Jonathan Holden - Manhattan, KS
Holden is a sweet, wryly funny man who is quick with a hearty laugh. We sit in a spacious and beautiful living room in his home in Manhattan, and talk easily about all manner of things, my favorite being a story about some girls heckling him when he was young for being too skinny. He turns to me and says, "Skinny Man, Skinny Man," bringing back the memory with real pleasure and maybe the smallest amount of leftover tragedy.
He brings up Wordsworth a couple of times, and we both recall the same line, "emotion recollected in tranquility." He brings up Kim Novak and we both recall her as well, in the old William Holden film, Picnic.
Much of Holden's best work is nostalgic, and he's plumbed his own past most beautifully in his memoir Guns and Boyhood in America.
He reads to me from his earlier book, The Names of the Rapids, and recalls for me the genesis of some of those poems.
It's an autumn afternoon, but the outside sun suggests late July or something. A gigantic wooden deck stretches out to the side of the house. I tell Holden how much I like it, and he tells me he does, too, but he regrets how often it has to be resealed. He hires someone to do it, and thinks he probably pays too much. The dollar amount sounds high to me, but I think to myself there's not much of a chance I'd do it for any less, nor would I want to do it on my own if I still had one.
I shoot some pictures of Holden up against a blue sofa, the light coming in the gigantic living room. We shake hands and say our goodbyes. I walk out onto the small cul de sac and head for a bigger road, one big enough for the rolling tin can that I know is out there waiting for me.
Elizabeth Dodd - Manhattan, KS
The sun is going down in Manhattan when I arrive at Elizabeth Dodd's home near the campus of Kansas State. The sun peeks through a stand of trees and we sit on a screened in porch in her back yard. Cars go by, but the town seems awfully distant.
As with all of these interviews, it's remarkable to talk to her about her work. Like many academics, Dodd is where she is partly because of a job. Born in Colorado, raised in Appalachia, she finds herself in the high grass prairie of central Kansas, a striking and beautiful landscape, desolate, stark, and currently fashioned with millions of small red plants. Her own work has been informed by all of the places I've mentioned, but Kansas figures prominently in one from her book Archetypal Light. She reads to me on the porch, and I recognize some of the prairies I saw south of town. If I close my eyes I can see the poem's trees as human forms, hear the prairie on fire.
We go inside the house, past its reclaimed and beautiful hardwood floors, and into Elizabeth's study. A striking ceiling to floor window pours soft early evening light into the room. Elizabeth has two workspaces, a plain table facing the window, and then a laptop away from the window, facing a favorite painting by a former student.
We say goodbye and I carry my bag of cameras and recorders alongside the road. I'm lost in thought about Dodd's work, especially the poem I've just heard, and I'm stunned by the sight of my giant RV, waiting in the parking lot of a church nearby. My wife is reading a magazine, and she greets me with crackers, peanut butter, and Pepsi.
Minnie
The giant 29 foot Winnebago began rolling northward today. For those following along at home, we moved the Beltsville furniture to the new vacation home in Arkansas. The stuff didn't fit, of course, so boxes line every room, boxes of such variety and combinations that the house looks like it might be a sort of training center for young men who dream of being movers one day. The garage is full. There is space enough to lay on one of the two beds. You could stand on a kitchen counter, but you'd be unable to walk out either of the kitchen doors. There is a wall of boxes by the front door that looks like a fort built by children full of sugared drinks.
Yet, our stuff is safe from weather. The house will serve as our storage home away from home and we've left it in the caring hands of my in-laws. I secretly hope that a tornado will come through and take it all away, the furniture, the clothes, any of that old stuff that was too useless to fit in the big rolling coach.
But you gotta meet my in-laws. They are aces. They fed us for the the few days we were in Arkansas getting ready to run, and now they will wait behind and make sure the boxes don't get out onto the street, where they might be struck by one of the two cars that rolls through the sleepy burg. My wife's parents are remarkably supportive of this journey, but as I do with everyone, I imagine that inside they continue to wonder what sort of madness has overtaken us.
We made our promises to drive safe and keep in touch, and in the gloom of a Thursday morning, with pelting rain coming down, we creeped out of northwest Arkansas, into Missouri, and then up Highway 71.
The RV is top heavy. It's 12 feet high and 29 feet long, but it feels like the first pebble is going to flip it like one of those alligators doing a death roll on Discovery channel. At any speed over 55, the steering wheels pushes and pulls back and forth. The whole experience in the driver's seat is like wrestling a big angry hog, slick as snot, mad as hell. But when it's sitting on the side of the road, it's pretty great. Air conditioning. Big dish on the roof to beam in TV anywhere on the globe. The living room is roomy already, roomier when you activate one of the two slideouts - the other expands the bedroom nicely so you can walk all around the queen sized bed.
We eat lunch at a truck stop. But far too soon, we're out on the giant slab again, the wind from 16-wheelers buffeting us from both sides, the coach drifting from the white center line to the warning marks on the shoulder. My wife drives, too, and none of the above bothers her. I see her with cruise control on, her hand limply on the steering wheel. She's listening to "Rhythm is the Dancer" on the CD player and humming along. I want to scare her, or throw a badger in front of the vehicle to make her swerve. I want to see some of the wild grim fear I've been feeling.
What the hell is wrong with her?
