The Writing Life Too

After spending four days in Prince George, B.C. it’s with great pleasure that I’m watching spring unfold here. I flew in late yesterday afternoon and when I stepped off the plane into 64 degree sunshine, felt almost reborn. When I had climbed into the plane in Prince George a bitter wind was blowing snow sideways out of a bullet-colored sky. As we drove to a dinner party Saturday night I felt like I’d slipped back into my childhood because snow plows had piled up snow 10 or 15 feet high and houses were all diminished at the back of the mounds of white. I had threatened the people at the dinner party that I’d write about our dinner conversation in my blog, but I won’t. Except I’ll report that being the only American at the table is always interesting when they demand to know how the hell George Bush won two elections. And I don’t know if they believe me when I tell them he hasn’t won a damn thing in his life, but I do know that Canadians are mad as hell at our government.

I rarely have the stomach for reading apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic fiction because frankly ever since George Bush stole his first election in 2000 and the horrors he’s unleashed on the world, I’ve been expecting the worst from humankind. Or at least the humans running our government. So although several people have recommended Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I had resisted reading it. After all, McCarthy’s dark visions aren’t for wimps. But while visiting my friend who teaches English to high school kids in Prince George, he drove me to a bookstore in town and bought me the book. We’d hiked up a hillside through snow, sometimes sinking as we trudged along and then looked down at the valley where two rivers met and the city spread below, all winter barren, the sky nearly turquoise.

Driving along we’d talked about what wakes us scared in the middle of the night and one of my big fears is that this country will never right itself, that the sweet promise of democracy has been played out, and we’re spinning into madness fueled by greed. My friend wakes with worries too, but not about his country or his future like I do. There are about six copies of The Road at his school that kids are constantly borrowing and as we drove to the airport, the windshield wipers brushing off the snow, he told me that a senior in his class “a sweet girl” had read the book over a weekend, weeping throughout.

And I finished reading The Road by the time I landed in Portland yesterday. As usual, every one of McCarthy’s words is carefully chosen as if chiseled into stone. It’s dedicated to his son who was about five when he wrote it. And it’s so haunting and profound that this book will always live within me. Part poetry, part horror story, you can scarcely bear to turn each page, but you cannot also not stop reading.

You see, some unnamed horror has changed the world to ash when "A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" happened ten years before the story begins. Almost no one is left on earth, but those that remain are "Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night.”

The story follows a father and his son slogging southward trying to avoid danger, hoping for warmth and life near the ocean in the midst of a nuclear winter. The father is weakened and coughing blood and you’ll never read anything so bleak or tender. The sun and moon and stars are gone and I cannot bear to imagine a world without our skyward companions. "The nights now only slightly less black," he writes. "By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp."

The boy’s most frequent comment is about how scared he is. Little wonder: "The land was gullied and eroded and barren. The bones of dead creatures sprawled in the washes. Middens of anonymous trash. Farmhouses in the fields scoured of their paint and the clapboards spooned and sprung from the wallstuds. All of it shadowless and without feature. The road descended through a jungle of dead kudzu. A marsh where the dead reeds lay over the water. Beyond the edge of the fields the sullen haze hung over the earth and sky alike. By late afternoon it had begun to snow and they went on with the tarp over them and the wet snow hissing on the plastic."

As we were descending over Portland, Mt. St. Helen’s white, scooped-out top filled the airplane window and I was so grateful for the sight of the mountain, for the sense that nature can survive, for a world not covered in ash. After I got home I walked to a neighborhood restaurant for carry-out Mexican food. I passed a bed of jonquils and buds appearing everywhere and spotted a tree that had opened into soft pink blooms and I’ve never seen anything more lovely. So I’ve been thinking a lot about old Cormac and his bloody visions of humankind and how this book is a love letter to his son. In one of his rare interviews when he talks about spending a life writing and the sacrifices it requires he said, "You're just here once, life is brief, and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it."

Hundreds of people have written accolades about this prize-winning book already. So I’ll leave you with McCarthy’s comment on what the book means, “Just simply care about things and people and be more appreciative. Life is pretty damn good, even when it looks bad, and we should appreciate it more. We should be grateful. I don't know who to be grateful to, but you should be thankful for what you have.”