(Howell Creek Radio address for October 13, 2012 -- ) The Giant Farm ============== Ten hours into our road trip in August, I pulled a muscle in my back somehow. I wasn't doing anything strenuous, just leaning forward in my seat, just before getting out to switch drivers somewhere in Nebraska, in the middle of the night. It was probably a re-injury of sorts, actually, since I'd pulled it a couple of weeks earlier. What can you do? I got out, smelled the fresh atmosphere of mayflies and turkey manure, stretched, tried to stretch it out by waddling a couple of laps back and forth under the ghastly sodium vapour lamps, bought an energy drink, and hoisted myself into the driver's seat. * * * A few weeks previous to this, I had been helping shovel soy beans at a Abe's farm, something I have done exactly once. It was actually kind of a neat experience, even though that was how I originally pulled my back. We were moving a silo-full of soy beans out of the silo and into a large green metal wagon for transport, by means of an auger, which (for you non-farm types) is a kind of Archimedes screw inside a giant metal soda straw that you jam into the bottom of the silo, and as the screw turns it elevates the soy beans up and out, and dumps them into the wagon. Now picture this: the auger is pouring the beans, which form a cone-shaped hill that grows as it fills up the wagon, and the wagon has a small square window in the side, which gradually gets covered by the soy beans. You might expect to see the level of soy beans rising slowly and continuously, but if you look up close at the pane of this window and watch carefully, you would see something different. The level of the beans appears to remain the same for a good minute or two, as soy beans bounce down in ones and twos and hit the window in random times and places; then, a wave of beans will come rolling down, and, all at once the level, rises another inch or so. I remember thinking that if I were an ant walking on that rising hill of soy beans, and if every second was equivalent to a year, this pattern of when the beans hit the window and how many at a time would be roughly equivalent to humans' experience of change in the world, and it would still seem just as mysterious. There were three of us inside the silo that day, shoveling the beans into the mouth of the auger. Abe and I are lean fellas, but Al was older, shorter, and stouter, and he had an extra burlap sack's worth of belly in front. I could see no earthly reason why my back should have given out and not Al's. He worked just a hard as we did, was probably a little smarter about it than I was, but if anyone's back should be giving out in protest, his seemed like it had a lot more to put up with than mine did. * * * Fast forward a couple of weeks again to the road trip. My cousin was going to be married in the mountains near Flagstaff, Arizona. Her parents (my aunt and uncle), my cousin Goodwin, Trixie and I left at 2 o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, drove through a thunderstorm and a night, and when the sun came up we were in Colorado Springs. We got out of the car to stretch our legs, and the sign at the entrance to the park said "The Garden of the Gods." At the time I thought I understood why they called it that; the paths we strolled along led through some huge, bright orange and tan rock formations that looked sculpted, and were only just large enough to dwarf you. You could just imagine it being a garden designed to scale for a race of giants. I later realized I was wrong about this. We kept driving. We hit the Arizona border just after sunset that night, and arrived at our hotel at ten o'clock. * * * I've been thinking lately what a gift it is to belong to a family that has no honour to defend. It seems to me that more spite, more actual harm, is perpetrated upon by family members upon family members when there pride to uphold, and a standard. In many cultures, suicide is an acceptable alternative to family censure, and I can almost say I imagine why that would be so. My family used to have appearances to maintain, but after much sin and much forgiveness, the appearances are gone, and I must say we are the better for it. It was interesting to drive those 3,200 miles with aunt, uncle and cousin, and to attend their family's celebration, for this reason. It was like an opportunity to observe the same beautiful crumbling of the edifice from the outside instead of the inside: the kind of resolved acceptance of each other that can only come from family crises. In that hard, hard choice between love and honour is that rare place where the solidest love can emerge -- and it had really better emerge, for love can be preserved through things like separation, suicide attempts, unplanned pregnancies, cancer; while honour never can. The trip and the gathering was, for me, a tale or a rite in honour of a family that had survived all of these things. Watch this quiet, lean, weather-worn uncle of mine in his leather boots, who perhaps would never have thought of moving his body to any rhythm faster than a season of the year, especially not in front of donzens of people, tentatively mount the steps and dance with both of his daughters. I wonder at how much acceptance he must have had to give, and receive, in order for that to happen. In the month after this wedding, my aunt would undergo extensive surgery, and my cousin Goodwin would slip and fall off a twenty-foot cliff, land on his head, and survive. * * * Our drive back happened to be so timed that the places through which we'd driven at night the first time, we now passed back through in daylight. On the first day I saw stark and alien cliffs of immense size that, on the voyage out, we had threaded unwittingly in the dark. And on the second day I saw endless, endless, endless plains of flat fields that, on the voyage out, I had sailed over unwittingly in the dark. These fields might seem boring, I thought; but they seem less boring if you consider that this is how the Grand Canyon itself would look if it were filled in. There might even be a grand canyon of sorts thousands of feet underneath all of this drought-dried corn, embedded under vast layers of fill and soil. Suddenly and inexplicably, that was when I really understood about the Garden of the Gods. It wasn't a garden _for_ gods, it was a garden _of_ gods, wherethe gods themselves were planted and grown. Who knows how many thousand years ago the last crop of them ripened? And these heaving hills of rock are not the ruins, but the young shoulders of the next generation, who have many centuries yet before they fully emerge. This, I think, is how to understand the land of North America. It is a land in an intermission between legends. * * * Thanks for listening to Howell Creek Radio. All episodes past, present and future are available for listening and download at howellcreekradio.com, as well as liner notes and links to the music. I've been working on my book 'Noise of Creation', which is being published electronically as it is being written. It's currently a free download -- find out more at . The music for this episode is by the Vitamin String Quartet; Ozzie Kotani and Daniel Ho; Antonio Vargas; and A Whisper in the Noise. Synopsis --------- Radio address for October 13, 2012. Takes place on the farm, and on a three thousand mile trip through the American southwest. The photo for this episode's album art was taken by myself at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado. The music consists of three covers of the same song, performed by the [Vitamin String Quartet][vsq], by [Antonio Vargas][av], and by [A Whisper in the Noise][wtn]; as well as [_Paka Ua_][ds] from _The Descendants_ soundtrack. [vsq]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00349N61E/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00349N61E&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20 [wtn]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000V88BAC/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000V88BAC&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20 [ds]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0064Z65Y0/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0064Z65Y0&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20 [av]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003B7V8OQ/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B003B7V8OQ&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20