Writing by Ben Hayes
Epiphany 2: Untitled
Other Writing:
» Limericks (forecasts)
» Cobbles
» A Bite Size Sense of Place
Epiphany 1: Untitled
Reflections are scarce in the West, a dry and rugged sort of place, for one simple reason, they require water. A perfect looking glass for body and soul that lies pooled, disturbed only by drops of water, rippling out across its surface. Water flows, cascades, glides, and that entire time works as a mirror. It doesn’t need to be clean, in fact sometimes the most toxic pools of sludge in the middle of a cracked and sorrowful environment reveals more than a crystal clear brook flowing through an alpine meadow. Looking into a body of water I see a culmination of everything upstream, the counties, the towns, the people, and their children. I used to think that I was abnormal for seeing this way, looking at a glistening surface in a landscape where it is fluid gold, a simple resource, and trying to read it like a book, but then I started asking people about water, what stories it told, and began to realize that in a landscape as arid as this, every story is defined by water.
A few days ago in Lone Pine California I walked into the town’s only hardware store with the intent of buying a notebook and a pocketknife. The one room store was cluttered to say the least. The walls were thick with anything you would ever want to buy, you could disappear down an aisle and nobody would notice you were missing for at least 10 years. From the ceiling hung a variety of ice-axes, hammers, toy sets, and icicle style Christmas lights. A Stout balding man greeted me at the door, hearing aids straining the cartilage of his ears, a white t-shirt tucked into clean blue jeans, on his feet were black Velcro shoes. The wrinkles on his brown weathered face folded together like miniature canyons traversing his forehead. I asked him where to find the knives, quickly we picked out a small red Swiss-Army knife called “the packer” from a dusty and cracking display case that sat on top of an iHome box, a seemingly alien item in what can only be described as stuff.
At the checkout counter the man’s sausage sized fingers shook as he rang up my purchase. Looking at the man’s face I guessed that he had lived here for a while, if not for his entire life, and I began to wonder what stories he could tell. How did this local see the water? How did it create the person that I saw today? So I asked him.
The man’s eyes lit up once he understood what I was asking, “You want to know about water, huh?” it seemed like a well deserved break between selling plumbing attachments and nail guns. So he began to tell me stories, his cracked teeth smiling between brown gums, his hands lay still now on the counter.
He came to Lone Pine from southern California when he was 19; he didn’t care to say where. He’s lived there every year since; he turns 81 in November. When he was 20 the Owens Lake was a different color, an earthy brown rimmed by layers of white, an enormous pot of dirt on the side of a small 2-lane highway. When he was 30 the river was dry, just a cracked white ribbon running through a similarly desolate landscape. He remembered floating in inner tubes down a cement ditch, he couldn’t remember where. In his 40s he worked at a car dealership. They had to wash the cars every other day to keep the dust off, a thick brown dust, heavy enough to scratch the paint. He told me about one time when he just tried wiping down a Buick with a rag and scratched the hood, it cost 30 dollars to fix. In his 60s he worked at a restaurant, the dust had become worst. Fine white silt that would creep in under the door and blow in fantastical shapes over the linoleum floor tiles. It would settle in the bottom of coffee cups that were left upright on tables, it gave the air a slightly poisonous taste. He claims that sometimes he still coughs up the dust, that it is stuck in his lungs, a little bit of the desert.
In his 70s there was less dust. He thought the entire lake had blown away, right down to rock, and I was in no position to correct him. He worked at the hardware store, selling everything from a garden sprinkler system to the impatient blonde in line behind me, to a blue and white striped engineer’s hat to the boy standing at the end of the counter. He likes working here, and think we will keep doing it, at least for a while. I ask him what will happen to the lake in his 80s, his reflection in the water. He doesn’t know, only that it will go to LA. He wonders what all the trucks are doing out on the lake, about the big visitors center at the end of town, about the tourists roaring past on the highway on their way to somewhere else, he wishes they would slow down when driving through.
He looked down at his hands, still steady on the counter, and I could see from the crow’s feet crinkling his cheeks that he is smiling. His gaze shifted again, and he looked me in the face. He asked me two questions. What the hell am I doing in Lone Pine, and what do I think is going to happen to the water in his 80s. I answered the first question quickly, explaining that I’m a college student, he called me a gypsy. The second question I let hang for a minute as he searched through the till for my change, 3$ and 50c.
I told him that I can only hope, I hope that there wont be dust, that there will be water, the river will run again, that people will slow down when driving through town. In truth I told him that I didn’t know, I was just an outsider.
Kneeling next to a small pond left in the middle of the alkali flats of what was once Owens Lake, I glance out across the desolate plane. The pond encircles a sprinkler, installed to keep the dust down, as much an outsider in this alien landscape as I am. In the shallow pond of red-brown water, framed between the sprinkler and a rusting drainage pipe, rests a perfect reflection, the Inyo Mountains rising out of a sandy gray wasteland. As I kneel there, smelling the slightly sulfuric wind blowing out across the desert, I wish the old man from the hardware store was here, to look down and see the reflection of the mountains in what is left of his lake.
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Epiphany 2: Untitled
Imagine 10 years in the future, I’m at the grocery store. I walk down the aisle to the meat section, located at the back of the store. The clear glass displaying steaks, shrimp, salmon, chicken. One difference, the entire selection is smaller. I shop wisely, ask where the meat is from, how it was raised, the butcher at the counter answers all my questions. I select my meat, and am still the only one at the meat counter. I checkout and go home, cook dinner, eat, and go to bed.
10 years in the future times have changed, global food markets are failing, local markets thrive. The beef that I buy comes from a local farm; raised on a small scale, grass fed in an ecosystem that can support a cow an acre. Buying my beef, I know that it was raised in a sustainable manner; market pressures combined with democratic political process has defined the way we source our food.
Our current system of where and how we get our food is going to change. Ranching as we know it in the Western US, especially on public lands, is currently a borderline profitable occupation. The ranching culture however is a tough beast, and will not go down without a fight. As a result, pushing to simply obliterate livestock grazing on public lands is unrealistic in the short term. New avenues need to be made to increase the economic possibilities for ranchers according to future market demands.
The main forces that will create this change in where and how we get our food are increasing energy costs, a strong “green” movement spurred on by global climate change, and increased customer awareness associated with globalization. Fuel prices are rising dramatically and will continue to rise in the foreseeable future. This change impacts ranchers simply in operating costs, but also through the transport of their final product. A decreased beef production with a higher final cost will be part of the final product, as well as meat production on more fertile land that can support up to 3 cows per acre, instead of the current norm of up to 1 cow per 500 acres. Also, production of beef in the American west, a low population density area, doesn’t make sense when the markets are heavier on the coasts. A more efficient use of lands closer to population hubs would help to decrease transportation costs. Not only is land in coastal states much more fertile, but also has a much lower density of public land. In addition, importing cheap meat from South America will no longer be feasible.
The strong “green” movement resulting from global climate change is helping to increase customer awareness. In the next 5-10 years people will increasingly think about their impact on the environment. Raising cattle in our manner is not an environmentally friendly food source, and people are realizing the effects greenhouse gas emitted by cattle, the inefficiency of transporting foods, and the ecological impacts of grazing. In 2003 US slaughterhouses killed 10 billion animals, which factors out to 19,026 every minute for an entire year (HCN July-Aug. 2004 p.60). This is significantly more meat than any country needs to consume, a number that we could easily decrease with drastic environmental benefits.
I enjoy eating meat, a juicy steak, a blue cheese bacon burger, and sloppy Joes. I’m not going to give it up, but I am changing what and how much I eat. I try to eat local meat, I try to think about how it was raised, and no, I’m not perfect, every once in a while I slip and eat a generic burger from an undisclosed source. We don’t all need to become vegans or vegetarians, we just need to think, consider how our choices and our purchases effect the world, and vote both on the ballot and with our pocketbooks.
The decreased demand for beef combined with increased operational costs, will lead to a decrease in the demand for livestock grazing and ranching on western public lands. The culture of ranching is essential to how the West became what it is today, and is not going to simply disappear. The people of the United States are going to need to be the changing force behind the use of Western Lands, through the political process and by considering where what we eat comes from. Walking down the grocery store aisle, looking for steak, I think about what I am buying, how my purchase will affect the world that I live in. I hope that knowledge about what we are eating will spread, and through that we will change the way that Western Public lands are used.
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Limericks (forecasts)
There once was a dog named tuck
He ran with vigor and pluck
The crypto he did crunch
His lunch he didn’t munch
And in the rainstorm, he played in the muck
I once new a desert rat named Tyee
Who only drank malt liquer and whiskey
When it came to the sandstone
He found a fossil of an abalone
So now he lives in Hawaii
I know this guy named Teddy
Who said to the desert he was ready
For sandstone and shale
Petrified bones of a wale
Secret knowledge he did not think of as petty
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A Bite Size Sense of Place
The man at the Bluff convenience store held the door for me. His black leather vest snug over a Harley-Davidson shirt, shimmering with recently dried sweat. His head was balding, with slight indents from sunglasses across his veiny temples. On his feet were big practical leather boots, boots that you wouldn’t want to be stepped on with. He gave me, an outsider, a wide berth entering the store, as if he didn’t want to risk touching me.
The inside of the Bluff convenience store was well lit, the cans and jars and bottles perfectly aligned on the shelves. The big man who held the door for me stopped at the checkout counter. He talked to the checker, a short young Indian woman- her name might have been Teresa. He greeted her as a friend, a warm “hi, how are the kids”. They appeared out of different worlds, the Harley man and the much younger Indian woman. As I perused the aisles in search ice-cream and snickers bars I heard them talking. Small town gossip about a guy named Dave, from Blanding, a neighboring rural town. It sounded like he had a run in with the law; I couldn’t hear what it was for.
As I searched through aisles, not finding normal snickers, only king size, eat me and you will have a heart attack, snickers, I wondered about this town. What brings the Harley man, why doesn’t the Indian woman up and leave for some more prosperous place? The aisles of Bluff’s convenience store blur with those of a familiar market in rural western Oregon. Thousands of miles, ecosystems, and mindsets apart, these two towns draw me, a sort of intrigue with the uninteresting. What is it about small, poor, rural towns that captivates me and pins down my curiosity, a stalemate at the end of a match?
Roaming the Bluff store I began to explore my absurd sense of attraction to something, somewhere, that most people would pass by on their way to somewhere else. The size, simplicity, and straightforwardness, that I began to find, presents a sense of place unparalleled in our transient and bustling culture; a sense of place in a bite size serving. A sense of place that I’m worried I might not find. I worry, childishly, about how I can care about the world if I don’t have some concrete version of it welded onto my brain. I need a microcosm for our bigger problems, a place that I can comprehend.
My attraction to small towns may be just the key that I’m searching for, A way to make it easier to love a place. I’d rather fall for a small main street, maybe just a gas station and post office, than tie myself to an alley in some bustling metropolis. Perhaps choosing this easier, more palatable route is cheating, but I’d rather succeed and stay than burn out and move on, have to find a new place, lose any faith I may have built.
When I checked out the man with the heavy boots had left, the Indian woman looked out the window, into the glaring southern Utah sun, maybe dreaming about somewhere else. I wondered if she liked living here, what her sense of this town tasted like, but didn’t have the courage to ask. Instead I gave her my 4 dollars and told her that I didn’t need a bag.
In the bluff store I found not only snickers bars and a tub of Ben and Jerry’s, but some borderline clue of why I like small towns. Right between the gas station and an abandoned church parking lot is where you’ll find me, searching for a bite size sense of place.
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Cobbles
Round cobbles warm my cracked and raw feet. The chapped soles rest into the smoothed surface. But my back burns from an onslaught of smaller grains, pounding my fragile skin with malice unknown to the cobbles. The cobbles will stay here for the most part, maybe moved a few miles downstream in a flood. The sand is transient, hurling itself with vigor to wherever it can go. These two are siblings just one bigger than the other. But the cobble will get smaller, make more sand, and there will be new cobbles, falling from the cliffs above.
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