Leaving room for the peculiar

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, rural places, eccentrics

Driving from Stillwater, Oklahoma to Denver some fifteen years ago, we stopped for a break in Limon, Colorado, a few hours short of our goal. Right at the end of the town, just a quarter mile from its beginning, was a little museum. We spent a charming hour there, then found the town was about to have their annual Founders' Day Parade, so we stayed for that. It was great. Serendipitous charm.

Reading Way Off the Road: Rediscovering the Peculiar Charms of Small-Town America, by Bill Geist, made me nostalgic for the rural and semi-rural life I've led in other, smaller towns. If more people spent significant time in "flyover country", I wonder if there'd be the kind of political polarization that currently plagues America. Some places and incidents in the book reveal truly charming aspects of rural America, though a few reinforce the backwoods stereotypes.

Take school bus racing. Vehicle racing of any kind is quite a foreign concept to a New Yorker. Heck, most of them never enter any auto unless it is a taxicab, and that is seldom. They haven't felt the 'need for speed'. But in places where you simply can't live without your own car (most of the country), auto racing is a popular spectator sport, and for many a participant sport.

Not many of us can afford to get involved directly with NASCAR racing, and Formula racing (such as Indy) is further beyond reach. But anyone with the entry price (typically 'bring your own junker') can enter a demolition derby. The cream of the DD is the School Bus Figure 8 Race, first promoted in Bithlo, Florida, about 15 miles outside Orlando.

Bill Geist, as the informal Fun Story Director of CBS News, has been to a great many odd places, to participate in, or at least watch from a safe distance, a great many local oddities. He freely acknowledges his debt to the cameramen, who must do everything he does, but backwards or over his shoulder.

The Iowa State Fair in Des Moines is more easily recognized as a safe, homey country entertainment. But did Bill go there for the country bands, the pie contest, or the tractor pull? No, he interviewed Duffy Lyon, who carves the yearly Butter Cow. He compares her undertaking to that of Michaelangelo, who only carved one of anything. Ms Duffy has created a new cow, working in a 40-degree (4°C) meat locker, each year since 1960. That's a lotta butter, a lotta cows, and an amazing oeuvre (she actually uses that same butter for about five years running before replacing it).

It is said there is less to do in the country. That depends on what you mean. There are certainly fewer Broadway shows and night clubs. But the work hours are longer. Nobody in the city works an 80-hour week, week after week for decades, the way most family farmers and ranchers work. Yet they find time for pastimes.

Some pastimes are decidedly odd, such as collecting twine and winding it into large spheres. This is just one of three twine balls of roughly the same size, twelve feet diameter, that contend for the title of the World's Largest Twine Ball. This one in Cawker City, Kansas, is probably the winner. Cawker City really is in the middle of nowhere, being about 150 miles from both Kansas City and Wichita, to the northwest of both.

The twine used for these is typically used twine from hay bales, once the bales are "unbaled" to be fed to livestock. The real champions of this sport beg twine from all their neighbors for a few counties in all directions. Twelve feet seems a practical limit, because they get too heavy to turn over, and tend to flatten once their weight exceeds a few tons.

Many a small town has a special something; someone famous was born there, or something significant was done there first or invented there. Some are famous for doing things differently, such as Whalan, Minnesota (100 miles southeast of Minneapolis), which being only two blocks long, is shorter than the average parade. So a few years back they decided to hold a stationary parade. The line up a police cruiser (borrowed from a nearby town that has one), a convertible with their oldest resident, a borrowed, and small, marching band, the local VFW veterans with a few flags, and some people on horseback. They line up, stand erect, and the townspeople and other visitors walk around, up one side and down the other. It doesn't take long!

Chattanooga, Tennessee, as it has grown, has swallowed up the unnamed place where the first tow truck was built, by a fellow who got tired of using mule- and human-pulled ropes to right overturned tractors or rescue ditched cars. He welded some stuff to the back of a Packard he'd cut apart, and created the first towing business. The museum honors this profession, without which most of us would have at least one dead car still lying dead by the side of the road.

It has been said, the slower you travel the more you see. Life may seem slower in Flyover Country, but I can attest to the richly detailed tapestry of lives, made by people who are as individual as all the differently-colored flowers in a Spring meadow. Bill Geist and his crews have dug out some pretty intersting specimens for our enjoyment. If a few folks here and there are motivated to take a driving tour through seemingly empty country, this book will have done some solid good.

Can you even see the center from over there?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, eccentrics

A portion of the cover illustration, intended to represent someone's brain, took a second look. I finally realized it is the pilot/thermostat module from a gas furnace. If you are old enough (or your furnace is), you know the drill: twist a red knob and hold for a few seconds while holding a lit match in the pilot hole…then "pop", it's lit, and when you release your twist, the furnace starts with a whoosh.

This is a fitting analogy to an eccentric's mind: a little old-fashioned, a bit particular (or peculiar), and very, very effective. When a self-acknowledged eccentric writes about eccentrics, the reader realizes right off that it truly takes one to know one. Pagan Kennedy, raised with the maxim "Eccentricity is more efficient", brings us a collection of vignettes into the lives of a variety of people who exemplify Richard Feynman's favorite ad slogan: "Think different".

The title story in The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories tracks the life of Dr. Alex Comfort, a mini-biography "in 17 positions." Dr. Comfort tried to single-handedly eliminate monogamy, but found that he'd bit off much more than he could handle. Though we now find that about half of all marriages end before "death do us part", the other half survive. Monogamy is still the most effective way two people can remain intimately related for decades; it has by far the best track record going.

Ms Kennedy's "Introduction" is one of the longest pieces in the book, a micro-autobiography of her writing career, of how she came to embrace journalism written with fiction-writing techniques. Psst: That's a long way of saying "story-telling". She is a story-teller. The stories she tells, with occasional bite-sized epilogues, take us into the realms inhabited by some very different, very engaging, very driven people.

One is not even human. Alex the Gray Parrot has achieved star status by attaining a spoken vocabulary of several hundred words of English, and can (or could) converse with people at a level you'd expect from a youngster who hasn't quite learned sentence syntax...say age 18 months. That's pretty good, from a bird who weighed less than the brain of an 18-month-old. Sadly, Alex has passed away, so we have to wait for someone to train up another parrot to see if this level of performance can be surpassed.

Cheryl Haworth, a women who excels in the formerly "male" sport of weightlifting, dominated the female version of the sport and made a lot of young women feel better about being "big and strong". For a time she was billed as "the strongest woman on earth." The piece was written not long before the 2004 Olympics, and in the postscript we find that Ms Haworth came in 6th in Atlanta. Post-postscript, I find that she also was sixth in 2008 in Beijing, with a combined lift of 259 kg. That means two lifts, by different methods, each around 300 pounds.

Among my favorites is Saul Griffith, in "How to make (almost) anything". He leads a movement to bring cheap, effective designs to many areas that are over-teched. The way the US "made the desert bloom" in the mid-20^th Century cannot be repeated in most of the world. They can't afford it. It could take a national economy in some countries to install a set of the pumps needed to run an American irrigation system. But I found myself most enamored of a device Griffith created that produces prescription eyeglasses on-the-spot, quite a bit quicker than a one-hour photo machine, and for tons less money. This is the kind of thinking that reminds me there is still much good in this world.

The last few essays are autobiographical. "Boston Marriage" is most instructive. I'd not heard the term, but I understand the concept: two women living under one roof, with many of the accouterments of marriage, and they may have a gay relationship, or they may not. Her four-year Boston Marriage, to a woman as straight as herself, was very convenient during the time they wished to date their favorite men but not move in with them, or marry them. Eventually, each attained a more intimate male-female relationship that led them to part, at least from under the same roof.

I guess women can do that. My relationships with the roommates I've had during my single years (now several decades past) were not in any way similar to relationships that seem normal to women. Men and women really, really do think differently, and feel differently. At least for a wholly straight man such as I am, no matter how deeply I may love a man, the expression has at most a veneer of affection, compared to the deep affection women so easily express.

I wonder if Ms Kennedy is really so much more of a thinker than women in general, or if it is simply that she managed to convey her thoughtfulness to me better than others before. These essay/stories (or story/essays) induce the reader to think, making them some of the best writing of our time.