Baling in America

Yesterday while baling straw—straw, not hay, the very sort of distinction Hollywood fails to discern—I realized what was wrong with America and made a mental note to address it at the keyboard.

Right about then the twine snapped and a bale exploded. I placed the state of the nation on pause.

*     *     *

I’m not here to impugn Hollywood as a whole, as we suffer enough these days from impugning each other as a whole. But there is context, specifically that I was riding the hay wagon (even when you stack it with straw it’s still a hay wagon) only a few days removed from a trip to Los Angeles, where (after presenting my Wisconsin driver’s license and pasting a pass to my pocket) I had been invited to pitch my stories to folks who make films. Or movies. Or streamers. Or TV.  Or algorithmic loop-de-loops. Who knows what we call the medium these days, although just now, as proof that time bends back on itself, it occurs to me that “moving pictures” covers it.

Script pitching is a late-stage hobby for me. You won’t have seen any of my stuff on screen because none of it has ever successfully run the gauntlet through to production, but I’ve had just enough unsuccess to splurge on a used Honda and knock out last year’s property taxes. Such are the economic advantages of living in the rural Midwest as opposed to living a single seventy-dollar Uber ride from Universal Studios. My filmic expectations were long ago tempered when my first book was optioned. I was jabbering about the opulent possibilities, when, with all the tender firmness of Mother telling me, “Finish cleaning your room, then we’ll talk about going to the circus,” my literary agent said, “When it comes to Hollywood, I’ll tell you when to get excited.” A smattering of expired options, one derailed development deal, and two decades passed, and she still hasn’t given me the green light.

My entertainment attorney in L.A. and his entertainment attorney wife possess pet parrots they take on walks in specially designed backpacks, so we are living different lives, a point reinforced when we convened for business purposes on the patio of a Beverly Hills coffee shop mere feet from the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and North Beverly Drive. Halfway through my regular drip it occurred to me that my wife and I could retire next Tuesday were I simply allowed to select any ten vehicles from the seething herd at the red light and post them on Carvana. Rodeo Drive was but a block away; on the hot breeze came the scent of Amex Black.

Having grown up in secondhand clothes smelling of cow barn, I delight in casually referencing “my entertainment attorney in L.A.” the same way I formerly delighted in casually referencing “my development deal,” although when my neighbor Denny asked me what the hell was a development deal I had to admit I wasn’t really sure, a moot point that grew even mooter when shortly thereafter the deal went putrescent, then evaporated, leaving behind a faint brown haze and an unpaid advance.

I rarely bug my entertainment attorney in L.A. For starters, I don’t generate a ton of bug-worthy action, specifically defined as ten percent. For finishers, I’ve done my googling and based on the artists he represents, barring some big break the best I can hope for is to amuse him with my rustic ways. Despite this, when my deal petered out, he nobly wove his hand through a ball of snakes and retrieved what was owed me, an amount that will hardly feed his parrots but here in Wisconsin will keep you deep in cheese.

The ace up my flannel sleeve is that every exciting thing in my life has happened about ten years after I hoped it might, and at about forty percent of what I dreamed it might. By the time I landed that development deal I had come to understand these things usually either bled out or blew apart, and when mine did both, I knew enough to be happy with that Honda and get started on the next thing.

*     *     *

I grew up poor but well-loved and well-fed, milking cows, forking manure, driving tractors, skidding logs and slinging sawmill slabs. I worked hard, but not too hard, and usually not until after Dad peeled me out from behind whatever book I was reading, often on the topic of Tarzan or six-shooters. An introspective farmer given to thoughtful observation rather than grand proclamation, Dad once said of the impact of my literary habits on my chore habits, “I lost more man-hours to Louis L’Amour than girls, football, and pickup trucks combined.”

It wasn’t all swinging vines and westerns, though. I read whatever I could get my hands on: poetry collections, history books, the local daily and the local weekly, the underside of the Kleenex box, the back of the toothpaste tube. I read All Quiet On the Western Front in third grade, and Gone With the Wind shortly thereafter. In fifth grade, I got busted for sneak-reading Serpico during class.

And through it all, I read my Bible.

I was raised in an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect. I’ve gone in depth on that elsewhere, so, the précis: I long ago lapsed into what I call bumbling agnosticism with traces of amateur existentialism, and the sect itself has gone on to wither in infamy, but my experience was gentle and cocoon-like, mainly because my parents lived lives of humility in service to the adrift and downtrodden. Thus, rather than leave me with a bitter aftertaste, this childhood infused me with a love for the King James rhythm, the thee and the thou, the shalt and the wilt. The literature of the deal, in other words. They say familiarity breeds contempt, but when I hear someone speaking that cadence, when I hear someone invoking scripture, I am skeptic, but not skittish.

*     *     *

I said that straw bale exploded, but it was not a Hollywood-special-effects-type blowout. There was a muffled snap! just audible above the clank-and-roll of the baler, and rather than blasting chaff every which-way, the bale simply lurched into looseness, curling back on itself in the manner of those glow-worm fireworks that extrude into ashy caterpillars.

My brother had warned me this might happen. It’s his straw, his tractor and baler, his land. I had dropped in just to visit, but I retain enough of my raising to know when you visit a working farm the best guests either stay out of the way or pitch in, and he had forty-seven other things to do, so when I said I could take over he bailed off to join his Amish helper unloading wagons back at the barn. Last thing he mentioned was that the twine rolls were about to switch over. Also residual of my raising, I understood this to mean I should be on alert as it’s not uncommon for the twine graft to fail during the transition, and sure enough, the knot linking the spent roll to the fresh roll came undone. The bale was still secure in the chute when I spotted it. I gave a whoop and a finger-whistle to get the attention of my father, manning the tractor. He was inside the cab wearing ear protectors and didn’t hear me, so I leapt off the wagon into the stubble, jogged up alongside the drive wheels and mimed the kill sign. I reknotted the bale by hand, but either my knot was faulty or the twine ends had deteriorated, because when the bale dropped to the wagon deck, it went poof. There was no re-tying it now. I simply carried it, armful by armful, back before the baler, feeding it flake by flake into the gnashing maw.

*     *     *

Hollywood has of late discovered so-called middle America, their sudden interest piqued by election results, ratings, and general decentralization of the industry. Whether they truly wish to deal with us is another question entirely.

Two decades ago I wrote Population 485, a memoir about returning to serve on the fire department of my rural Wisconsin hometown after a 12-year absence. Joining up was hardly heroic, as the roster already included my two brothers and my mother. In smalltown America we join the fire department as one joins the Rotary, or the softball team.

The book never charted, it never brought me millions, and it never landed me on Oprah, but it hit some lists, sales exceeded expectations, and it sells steadily to this day. I attribute the bulk of the early burst to the support of my New York City publishing team. They have my lifelong gratitude, and I remain in contact (and under contract) with them. But there was one area where their promotional plans did not align with mine: I kept pestering them to supplement the standard book tour by pitching me as a speaker for firefighter and first responder conferences. A cozy bookstore reading is nice, but I saw a chance to share the book with hundreds of fellow travelers in one fell swoop. And yet no matter how I pushed it, the publisher always demurred, the reasoning some polite but consistent variation on the theme of those people aren’t really readers.

I have shared a fire hose, the back of an ambulance, and many a dirt track stock car race with a fair sampling of those people, and statistically speaking, the publisher wasn’t wrong. But what the New York City crew overlooked is that the hurdle here was less about literature than iteration. Had I positioned myself outside the door of a hotel conference room in Duluth and asked every firefighter and first responder who showed up if they wished to purchase a nonfiction memoir exploring themes of identity, mortality, and sense of place, I’d collect nothing but snorts and blank stares. Instead, I just bulled ahead and—leveraging my real-life credentials—pitched myself to these conventions on my own. Then I stood at the podium and simply shared the stories. Not as mine, but ours. In our language. Our lingo. Our sensibility. I read excerpts about people the audience had never met but recognized as their neighbors. Their patients. Themselves.

And when it was over, I sat at a table in the back of the room and signed book after book after book for those people who weren’t really readers.

*     *     *

When I am at my most relaxed, shooting the breeze in my brother’s shop, or swapping tales after the monthly fire meeting, or talking through a truck window, I slip into the patois of my people, dropping my gerunds, mangling my grammar, and code-switching from “You” to “Youse,” from “yes” to “yah,” from “meet you at the café” to “meetcha down t’da café.” I fall into the familiar rhythm of summing up sentences with the phrase “and that there,” pronouncing it, “n’nat’dare.” There is an ease to my being when I talk this way. I have equated it to slipping into a pair of well-worn jeans.

Our environments shape our syntax.  This week I received an email from a Hollywood assistant that read, “I am so sorry but Steve is being pulled into a project meeting so we’ll need to reset this Zoom.” That very same day a co-writer pal of mine received an email from a Hollywood assistant at a completely different production company reading, “Miriam has unfortunately been pulled into a timely meeting with our head of TV…”

The clear and thoughtful intent of these emails is to send regrets and reschedule and I respectfully accept them as such. But the Middle American stoic in me—and the me who has handled vehicular extrication tools and dead bodies and pieces of dead bodies—eye-rolls at the tone, which implies some grave unforeseeable mishap, when in fact I too would choose to meet with the head of TV rather than some goofball script-pitcher Zooming in from a room above a garage in rural Wisconsin. “Hey, we gotta move this to Friday,” would suffice. As would, “And we’ll prolly move it again.”

But it’s the word pulled that gets my giggle. I entertain this vision of Steve and Miriam bracing against their desks, struggling to stay in place before their screens, protesting that they have a meeting with me, even as they are drawn from their workstations by some implacable gravitational force.

I look like a lumberjack but feel things like a poet. I love lyric language but hold a gut-level affection for patter and parlance. I thrill to elevated prose but cherish common talk. In my family, on my fire department, in my home county, the unpolished look and lexicon help me pass for a roughneck, but my original people know better. In more civilized settings, however, I am not above playing this light deception to my advantage. I was once in a group Zoom featuring a producer whose self-regard exceeded his resume, and whose incessant lightweight intrusions brought to mind a leg-humping terrier. It had become clear to even a flatlander like me that he was not The Guy, and I was already on a slow boil when he embarked on a condescending high-toned ramble insinuating I didn’t know my business. I let him finish, and then, with apologies to my devout late mother and all my farmer friends and relatives, and before my pathological self-deprecation and imposter syndrome kicked in, I shifted down an octave, fixed him with a gaze we call Focused Logger, and said, “Son, I may talk like a fuckin’ farmer, but I can write like hell.”

He shrank in his seat like a snail in salt.

I think of myself offering the same retort to some drunken butcher in my hometown tavern and chuckle. He would knock me across the pool table and stuff me in the corner pocket. In fact, I am typing these lines to the tune of a self-curated playlist featuring Mazzy Star, The Cure, Morrissey, early Radiohead, Bon Iver, and Everything But The Girl. I have titled the playlist, “Yearning Writer.”

The way I speak when I’m standing where I’m from, the way I slouch into it, the actual physical stance of it, that’s how I feel out there on that hay wagon. The way I reach for the twine to draw the bale from the chute; the way I ride the pitch and sway of the wooden deck; the muscle memory that comes alive in the split second of balancing the bale on my forearms above my head before chucking it to the top row; no matter how soft I’ve grown, no matter how much I enjoy the adventure of pitching my writing in big cities, the back forty is a place I understand to my bones. Even the discomfort of oat husks down my shirt, of chaff and sweat mingling itchily beneath the waistband of my jeans, all of it is a ceremonial time-stopper. Or time returner. Shootin’ the breeze, stackin’ the straw, these things are, in the words of Joan Didion, “a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are.”

In my limited experience, the system and the process of turning books and scripts and pitches into the final product is like playing roulette in a bumper car. You have very little control, the odds of winning are profoundly slim, and the place is filled with people trying to take you out. There is also the assessment of a much more successful screenwriter pal of mine: “This is a career without dignity.” Counterpoint: having at various points in my life supplemented the budget by eviscerating chickens, hooking log chains, and chiseling frozen cow poop from the crevices of a manure spreader, I find it light and delightful duty.

The goal is to “get in the room.” As in, the room with the people who dispense the golden tickets, or at least a sweet little first-look deal. In my case the room is usually the one above my garage and a grid of faces across my laptop screen, but now and then there is reason to present in person, and it’s off to Los Angeles.

As I departed for the most recent session, my wife kissed me and quoted a line from the film What’s Up Doc?: “Remember—everything depends on this.” I chuckled, because of course the opposite is true, and our little family of four quotes that line prior to everything from job interviews to plunging the toilet. I am not nervous about these meetings. There is a sense of anticipation and possibility, just enough to keep me sharp, but I’m not all wound up about it. Perhaps I’d do better if I was. There is a certain gimlet-eyed vibrating drive I do not possess but have witnessed in places like Soho House West Hollywood, where the view was astounding, the hors d’oeuvres were tasty, the seats were soft, and the general vibe of the creative climbing class felt like desperate times in a razor factory.

I’ve built a modest career from writing and speaking and low overhead, so I’m not pitching for survival. I’m casting a line, and if the bobber wobbles, great. If not, within 48 hours of being “in the room” at Universal Studio, I’m “in the van” to Gilman, Wisconsin. The van is a 2002 Toyota. My helper Tony and I pack it with boxes of my books and T-shirts and stickers and can koozies, and then we unload it again in places like Gilman, and for an hour or so I share stories and laughter with a roomful of strangers who feel like friends, buy my books, and offer to help reload the Toyota. Then it’s off to a library in Winona, Minnesota, for more of the same. Furthermore, in the three days prior to my most recent script pitching trip, I accompanied my neighbors on three rescue calls. One for a suicide attempt. One for a car accident. One for a farmer struggling to breathe. I make only a handful of these calls per year. But it keeps my mortality front of mind. I’m not pitching for my life. I’m pitching for what might be. Then it’s back to the little room above my garage and trying to figure out why the septic tank is making that sound.

*     *     *

As of a month ago my father is a widower. Widowed, widower, the words hit my ear like pea gravel on a tin can because that’s not the man I see up there in the tractor cab. I simply see Dad.

Mom was 84 the day she died. She was always copacetic about aging, but admitted she found it unnerving when her first child (me) turned 60. As a late-start dad it is unlikely I will experience this milestone with either of my daughters, but there is an inverse corollary sensation when your octogenarian father is watching you struggle to re-tie the strawbale and—sexagenarian though you may be—you feel immediately fourteen and under review.

It was in those teen years I began to grow my hair, and I recall standing in the milkhouse as Dad softly but sternly informed me my lengthening locks were an abomination before God. Over the years our relationship has been a sustained exercise in outlasting each other’s stubbornness, the transcendent mitigating factors being I never once lost my love or respect for the man, a couple of biggies indeed. We were also well-served by a shared sense of humor. And the breathing room provided by my wandering years. And he took me fishing. Also, I went bald.

Several biggies, I guess.

Dad has always been small of stature, but two years of his selflessly serving Mom through her cancer have shrunk him, put more bend in his back. He is alone in the house now for the first time in 61 years. To see him solo on a tractor isn’t what puts a tug in my throat; it’s the vision of him climbing the stairs to the empty bed, his footfalls echoing.

But the sun is warm and the sky is blue. The baler sweeps the straw from the stubble and stuffs it before the plunger, the tractor engine bogging and recovering in rhythm. The twine holds, the bales pulse up the chute. I come from a people who save and destroy themselves through labor. I grab another bale and knee it into place.

I dropped that Didion line like I’m steeped in the oeuvre, when apart from possibly an excerpt here and there, until last month I’d never read her. This wasn’t some sort of dumb iconoclastic stance; I just never got to it and reside far enough outside of the cool kids circle to just go ahead and say so. But a chance observation during my most recent Los Angeles trip set me on a course to catching up.

I was in an Uber headed for a meeting with, yes, my entertainment attorney in L.A., the one with the parrot in his backpack, when I looked up from my phone just in time to clock the distinctive façade of the Troubadour, which even a clodhopper like me recognizes as a legendary nexus and launch pad for everyone from Elton John to the Eagles to Guns’N’Roses. Lenny Bruce got arrested there, I thought. John Lennon got kicked out of there. It felt the same as the first time I climbed from the subway and into Times Square or stepped into Fenway Park and saw the Green Monster—a childlike jolt of loose-jawed recognition that something mythic exists for real, and right there.

But the Troubadour plucked a deeper harmonic. It was the remnant sense of a scene long gone to ghosts. I got saudade in my gut like when I watch reruns of The Rockford Files, that sense of sentimentality for a place that was never mine, never will be, and yet bits of it still wisp like spider silk through the washout white of the California sun. I am a late-arriving tourist, but I find it exciting to move in streets and spaces echoing with scenes the farm kid only read about, no matter how superficial, tarnished, or attenuated those scenes may be.

A week later I was in a bookstore and spotted a copy of Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz. I had read a review of the book when it released, and it didn’t seem for me. But I recalled from the review that Babitz was a denizen of the Troubadour scene. I flipped the book and read the description. When I saw the line about Babitz circulating “where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock ‘n’ rollers, and drug trash” I figured I’d feed my vicarious self and bought it.

Longing for defunct scenes is hardly unique to artists. My farmer neighbors shake their heads and speak of the days when a man could feed a family with 25 Holsteins and a John Deere B. My mechanic plugs his code scanner into my minivan and dreams of spark plug gappers and four-barrel carburetors. I long to have participated in the moveable feast, to scribble in Parisian cafes, to comport and compose in Key West. And even though I know the history of Great American Writers running to Hollywood was symptomatic of late-stage wasting disease, as the plane descends to LAX in this artificially intelligent age there is still the romantic hope that one might yet squeeze a drop or two from the disintegrating digitized teat.

Didion & Babitz was a good read, Anolik vividly repopulating the streets and neighborhoods and city I’d visited just weeks earlier. The subagenda of the book seems to be to canonize Babitz and discredit Didion as a detached careerist. This seems a false comparison or at least of limited relevance, but as a backwoods autodidact what do I know? The main effect was to push me to reading both women’s work, and I found them a complement: Babitz smart and cutting and libertine and sensuous and more effective at conveying louche assignations and capitulations and the complications of coke-dust passing for stardust, whereas Didion’s cool eye and conservative considerations convey a more bloodless but no less vital take.

There is always a part of me that wants to be a Babitz. But I’ve always been too well-behaved. Too pragmatic. I may have left the church of my childhood, but a certain modesty prevails (a one-off producer cuss-blast notwithstanding). And yet I value the Babitzes who live large and crash hard in ways I neither dare nor desire and leave a record of it so that I may absorb their hard-won wisdom by proxy, without collecting the dents or doing the rehab. I feel the same about my chief unmet mentors: Waylon Jennings, Dylan Thomas, Steve Earle, the writer Jim Harrison.

In the introduction to my copy of Eve Babitz’ Slow Days, Fast Company, Matthew Specktor writes that California artists have long been suspected of lacking rigor, as if sunshine weakens the mind. But I feel sharp when I’m out there. Invigorated. Catching a buzz off the fumes of what remains. Babitz described the bright sprawl of it all as an antidote to claustrophobia, a place where she could work, “oblivious to physical reality.”

That’s it, or at least a bit of it. Country boy goes to the city to find some space. To sit alongside Sunset Boulevard in a Silver Lake café and work on a screenplay like every other person in the place. To get a little taste of the moveable feast. Even if it’s leftovers.

*     *     *

At some point in every Hollywood pitch session, someone on the receiving side leans forward and, in the regretfully solicitous tones of a therapist lauding your commitment but questioning your progress, says, “Unfortunately, we’re just not sure we see the engine.”

The engine, the engine, the engine—it recurs incessantly. Even my mechanic Tim down there at Tim’s Auto Care doesn’t obsess over engines at this level, and he makes his living off them.

I recognize the importance of the engine as a dramatic concept, but more often than not you get the sense it’s a defense against the danger of saying yes.

“But what do you see as the engine?” you’re asked, after you’ve spent 20 minutes describing every facet of the engine. It is baffling to do business with people who live and die by the engine but cannot find the engine.

“Well,” I replied in a pitch meeting not so long ago, “the very fabric of the community depends on a fascinating gaggle of volunteer neighbors responding to life and death—and sometimes goofy—emergencies several times a week on a split-second’s notice.”

“But in terms of the engine…”

The word is invoked as if it is a rune to be decoded, an elusive talisman, the secret key to a boffo box office, when in fact a quick flip through currently playing content tells you by and large the emperor has no engine, or it is at best what my neighbor Denny calls a “one-lunger,” and in the terms of actual viewership frequently irrelevant if not an impediment.

I was once privy to a pitch for a show predicated on a terminally ill man of wealth who gathers his estranged and feuding adult children and their partners in a small room of a big mansion, hands each of them a revolver containing a single bullet, informs them he is dying, then leaves it to them to decide how to split the inheritance.

At which point the studio rep leaned in and inquired, “But what do you see as the engine?”

I very nearly ate my shirt.

*     *     *

For several years I fiddled around with refashioning the book Population 485 as a stage play but always stalled out. Eventually I approached several regional theaters, told them I had written a play, and booked it. With signed rental agreements and non-refundable deposits as inspiration, I then holed up in a converted chicken coop for three days straight and finished the script. Then I hired a director and local actors, and we performed the play in tents, high school theaters, and jewel box opera houses leftover from the lumber baron days. Show after show sold out, and the ones that didn’t, almost did. Lest I sound a dumb braggart, let me calibrate: This was not a Hamilton! situation. Our tour never took us outside the Wisconsin state lines, and our tour buses were my 2002 Toyota minivan and my buddy Jono’s pickup truck. The point is that before every one of those shows, the lines and lobbies were dominated by the “usual” cultural arts crowd, and glad I was to see them. But thanks to word of mouth and targeted marketing the likes of homemade posters on firehall doors and community events posts in local weeklies, and appearances on the Moose Country 106.7 morning show, you also saw a good lot of volunteer fire and ambulance caps and jackets in the mix. These folks tended to cluster stiffly, their body language suggesting they’d be far more comfortable doing CPR or running into a burning building. But after the show, when those same folks spilled into the lobby to mingle with the cast and other attendees, they were transformed. Animated and voluble. Alternately teary-eyed and sparkling. Laughing and reminiscing. Sharing their stories. With each other, and with strangers.

What they saw on stage was not rah-rah hero stuff. There are sections of the script that play against preconceptions no matter which way you play. There were times you could feel the discomfort in the room. But what the production had—in its framing, in its refusal to pander or condescend, in its colloquialism—was veracity. The story neither polished up nor dumbed down.

We hustled that play here and there around the state for two years. Evidence has since emerged that I failed to mend the rend in our national soul with My Art. But how many heartwarming evenings the cast and crew and I enjoyed mingling in those post-show lobbies. Time and time again we heard, “This is the first play I’ve been to,” or “I haven’t been to a play since high school.” And then they’d point back to the theater, and give some variation on the line, “But that—that’s how it is.”

That quote echoed in my head last month when a Hollywood executive invited me to pitch my work but then sent a follow-up email preemptively admonishing me to avoid indulging in “coastal commentary.”

Irony is chewy: Whether being informed by a big city book designer that it’s irrelevant if the truck on the cover is a Chevy or a Ford when the subject is an International Harvester, or that folks won’t notice the difference between pumpkin orange and hunter orange, or that volunteer firefighters won’t buy memoirs, or farmers won’t buy novellas, or my neighbor Denny won’t attend a play, or that it’s “cater-corner, not kitty-corner,” I’ve spent most of my career trying to overcome coastal commentary. Or more to the point, coastal assumptions. My writing desk overlooks our literal back forty. The walk from my office door to my deer hunting stand takes less time than a PBS pledge break. The nearest coast is three hours north of here. It borders Lake Superior, and herewith my coastal commentary: Should you find yourself at Halvorson Fisheries in Cornucopia, try the smoked whitefish.

I briefly entertained the idea of road-tripping to Universal Studios in my rust bucket ’94 Chevy Silverado, dropping the snowplow blade at the gate (no need to swipe or scan), and strewing signed copies of Brian Leahy Doyle’s Encore! The Renaissance of Wisconsin Opera Houses. On occasion, it’s fun to remind my pals in New York publishing and L.A. production that sometimes out here in Middle America we think things up all by ourselves.

What is the engine?

The engine is veracity.

*     *     *

I possess a concealed carry permit less to carry than to keep my options open, but in Los Angeles it is a moot point forcing me to rely on common sense, situational awareness, and dumb luck. This fails to reassure some of my local rough-and-tumble pals, who regularly warn me off my trips to New York City and Los Angeles and cities in general. With dread certitude they conjure hellish wastelands populated by subway-stalking zombies and random pagan communists. It is odd to receive these trembling admonishments from men wrapped in tribal tattoos and belly band holsters, speed-loading nicotine pouches whilst leaning cross-armed against their jacked and stacked Punisher trucks. Perhaps they are too young to have memorized the lyrics to Hank Williams, Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive.”

I guess the thing here is, veracity cuts two ways. I’m not fearless, and I’m certainly not bulletproof. I don’t ride the New York subway staring at my phone. There are plenty of places in Los Angeles where I sure would hate to see my Waymo stall out. But I’ve learned firsthand the rhetoric we are fed is not always the reality served. I gripe about Hollywood misunderstanding me, but how much have I done to learn of them? “Them” being actual people. Turns out that assistant who sent me the “pulled away” email is a young Midwesterner who struck out on her own and is taking her shot. We’re both chasing our own variation on the California sun. Louis L’Amour was born in North Dakota but he wrote those cowboy books while living in Studio City.

The bookstore where I bought Didion & Babitz is in rural Pennsylvania. I had traveled there to observe and learn from a friend filming a tv series about a family fighting to keep their farm in the wake of the patriarch’s suicide. It’s the producer’s second rural American production, having decided rather than pitch veracity, he will simply go to the source and seek distribution on the back end. Decentralization is here, whether Hollywood is ready or not. While writing this essay I took a break from the desk to promote my novella on an agriculture podcast hosted by a corn and soybean farmer in Illinois. One does not always require a salon to convene a salon.

In both the production and the storyline, my friend’s series draws on churchgoers. This is not central to the production, it is simply so. The way my friend put it, the film isn’t faith-based, it’s faith-inclusive. I like the idea of that as applied in a secular sense to all of us, be we backwoods or big city. I’m always going to be more country than cosmopolitan. I love to swap stories with my friends in the world of rural rescue because we speak the same language. We’ve shared the same adrenaline, fear, and heartbreak. But I feel a similar camaraderie when I’m in the big city talking scripts and cuts and edits and yes, even engines. I’ve given light treatment in this piece to the way my coastal friends have enriched me in experience if not royalties. What I take home even if I don’t take home a deal. Their syntax can be an exasperation, but I’m happy to play in the sandbox.

Once upon a time deep into a book tour I was feeling bleak in a Days Inn alongside a midwestern interstate when the Ryan Adam’s song “La Cienega Just Smiled,” cycled into the mix and issued tinnily from my laptop. A ridiculous loneliness seeped through me as I beheld a vision of late-day low-angle sun setting sharp shadows across a boulevard I’d never traveled in a city I’d never seen. Now I’ve been, and the feeling is the same. Only now with a sweeter tang. I remain a cheesehead doofus, but my America is a little bigger. A little more resonant.

“In order to remember it,” Joan Didion wrote, “one must have known it.”

*     *     *

Among my favorite pastimes is the needle session, in which we stand around after the fire or the deer-skinning or the wedding and generally denigrate each other. Very little is off limits—your truck, your drinking, your mistress—as long as the jabs are delivered in good humor. I once participated in the free-for-all dissection of a welder’s dead marriage that was the demented inverse of group therapy but had everyone in stitches, including the man set to spring for alimony.

The thing is, we know each other. It is the familiarity, the shared experience, that keeps us from causing hurt. Or aiming to cause hurt. Of sliding into simple mockery. It implies a question I should ask myself as I go off on the syntax or the engine. When does the needle become a rant?

I listen in the big city, I listen on the back forty, and I wonder: Can we transcend resentment? Can we see each other as we used to see each other? Do we have any interest in each other’s stories? Do we have any interest in getting each other’s stories right? In sharing our veracities? Can we still stand shoulder-to-shoulder if we don’t see eye-to-eye? Or do we let it all bust loose, and feed it back through the baler? Start all over, see if the knot will hold?

*     *     *

Out there on the hay wagon things were pretty as a picture. Pure blue sky. Golden sun on golden straw. The field framed in trees. My father navigating, our slow-motion reconciliation complete. Him in his faith, me in my doubt, working the windrows, back and forth, ‘round and ‘round in Middle America. The ground is rough. The wagon bumps and lurches. I stack the bales the way my father taught me, an interlocking pattern set to flex but not fall. Somewhere in Los Angeles a good man is walking his parrot.

- end -