KHRIS:
The screen gave me two news stories Monday morning: King Kong had burned to death in a back lot fire and Brazil and Peru were planning a highway through the Amazon to increase trade with China. I swallowed both with my cereal and agreed to go strawberry picking with my mother.
This and the dozens of other “hey, do you wanna…” fundraiser candy bar ideas she’d tried to hook me on in recent days were part of the burden of coming home. I don’t do it often, and never for so long. When I do, the fragile tower of newspaper clippings and legal pad notes are pulled from her drawer in our coffee table and called out loud as if taking role for Mr. Berrypicking, who stands in the room with us, next to Ms. Bowling, Mr. Canning, and others. Three weeks is just enough time for her to realize the dream concierge inside herself and introduce both of us to the whole lot. Today, we would be fruit-pickers. Tomorrow, something different. In this way, home stopped being home for both of us while I was around. To this new place she was just as foreign as I, but she felt obliged to be my tour guide here anyway.
Her carriage is a mid-90’s oven with roll down windows and the wrong time on the console. With the timer set to 20 minutes for the ride, we begin baking in it with one arm each on our respective sills. A batallion of worker bees is deceased on the fuzzy battlefield under the rear window. A radio station that used to play Smooth Jazz, that was bought out and switched to Top 40, at the moment seems to have been bought out again to bring back dance from the early 90’s. My mom is in her mid-50’s and doesn’t really care about any of it.
“Isn’t this great? I’m so happy that this is my ride to work everyday,” she says.
She’s pointing outside of the car. Black, yellow, black, yellow, black, green, green, green, beige with blue shudders, green, beige with blue shudders, green. Sherman Oaks. Foral Valley. Oakdale Terrace. Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Home. Home?
I watch the newly paved old roads through a rim of dust and pollen on her windshield, trying hard to see what is seen by eyes that never left. Impossible. All memories are back lots, but upon my return to the ones I know, I find new ones assembled all around me. I am late for whatever has happenned. I stage the story for myself in pieces:
Hollywood the Idea, that naturally adept traveler who knows no city limits, is light enough to recline on a jet stream hammock for a one way trip around the world. He leaves as a boy with halos of blond curls for hair and a forgivably plump belly. He finds sustenance in himself as he naps thoughtlessly in the skies, letting his plastic trinkets, smiles, ideals, reality, whatever slip from his loosely cinched pack into gravity without discretion.
They fall to the earth. With each trip around the globe, the Idea becomes more comfortable, too comfortable, and he lets more and more fall, he drops his waste overboard as well, and it all falls to the earth. After decades of traveling, the Idea is old and tired, open to complacency, drooling over the edge, fat legs dangling, his shoes sliding off, his watches next. He needs a caretaker.
A scattered trail of Cul-de-sac craters crisscrossing America marks decades of impacts. From the shrapnel seeds of each Thing, scattered in natural symetry around the curbed rim of every crater, identical 3 bedroom monuments grow, coated in vinyl for posterity. That could mean that the old man, that lazy traveler, has finally died. His hammock is sagging into a smile now, heavy with the dead weight of his near naked body. His gray beard is tangled, his stomach obtuse, he must be too much for simple clouds to carry. Maybe he has himself fallen and this is where he has collapsed upon landing.
That is one way it could have gone. However it happenned, I wasn’t around to see it. All I have are the sounds of tires peeling off the asphalt, cars passing each other, and a view. The aftermath. From the road, the headstones seem silent. No sound could carry across that graveyard lawn. Each one looks abandoned, but is no doubt kept on respiration by walking lungs who have day jobs. A lot of trees have been cut down, a lot of houses cut out after that, each one pasted in a sore. The wildlife has become more visible as a result. More invisible, too. Driving past, you see ducks and deer on the lawn. They’re really there, but they’re evocoative before anything else. Even buried in the soil beneath them, the Idea is still light enough to float to the surface for people to carry him everywhere in their own personal hammocks of their subconscious as they drive by. The Surgeons of Suburbia know this…
My mom is just trying to be sweet to me and show me around.
20 minutes done. We get to the farm by turning left after the on-ramp to the interstate. Shady Brook Farm was never anything I thought of as important to me, but it was constant, and when you’re growing through so much change as kid, you like to have a Shady Brook Farm to give you a hay ride once a year. It wasn’t my idea to come today, but I would have taken a hay ride if it were offerred.
I squeeze out of the oven, careful not to tap the Excursion parked next to me with my door. Its alarm beeps and the driver walks past me toward the barn. The tie waving over his shoulder pulls open the curtain on a pretty typical tragedy. The brook was never there to begin with and there is certainly no shade here, but this parking lot used to be dirt. There is still lots of red and white paint, lots of flowers, plants for sale, but the barn is new? With that guy’s cologne in my nose I try to take in the change. The barn was going to be different from the one from the one in my childhood no matter what, but now it’s actually a reconstructed replica of what used to be there, a farm themed, old fashioned feeling laxative for guilt heavy gaz guzzlers to ingest on their lunch break.
My mother’s voice turns briefly to audio tour as she narrates the old barn into a documentary, edited in real time. She notices my head leaning back in awe as we float through the door like passengers on some indoor log flume ride.
“Yeah, they got rid of that old barn, I can’t believe it, that was built by the Amish,” my concierge reports from the History database in her head.
Inside, the new barn is a small cross section of exposed, unfinished beams, stacks of homemade jams, banana butter, pomegrante butter, apricot-plum-apple spiced butter. I don’t see butter anywhere. I do see a lot of glossy fruits and vegetables. The apples are stacked uncomfortably on top of each other, but shining, like cheerleaders in that ridiculous “human pyramid.” They’re the same Washington brand that the chain grocers sell, except they’re surrounded by more unfinished wood than the ones in most grocery stores, which makes a more artful frame than tile and colored plastic paneling. Besides, plastic isn’t organic. But neither are these apples. Or this place, for that matter, no matter how many signs they have. The two cashiers in plaid aprons and thick glasses are set up in small booths hammered together with a couple dozen planks. White haired men in overalls or plaid shirts and cut off jean shorts hurry like paiges between us, carrying boxes of produce to the shelves. All of the details without being particular.
The registers wink at the Washington apples.
“Hey, if you’re here next Halloween, when they come for the hayrides, I could be an abacus and you could scratch that wax off yourself and put some bruises on,” one says. “Maybe a wormhole too, ok?” adds the other.
The apple sitting alone atop rows of others rolls one spot to the left, resentful.
“Look, you know I won’t be around for that.” A pale hand floats overhead, pauses, then passes further away. “Let’s do it now, before I go…”
The far register thrusts open its mouth and the cashier makes change. My mother is asking about how many berries we need to make one jar of jam.
“Ah, nevermind, forget it,” the near register says, feeling guilty. “It’s already happenning. You won’t miss anything. We don’t need to dress up, we’ve got this place.”
The apple doesn’t respond because a different wrinkled white hand is palming its entire body. The hand slips the apple into a plastic bag, drops about a dozen more on top, and spins the bag shut. It’s lowered into a basket carried by a freckled forearm, with the handles sitting naturally next to two complicated silver bracelets. Also in the basket are corn starch, small containers of cinnamon and cloves, a bag of sugar, a bag of flour, and apple butter.
The cashiers exchange confused nasal groans over their shoulders while entering produce codes into the registers. Neither of them know how many berries we need. We all shrug. I grab one of the free cardboard boxs next to the counter and ask for directions to the fields.
We pass a series of plants for sale next to a sign that reads “Deer-Resistant Shrubs” before finding ourselves on the edge of dozens of long rows of small plants that come half a foot off the ground. There are thousands of them. In one direction, they run to forest, and in the other, to the highway. My mom takes off to begin picking. I walk a little slower, a little more timid, trying to concentrate on what I’ve imagined to be the simple joy of picking fruit, without worrying about where this may fit into the theme of the place.
But I keep getting distracted by the scorching of the asphalt treadmill running next to the field. The berries stop within feet of the road’s edge, as if the field would keep going if the road were not there. In its current state though, the area wouldn’t allow that. There is an office park of about four cubed buildings on the other side of the highway. I don’t remember that being there, either. It used to be a small grass lot with no trees, surrounded, like the strawberry field, by highways. Maybe by that point it wasn’t much of a lawn anyway. It watches the cars pass, listening to the sound of friction between two man made things bugling for more.
“Khristopher!”
All of this dried tar makes me feel like the island of dirt I’m standing on is only here because it hasn’t been dug far enough into yet, like underneath all dirt the earth has always had a layer of perfectly laid concrete, already lined in yellow or white, and we’ve just begun discovering it. I’m late for this, too. We all might be. Not because we had any appointment, but because this was bound to happen from the start. Collectively, we have an appetite, and in the strangest methods of satisfying it, we negotiate presumptively with nature to leave her wartorn outposts like this farm. We won’t pick this scab off now, we’ll work around it. We don’t want to harm anyone, we’re just trying to fulfill our potential.
“Khristopher!”
She’s calling from somewhere far away. I’m standing in the same field, a fearless scarecrow surrounded at once by the office park across the highway, hay rides, model houses, the freshly cut wood of the new barn, deer resistant shrubs, a paved parking lot. They stand tall over my consciousness, distant family members leaning in toward each other until their temples press together into a canopy, its underside studded with their dead-eyed stares. I see that underside while the sun blasts their anonymously uniform topside. In their huddle they’re watching me wrestle with what they’re calling hallucinations. I do not look well to them wriggling around in my hospital gown. “Increase the IV,” one suggests. “Don’t worry, it’ll pass,” says another. Behind eyelids clenchled like vices, I am razing their back lot to the ground, slashing it and burning it appropriately, champion arsonist of insurance company buildings shaped like bricks but covered in glass panels to reflect me and my complicity with the smugness of a brawler in a charity match.
There isn’t nearly that much hype here though, not in the field. No crowd at all actually, except for a few families of three with little girls dressed in flowery patterns. Sun. Clouds. Nature. No nicknames or metaphors for myself. Just me, and the rows of berry plants, and the silent glass across the highway emphasizing the reflections of everything around me.
“Khristopher!”
Taking a breath. I’m holding the most geometrically perfect strawberry I’ve ever seen. The skin is smooth and swollen protectively around every seed in minature diamond shaped pockets. I turn it in my fingers. The stem is torn and my fingertips are wet. There are so many symetrical compartments on this one berry that it seems capable of housing each one of the thoughts I’ve projected onto it during the moment I’ve had it. One for escape. One for the innocence of a strawberry field. One for starring at the clouds and forcing myself to do something playful like finding familiar shapes in them. One for knowing better. One for wishing I didn’t. One for rebellion. One for seeds who have no choice over where they are planted, and must grow into fruit in whatever place that is, just to be picked. And so on, until each of the berry’s seeds are full with new thoughts. I drop it into the box with about a dozen others.
“Cheese and crackers! I’m getting some good ones over here!”
My mother is still calling from across the field, waving one arm in the air as if she were on the back of a ship leaving the harbor for some happy destination. To her, that’s probably about where she is, and where she continues to go everytime she walks over another row, further out.
“You’ve got to get over here, Khristopher! Get out of those first few rows! Everybody picks there! This is where the good, oh my god, look at these…”
As I get closer, I see that she’s supporting two carefully stacked handfuls of berries with her wide chest that’s sliding beads of sweat into her black v-neck t-shirt. She mentioned earlier that it went well with her new pants, and her hair, and her accessories . We’ve always lived opposite affluence, but she takes pride in dressing up for occasions such as this. Sun-glasses and wild hair make a perfect compromise for the noble colonist. I surrender control of the box to her and we kept picking.
A farmhand-looking man with wrinkled legs bounds over the rows in our direction. His accomplished mustache casts a shadow on the chest of his tanktop when he turns to acknowledge us.
“Hey, do you know where the good strawberries are?” my mother asks him.
“No, I’m just passing through. I’d try a few more rows back though. People don’t want to walk that far.”
“I knew it!”
She scurries over the next few rows as quickly as she can with her head down, looking for the next darkest berry while coming ever closer to the highway.
That highway is her Pacific. She needs it there. Without it, she might fall in love with the expertise she’s feeling for as long as she can speculate that there is another row to step over. As long as the highway is there she knows where to stop, even if the sly tide of that sea continues to lather and erode the shores where we’re working. She doesn’t see that happenning now because she won’t be around to see the results when they come. That’s left to me and mine, those born into the e-age, who are better equipped than our parents with the knowledge of sailable seas to naviigate with drop down menu travel and options, so many options for feeling exploration. You don’t have to be a seaman or a merchant to do it. Anyone can.
If only we knew whether or not the feeling of exploration alone, a single, perpetuated bodily flush, will validate us chasing our own heels around the globe on the day we return to this same modern fruit patch, only to find that it has rotted, or been paved over by another, or perhaps altogether forgotten. Then it will seem new, and perhaps the excitement will make the journey worth continuing, becuase there is still more to be had. If only we could be outside of this tiny planet to see ourselves then, circling the Earth happy-go-lucky, each voyage of discovery wrapping a new belt on the straight jacket whose buckles have never been capable of holding anything squeezed so tightly. Yet here I am, bound myself, following my mother of a past generation, accepting the charm of fruit picking labor that propels the same circular journeys backward over what has already happenned. We too will end up here, where we began.
We pick strawberries until we have what we think to be enough to make jam. We find our way back over the rows toward the barn, the swollen red berries in our box that said “Fresh Picked Berries” in blue cursive on its side. Even without the quotations, the eyes don’t read any of these words alone. The eager pendulum of each letter in that script brings you up and takes you down, back and forth in time between radio broadcasts and red handled kitchen utensils, pilots and polka dots, and the muddy concrete being watered by ticking sprinklers that spit near the berries you just picked under the supervision of a state highway. Riding on that swing you see America—that box of low-carb Jiffy muffin mix that brags progress and avoids it at the same time. And they see my hands, holding on to everything you just saw in that instant, which is what I came to the farm to put into a box and take “to go.”
“Are your fingers red?” she asks.
“No, just kind of pink,” I say.
“Well that’s cause you didn’t go deep enough. I was way out there…”
She had been. And her fingers are redder than mine.
“That’s just because you squeezed too hard when you were taking them. That’s juice on your fingers.”
“I know, that means I got the good ones,” she says.
Always after the good ones.
It didn’t really matter whose strawberries were better at this point because they were all in that same box. Competition became more meaningless later when,after smoothies, syrup, fruit cocktails, and jam, we still had strawberries left over to rot.
They rotted in that complementary cardboard coffin four days later when “Fresh Picked Berries,” wasn’t true anymore. But that box, slid into the same trash bag as the newspaper, still read that way when the garbage men took it for their pile, and it will, until we recycle it into a different useful legacy.
Nothing was really harmed by the back lot fire in Hollywood except replicas. “We have duplicates of everything,” a company executive said afterward. “Nothing is lost forever.” So it is with the King Kongs of the world, their empires, and their state buildings. Even if my mind were powerful enough to actually raze that office park to the ground, the office park would appear somewhere else, because it’s in me now. So are the headstone houses and the barn. The buildings I see might not look the same at all, but they will be identical in their imposition, which will prod the same feelings from me when I see them, and then they will be tangible again, like they were well before my lifetime.
The back lot can burn, but the few hours when it was alive, and what it looked like then make it immortal. As are empires, as was our fearless traveler, who only seem to be selective about the people and things they include and exclude. Borders are simple legal matters. True empires dominate through simple exposure, knowing that memory lasts longer than any life, any country, any leader. Just show it to them, it says with confidence. They will remember.
The screen showed two news stories Monday morning. I ate them with my breakfast.
