—FOREWORD REVIEWS, starred review
Before Us Like a Land of Dreams follows a disheartened mother traveling an evocative route through the arid West. As her narration fades, the ancestral dead speak directly: a ragged Mormon boy yearns after a Shoshone family. A defeated polygamous wife shuts her mouth for good. A hoarder's queer son demolishes the artifacts of his lonely Idaho childhood. Descendants of British squatters sustain family delusions until a devastating suicide shatters their royal dreams. An elite colonial clan gradually awakens to the stark blue of the Great Salt Lake. The dead yield no answers, but they conjure vivid mortal moments set in iconic—and diminishing—American places.
KARIN ANDERSON is a gardener, writer, mother, wanderer, heretic, and English professor. She hails from the Great Basin of Utah.
—FOREWORD REVIEWS, starred review
Before Us Like a Land of Dreams follows a disheartened mother traveling an evocative route through the arid West. As her narration fades, the ancestral dead speak directly: a ragged Mormon boy yearns after a Shoshone family. A defeated polygamous wife shuts her mouth for good. A hoarder's queer son demolishes the artifacts of his lonely Idaho childhood. Descendants of British squatters sustain family delusions until a devastating suicide shatters their royal dreams. An elite colonial clan gradually awakens to the stark blue of the Great Salt Lake. The dead yield no answers, but they conjure vivid mortal moments set in iconic—and diminishing—American places.
KARIN ANDERSON is a gardener, writer, mother, wanderer, heretic, and English professor. She hails from the Great Basin of Utah.
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Overview
—FOREWORD REVIEWS, starred review
Before Us Like a Land of Dreams follows a disheartened mother traveling an evocative route through the arid West. As her narration fades, the ancestral dead speak directly: a ragged Mormon boy yearns after a Shoshone family. A defeated polygamous wife shuts her mouth for good. A hoarder's queer son demolishes the artifacts of his lonely Idaho childhood. Descendants of British squatters sustain family delusions until a devastating suicide shatters their royal dreams. An elite colonial clan gradually awakens to the stark blue of the Great Salt Lake. The dead yield no answers, but they conjure vivid mortal moments set in iconic—and diminishing—American places.
KARIN ANDERSON is a gardener, writer, mother, wanderer, heretic, and English professor. She hails from the Great Basin of Utah.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781948814034 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Torrey House Press |
| Publication date: | 05/28/2019 |
| Pages: | 375 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
During the month I spent in England with the precious Anglophile I had recently married, my grandmother Connie Anderson died in Utah. I had known it was coming but I'd hoped she'd hold on until we returned. The stroke had knocked her off course before our departure and although she had regained speech—slurred but intelligible—and lost the deathly pallor, the truth of mortality was upon her. She was eighty–six. Grandma had been anxious for me to embark and return. To England, I mean. She had assigned me to find the "family castle" in Essex. Bring back photographs, maybe a souvenir. "Something from the land itself," she said. "Bring me some dirt and leaves."
Not sharing the love of all things British that characterized nearly everyone in my family and my husband's, my hometown, and my colleagues in the English M.A. program at Brigham Young University, I did not know where Essex was. "London" and "England" were in my mind interchangeable terms. I did however appreciate Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," and so in re: "Dover" I held some concrete imagery of waves and the tiny sound of rolling pebbles. I had memorized the final lines almost by instinct:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And here we are as on a darkling plain
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Whatever prompted me to ask awkward questions over the course of my erratic education was not a wish to play renegade, although I was sometimes rebuked for that. It was not some fresh or original intelligence. In graduate school, just as in first grade, I did not know how to efface irrelevant complications. I had a sharp memory for facts and names; I could recall books and experience in technicolor, a party trick that had passed for smarts and sometimes smart–assery since I was a child. I had been warned to veer away from certain questions that would not evacuate my cluttered head, so I had honed a subconscious habit of holding discrete items of information apart from one another. But sometimes I forgot. And so in class I had asked my lit professor why we would read a nihilistic poem like "Dover Beach" at Brigham Young University.
Understandably she misread my intent. I didn't comprehend it very well myself but I had been profoundly moved when I read "…hath neither joy, nor love, nor light / nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…." It wasn't a conscious recognition. But even the relatively happy experiences I brought to poetry were tinged by an apprehension that joy, love, light, certitude, peace, and help for pain were tenuous. Consider my Great Grandma Porter, who spent the fifteen years before her death frantic to return to a lost home, urgent to rectify something she could no longer name. Consider Hannah Bastion, friend of my aunts, who grew up under the meanest despot in my hometown. She loved her children as irrationally as I love mine. She died of leukemia just as the world was opening to hard–earned joy. Consider my mother, made of early resounding loss. Consider—well, the list went on, and widened its circumference, all filed under All is well, all is well.
I blurted the question awkwardly but it was sincere. I did not know how to harmonize the certitude of my home faith with the resonance of despair. I was beginning to sense that Emily Dickinson was the great American horror–master. I could not understand why Willa Cather or Walt Whitman, or Langston Hughes or Flannery O'Connor were as actual people One Hundred Percent Irrelevant to their earth–shattering language. I had picked up Momaday and Erdrich and Hurston on my own time. I did not know what to do with that stuff but it wove bright ribbons through my foggy brain. Sherwood Anderson set an image in my mind that shook me in its hard compassion: that half–naked old woman in the snow, eaten by her own dogs. "Fine examples of local color," I was informed, "but topicality cannot rise to the status of Great Literature." "I’ll say it again," my professor said again. "A truly literary story has nothing to do with you or your little life. Now excuse me while I bring us back to a more relevant graduate–level discussion. Here in graduate school."
And so the day my husband accompanied me to Paddington Station, put me on the bus toward Chelmsford and circled back to the relevant cultural immersion of the London Art museums, I found myself with an entire day to not ponder why in the hell I was sitting on a double–decker bus farting its way through the claustrophobic streets of a city I felt no communion with. I tried to absorb the ambience of the roundabouts and stacked–up flats and pubs and pharmacies. I wished to look pleasant, young, and adventurous, but not too conspicuous—a literate sort who knew how to deploy the Oxford comma. A futile performance: I was the only upper–deck passenger once the bus slugged into something like open country.
"What do you even want to go out there for?" my husband had queried the day we'd sat to plan our meticulous English visitations. "If you want to go out to the country, go to Bath or Stratford–upon–Avon. You're an English major. Why don't you go see where Shakespeare was born?"
"I promised my grandma. You know that. There's that castle out there."
"England is a castle a minute. Like mountains in Utah. You have to pick the good ones, like Hampton Court or Tintagel. You're wasting a whole day. There's nothing important."
I pointed to the map. "Well, look. Maldon's out that way."
"What’s that?"
"They cared not for battle?"
He furled his pretty lips. "Whatever."
I arrived in Chinle, Arizona, to a snarled late–afternoon mess. Maria's intelligence notwithstanding I nearly drove on through. I waited at the stoplight convinced that every single vehicle would rush into the intersection at once, but the left–turn arrow beckoned me through and then I swerved into the parking lot of an oversized Super 8. The lot was packed with Subarus and Toyota trucks. Tourists speedwalked toward the check–in to book the last rooms. I put a foot out but could not make myself go in. I retreated to search Expedia for an alternative.
Holiday Inn. No.
Thunderbird Lodge. Fine.
I poked in a debit card number and hoped for the best. Confirmed. I followed the road east toward De Chelly itself, expecting to see some shoddy motel within a block or two. But beyond an early small sign and arrow there was no hint of safe bedding. I had a tent and sleeping bag to survive a 25–degree night in the campground but the thought was dismal.
Thunderbird Lodge was within the park itself, Navajo proprietors. Turns out I needed to follow the signs to Sacred Canyon Lodge, the former name of the same place. As I've aged I've become accustomed to linguistic mismatch. There was a charming 1940s look to Sacred Canyon/Thunderbird motel: sturdy Craftsman–style stone and wood. Birds sang in the backlit trees. I took a deep breath and stepped out of the car to walk toward the office. A young man about the same age as my older son—mid-twenties—wafted from the shrubbery to show me a two–foot piece of carved cottonwood: an eagle atop a pueblo, crowning a twisting pathway.
My son is an artist. I like to think I have an eye.
"Not bad."
"Cheaper than the gift shop. Twenty–five bucks? I just want dinner."
I gave him three tens and he grinned, cute. He beelined for the quiet cafeteria.
I put the art in the car. I thought about my son. Serious and angry, slender and witty. Gay. Self–righteous, generous, fraught. An artist with an eye so potent it makes him in that one way superhuman. A youthful bitterness that may save, may annihilate him.
Loyal to his mother beyond practical justification.
I've been thinking about men. Trying to understand them, to stop assuming things. Consider them one by one, as fellow humans with something in common. But particulars were too much to consider, for too many minutes, in my state of mind. I re–approached the office, checked in, and threw my bags into the room. As far as I could tell I was the sole patron. I walked back out petitioning that eagle god for one more hour of sunlight. Started my car. I wanted at least to see the White House Ruin but had no guess how far it was.
Not far. I turned left at the sign and drove another mile on a thread of pavement. The parking lot was empty. I got out, took a few steps, returned for a jacket, and walked out to the edge. One easy step away from a leisurely freefall. It did tempt me but this would be disrespectful to the Dineh. It was beautiful here and I remembered I had come to witness.
The sun lit the clifftops across the deep gulf of evening air, saturating the high flats. The bright blaze striped the tops of the imposing walls, illuminating juts and sculpted waterways waiting to cup the next flash flood. A hundred feet below the rim, a hand's length to a raised arm, the shadows cast purple across every Pantone shade of orange. Shallow snow stippled the larger scene as it chose, accentuating the river crescents, metering suspended angles of repose. The canyon is narrow. Maybe a big human shout could be heard from one bank to the other on a still evening like this, but it's also grand and gracious in its sweep, and deep, compartmented by jutting walls and opened through narrow transits into grand sky–ceiled rooms. The river meandered like a Chinese dragon between the silent cliffs.
I scanned the five–hundred–foot walls for the White House, afraid the sun had already dropped too darkly. But there it was, way down and to my right, neat and square, tucked into an egress the shape of a human eye. Were I a child I would have believed I could cradle the tiny town in my palm. The front ledge was fortressed by an infantry of well–fitted stones, opening at key points to welcome allies or smash enemy fingers. Vermilion desert varnish striped the sheer wall above.
On the canyon floor just below it stood a complex of kivas and apartments, roofless and interconnected like the canyon it mimicked. Before Anglo marauding ran its course, ruins of this kind still sheltered the everyday objects of ancient lives and deaths. Now they lie stripped.
De Chelly has hosted murderous clashes. The verdant flow below these ruins was the site of a Navajo ambush on Colonel John Washington in 1849. Navajo fighters had stalked Washington's troops from the east. The troops pushed cannons. Washington surely knew he was under surveillance but the ignorant army had no idea how many eyes were upon them, nor from which nooks or overlooks. Once the four hundred American soldiers reached the section I gazed upon, three hundred Navajo defenders attacked from above. Washington's men blazed away but their bullets only struck sandstone. Thinking to impress, Washington resorted to blowing cannonballs. Gradually the Navajos descended the sheer canyon walls, overpowered the cavalry, and then allowed survivors to escape to Chinle. A cheap paper treaty was signed soon after between Washington's army and a non–representative handful of Navajos. This has got to be galling to Native historians: the Navajos had already agreed to peace with their own formalities a few years prior at Fort Canby. Over a hundred Navajo celebrants had been massacred by frightened U.S. soldiers on that treaty day for displaying multitude, or exuberance, or both. Afterward Chief Manuelito advised his people to never again reveal themselves in number. Thousands of human beings lived in the sandstone heights and depths of their vast home territory, but beyond that terrifying vision at Canby the Anglos never managed to comprehend it.
Now the sun went down completely. The cliff walls were deep blue and black. More than a thousand years ago the lights of the pueblo would have flickered up from the darkness like a jar of fireflies. I drove back to Thunderbird.
I did not want to see my drive to Safford as a second pilgrimage for my Grandma Connie. I sure as hell didn't want to make it some homage to my long–dead grandfather. My rather long walk in my twenties out to the red brick castle in Essex, England, seemed sentimental enough to cross Grandma–pathos off my list. I had found the family castle after a three–hour foodless and waterless trek, very pretty but meaningless beyond my grandma's romantic sense of it. I stood at the swan pond, gazing blithely across the water toward the gatehouse, a lovely crumbling structure now sectioned into three or four squalid flats. A matted rug hung from one of the upper windows. Broken toys littered the side yard. I strolled around the edge of the water to take a few photographs of listless floating birds. Might as well have been decoys. The real history stood in the background, the country estate of the sadistic toady Richard Rich. But at the time I didn't know that much about him or his political pastimes. I stood in that spot because my grandmother's grandfather had been born there. As a child he had nearly drowned in this very pond.
I put some stones in my pocket. I picked a few tiny purple roadside flowers from the abundance, pressing them between the pages of my notebook. I knew it would matter to my grandma and I loved her.
My Grandma Anderson was broad–shouldered and big–boned. Oldest daughter of an over–elegant mother, she spent much of her youth chafing against her mother's admonitions for charming a future husband, which helps me comprehend, painfully, why Grandma kept her starry eyes for the capable but deeply flawed man who chose her and really did seem to love her.
Grandma cared not for housekeeping. She was a lousy cook. Her heart was in her yard and garden, a stunning acre of old–timey horticultural glory: apricot, apple, and plum trees. Currants and raspberries. Long rows of carrots, peas, beets, potatoes, squash, tomatoes. Purple irises that she called "flags." Hollyhocks, orange day lilies, four o'clocks, daisies, primrose, lilac. A meticulous system of little ditches and headgates to maximize her weekly water turns. She laid red flagstone walkways in arcane routes from one section of vegetal design to the next. A massive locust tree in the backyard shaded the swing set. Best climbing tree in Alpine, Utah.
Also Grandma loved books. Her house was lined with them although she was alert to the hazards of our mutual attraction to the page. She admonished me to read only the best books. "Leave the bad ones be," she said, more urgently as I grew. Her mind was sharp and hungry, her insights critical and astute, but she kept them curbed.
My family lived up the hill. We weren't direct neighbors but the far backs of our lots were nearly adjoined. My siblings and I would follow a path through our father's beloved apple trees, step over a couple of stiles and emerge into Grandma's yard, picking and eating as we progressed. Usually I'd find Grandma in the garden, weeding or hoeing or fussing with the ditches. She'd reach an anxious pitch before her water turn, calling my father hourly, then quarter–hourly to make sure he was ready to help her pull the headgate up near Patterson's barn. She'd stand at the gate waving her watch. Dad and Grandma were snappy and irritable with one another, but also tender and close. They’d lost and gained much together. They loved apple trees. They loved the sucking sound of a shovel, scraping into the mud of an icewater ditch. They despised posers and grandiosers and trick–talkers although they were plagued by similar talents. Both strode the planet with the cinematic recall of born storytellers.
In England I planned a nice story to tell Grandma about the lush greenery of Essex as I plodded back toward town between hedgerows, past thatched cottages and grand crumbling estates. I stopped at the Church of St. John the Evangelist, which the locals had told me to admire, twelfth century, and it truly was beautiful—surfaced with halved globes of slate, fist–sized and matte–textured like eggshell on the outside, glassy like gelled candy within. Even now similar stones lay about. They reminded me of Moqui marbles but heavier. I put a small one in my bag. I pressed my hand into mud and made a dirty print on a page of my notebook.
I walked in to the curio shop/post office while I waited for the London bus. I bought a postcard, wrote something on it, and crossed to the far side of the counter to purchase a stamp from the woman who had just rung up my souvenir. I wanted Grandma to receive it with a Little Leigh's postmark.
"Post office isn't open yet, love."
"When will it open?"
"Ten more minutes."
I had a bus to catch in thirteen, across the street.
"I'm hoping to send this to my grandmother," I said. "In America."
"Well, you can do that. Just ten minutes now and the post office will open."
I could not tell whether I was dealing with a cultural gap or just a peculiar person. "Is somebody coming in to open the post office?"
"Oh no. It's just me. But right now I'm working the store. At four o'clock I'll be taking on the additional responsibility."
What kind of post office opens at four? I could see a little cabinet with stamps. Right there. Unlocked and awaiting commerce.
"Well, I really need to catch that bus back to London. My husband will be waiting for me. Could you possibly open a few minutes early?"
She looked at me concerned, as though I didn't understand English. "Post office opens at four o'clock. It is now seven minutes of four."
I stared. She stared back with arched eyebrows.
"How about," I suggested, "I lay down the money for a stamp right now. And then, maybe? At four o'clock you could take the money off the counter, fetch a stamp from that cabinet there, put it on this postcard for me, and slip it into that slot?"
The woman thought this over. "Well, all right. That would be fine. Problem is, you have to buy international stamps in fours. You'll need to buy four stamps. And I won't be able to break them apart until four o'clock."
"Okay. Fine."
She looked expectant.
I managed, "How much?" I can't recall her answer but it required change. Which she would not be able to provide until the post office opened at four o’clock. "Keep it then!"
"Well, all right! But it sure seems like a lot of fuss for one little postcard."
I ran out to the street, waving my ticket at the red bus and it stopped for me.
"Don't seem all that difficult to get to the stop in time," the driver said. I wound myself up the spiral staircase to sit up top and admire this England all the way back to London.
Grandma was dead before I could carry my treasures home to her. She never received my postcard but we arrived in time for the funeral. I slipped the slate, pressed flowers, and Essex dirt handprint into the casket to accompany her on the four–hour drive to the cemetery in Ammon, Idaho, where she was buried beside the man had who had long ago fallen to the sea from an exploding jet.