“Hi there,” Holly said, in that tentative way she always starts a conversation with a stranger. “We bought tickets for a bus to Rockford online and we were wondering if we’re in the right place.” The woman behind the counter seemed friendly enough. “Yes, I’ll make an announcement when your bus arrives.” “Is this all we need,” said Holly, presenting the e-mail confirmation we’d printed last night, a world away. “Yes,” she replied cordially. “Thank you,” I said as we stepped away from the counter to take up our seats on the nearby wrought-iron benches.
“Where is the bus to Waukesha?” A hook-nosed woman leaned over the counter as if to intimidate an answer out of the unflappable attendant. The woman behind the desk did not cut an imposing figure, but her confidence and competence seemed to eschew out of every pore on her caramel-colored face. Her cheekbones glistened as she mildly pursed her lips, responding coolly: “I’ll make an announcement when your bus arrives.” The flustered woman’s beak bobbed up and down; “Ok, ok, ok thanks,” she crooned, moving away across the cluttered bus terminal, eyeing some distant seat like a hawk searching for prey.
The woman behind the desk had drawn out the day’s paper, the local section, and sat back in her swivel chair scanning the front page. There was something so familiar in the glazed look she had, the way she seemed to recline completely out of her workspace and fall back into the depths of her own concerns. She paused, coming out of her reverie to fold back the page, and then slouched back against the worn plastic backrest. Other customers came up to her, talking in hushed tones about when the next buses would be coming and going; the lady behind the counter would lean in and listen attentively, answering their questions over and over again: “Yes, I’ll make an announcement when your bus arrives,” “I’ll make an announcement when that bus is here,” “Yes, I’ll make an announcement.” In between, she would fade back into herself, carefully folding the paper back into its proper shape once she’d finished reading it, her fingers doing the work while her soul strayed.
A few paces away another young black woman was mopping the floors in the entryway between two sets of sliding glass doors. When she finished a section, she would pick up the yellow “caution: wet floor” sign standing near the doors and swing it back and forth, fanning the newly-clean floors dry. With each drop, the two halves of the sign would clack together, announcing the nadir of each swing with a sharp crack! In a calm, steady rhythm, she fanned the floor, each snap following in the drudgery this woman’s entire form seemed to embody. Back and forth she walked, clacking her sign, drying the floor, pausing indignantly when a traveler would pass through the doors, causing her to break her tuneful toil. I couldn’t help but think of the Christmas carol “Sleigh Ride,” as the sounds of the bus terminal jingled along punctuated by the whip-crack of the cleaning woman’s “wet floor” sign.
The woman behind the desk made her announcement: “Bus 572 to Rockford has arrived at door five. 572 to Rockford.” Holly and I gathered ourselves and stepped out into the cold Chicago afternoon. Rain came pelting down just on the other side of the protective overhang the bus’s passengers all crowded underneath. In a blazing orange jacket, the bus driver began to heave luggage into the cargo area. “Where you goin’ ma’am?” he said to the older woman in front of me. “Rockford,” she replied; the answer seemed obvious to her. “Yeah, but where? The Clocktower? Bus depot?” The driver had been obligated to explain this bus’s stopping points plenty of times, so this last question was delivered with the same cool impatience displayed by the woman behind the desk. Before the elderly woman could respond, the bus driver’s sunglasses seemed to flash, his whole face darkening. “Ma’am you cain’t do dat!” He barked at a woman who had just pushed her black Samsonite on top of the other luggage. The woman looked up, bewildered; the confused look on her face was the same one she’d had when she asked me if this was the bus to Rockford or not a few minutes before. “What?” she squeaked. “Dis’ doh coulda’ fell on yo’ head ma’am. Always let da bus driva’ do it, ok?” He pointed at the cargo bay’s door, which hung precariously on its worn hinges. “Oh, ok,” she said meekly, ashamed to be the center of attention. “Where you goin’ ma’am?” He repeated his mantra. “Clocktower?” “Actually, I’m going to the Holiday Inn,” she replied in a last attempt to be helpful. “See, dat makes a difference,” the driver said, his ebony face contorting into a half-smirk, half-smile that clearly demonstrated his feelings towards the unwieldy passenger. He hefted her bag up out of its temporary nest and hurled it into the aft-most section of the cargo area. “Where you goin’ ma’am?” he said again to the older lady, who had been patiently waiting. “The clocktower,” she replied, and he whisked her bag into the appropriate section of the luggage compartment. I pushed the single piece of luggage Holly and I had packed for the trip up to the curb. “I’m going to the clocktower too,” I told him. “Well awright,” he said as soon as he my destination. Before I’d even finished my final syllable our suitcase had been launched into the bus. “Thank you sir,” I said, in that matter-of-fact way it always seems to come out. “Where you goin’ sir?” He had already moved on to the next passenger in line.
I have my father’s knees. His cinder-block calves still dwarf mine to this day, his thighs lack the definition I’ve gained through years of playing sports, but the thick ligaments and round, heavy kneecaps in between are the same. We share a distinctively wide patella covered by a tough, wrinkly patch of hardened skin, as well as the same odd bulge where the lower end of the quadriceps interjects onto the inside part of the knee’s upper half. There are other similarities to be sure, but our knees, those God made carbon copies of one another.
***
My family celebrated my eighth birthday by taking a camping trip to ClearLake, high in the Cascades. It was my first visit to this marvel of nature, where the water (supplied by melted snow-pack and purified by the lava rock from which the lake itself is carved) could yield a crystal-clear view of submerged tree trunks and fish eighty or a hundred feet down. The views of the mountains, the lake itself, and the lush, thick forest we were surrounded by were all marvelous, but my attentions throughout the trip were with a small manmade object my parents stashed underneath the small stack of firewood. I had been clearly instructed not to touch the hatchet, nor to use it to chop anything (especially my brother). On the final day of the trip, however, while my family was distracted with making preparations to leave, I snuck the hatchet out from under the woodpile and began to carefully hack at a gigantic stump just outside of my parents’ eye-line. Whack! I drove the hatchet down into the wood, watching it cleave a thick wedge out of the bark. Up again, arms outstretched above my head, then Whack! I pierced the stump again and again, using both hands, then one hand, perfecting my technique so that I could chop wood ambidextrously. A steady rhythm of muffled thuds crept away from me through the forest, my undeveloped arms not yet capable of delivering a loud, ringing death blow. I hacked away at the stump, circling it, pounding it again and again, until the hatchet came swinging down and there was no whack. I looked down from my intended target to find the hatchet’s blade slicing into my right knee, my arm stopping its course in slow motion. Too late I heeded my parents’ warning and dropped the weapon, neither screaming nor crying, but simply staring as the small, thick line began to ooze crimson. I had the presence of mind to put the hatchet back in its place and concoct a brilliantly foolish story about falling and cutting myself on a lava rock before approaching my parents, a river of blood now pouring down my calf. “Mom,” I said calmly, fighting back the pain and humiliation lurking in the back of my throat. “Mom, I think we need to go to the hospital.”
The nearest hospital was at home in Eugene, so my parents drove me there. I told the doctor in Urgent Care that I’d fallen, and he stitched up the one-inch laceration on the inside part of my knee after cleaning the wound and finding (believe it or not) not a single sign of lava rock. I wear the thick scar to this day, though its ghastly purplish hue has toned down some in the intervening years. The stupidity, the wound, the scar, those are mine; the knee is still my father’s.
***
One cloudy February afternoon, the soggy kind that Eugene is prone to, my baseball team was practicing squeeze bunts on the turf field we used during the winter months. The pitcher would lob a ball towards the plate, a coach would roll a ball out onto the field to simulate the bunt, and the runner on third would try to score successfully. As the catcher, it was my duty to tell the fielders if we had a viable chance of getting the runner out at home. The tall lanky freshman pitcher tossed in a pitch, my red-haired teammate Chase took off from third, playing the part of the runner, and the coach who stood beside me rolled a hard grounder down the third-base line. Chase came on like a steam engine, but his huffing and puffing was drowned out by my hoarse shouting, “Four! Four! Four!” The third baseman fielded the ball cleanly, expertly flipping it from glove to bare hand. His crisp throw sent the ball into the hard leather of my catcher’s mitt with a sharp Whack! I dropped onto my knees, barricading the precious plate as Chase recognized he’d been beat. His foot cranked up underneath him as he careened into a hard slide towards my left side in a last ditch effort to slip past. I locked out my knee, extending my leg to its full length, and caught his upturned cleats with my shin guard. My leg didn’t move, but my knee certainly did, wrenching over sideways and sending a signal of agony that was entirely unique in my experience. There was no momentary numbness, no presence of mind; I simply crumpled over backwards, my eyes welling with tears. Chase helped me to the trainer’s room where I was told that, though I hadn’t torn anything, I would certainly need to stay off of my left knee for at least a week.
During the next season I started to wear thick neoprene braces on both of my knees (the left’s was thicker) whenever I would play any sports. The braces slowed me down a little when I’d play racquetball with my best friend, though I still managed to beat him plenty of times. Baseball had developed my right arm into a powerful weapon, especially on the racquetball court, where I could out-hit him by a wide margin, even if I couldn’t outrun him. I remember once crashing my knee into one of the hard concrete walls at full speed while making a play on a hard hit ball. Whack! I cranked the forehand shot into the opposite corner just before meeting with the immovable object that was to stop my forward momentum. I fell to the ground and writhed around in pain until the burning daggers retreated and allowed the dull, ever-present throbbing to resume its duties. I wouldn’t stop playing though; the love of these games, and the camaraderie that came with them is mine; but my knees, those are still my father’s.
***
Sometimes when I would lay awake at night, I could here my dad’s heavy footfalls on the stairs just outside my room, the creaking of each step punctuated by a pop or crack like that of a dried twig snapping in your hands. He’d reach the top of the stairs and the pops would fade away as he passed by my door, moseying down the hallway to bed. One day, after years of hearing these familiar sounds, I was caught off guard when, while climbing to the second floor of my high school in a deserted stairwell, I recognized the echoing sound of twigs snapping. I paused, then shifted my weight onto the next step. Though no sound came, I felt my knee creak like an old rocking chair sitting on top of worn floorboards. I took the next step, my left leg creaking this time, the feeling building in my mind until it burst forth as a sharp crack that rang off the stairwell’s concrete walls. I stepped again, and again, until I’d reached the next floor, the cacophony of pops still ringing in my head. I couldn’t help but laugh to myself: my dad, the professor, had skipped out on PE because he didn’t like sports, learned the game of baseball from a book for his sons’ sakes, and has knees that crackle like a bag of popcorn. Believe it or not, I have my father’s knees.
The empty two liter bottle stood naked, without its Diet Pepsi label or royal blue cap, prayerfully awaiting its execution. Fifteen paces of cropped, sun-bleached grass separated the victim from the tips of my Nike running shoes. “Here you go. Safety’s on,” said Bernie, handing me the Sig-Sauer. I took the pistol delicately, too delicately for such a masculine exchange. Such caution wasn’t allowed in front of my future father-in-law, who had finished casually blasting a Coke bottle to smithereens with a jauntily aimed .357 snub-nosed revolver. I shook my head, clearing out any fear as the fingers of my right hand closed confidently around the grip of the Sig. My left painted greasy sweat marks on the slide as I pulled it back, cocking the weapon’s hammer into the firing position. Slightly adjusting my stance, I raised the gun to eye level, simultaneously clicking the safety off with my right thumb.
A warm July breeze caused the bottle to shudder on the uneven ground of my in-laws’ pasture. Bernie stood beside me with a mostly empty can of Coors gripped wistfully in his left hand, the smoldering .357 hanging from his right, his eyes locked on my intended target. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, wondering if I would be able to impress him with a clean kill on the first shot. I had a knack with guns, a sort of natural talent that I had never discovered until, at the age of 15, one of my uncles took me to a firing range, put a 30.06 in my hand and said, “Let’s give it a shot.” On that day I hit a six inch wide paper plate rapped in aluminum foil from 200 yards with a rifle that had been manufactured forty years before I’d even been born. I hit the plate four times in a row, standing awkwardly with the heavy weapon weighing down my underdeveloped arms, the large industrial earmuffs making it nearly impossible to line my right eye up with tiny glass circle that was the rifle’s sight. On this July day, however, two years and a few hundred rounds later, I wasn’t encumbered by such inconveniences. I had assumed a well-practiced half-turned stance, easily held the pistol steady at arms length, and buried my chin in my right shoulder so that my good eye (the left one oddly enough) lined up with the gun’s irons. The gentle breeze ruffled my t-shirt and I saw the bottle shiver once more, this time as I aligned the three pieces of the gun’s sights just below the bottle’s middle. With a slight correction to compensate for my right-handed trigger pull, I had come to the moment of truth. My worries about Bernie’s reaction, the bottle’s seeming unwillingness to hold still, my unconventional firing position no longer mattered as the entirety of my mind concentrated on the musculature that would depress the Sig’s trigger.
The instinctive flinch that accompanies any loud noise can be tempered with practice, but such a roar as this weapon made shattered any habituated steadiness that I may have possessed. My eyes slammed shut in the millisecond it took the rather large bullet to escape the pistol’s barrel, its shell casing cartwheeling out of the breech, and travel the fifteen short yards to the bottle’s right side. As my eyes slammed back open, so too did the bullet careen into and through the Diet Pepsi bottle, which, despite having a large portion of its upper half removed in a single split-second, refused to topple over backwards. It stood perfectly still, a stillness that possessed me as well, enabling my arms to grow steadier, my mind to quickly calculate the position upon which I would place my sights, my finger to delicately apply the needed force to release the weapon’s hammer and hurl a second volley into the proud bottle. This time there was no flinch; neither was there a roar. The bottle was caught square in its middle, toppling backwards this time as the bullet ripped straight through, nearly cleaving its victim in two. Seeing my quarry fall, I moved to finish it off with a bang. Aiming slightly lower, I fired a third and final time, my arm’s absorption of the recoil the only sensation I seemed to feel. The bottle was hit in its upturned base near to the ground, the large caliber bullet causing the earth beneath it to jump up and hurl the bottle in a high arcing spiral to its final resting place a couple of feet away.
I unknotted my shoulders, lowering the volatile weapon and quickly engaging the safety. Bernie turned to me and said, “Mmm hmm umm hmm mmmm.” I saw the smile on his face, recognized the approval in his dancing eyes, but could not make out a word. I cocked my head to the left so that he spoke directly into my right ear. “You want to try the .357?” I nodded, trading pistols with him in a daze. It dawned on me that because of the odd position I had placed my head in to be able to aim with my left eye, my left ear had also been pointed directly towards the bellow of the Sig Sauer. When the first shot had gone off, my left eardrum was torn apart by the powerful waves of sound emanating from that twice deadly weapon.
I had not been wearing the oversized earmuffs my uncle had mandated on the firing range. I had perforated an ear drum, resulting in temporary hearing loss and permanent hearing deficiency in my left ear. I had nearly killed one of my most valuable senses executing a plastic bottle to impress a man who already loved me like a son. The high pitched squeal in my left ear that attends every silent moment tells me these facts. My own regret does the rest.
I feel the rhythm of city living every night when I go to bed: the light from the street lamp that sings between thin plastic blinds; the brassy wailing of fire engines’ horns; the smooth tenor of police sirens accented by the roar of a Crown Vic’s V8; the pitchy soprano of the twittering ambulances; the diesel monster trucks rumbling by. They all mingle together to form an insipid chorus barring any possibility of sleep…for a moment anyway. Then silence, and I remember that Forest Grove is a sleepy little town, just on the suburban side of “boondocks” qualification. It’s not that much different from Rock Falls, Illinois, another quaint little village built up by farmers and folks looking to stake their own claim in life, where my dad, and his dad, and his dad’s dad, were all born and raised. It’s a place where I’ve always dreamed of settling down, carrying on the family legacy of good old-fashioned hard work, ingenuity, and small town living that delivered a joyful and prosperous life to my grandparents and propelled my father to get the hell away as fast as he could.
My dad is no farmer. He’s certainly not a steel mill man (though it wouldn’t much matter now since the mill in Rock Falls has been closed for decades). He demonstrated this clearly when, during the summer after high school he spent working in the wire-fence section of that factory, he chose to pass his breaks out on the loading dock with a book, instead of sharing a smoke with the other men in his crew. The next summer my father wasn’t hired because his foreman had given him a poor review, citing as his chief complaint the fact that he “read too damn much.”
So it’s easy to see why my dad might try to find any way possible to escape such a suffocating town. He married my mother while they were both still in college, and the two of them made out pretty well in a series of jobs in and around universities in Wisconsin and eventually Minnesota until my older brother and I came along, cementing our family into a nice community in St. Paul, Minnesota. My dad went back to school for his PhD in philosophy, my mom worked for some big insurance company, and my brother and I beat up on each other (it was cold and we were indoors a lot). I rode the bus to school, I had friends on the block, and I could see skyscrapers from the park just up the street. It was city living at its finest, without all the crime, smog, or filth that normally comes with it, and I thrived on it.
Yet most of my favorite childhood memories involve time spent not in St. Paul, but Rock Falls: bouncing around in the little red trailer my grandfather towed behind his John Deere mower as we cleared brush or moved dirt; daring my brother to touch the electric fence the neighbors used to keep their horses in the pasture; hitting walnuts with fifty-year-old baseball bats into the cornfield less than a hundred yards from my grandparents’ house. After hearty dinners I heard amazing tales of my grandfather’s exploits during his childhood in the Great Depression, old war stories about Korea, anecdotes from my grandmother’s days in teaching…anything and everything that I could soak up during my time in Rock Falls I tried to hold on to, even as my life continued during the week back at home.
Our family moved to Eugene, Oregon when I was only seven, making visits to Illinois a rarer occurrence even as I was entering my most formative years. As I experienced the homeless veterans, smelly hippies, and ne’er-do-well college students that plague Eugene, Rock Falls became an idyllic place that I refused to let go of. I can’t say that I wasn’t changed by years of city living; I’m just as plugged in, tech savvy, and text-message happy as any other twenty-year-old. And I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing. The truth of the matter is, though, I’m still a little bit country after all these years, if only so that I remember where I come from, what I’m here for, and how I can achieve the happiness that we all so desperately seek. My answer lies about two hours west of Chicago down I-88, where generations of my family created success and happiness through the cardinal virtues of hard work, discipline, ingenuity, and love, virtues I hope to carry with me for the rest of my journey through life.
