Blue Highways: Buckhannon, West Virginia

Unfolding the Map

This post is garbage!  Or, more accurately, it's about garbage.  I hope you don't think it is garbage!  As William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) makes his way back toward the end of his journey, he passes through Buckhannon and notices all the rusting cars and appliances in yards.  It got me thinking about garbage in my life.  What is garbage?  How do we know it?  I don't say I have any answers, but reflections.  If you want to know where Buckhannon is located, this virtual map won't clutter your house!

Book Quote

"At Buckhannon, I drove southwest on state 4.  Beautiful country despite hills clobbered with broken appliances and automobile fragments, which children turned into Jungle gyms.  Should you ever go looking for some of the six hundred million tons of ferrous scrap rusting away in America, start with West Virginia."

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 3

East Main Street in Buckhannon, West Virginia. Photo by Tim Kiser and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Buckhannon, West Virginia

This morning I had just sat down to eat breakfast, drink my cup of morning tea (Darjeeling) and read the paper when my wife said "Oh, today's garbage day."  That meant that I had to trundle myself up, gather up the garbage from the kitchen and two bathrooms, drag it out to the trash can and wheel it out to the street, along with the recycling.  Only after that could I sit down and enjoy my oatmeal and tea.

I write about that humdrum little detail because like most Americans, I have a complicated relationship with garbage.  This relationship includes not only making sure that I have the garbage at the curb every Wednesday for the trucks to pick up, but also deciding what is garbage as opposed to things I want to keep.  In my relationships with other people, I've found that garbage is a very subjective term.

We all know garbage, for the most part, when we see it.  Wrappers discarded on the street are a good example of something we might label as garbage.  Stuff that smells is garbage, such as old or spoiled food.  But occasionally, we see something that someone has set on the curb as garbage and find it desirable.  As a college student needing a couch for his dorm room, when I saw a halfway decent one sitting out on a curb, I took it.  Lamps, old televisions or computers, things that in our increasingly throwaway society people discard because it is easier to buy something new than fix the old, often are put out as garbage by some but then taken by others.

Sometimes, things we have that we consider beautiful are considered garbage by others.  I don't know how many times I've been in houses that have what I consider hideous art on the walls.  Why would anyone buy that, I wonder?  What I think would look better adorning a trash can than someone's home might well have special meaning to the person who owns it.

My uncle, a hoarder, gave me a new insight into the junk versus treasure conundrum.  He collected things that he thought would be valuable someday.  His house was literally untidy pathways between piles of stuff.  Most of it was trash.  He collected newspapers because he thought the headlines would be worth something someday.  He collected cheap memorabilia for the same reason.  He had piles of books, usually bad novels or biographies.  I suppose that he thought that someday some of these cheap things would not be readily available, leaving him the sole proprietor of a moment of time and history that people would want to reconnect with, and would want to pay lots of money for that experience.

I'm not saying that he didn't have valuable things.  He had a practically priceless collection of vintage, excellent condition 78 RPM records comprising classical, jazz and pop music dating from the early 1900s up through the 1940s and 50s (someone actually put some on the web, that you can see here).  I desperately wanted to own this collection and make it available to others, but unfortunately he didn't leave the records to me and the family of his surviving brother (my other uncle) took possession of them on my uncle's death.  I can only hope that they made their way into the hands of collectors who will appreciate them, or to a museum or some music foundation that will preserve them, rather than getting thrown in the trash.  He also had some collectible baseball action figures from the 1960s and 70s that were still in their original packaging that might be worth something someday.

My uncle helped me understand the mentality of a next-door neighbor, many miles and many years later.  This neighbor was gay, but in appearances was the antithesis of the stereotypes of gay men.  He dressed like a slob, and lived in a house that was eventually condemned for code violations.  He had been the owner, with a life partner, of an antique store.  When his partner died of AIDS, he closed the store and brought all of the stuff home. Some of it was very nice, such as costume jewelry, vintage clothing, and other material antiques that might fetch a bit money if sold.  Yet it was piled all around his place - with trails between the piles - and not put to any use whatsoever.  Eventually, the city condemned his house and bulldozed it.  My neighbor had managed to liberate most of his stuff from the home, and went to live elsewhere - hopefully somewhere in the country - where he could keep his stuff with less attention from authorities.  What became an empty lot was eventually sold to an Asian immigrant, who built a house that he rents to a Navajo family.

My own house is filling up with stuff.  I'm not a hoarder, but trying to decide what is garbage and what isn't is difficult.  Most of the stuff I have has a memory attached to it that for some reason I am reluctant to part with.  It keeps accumulating, making keeping an uncluttered house difficult.  But I have trouble classifying it as either garbage or someone else's treasure.

In the country, one can drive in rural areas and see rusting hulks of autos, trucks, buses and tractors sitting out in yards on blocks, weeds growing up through the engine, and missing windows because they have been busted in by mischievious kids or elements.  Appliances also sit rusting, unused and unwanted.  Most people associate this type of yard with a "trashy" element.  After all, how can someone not care about the appearance of their home with all that trash around it?  Yet, if you talk to people, you'll find that often they scavenge these items for parts.  That's what I suspect that people in West Virginia, with "some of the six hundred million tons of ferrous scrap rusting away in America," are doing with it.

Lately, trash is making a comeback in the form of "found art."  Enterprising artists take bottlecaps, sea glass, old dominoes and ScrabbleTM tiles, old photos, broken ceramic and crockery, and dated magazine pages and turn them into jewelry or put them into other types of art.  I have bought my wife brightly colored jewelry made in Africa from tightly rolled magazine pages.  I have seen handbags woven from the straps of old seatbelts.  Discarded wire is used to make brightly colored baskets.  I've always heard that "one man's trash is another man's treasure," and these found art objects are making a believer out of me.

I believe that if I see garbage in my life, that's what it is.  If something is cluttering your life, or smelling bad, and hampering your style or causing anxiety, then get rid of it.  Perhaps it's time for me to loosen my bonds to my accumulating stuff, let it go, and hope that my treasure can also be someone else's treasure too.

Musical Interlude

Oscar the Grouch of Sesame Street is the world's foremost lover and proponent of trash.  In this video, called I Love Trash, he sings the praises of garbage.

If you want to know more about Buckhannon

Buckhannon-Upshur Chamber of Commerce
City of Buckhannon
The Record Delta (newspaper)
Smithsonian Magazine: Buckhannon: The Perfect Birthplace
Upshur County Convention and Visitors Bureau
West Virginia Wesleyan College
Wikipedia: Buckhannon

Next up: Sutton, West Virginia

Blue Highways: Bonner's Ferry, Idaho

Unfolding the Map

At Bonner's Ferry we turn east after getting almost as far north as we can go in the United States.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) and Arthur O. Bakke are deep in discussion about spiritual and earthly matters, and LHM admires the simplicity of Bakke's life.  We'll reflect on simplicity too.  Take a look at the map for Bonner's Ferry.

Book Quote

"At Bonner's Ferry, where U.S. 2 ran a long, deep break in the Bitterroot Mountains, we turned toward Montana....

"'You've got necessities in one box, your work in a briefcase, a creed in your shirt pocket.  I admire the compression of it.  I wish I could reduce it all to a couple of boxes.  I like your self-sufficiency.'

"'Don't give me so much credit.  Paul preached how pride separates us from God....'

"'Maybe so, but for basic necessity, you come close to material self-sufficiency.'  Bakke sat quietly.  'The college students you talk to, they must admire your on-the-road work, your freedom.'

"'I don't think many would trade places with me.  Would you?'

"It was a terrible question.

"'I don't have your belief or purpose.  But I wish I knew what you know.'"

"''Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.  If any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know.'  First Corinithians eight: one and two.  Knowledge of the Lord is the knowledge worth knowing.'"

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 3

Downtown Bonner's Ferry. Photo by the Idaho Department of Tourism and posted at the Sangres.com website. Click on photo to go to host page. 

Bonner's Ferry, Idaho

I love the idea of living simply.  I just suck at it.

I don't want to give the impression that I have a lot of money.  I'm comfortably middle-class - a public-sector worker at a university medical school with a good salary, decent benefits and, barring a total collapse of the health-care economy, a job for life.  I earn some extra on the side teaching political science courses.  In a good year, I might earn up to $15,000 on top of my annual salary.  My wife also has a decent job as a business reporter.  I am intensely aware that I am lucky given that there are so many people that are jobless.  I am also lucky in that I am not under crushing amounts of debt.  Our car is one payment away from being completely paid off.  We don't have a mortgage.  I have about $20,000 outstanding in student loans which I always considered more of an investment than a debt.  We rarely keep debt on our credit cards any more.

Lately, however, the idea of living simply in a way that produces growth and harmony has come roaring back at me.

I was introduced in my early twenties to the concept of a simple lifestyle.  Just out of college I had joined a program called the Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC), and went to live in inner-city Milwaukee in an intentional community with other volunteers.  All of us worked in a not-for-profit social or environmental justice organizations - I worked in an inner-city school as an aide.  In exchange for our work, the agencies paid for our insurance and travel, and gave us a stipend of $300 per month.  Out of that $300 I was able to take $75 for my own personal expenses; the rest went into the pot for rent, food, utilities and other house expenses.

JVC operated according to these four tenets:  social justice, community, spirituality, and simple lifestyle - all influenced by Catholic social teaching.  The unofficial motto of JVC was "ruined for life."  I initially joined for one year, but re-joined for a second year in a different job - working with unemployed people.  It was during this time that I learned how to make $75 stretch for one month (easier, I admit, in the 1980s than it is now).  However, that meant curtailing my time on the phone (no cell phones but long distance plans back then!), not buying candy bars or sodas, limiting my time out in bars or doing other fun stuff.  As a community, we had to shop smartly and selectively and make things that we could stretch.  We were pretty good at it - we accumulated enough money to help other communities that weren't making it as well and we were able to buy an old car so that we could reduce our reliance on other people for rides to the store.

A lot of time was spent together at home.  We played games, we talked and we enjoyed each other's company as much as we could.  We watched television and we read books.  We became close as a community because there weren't many distractions, especially during the cold Milwaukee winters.  It's hard not to look at that time through rose-colored glasses, because we were also five different personalities thrown in together.  We fought sometimes, and we endured hardships - our house was broken into 6 times over two months and a group of us was attacked by gang members while walking to a bowling alley and two of us were beaten badly enough to go to the emergency room.  Though I wasn't hurt, I began to experience the first of what would become on and off again panic attacks in response to stress.

I met my wife in the JVC.  She was more in tune with Catholic social teaching than I was and already believed in the tenets of the program prior to her volunteer year.  They made a big impression on me.  Since that time, I have been drawn to social justice causes, and in doing work with the poor and disadvantaged.  I continued to live in inner-city Milwaukee, and since I left there have never shied away from going into any inner-city areas.

But as our incomes began to rise, we gained a lot more physical and, for lack of a better term, metaphysical clutter.  We became busy, and we did more.  In my twenties and thirties, this seemed fine for me.  I liked being busy.  I enjoyed the things I did.  However, focusing on all of the things we were doing let me ignore and avoid looking at things that I probably should have been putting more attention to.

About four years ago, I realized something was wrong.  I wasn't exactly happy with the way things were going in my life.  Upon some examination, I realized it was because my life was so busy.  We have no children, so evenings were often (and still often) spent out.  There were weeks where I wasn't home in the evening for 6-7 days.  We weren't partying or anything like that.  Instead, one night it might be a work function that my wife needed to attend, another night it might be a movie, a third night might be taken up by a late day at work then a late dinner, a fourth night might be another function, a fifth night might be dinner with a friend, the sixth night a play, and the seventh night, if it wasn't off, was perhaps devoted to some other gathering or event.

I looked around my house, and saw a cluttered lifestyle that was difficult to keep in check.  The lack of time at home meant that we had let things build up and weren't putting things into their place or even paying attention to what we brought home and put down.  The clutter of things was bad enough - the clutter of events and happenings was even worse.  I realized that I had ignored myself.  I wasn't giving myself any space to be alone, to ruminate on questions, to read and grow.  All of this was leading to strain between my wife and I.  We hadn't had kids, partly because of how active our life was, and suddenly when we thought we might try, we discovered we couldn't.  This was a real blow to me.  I had always pictured myself with a child, a daughter, and it was hard to accept that it might not happen.

I started examining myself, and my instinct was telling me that I had to de-clutter my life.  I needed to make time for myself and get with reacquainted with me.  And to that end I have been devoting myself with more or less success for the past two years.  I say more or less success because I got sidetracked once, and at other times I have found it difficult to say no to people, including my wife.  But I've worked my way to an awareness of what I need to do, and hope that it will translate into action.

Which is why, coming back to the quotes above, LHM's talk with Arthur O. Bakke resonates with me.  Both in their way are seeking answers for themselves.  Arthur believes he's found the answer in God and Jesus and in showing others the way to what he sees as truth.  He has de-cluttered his life of earthly things in service to what awaits the good on the other side.  LHM is also seeking answers to questions about himself and his life.  He seeks them on the road, in literature and in making sense of his experiences and how they relate to his life as he travels.  Both have left their previous lives behind in the hopes of finding something.  They aren't dissimilar, which is probably why they grow to like each other.  It is also symbolic that they are at a place that was a ferry.  In a ferry, you cross a physical boundary to another place - from riverbank to riverbank, from city to country or vice-versa, or even from life to death.

I too seek answers.  I've gone down some wrong paths, and yet I feel that I understand more than I did.  I have a vision for what life must look like for me to be satisfied as I head into its second half.  Unlike in the past, I also now have some motivation to cross my own boundaries to get there.

Musical Interlude

I heard this song on a strange little movie called Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus.  The song is a traditional ballad called Wayfaring Stranger and it is sung by David Eugene Edwards.  I like how the road through symbolic darkness and woe leads to beauty and light.  It's the life that most of us travel until we find what we need.

If you want to know more about Bonner's Ferry

I want to highlight that near Bonner's Ferry in 1974, the Kootenai Tribe declared war on the United States and posted tribal guards on the entrances into the towns where they asked motorists to pay a toll to drive through lands they claimed as theirs.  While most tribes are forbidden by treaty to declare war on the U.S., the Kootenai never had a formal treaty.  The United States conceded a small bit of land to end the dispute.  The land became the Kootenai reservation.

Bonner's Ferry Chamber of Commerce
Bonner's Ferry Herald (newspaper)
City of Bonner's Ferry
newsbf.com
Sandpoint.com: Bonner's Ferry
Wikipedia: Bonner's Ferry

Next up:  Kalispell, Montana

Blue Highways: Eagle Flat, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapDon't you ever feel like you just want to get rid of all the clutter in your life?  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) presents the desert as minimalist, which gets me to muse on the clutter and complexity in my life, and how I might use the desert as an inspiration to simplify.  If you want to see the spare and barren place in Texas that inspired all of reflection, click on the thumbnail of the map at right.

Book Quote

"Somewhere near Eagle Flat, before a rider-against-the-sky horizon, I stopped to rest from the buck of sidewinds.  Annual rainfall here averaged less than seven inches, and the Rio Grande to the south often ran dry before it crossed the desert.  Spindly ocotillo stalks, some twenty-five feet high and just coming into orange blossom, bent under the north wind.  Creosote bushes had cleared dead zones by secreting a toxic substance from their roots to insure whatever moisture fell they would get....

"Between the creosote and stony knobs streamlined by gritty winds grew grasses in self-contained clumps and cactuses compacted like fists.  Everything as spare and lean as a coyote's leg.  Under that sprawl of sky and space, the minimal land somehow reduced whatever came into it, laying itself austerly open as if barren of everything except simplicity.  But it was a simplicity of form - not content."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 9

A vista near Eagle Flat, Texas. Photo by "omd31473" at American Greetings Webshots. Click on photo to go to site.

Eagle Flat, Texas

I wish I were like the desert as LHM describes it.  Not the dead zones created by toxic creosote secretions in a desperate attempt to capture water.  Nor do I want to be a spindly ocotillo plant, or other spiny desert plant that lures one with beautiful blossoms but can pack a sharp stab if one gets too close or touches them.  I've met people like that in my life, have been hurt by a few of them, and I don't want to emulate them.

What I'd truly like to emulate at this stage in my life is the minimalism and the simplicity that the desert teaches.  I live a life of plenty, at least for me.  My wife and I both work, which in the economy as it stands as I write is a good thing.  We are busy people, always doing things.  Our calendars are packed with work things and events, public service, and entertainment.  My wife is more busy than I am usually, with her journalism, her radio work, and her presidency of a national women's journalism organization.  However, I often go 4-5 days a week without getting home until eight or nine at night.  I belong to a group that eats once a month with men who just got out of jail and are in a halfway house, a bit of normalcy and generosity that we hope they can carry with them and perhaps keep them from going back into jail.  I get together with friends.  My wife and I like to do cultural things together.  I stay at work often later than I need.  I manage to fill my time without even knowing how.

Our house reflects our lives, because we are not in it much.  It is cluttered and difficult to clean.  We don't spend the time we need to cull the things in our life down to what we need.  We get frustrated with it, but we continue live our lives and wonder when we'll ever get to making our home more manageable.  We keep bringing in more stuff, which we have to find room for.  We keep scheduling events, and the chores go undone.

Sometimes we have trouble communicating, because we are so involved with things that it limits the time we can have discussion together.  It has led to some difficult times between us.  The clutter of our lives makes it easy to get distracted from the hard things we should discuss.  In the past couple of years, frustration with this state of our lives, along with professional worries, lead me down a path that was destructive and hurtful.  It was a time of pain and guilt, and a time I exacerbated due to my actions.

My thoughts and feelings have also been a welter of complexity that in many cases hasn't served me in good stead.  I tend to be a sensitive person emotionally that overthinks things, puts two-and-two together when it doesn't add up in reality, and blames myself for pretty much everything.  When I perceive someone's hurt or pain, I make a great effort to help or to fix it.  I prop people emotionally, or at least try, and spiral downard if I can't do anything about it.  At the same time, I minimize my own emotional hurt and pain, and convince myself that I am a net cause of hurt and pain and inadequate to helping others.  Counseling, and the advice of friends, over the years has convinced me intellectually that I am being unrealistic if I think I'm the holder of all the bad in the world.  Emotionally, I'm still trying to get there.  Thankfully, my wife is taking this journey with me and we are moving forward, together.

I wrote before about how some have found stability through removing themselves in some way from the world.  I can't do that.  I'm drawn to it in some ways, especially during hard times, but that feels to me like just a reaction, not a lifestyle.  But I do look to the desert, and LHM's words remind me that the desert offers a lesson.

Here is a portion of the world where minimalism is not a luxury or a fad, but a necessity.  Life exists in balance.  In the desert, any plant or animal that exceeds its alotted portion will wreak untold havoc upon the rest of the ecosystem.  Any plant or animal that falls short will suffer personal consequences - it will go hungry or thirsty, or in the worst cases die.  Each plant and animal does what it needs to survive.  No more, no less.  It is a simplicity that I would do well to emulate both in my actions and in my thoughts and feelings, to simply accept myself as I am and be satisfied with that person in all my glories and all my faults - the blossoms and the spines.

The paradox, as LHM points out, is that the desert shows that simplicity of form does not mean simplicity of content.  It is in the letting go, the search for a simpler life, the search for harmony, and the desire for inner and outer peace that allows us, when we find it, to understand the complexity and the beauty that is us and our lives.  So, as I sit writing today, in my cluttered office in my cluttered house, I have Hildegard von Bingen's music playing in the background - her complex melodies underscoring the simplicity she desired of her daily life in a 12th century convent and her simple desire to be closer to God.  My house is situated in a desert gussied up by civilization, but at its heart still a desert and therefore, if I look, a further example of simplicity that can inspire me.  It was here long before humans showed up, and it will be here long after we, our dramas and complexities, are gone.  It has reached some kind of universal understanding that I cannot fathom, but that I can strive to understand if I set aside or at least minimize my complexities for a while.

Musical Interlude

In the spirit of how I wrote above, I made a video of pictures I took in West Texas, specifically Big Bend, the Davis Mountains and the Guadalupe Mountains.  Unfortunately, the video didn't turn out as well as I'd like - my video software on my desktop is not as good as it could be - but the music is from the same Hildegard von Bingen album I was listening to as I wrote.  The video will give you the sense of the desert out there.  I'll upgrade the video when I get access to my laptop - which is with my wife on a trip right now.

Addendum:  Evidently, if you're in Germany you can't see my video with the Hildegard von Bingen music as it's been blocked.  So, below is a silent version.  Find Hildegard's O Vis Aeternitatis, put it on, and watch the video.  Sorry - but evidently one just can't put music to a video any more and post it on the web.  What is the Internet coming to?

If you want to know more about Eagle Flat...

...today you will just have to be content with the minimalism that the desert has to offer.  There isn't anything  in Eagle Flat but the desert, which is in the spirit of this post anyway.  Take some time, if you can, to sit with Hildegard von Bingen or in silence, even if it's only for a minute.  Take away the complexities of life and enjoy the feeling of being.

Next up: El Paso, Texas