I also opened the hatch of the woodstove downstairs and tossed full buckets of water onto the hissing coals, causing choking clouds of sulfurous smoke to billow out into the house, where smoke alarms now blared from every room.