Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
I drive our son Jameson to school, and sometimes I have the radio tuned to Morning Edition on NPR. The timing is pretty good because now and then, around 8:45, I’ll catch a four-minute segment by a woman who’s an expert on trees.
Anyway, back in March she was talking about where chocolate comes from—cacao trees—and explaining that their seed pods grow straight from the trunk. That’s rare. Usually, seed pods hang from the branches. But in the cacao’s case, they need the help of howler monkeys, and those things weigh about 30 pounds, too much for the cacao’s slender limbs to keep from snapping, so the trees evolved. They needed the monkeys to break open their seed pods, and eat, and drop them—reproduction—and that meant the seed pods needed to grow from the trunk. How frickin’ cool is that?
And why would anyone think that they can do a better job than nature?
The Shepherd and the Tech Consultant
One day a shepherd saw a man approaching. The man was sporting new boots, a Tyrolean hat.
The shepherd was wary, of course, used to sensing things from a distance, and able to tell when birds-turned-quiet meant bear, or storm, or who knows but better keep an eye on this. She was wary, even annoyed, but she waved hello.
“I thought you’d be a man,” the man said, “and have a stick with a curly-cue hook,” but she didn’t shoot yet. Her gun was for emergencies.
Still, she wished that the wind would pick up, howl loud so she couldn’t hear him talking: About optimizing grazing with his chewing algorithm, and improving sheep cognition with his evolution software, and enriching the softness of their wool with his image-filter comb, a comb now killing it in Phase 2 beta-testing, a comb whose code lines were written by secret monks kept hidden with a cloaking program hacked from NASA engineers. “Just think of the sweaters,” he said, “and what they could do for Humanity”—
Once the echoes died down and the birds had resettled, the woods gave thanks by seeming greener. She could smell November—smoke gone, a certain cleanness. And no one in town would mind that she’d had to shoot a wolf.
Of course, artificiality is not the only problem. Another is the false promise of a shortcut. Those suckers are enticing, aren’t they? Even though they’re synonyms for mirage?
That’s sort of what this next poem is about. That, and the goodness of coffee:
The Mapmaker’s Story
Thing is, she understands people:
everyone looking for a shortcut.
So she draws them a road—
finally paved, but snake-narrow—
and a trestle bridge
to mark the turn.
The switchbacks
are going to be insanity,
and the drop-offs
steeper than they’re thinking,
and she leaves out the part about logging trucks
always hauling ass around a curve.
You can’t draw fog on a map,
so she doesn’t,
but she highlights the fork ahead in red:
either over the pass to the interstate,
or this way brings them back
and she’ll have the coffee waiting.
If people want to measure things in miles,
well, that’s up to them.
Even so, I am going to measure things now because this is the 90th piece I’ve written for this series, and this month marks eight years. I never thought I could do that. In fact, I never would have started in the first place if it weren’t for Simmons Buntin up and asking me to. First, he asked me for a “guest blog” (see “Trigonometry”), and then he asked me to turn that one-off into a series, which was flattering, of course, but also a bit intimidating.
And it still is. I mean, I’d like to make it to an even 100 pieces and a full nine years (like nine innings, or like nine planets if you still count Pluto despite its demotion to the minor leagues). Heck, I’d like to make it beyond those numbers since, unlike sports, I don’t need my younger days’ ankles to write this. I can write without running and jumping.
Where to go next, though, is always the question. And the same as almost every month, I don’t know. But that’s probably lucky, in a way, since it means I’ll get to discover what I’m thinking. Maybe that’s the reason, eight years ago, I chose “Old Roads, New Stories” as the name for this series, a series that led, in fact, to my book called Accidental Gardens, another title that seems fitting to me since this project took root by accident and then grew and kept on growing.
Thanks to everyone so far who has come along by reading. And thanks in advance for coming back next time just to see what might be up ahead.
Rob Carney’s first collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens, is out now from Stormbird Press, and his new book of poems, Call and Response, is available from Black Lawrence Press. Previous books include Facts and Figures, The Last Tiger is Somewhere, The Book of Sharks, and 88 Maps.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header image by Tom, courtesy Pixabay.
