Adam Gnade

AN ESSAY BY ADAM GNADE

It’s just me and Rachel on the farm now. Dukes and T off to DC, and then the deepest South. Long days. Up in the morning to let the lambs into the fields to graze. Feed the goats. Sweep out the barn. Check the crops. Truss up the crumbling chicken fence. Clean up broken branches from storm damage. (“All these trees will fall some day,” is a line I hear in my head. And from what?)

Book work starts at 1pm. Since June it’s been too hot to work in the house so I open the barn door and sit just outside it with a straw hat on and my cowboy boots off and hash through it until evening. (Edits and rewrites down to page 83 of 166. Getting there.)

At sundown I drive Rachel to the old brown facades and saloon rooms part of town for her play rehearsal. (Her role, a French maid.) These days I drive back to the farm with all the windows in the Jeep down and the Defiance, Ohio record loud as I can get—loud because it’s vital and because I want to sing along and make its truth mine. And the singer singing “and now I’m back here in the Midwest/where everything’s familiar and sincere.”

Sometimes I stop at the river, the Missouri—“the Old Muddy” says John D.—to watch it move past and write letters to Bart or my grandparents back in their lamp-lit trailer in the artichoke fields of Central Cal, making coffee, fixing supper at dusk. (The true western movie heroes better than McMurtry or Ford could ever dream. Everything I do is dedicated to those two. But my dirty little stories I’d never show them.)

It’s lonely out here. Lonely and quiet and good. (The words alluvial and antediluvian always pop up but that’s wrong.) The rains have been magnificent. (They’ve been bastards too; Greek daggers in the sleeve, mean grins, bad jokes.) Nights are quieter than outer space. A carpet of tiny frogs. Fireflies. Heat. Usually I dream of snakes, coyotes yipping in the lamb pen, honey stock rifles and solitude of the prairie and a blight on the bells and romas. Last night I dreamed I was on tour with Mikey and Clint and the Castanets guys. It was a nightmare, but it wasn’t lonely. We were in Tahiti of all places—drunk in the ocean under the moon, laughing and losing our minds by tiki light. Ray stoic and bearded in his Bosephus shirt, steady, on a steady drunk (Willie Nelson by sainted light in his visions. And where are the braids now?) Ryne in a trance with his ear to a conch. Yoni supernatural. Mikey and Clint smashing kava bowls and sacrificing the fattened calf. The shows—like an undersea war and louder than the crack of earthquakes, the voice of a god.

I know back in Portland people will be drinking and dancing and cooking communal meals and playing shows and I know some of those people are the best you’ll ever meet. I don’t miss Portland but miss the people. I miss the housemates Dan and Mia, Conner, Ray, Amy, the good Erik Henriksen, the good Megan McIsaac. I miss other people I wasn’t good enough to and I won’t dishonor their names by saying them here. But all those good ones back there… This is good too and I’m going to push forward.

See, I want to hand you this book and have you understand every word and give your whole heart to it. As a reader, that’s about the best thing I can hope for a book. A book for people like me, a book I can give my heart to and live inside for a while and feel a little less alone. I’m fighting for it every day and I will try my hardest to make this great.