SWEATY CHEESE AND INJURED CEREAL
One of my favorite things about the tent shows is the sound of guests at intermission. It’s a gentle sound. It’s a warmhearted sound. It’s the sound of old friends reuniting and strangers getting along. It’s the sound of people visiting.
You know what? It’s the sound of happiness.
And why not? Here we are, feet planted right on the earth. It really is a tent, you know. No floorboards. You come to the Big Top, your feet remain in contact with the planet. You’ll catch the light scent of gently trampled grass (yah, you can trample something gently, it just takes time and civilized persistence), you’ll hear the crunch of gravel underfoot, a whisper of canvas on canvas, and now and then when the wind is right you’ll catch a whiff of bratwurst sizzling under the food tent across the way. And you can eat a brat when you’re up here with no worries because the rest of the experience is so very heart-healthy.
Me, I’m backstage picking around what’s left over on the deli tray. It starts out as a nice little spread, as well it should be: hungry musicians are cranky musicians, and cranky musicians tend to slide off key or transpose everything into the key of D-minor, the saddest of all keys.
But now there’s not a lot left of that deli tray—just three pieces of sweaty cheese. No surprise, really. I spent some of my formative years in the company of country music roadies, and they taught me the two most important rules of the road (and life). Number One, if you get ten minutes, sleep. Number Two, if you see food, eat it.
I always kinda operated that way anyway, at least on the food front. I was raised in a big farm family. When we had company for dinner, before passing the first bowl of food Dad used to tell the guests, “Take what you want the first time, because it ain’t comin’ around again.” Mom fed us mostly on oatmeal out of a twenty-five-pound bag. One fall she got a garbage pail full of wheat from the neighbor’s gravity box grain wagon, and for a pretty long stretch there we had boiled wheat for breakfast. The only time we got box cereal (which we called boughten cereal because, well, because it didn’t come from the neighbors’ gravity box) was on Sunday mornings, because Mom had to get six or eight kids ready for church and she didn’t have time to boil all that wheat. And even then she bought all the box cereal at some big ol’ scratch-and-dent warehouse up a back alley somewheres.* We used to say we never ate a box of cereal that hadn’t been backed over by the truck that brought it. I guess you could have called it injured cereal. But compared to a vat of oatmeal, that injured cereal was pretty good stuff. I remember one time my brother and I were watching TV at my grandma’s and that Total cereal ad came on, the one where they stack up twelve bowls of Froot Loops next to one bowl of Total and the announcer says, “You’d have to eat twelve bowls of Froot Loops to equal the nutrition in one bowl of Total.” My brother looked at me and said, “I’ll take the twelve bowls of Froot Loops.”
Anyways. I have no complaints about the deli tray, although I do have to say that seeing this is Wisconsin, next time would it kill ’em to throw in a little lefse? I’m gonna have my people talk to their people.
*Yep, I know: “somewheres.” Was gonna change it for the book, but that’s how we say it where I’m from. Especially when we’re feeling comfortable. See also: “Youse guys” and “Anyways …”
A WORLD AWAY
When I was a little boy, maybe four or five years old, Grandma got us a tent. We pitched it in the front yard, and I still carry a vivid memory of the separate world that tent created. A world that smelled of tromped grass and stale sunlight. A world that made my little liver quiver as I imagined myself an explorer lost somewhere in the land of Tarzan even though Mom and pancakes were just forty feet away. Maybe that was the best part about a tent: it created a world away.
I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian sect. I like to say that because it makes people pull up short—they think I was raised inside a walled compound where we hoarded diesel fuel and fertilizer. (We actually did hoard diesel fuel and fertilizer, but we used them to raise corn.) Part of being in this church was that we didn’t actually have churches; we met for Sunday morning meeting in regular houses except for the time once a year when we met for what we called convention. For convention we came from all over the state and convened on a farm, where we parked our cars in the hayfield and held services in an old barn. Our hymns rose through the rafters of the haymow. When it was time to eat we’d head across the grounds to a big old army surplus tent. We gathered outside the flap and waited. When everyone was ready, the dinner bell rang and someone pulled back the flap. We filed in quietly and found our place in long rows of tables and benches. The silverware was wrapped in a napkin and all of the cups and dishes were upside down, I suppose for sanitary reasons. We sat in silence. Part of the reason we were quiet is because we were churchly, but there is also something in the nature of a tent that is conducive to quietness and reflection—it’s the scent of the earth and the grass but it’s also the enveloping canvas that shelters you and dampens and tempers any noise that does arise. So we’d sit there quietly and then a sister minister would lead us in singing grace. When we hit the final note there was a grand clatter of cutlery and porcelain and coffee mugs being flipped over and the tent would soon fill with the aroma of what we called convention stew, which was your basic hearty beef-and-vegetable stew made in a tureen the size of a washing machine.
Not all of my tent memories are so heart-warming. When I was still a tot, Mom took me to the circus. About halfway through the production a clown began soliciting audience volunteers for his act. I scrunched down next to Mom but he homed right in on me. Plucking me out of the crowd, he stood me in the center ring. I could feel the heat of the lights as he spoke into his microphone.
“What’s your name, little boy?”
“Mike,” I whispered.
“Oh, you’re going to have to talk louder than that,” said the clown. “What’s your name?”
“Mike,” I squeaked. All this time the clown was keeping the microphone to himself.
“Oh, no, you gotta be a lot louder than that,” he said again. “Just yell your name right out so people can hear you!” And right when I yelled “Mike!” he jammed the microphone into my face and I was shocked to hear my little voice reverberating throughout the gigantic tent.
The clown then proceeded to conduct a number of humiliating bits that culminated in him tipping me over his knee with my butt pointed toward the bleachers. He dusted my little hinder with a gigantic pink feather duster, then reached into the waist-band of my pants and through some sleight of hand pulled out a huge pair of baggy women’s underwear. The audience roared.
Finally he carried me back and released me to Mom. “You’re a good little sport,” he said. “I want to give you something to remember this day by.” (As if I would have problems remembering this day, I’m thinking, still freaking out forty years later.) He pulled out a balloon and blew it up until it was longer than I was tall. With the spotlight still on us, he handed it to me.” Here y’go, little feller,” he said, and as I reached for it he let go and it went farting off into the air, corkscrewing into flaccidity and nothingness while once again the audience roared.
So you’ll understand that among the many reasons I enjoy coming up to Big Top Chautauqua is because it’s always a world away, and with each visit I’m pretty much guaranteed a few new canvas-scented memories.
But best of all? Zero sociopathic clowns.
FLYING ABOVE THE CANVAS
The guest for this show was Paul LaRoche, performing with Brulé and AIRO. LaRoche honors his heritage by singing of the people, land, and history of the Lower Brule Sioux Reservation of South Dakota, and the performance I refer to here included dancers in traditional regalia. That said, LaRoche will be the first to tell you that his music draws on more than one world and in fact draws on the seven directions.
Earlier tonight during the show, when the drums were pounding and the dancers were spinning and the flute was swirling,
I took myself out of the tent and imagined myself high in the sky above Mount Ashwabay—perhaps on manmade wings of silver, perhaps on feathers alone—and as the final few minutes of sunlight hit the sloped face of the earth, there far below I saw the still, blue dot of this tent, surrounded by thousands of acres of quiet twilit forest, and thinking of the power and color and life pulsing at the center of that blue dot I marveled again at the idea of what transpires as a result of the simple act of creating a space. A space aside: aside from the hustle, aside from the grind, aside from the things we have grown used to. Aside from the well-worn grooves. A place where, even if the music is thunderous, we are allowed the gift—so rare in our pandemonious world—of reflection. The gift of time and place aplenty to turn yourself over to the sound and spirit and see where you are flown. Tonight, after only a few heartbeats of music, I felt thunder storms approaching across a broad plain, I felt a western river valley open before me, I felt the call of a people through time. I heard ghosts marching.
Day-to-day, I’m pretty much boots and blue jeans. Pork chops and pickup trucks. Can’t dance a lick, and don’t care to. Not inclined to carry on. But I learned a long time ago there is value now and then in turning yourself over to the moment. To letting your soul wander out there unprotected. Oddly enough—or not oddly at all, if you give it proper consideration—much of my openness to this idea comes as a result of my being raised in a fundamentalist faith. I learned at an early age what it is to turn yourself over to a greater mysterious power and sign off on the idea that things are bigger than you and that there is more to life than just puttin’ on a big pair of boots and stompin’ around. I wandered other paths in the years that followed, and generally prefer pondering to preaching, but I have never lost the thread of the idea that it is in those moments when we let our hearts fly right out of our chests that we are closest to understanding the mystery of our clunky lives on this earth. Or if not understanding the mystery, understanding each other. We are all related, says Paul LaRoche.
Whether they emanate from the Bible on my lap at a gospel meeting in a bank basement or from a Native American flute, those things in the air that we cannot touch, that we cannot grasp, are nonetheless the things that can lift us above every earthbound worry. At times tonight I can feel the flow of long-gone buffalo, and I yearn for the idea of prairies before man—any man—and in that yearning is something even a lapsed, post-Calvinist Scandihoovian knucklehead can recognize as transcendent and universal, something between this time and time past, and I wonder as I hear the flute whipping like a prehistoric wind if perhaps that is the most universal human longing of all—the longing for the beginning of everything, for a clean slate and a fresh soul, for a fresh humanity. What is the sound of a flute, after all, but human breath dancing?
We will leave this tent soon enough. The clunky day-to-day awaits. Boots on the ground, pickup truck to the feed mill.
But for just a little while longer, I would like to fly.
BLACK DOG
Welcome back to Tent Show Radio, folks, from the backstage dressing room with the one lonely little lightbulb burnin’…
Back home on the farm I just came off a little stretch where I was feeling glum. Nothing big, no need for cards and letters, doin’ fine, just one of those deals. For reasons that I’ve previously classified as biochemical, genetical, banal, and foolish in the face of good fortune, I have off and on throughout this life found myself in the company of what Winston Churchill called—at least I think it was Winston, and I’m going with that even if it’s wrong just to spite Google by not doing the instant cellphone search that has come to replace our carbon-based brain cells—“the black dog.” Now my black dog is hardly worth talking about, really. I’ve had friends and acquaintance whose black dogs gnawed right through their breastbone and into their vitals and in some cases ate them alive. My black dog is smallish and nibbles at my belly button now and then, or walks in all wet and shakes cold swampwater on my toes, but within a day or two or a week at most, it wanders off to hide behind the barn and I can feel the sunshine again.
I don’t mind that little black dog, because he tends to direct my eyeballs inward. Not just to gaze at my navel, but deeper, into the darker corners of those mysterious inward shadowy elements of ourselves we can’t really describe or put a location on but we feel with the very same heaviness as if they were clearly labeled on page 37 of some anatomy textbook somewhere. It’s good, I think, for me to look in the acorporeal mirror and see nothing looking back and wonder what’s missing, or what needs sunlight. Some of the best progress I’ve made as a human being has come when I was brought low enough to consider the worst I might be as a human being. Wasn’t any fun, but one hopes it pays off in the long run.
Clearly these ramblings require a disclaimer. The real black dog—the big, lurking, foul-breathed drooler—is no help at all. It is one thing to feel a little down; it is another to feel utterly out. I do have a nursing degree and once spent time answering a suicide hotline, so you understand I don’t intend to minimize the real deal. Some battles are not meant to be fought in the dark alone. Don’t do it. Don’t let your friends do it. But as for me and my generally trainable black dog, I’ve learned to live with him, and as long as he’s around, rather than let him back me into a corner I try to follow him someplace useful.
And it’s funny what will run him off. Usually it’s just time. In other cases the change is so abrupt it’s clear some intracellular switch got knocked back into the “function” position. And sometimes exterior forces will do the trick. Like, oh, say, gathering in a big happy tent with other happy humans. Sometimes a physical remove delivers a psychological remove—it may not even last, but for a little while your brain gets pointed in another direction and your heart beats to a more lively rhythm. Maybe church will do it for you, or maybe a group of friends telling old stories around a kitchen table, or maybe just a road trip to an unfamiliar city. I can tell you I’ve shown up at this tent more than once with the black dog riding in the back seat, and then I’ll be in here and the music will be going and the people will be rocking or swaying or applauding or just sitting quietly with their faces tilted toward the stage just so, and I’ll look around and hey—no black dog. He may be waiting in the car, he may jump out from the ditch somewhere along the road home, but he for dang sure ain’t gettin’ in this tent.
So I look forward to the second half of the show here, listening to music that is to black dogs what that mail carrier spray bottle is to nippy-yippy dogs. It’s nice just to get together and feel the sunshine, even if you are under a tent after dark.
Oh, and P.S.: I may have made up the word acorporeal also but am maintaining my Google holiday and will not look it up until the show is over.
CANVAS RAIN
During this performance we could hear the sound of rain hitting the tent. It was lovely.
Did you hear the rain on the canvas earlier? That was nice, I thought. The thing about music in a tent is, as long as everything’s battened down and buttoned up, the rain can be part of the show without wrecking the show. The click and the trickle, the tappety-tap, the steady fall of it, it’s a soft carpet of sound that only adds to the coziness of the space. Outside of blizzard nights, never does our old farmhouse feel so safe and gracious as when I am tucking my daughters abed and through the hip roof just feet above us we can hear the muffled finger-drumming of rain on the shingles.
Rain can run you right out of adjectives. It falls an infinity of ways, it sounds an infinity more. Tonight the rain is striking canvas stretched tight as a drumhead, so every little drop lands with a percussive splat. It is the sound of leprechauns applauding.
Rain on a flat rock sounds different than rain on a round rock. Rain on green leaves sounds different than rain on fallen leaves. Rain on your picnic table sounds different than rain blown sideways against a window. Rain on an umbrella sounds different than rain striking the bottom of an upturned canoe.
The sound of rain is colored b
y your circumstance: the sound of rain on a cold day versus the sound of rain on a warm day; the sound of rain on withered corn versus the sound of rain for the seventh day straight; the sound of rain when you are standing in dry socks versus wet socks.
When I worked on a hay crew in Wyoming, the sound of rain on the bunkhouse roof in the morning meant I’d be trading my swather and the wide-open spaces for a paintbrush in the boss’s wife’s kitchen. Earlier in the season, when I was working on the irrigation crew, rain in the morning just meant I’d be wet all day.
Twenty years after I dug my last feeder ditch, my boss contracted cancer and I returned to the ranch to do the job again. He was a hero of mine and responsible for some of the few threads of good character I might possess. The day before he left for the hospital, we were working the big ditch up top and a ferocious rain blew in. We ran for the pickup truck and talked over the roar of the storm. My wife and I were only recently married; he and his wife had grown children. “Your wife,” he said. “She’s a good woman.” The rain rattled on, and he grinned a little. “You and me,” he said, “we both did better than we deserved.” It was as close a moment as we ever shared, and I’m not sure it ever would have happened had the rain not driven us into the cab of that truck.
Rain is a sight as well as a sound. Think of a dry stretch, and then the first fat drops pockmarking the dust. Think of raindrops curving through a headlight’s beam. Think of the streetlight rainbow slicks as the first rains raise the oil from the asphalt.
During a recent stretch of drought, clouds would appear in the hot afternoon, small and scattered as spooked sheep, and here and there thin gray streamers of rain would drape down, then seem to evaporate before hitting the ground. My brother the farmer swore the streamers would veer away from his plowed fields, perhaps brushed aside by the heat rising from the baked earth.
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