How to Cuss in Western

by Michael P. Branch

  Back upstairs, thick smoke began to fill the house, even as I continued to splash water not only on the floor and wall but now also on the nearby stacks of books and papers that represented all my ongoing writing projects. After twenty-five minutes of this frantic, solo firefighting, I saw through the smoke the distant, flashing red lights of emergency vehicles making their way up the long, muddy driveway to our home.

  When the firefighters arrived, they quickly suited up, oxygen tanks and all, and relegated me to the sidelines. For the next three hours I stood out in the cold, shivering as I watched a small army of masked men running in and out of our house carrying axes, hoses, and chainsaws. Smoke billowed from beneath the eaves of the roof, and I could hear chainsaws ripping into the floors, walls, and ceilings, as emergency responders chased the fire through our home. Through the windows shone headlamp beams tunneling into the smoke, but I could not see enough to know what was going on, and for a good part of the night the fate of our home remained uncertain.

  Our house was ultimately saved, but not before the computers were fried, books and papers water damaged, and most of the furniture, carpets, curtains, and clothes ruined by smoke. Still, my family was safe, and our home was still standing on Ranting Hill. Even our dog and cat had survived the fire by fleeing into the open desert. It was obvious enough that it could have been much worse. What if we had not been home, or the smoke alarm had failed to work, or I didn’t have on hand five fire extinguishers to slow the blaze? What if snow or mud had kept firefighters from reaching Ranting Hill? What if the bearing-wall posts supporting the roof had burned through while I fought the fire with nothing more than a bucket?

  Two centuries after Thoreau’s birth, no environmental writer can get completely clear of his shadow, however hard we might try. Among the most enduring elements of cranky Uncle Henry’s legacy is his tireless interrogation of the value of experience as compared with the value of things. The opening chapter of Walden, “Economy,” is as eloquent an attack on consumerism and materialism as American literature has ever produced, and any honest reader of that text is forced to examine why they own so much stuff, how much of it they actually need, and whether they might be better off if they could somehow recover the time they spent working the job to earn the money to buy the stuff, which they felt they needed to console themselves for the stress and fatigue caused by the job, which they had to keep working so they could buy the stuff.

  “The cost of a thing,” wrote Thoreau in Walden, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” What if we made decisions about purchases not using a definition of cost that equates stuff with dollars but, instead, by invoking this alternative definition of cost as the precious time we must sacrifice—the sheer, exquisite, irreplaceable life experiences we must forgo—in order to afford the purchase? “Shall we always study to obtain more of these things,” asked Thoreau, “and not sometimes to be content with less?”

  I first read Walden several lifetimes ago, when I was a poor graduate student at Mr. Jefferson’s university, living in that Appalachian shotgun shack back in Shadwell, Virginia. The room in which I slept contained only a sleeping bag on the floor, an inverted peach crate for a side table, and a small reading lamp atop the crate. It was as austere an existence as anyone who isn’t homeless or backpacking is likely to experience. And yet, so incisive was Thoreau’s critique of the burden of possessions that I remember returning to my room late one night after studying Walden, looking down at that mummy bag and peach crate and lamp, and thinking to myself: I don’t need that damned crate.

  Now, here I was, decades later, the day after our house fire, watching load after load of damaged stuff being hauled out of our home. As the demolition and salvage work proceeded apace, it was a surreal experience to watch strangers carry charred I-beams, chainsawed wallboard, stripped carpet, and fried electronics outside, where—along with many of my books and papers—they were unceremoniously dumped in a pile in the mud in preparation for the haul out.

  It was precisely because the total cost of his little home at Walden Pond was a mere $28.12½ (at a time when the average cost of a house in town was around eight hundred bucks) that Thoreau considered himself the richest man in Concord. “If my house had been burned,” he observed, “I should have been nearly as well off as before.” In other words, the less stuff you have, the less you have to lose, and fewer are the hours lost in fueling the acquisitive fire that consumes so much of our lives.

  Like Anne Bradstreet, I care a great deal about my family’s things, and I will wager that I value my books as much as Jefferson did his. I hope that, like Mark Twain and Ed Abbey, no sudden blaze can deprive me of my sense of humor, without which life’s difficulties would sometimes be unbearable. And I aspire to the wisdom that graces Maxine Hong Kingston’s account of the total loss of her home and her magnificent Book of Peace. But, finally, it is the voluntary simplicity of Henry Thoreau that has served me best during this trial. While I suspect I will never acquire what Thoreau considered his “greatest skill,” which was “to want but little,” his insistence that cost be reckoned by the standard of life itself provides a liberating insight of immense value. We have nature, which is our widest home, and those we love, and the fleeting privilege to experience both. In the end, everything else is just stuff.

  WHEN MY FATHER-IN-LAW’S sixtieth rolled around, we gathered as a family and asked what he wanted for his birthday. Without hesitating he replied, “I want you all to run a half marathon with me.” I responded to this proposal as would any supportive person who cares deeply about honoring a close relation’s important birthday wish: “No, seriously, what do you really want?”

  Assured of the unhappy news that he was serious, I pointed out that the farthest I have run since age sixteen is from my writing desk to my beer fridge. Indeed, the fact that I have a beer fridge in my scribble den may help you to gauge my level of interest in long-distance running. I also observed that, from an evolutionary point of view, running only makes sense if one is chasing or being chased. He responded that since I was certain to do very poorly I would have the opportunity to chase all 6,999 of the other participants. My motivation would thus be to avoid coming in last. This did seem a compelling incentive, but still I resisted, this time telling my father-in-law that while he is a full-blooded California Central Valley Okie, running is rather a yuppie activity—unless one is running to nab a possum for the stewpot. Unpersuaded, he swiftly concluded the conversation by genially dismissing my arguments as “the sophistry of the chickenshitted.”

  Unfortunately for my wife and daughters, I have matured very little since age sixteen, when I dove off a ninety-foot cliff only because another kid made chicken sounds at me. So if I told you that the joke about the redneck whose last words are “Hey, y’all, watch this!” was written about me, you’d guess correctly that despite my lack of experience, interest, motivation, or fitness, I ran the hell out of that half marathon. And while three or four thousand people did cross the finish line before me, including a bunch of girl scouts, an eighty-six-year-old woman, a really friendly army vet in a wheelchair, and, of course, my father-in-law, I eventually crossed too. I was soon surfing a fat endorphin buzz, drinking free beer, and reveling in the fact that I was demonstrably not a chicken—and it wasn’t even 10:00A.M. yet. In that moment I experienced a disconcerting realization: I actually liked running.

  Why disconcerting? Our home landscape in the high-elevation foothills of the western Great Basin Desert is extreme and unforgiving. It is a hard place simply to live, never mind run. Summers are hot and dusty, spring and fall can happen in the time it takes to fetch a whiskey, and the wind howls all year around. But it is winter that makes running here nearly inconceivable. I’ve seen it snow every month of the year except August, and it is not uncommon to have some snow on the ground from November through April. Before my half marathon euphoria even subsided, I ha
d already begun to wonder if in becoming a runner I had started something the high desert would never let me finish.

  As the snows of winter buried my hopes for running, I began to despair. The temperature of my cabin fever ran higher than usual, and even snowshoeing didn’t do much for my morale. Finally, in a despondent fit I recalled a Danish maxim that had once been shared with me by the Norwegian wife of a Swedish friend while I was visiting Finland: “Det er ingenting som daarligt vejr, det er kun daarlige paaklaedning.” While these words of wisdom appear on the page as if they might translate as “Those who ingest some dark beer, must eat their hairiest goat,” it apparently means, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just being badly dressed for it.” Perhaps I was simply ill-equipped! Certainly, there must be runners in other parts of the world who had conquered the challenge I now faced. I had a Great Basin problem, but I needed a Nordic solution.

  Research led me to the Icebug, a running shoe developed in Sweden by Peter Öberg and Erik Öhlund, guys whose impressive athleticism, self-described “freakish interest in shoes,” and names with umlauts were precisely the credentials I sought. The running shoe the umlaut brothers invented is fabricated from a special kind of super-grippy rubber, and includes this medieval feature: its sole is embedded with two dozen steel studs. The real trick is that these studs are not fixed in the sole but instead are pushed outward by the runner’s weight as their foot flexes against a slippery surface, like twenty retracted stilettos that suddenly shoot into action when you need them most. The ad copy suggesting that I’d soon be streaking across bare ice seemed overly sanguine, but I was desperate, and so I placed my order and waited for the experiment to arrive.

  My first midwinter run up into the Silver Hills was among the most memorable of my life. I dressed for the occasion, laced up the black, spiked Icebugs—which more closely resembled torture devices than running shoes—and headed out hopefully into the snow. My route would be up the BLM canyon road into the white hills above, my destination a perennial spring in a frozen valley at about 7,000 feet. I had read that the shoes worked best on compacted snow or ice, and I knew that my misanthropic neighbor, Ludde, had already been up the canyon road on his chained-up ORV, breaking trail to give his ten bird dogs a slot in which to run. And so I took off, laboring uphill through the snowbanks, following the track made by Ludde and his pack of pointers. The farther I ran, the better I felt, my growing elation inspired by the feeling that the tools on my feet had opened my high home hills in an entirely new way. The glistening gates of winter swung open before me, and I experienced a satisfying sense that snow would never hold me prisoner again.

  Having run the three miles up to the spring, I paused there to drink and to admire my looming home mountain, whose massive, snow-corniced brow was etched against the cobalt western sky. The tips of bitterbrush, ephedra, and sage protruded from the drifts here and there. A pair of glossy ravens appeared on cue, slicing black over palisades of marbled granite on a nearby ridgeline. Then I tightened the laces on the black Icebuggies and began running down the mountain. The farther I ran, the more I trusted the crazy shoes, and with that trust came comfort, and with comfort speed, and with speed the return of that species of exhilaration that is unique to running. I was alone in the expansive silence of the high desert hills, and I was streaking downhill on naked ice, dropping toward home through a sinuous slot in an unbroken wilderness of snow. It was my apotheosis as a runner. I felt effortlessly strong, agile, and swift—exactly like a pronghorn, I thought to myself. In reality I was graceless, panting, and hoofing about fifty-four miles per hour more slowly than a pronghorn, but somehow I didn’t notice that at the time.

  Ten years later, I still run that half marathon with my family every fall, and I continue each year to be beaten badly by children, and by the aged and infirm, not to mention the sound drubbing I routinely receive from my father-in-law. But among the pleasures of running is that, when conditions are right, it is possible to enter a state of mind in which one’s shortcomings cease to be relevant to the enterprise. When I lace up my Icebugs and head up into these snowy canyons, I feel unaccountably fleet and swift. As a runner I am every bit as slow and awkward as I ever was, but no matter. In those brief and shining moments, drunk on endorphins and snowy desert light, my studded soles and winged heels transform me into the Mercury of Silver Hills.

  THE HILL FROM WHICH I have been ranting so passionately for so many years is good for many things: to hold our house up high into the teeth of the desert wind and generate an updraft on which harriers kite; to give us the pitch necessary for quality tobogganing, and to ensure that we are snowed in often enough to enjoy it; to keep us above winter inversions so we may gaze down upon an archipelago of broken peaks emerging magically from a valley-wide, flat-topped ocean of pogonip below. Perhaps the most satisfying thing about living atop a high hill, though, is that it offers so convenient and pleasing a place to throw things off of.

  Maybe I should be ashamed of my enthusiasm for heaving things off our home hilltop. But judge not, lest you be judged. How often do you feel an urge to fling something? Perhaps I am more of a hothead than the average person, but approximately every seventh time I pick up an object—a jammed stapler, ringing cell phone, cold cup of coffee, poorly written newspaper, or any of an infinite number of things that are, essentially, cheap plastic crap—I have a secret desire to launch it. Most of us have learned to repress this basic human desire to throw things, or at least to sublimate our desire into the congenial tossing of Frisbees or softballs. But I believe that we each harbor a deep longing to convert the latent energy of our daily frustrations into the more satisfying kinetic energy of a flying object. For me, the most rewarding means by which to make objects fly is to perch atop Ranting Hill and, in inspired bursts of rage, throw them as far as I can into the open desert below.

  When I sing the praises of my home hill as an excellent place from which to throw stuff, I mean to advocate the chucking of objects not as mere petulance but rather as a deeply ennobling form of self-expression. Consider the etymology of the word missile, which, when used as an adjective, denotes an object that is “capable of being thrown”—a quality shared by nearly everything I can get my hands on when I am sufficiently irate. That word’s older cousin, missive, derives from the Middle Latin missivus and was often used in the beautiful phrase littera missiva, which means “letters sent.” When in a fine fit I heave things off my hill, I am expressing the zeal of a missionary (another related word) who wishes, earnestly, to send a message forth. Like these essays, which are small missives launched toward you from the crest of a remote, unnamed foothill in the western Great Basin Desert, the things I pitch off this place are dispatches. To paraphrase fellow recluse writer Emily Dickinson, they are my heartfelt letters to the world.

  Most of the objects I have thrown off our hill are not letters in the conventional sense. Rather, they are missives in the form of cheap tools, broken toys, dull saw files, ugly patio furniture, dead rodents, blown-out work boots, empty ballpoint pens, nicked Kevlar chaps, or anything else that annoys me and thus seems suddenly in need of aerial relocation to packrat country in the sagebrush down below. For me, these missile launches are a survival mechanism. If I am a loving husband, patient father, devoted son, helpful neighbor, and good-humored writer, as I hope I am, that is simply because I can purge my frustrations with a healthy toss now and then. The therapeutic value of this tossing, however, depends upon the strictest solitude, which is a luxury those who live in town can scarcely afford. Like urinating outside one’s home—a gesture that is a sublimely satisfying expression of personal freedom and a means by which, like writing, I mark my territory—it requires both privacy and space to hurl stuff properly. If you toss objects out of your apartment window, you are arrested; if you fling junk around your suburban yard, you are socially outcast. But here, in the open country of the desert West, you can throw whatever you can afford to do without for a while, just so lon
g as your children aren’t around to learn from your poor example.

  For many years I steadfastly maintained the self-discipline to throw things off our hill only in moments of solitude, until one recent winter night when my fury overcame what shred of good sense I still possess. My mother-in-law happened to be visiting at the time, when a smoke alarm that had been giving me a world of trouble went off in the middle of the night. Bear in mind that this malfunctioning alarm had awakened my family three nights in a row, that my repeated attempts to fix it had failed miserably, that I had managed that day to get both my truck and tractor stuck in the same icy ditch, and that I had not discovered, until noon, that I had accidentally been drinking decaf all morning. When, at 2:00A.M., this smoke alarm—which now had the formerly snoozing mother-in-law beneath it—went blaring off again, I rose slowly from my bed, walked calmly up the stairs toward the deafening chirping, stepped up onto the mother-in-law’s bed (with her still in it), reached up, and with a brisk yank pulled the malfunctioning unit, wires and all, clean out of the ceiling—leaving a ragged hole from which gypsum dust rained slowly down onto my wife’s mother.

  There followed a nourishing silence, during which I turned to head back to bed. In the next moment, however, the worst happened: the alarm released one final, shorted-out little beep. It was only a death chirp, really, but by this point my patience and I were both exhausted, and my decisions were being made in the part of my brain that evolved long before smoke alarms were invented. I excused myself politely from the room, calmly opened the slider door, stepped out onto the balcony, and then pretended emphatically to wipe my ass with the alarm—a dramatic gesture I need hardly add was purely instinctual—after which I heaved the device as far as I could out into the desert night. I watched with satisfaction as it sliced away into the moonlight, as if in slow motion, toward a distant juniper. Although I injured my triceps slightly on the throw, it was a moment so deeply gratifying that I find it impossible now to express fully the pleasure it brought.