Essays

Salt and Light

February 13, 2016 Essays, In House

island in ocean

Seaside, OR

Two days after my birthday, we drove over the coast range to Seaside. It was a Monday, and I’d taken off from work, knowing I’d need a recovery day after the party that had lasted from Saturday afternoon till Sunday morning. Some might think that lazy or irresponsible; I think it’s just knowing yourself.

The weather had been sunny when we left our place in Newberg, a small town south of Portland in the Oregon wine country, but by the time we started up into the steep ridges separating the Willamette Valley from the ocean, the rain had started, which wasn’t a surprise, as it had already been one of the rainiest winters on record: in December there had been 25 straight days of rain, which is in the ballpark of 40 days and 40 nights. Jane took a nap, while I drove squinting through the water-blurred windshield. I always teased her about being able to fall asleep anywhere, and I smiled now at how peaceful her face was while I guided our 25-year-old Pathfinder—which we’d bought from a towing company for 500 bucks after it had been abandoned in downtown Eugene—along this curving road lined by 200-foot-tall fir trees growing up from the slopes below.

Linefork: In Proximity to a Movie in the Making

January 16, 2016 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

storyboard

A familiar sound comes from the other room. A voice—from Kentucky; from a monitor speaker, ten feet away in Massachusetts. I hear it in the kitchen. A clip of speech, a cadence heard again and for not the last time. Open floor plan living: all sounds permeate. Racket of chickens, dogs, lilting voice, banjo.

A film, incomplete—still very much its audio-visual pieces. We cohabitate, this thing and I. I am not the maker, though he lives here too. I am adjacent to the making.

I was there when it happened. The beginnings of this thing that has now sprawled through our lives. That was three years ago, on a summer road trip from Boston to points south, stopping to see friends in Charlottesville, Nashville, Memphis, before making our way back north.

Thanksgiving in Southern Illinois

January 2, 2016 Essays, In House

By MARIAN CROTTY

shed

My sister lives in southern Illinois in a town of about 15,000 people called Mt. Vernon, a small town surrounded by acres of empty fields, harvested and shaved bare for the winter. In the villages on either side of the town, mini oil drills bob up and down in the front lawns of small houses and most of the bars have posters tacked to their doors that say “Hunters Welcome” in safety-vest orange. Mt. Vernon itself, though, sits at the intersection of highway 64 and highway 57, and the scenery is often what you’d expect to find at any other small-town stop on a road trip across the middle of the country: hotels, gas stations, fast food, two Mexican restaurants, a Kroger grocery store with a solemn pledge of good service stenciled on the glass window above the shopping carts.

On Display

December 21, 2015 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

In the cabinet in the atrium outside my office is a glass display case that holds, among other things, a beautiful kidney shaped vessel, its patina smoothed by use. Label: “Brass Pus Basin.” It is an object to stand and stare down at for a while, intentionally or idly, to move on from and return to, to see in passing. Nearby, as part of an exhibit on bloodletting and cupping, are 18th- and 19th-century thumb lancets with their sharp little blades and tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl handles. In the next case over, a collection of 40 or so calculi (“bladder stones”) of varied size and shape, all disturbingly large. This is the Warren Anatomical Museum, at Harvard Medical School’s Countway Library, where “the dead teach the living.”

Trailer Days

December 19, 2015 Essays, In House

By JAMES ALAN GILL

trailer park

The town was segregated, not by laws but by economics. The lines were almost too stark. The northeast side of town was the “black side of town” while the southwest side of town, the farthest away from northeast, was the well-to-do, upper-middle-class “nice neighborhood.” The truly well off lived outside city limits in large homes built along cul-de-sacs in the middle of hardwood forests. I lived in the giant trailer park north of town, just across the railroad tracks from the NE housing projects.

It had nearly 400 trailers, a hamlet of tin cans. The trailers were singlewides, mostly from the 60s and 70s, and placed close together with small patches of grass between. They were set on concrete pads and anchored with “tornado straps,” metal bands bolted into the ground. It was a cheap place to live. A guy I worked with at Domino’s Pizza had lived there and sold his trailer to me and my friend Jon for $2,000. Lot rent was $100 a month, including water and trash.

Period Rooms

December 5, 2015 Essays, In House

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

i12-02097

It was a long, elaborate, symmetrical Adam room, with two bays of windows opening into Green Park. The light, streaming in from the west on the afternoon when I began to paint there, was fresh green from the young trees outside.

—Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The serene, neoclassical “Dining Room from Lansdowne House,” designed by Robert Adam in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art eerily matches Evelyn Waugh’s description down to the green light and the house’s fate: two wings demolished in 1930 to make way for a road, and the rest converted to an eating club in London’s Berkeley Square. In Brideshead Revisited, contractors are about to pull down Marchmain House and replace it with a block of flats. The Landsdowne Dining Room, in its symmetry and restraint, exudes confidence in the rightness and durability of inherited privilege.

Ivory Teeth

November 27, 2015 Essays

By JENNE KNIGHT

lake

My mother is driving us away from Spokane International Airport when she tells me about the elk. Before dawn, she warmed her Ford Ranger and headed into town, planning to catch up on some work before I arrived from Baltimore. At one moment there was no elk. And the next: elk. A world of elk and the metallic rip of something under the hood, the sort of sound I fear on the long flights home. That undeniable knowledge that something has gone horribly wrong.

After a Year in Baltimore

November 7, 2015 Essays, In House

By MARIAN CROTTY

Howard Street

I keep wondering what is strange and what is merely unfamiliar—what is truly inexplicable and what I simply don’t yet understand. For instance, for months, airships from the Aberdeen Proving Ground have floated on the edge of the skyline—two fish-shaped blimps invisibly tethered to the ground, wobbling the way a balloon would travel if it were tied to a post and caught up in the wind. They belong to a military surveillance project being developed by Raytheon to scan the Eastern Seaboard for cruise missiles. For months, I told almost everyone I met about the airships, trying to shock someone, but they almost always shrugged. “I saw those,” they said. “I thought they were weather balloons.”

Driving to Malaga

November 1, 2015 Essays, Issue 10, Issue 10 Essays

By TODD HEARON

(And way up north they’re starting to recover
in Maine the undeniable remains
of a settlement you might be interested in seeing
you’re into that whole hushed-up-history thing….

—postcard from Tennessee

You’ll pull off the main road, Route 209, south of Phippsburg, where Google Maps tells you. It won’t be long until the pavement’s gone, dirt road bleeding off into thinner dirt road, the coastal woods around you more and more secluded, untouched, the stillness and silence cut only by the rattle-and-pop of your tires and undercarriage. Summer foison is in the woods and the thick roadside overgrowth oppressive. It leaps out urchin-fashion to snag your fenders and doors. Occasional capillaries, also dirt, appear from nowhere and feed into your passage; as you wind slowly deeper, you keep one eye to the rearview, making note which way you’ll steer to make it out. Time’s a lost thing, memory a maze. How long have you been puttering now? Trouble out here, nobody’s going to find you. Google Maps shows only a faint gray line extending vaguely westward through a cyberphoto block of green.

Puppetmaking

November 1, 2015 Essays, Issue 10, Issue 10 Essays

By AURELIA WILLS

The Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater is on a stretch of East Lake Street lined with Latino and African businesses. The South Minneapolis theater is committed to the Powderhorn Park neighborhood, to social and environmental justice, to creating community through puppet theater. Every year for a decade, I’d watched the theater’s May Day parade. The first Sunday in May, the parade ran down Bloomington Avenue to Powderhorn Park, where the theater held a Tree of Life Ceremony, and afterwards hosted a festival. The giant puppets were strange and beautiful, the political statements loud and unequivocal. It was an event that wouldn’t happen in Saint Paul, with its quiet streets and big houses. Every April, HOBT had open workshops. Anyone could learn to make a mask or puppet, and be in the parade.