"Happiness is tough to write about," says Charlie Baxter, peering over the top of his little glasses in our literature seminar. "Happy stories resist standard storytelling practice - happiness here doesn't arise from the characters willing themselves into action, but from happy accidents, from wandering into things. Characters don't search - they find. Events can seem haphazard because they're not linear, but still, something happens that the protagonists need."
Yesterday, hearing this, I had to resist the temptation to throw my hand into the air, Hermione Granger style. In lieu of turning his seminar into a lengthy ramble, here's the story of my happy accident this weekend, of our haphazard wandering.
This Saturday in Iowa was particularly balmy. As I stood in a tank top, hanging wet laundry on a rack in the sun, I wasn't sure exactly what to do with it: beautiful days have that effect on me, especially ones so close to the dead of winter. "It's going to blizzard soon," I'd been warning non-winter-natives darkly all week. "Just you watch." This unearthly beautiful day wanted something, but I couldn't think what.
My phone rang then, thank God, and it was Christine. "Can Justin and I come hang out on your back porch?" That's a start, I thought. Soon they were sitting on my rickety lawn chairs, sipping coffee. But they had the same feeling: the day demanded action.
"Let's go look at cows," I said. "Of course," they said, God bless them, and we headed out up the driveway.
A half-mile or so from my house, the suburbs break away into rolling hills dotted by little dark cows. "I'm warning you guys, we're not supposed to be in this field," I said, "but I think if we're sneaky about it it's going to be okay." I didn't know who this little trail belonged to - still, it was worth being shot at, it was that beautiful.
I turned around to look at Christine after she'd snapped this picture of us. "We're almost here, the cows are over there," I said, then finished with "- Oh my God a deer!"
Two does, startled by our appearance, were bounding hell-for-leather out of the field and across the road. We stood in horror as one leapt a low barbed-wire fence and sprinted across: as the other one attempted to follow, a little black car motored up, and we made frantic "Stop!" motions with our hands at it. Could they see us from the top of the hill? They could; it stopped to let the deer cross safely, and as it drove on, hands waved at us out of the car's windows.
Baxter has a theory that he calls "Wonderland" - that sometimes, like Alice, characters enter a place where the normal rules don't apply. Generally this is triggered by some sort of strange happening, like the white rabbit bounding across the lawn muttering at its watch. Those deer were our white rabbits, and Wonderland was about to follow; as we stood there laughing in happiness, a white truck puttered towards us.
I froze. Its low rumbling was an implication that we were not on public property. As the farmer inside got out, all dusty jeans and suspenders, I chattered apologies. "I am so sorry," I said, "we just wanted to look at your cows, I live right over there, I just love cows so much..."
"Those aren't my cows," he said, "but we are on my land." He seemed pretty jovial about the whole thing. His blue eyes watered and twinkled over a sharp nose. "I'm building a sculpture, see?" and he waved his hand at the concrete square I'd noticed on walks. "Come on over and take a look." Our group threw anxious glances back and forth, but followed.
The four of us stood on the perfect square and gazed out over the road to another hill, upon which perched a big distant rock. "Now, look at that boulder," he said. "It's a visionary stone, see, and the sculpture's going to be a big old giant, just sitting here contemplating it."
It looked like a normal boulder to us, but we nodded. "What's it made out of?" Justin said.
"It's a rock," he said.
"No, this," Justin said.
"This is concrete," the man said.
"No, the sculpture."
"Oh - limestone," and he scratched his head. "Big old blocks of limestone, just as soon as they dig them up from the quarry."
Apparently this was serious business. "Cool," Christine said. "We're from the Writers' Workshop."
"Good God," and the man got visibly excited, "I've been trying to get you out here for years! It's just never come together, is all - Well, look, if you're from the Workshop, where are you parked? There's something you really gotta see."
"We walked," I said, eyeing him.
"All right," he said, "you gotta see Whitman's Glade. Come out with me. Come in my truck." He waved a hand at his large white pickup. "Come on!"
We're three people, I think we thought, we can take him, but Christine was already running for the truck. "I have always wanted to do this," she said, and she leapt into the back, where she sat amidst tools and wire. Justin followed, and they perched there, giggling at the Midwestern-ness of it.
"You know, I have four seats in the cab..." the man said.
"They're too excited," I told him, and I clambered into the front seat so I could snap a picture of them through the back window.
On the mile-long drive there, I learned that the man's name is Doug, that he owns the four hundred acres of rolling hills near my house, and that he is not in fact insane but a genius (or maybe a little bit of both). "This is sacred ground," he said. "Don't know what happened here, but it's something big. It shouldn't be built on."
I was reminded of the woods behind my house when I was a kid, and the cookie-cutter developments that moved in immediately after we did. I'll never live in the suburbs when I'm a grownup, I said then: how relieved I was when I moved to Iowa to find that my barn was surrounded by woodlands and hills. How unspoiled, I'd thought then, and "Thanks," I said now.
We drove past a wild, ramshackle barn covered in Halloween decorations - a spooky goblin hung out the upper loft window, its black robes streaming in the breeze - and pulled through a gate and into a parking lot, where three or four cars rested. "Must be a visitation going on today," he said. "You need a code to get in, see."Christine and Justin clambered out of the back, still laughing, and together we walked into the property.
A tiny lake with a little seashore greeted us, along with about a dozen children in baseball gear, who'd apparently come to take pictures.
"You can swim in it," Doug called over his shoulder, and "There are stepping stones over there. Hey, ring the bell!"
I ran up to it and swung on the rope. It donged throughout the property, and as soon as we left to walk into the woods, the baseball players swarmed it; throughout the visit, I could hear its loud, solemn rings and their laughter. "Come on," Doug said, "let's go see Whitman's Glade."
From the far shore of the lake, the cabin near the bell-tower watched us while the tiny baseball players frolicked in the sand. "It's a contemplation place." It was a small, well-built little thing, a lot like my own red barn; the ceilings inside were built from the beams of an old Iowa City church that'd been torn down. "Everything is sacred."
Doug led us onto a little trail - it was something less than a road and something more than a deer trail. The ground was full of fallen leaves, my sandals rustling through them; the trees were stark and bare and lovely above us.
These four-hundred-acre woods are the closest thing to Wonderland that I've ever experienced. They're like a haunted trail without the haunting, or with a good kind of haunting. The interstate fades to a distant roar, like the ocean; the birds have gone south for the winter, and the only signs of people are the little enigmatic signs, hand-painted arrows leading to God knows what. "Whitman's Glade," said one, and soon we were in a sort of paved courtyard, covered in fallen leaves and ringed by rocks. At the far end, three sculptures waited for us. (Thanks Justin for letting me steal your pictures.)
A white mailbox stood off to one side, packed with books, a lone pink crocheted hat, a dried-up teabag, a small container of nutmeg, and a few odd chain links. Doug cleaned it of the chain links and teabag, put the nutmeg in his pocket, and left the hat; Christine took out the abridged poems of Walt Whitman, and for a few minutes we all stood gazing in different directions as her voice read "Song of Myself".
A child said What is the grass?
fetching it to me with
full hands,
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
There was a silence, and then, "Well," said Doug, "let's go see the stones."
I'm not even going to attempt to explain the backstory - I suspect you wouldn't believe me if I said it here, or rambled it out as I have been. These are old stones, though, older than the New Testament; they weren't carved in Iowa City, but were rather brought across the ocean on a boat; nor is their height their full height, since they're rooted half in the earth, half out of it.
I honestly don't know how long we sat there, separate but together. As Doug said, "If you come here alone, and sit, you'll be in Iowa City - but you'll be a million miles away." For a day, we were.
http://www.harvestpreserve.org/
We're going to try to hold a reading or an event there, either in the winter or as soon as it gets warm; if you're interested in visiting on your own, they request a day or two of notice, and then they can unlock the gate for you. It's not an open park, exactly, but they are interested in fostering writing of all kinds - and it's definitely worth a walk, any bit of it, the stones or the statues or the lake. It's a Wonderland, all of it.
