Two Boys on the Bummel

My trip abroad has been postponed for a few days. My grandmother, commonly known as Chichi, became gravely (and rather suddenly) ill late last week, so Kate and I flew to Oklahoma on Friday to be with her. Tina came out over the weekend as well. As of last night her condition seems to have stabilized, but it's unclear for how long.

Moments like this are when you need your family the most. Siblings are especially helpful with this stuff, since they stand in exactly the same relation as you to those who are suffering - they share the same mothers, parents, uncles, grandmothers, etc. My mother and her brother have been sharing the burden of their mother's illness for some time - coordinating their visits, handling the details of hospitals and appointments and nurses, talking to each other about everything - and, difficult as all this is, I know it would be nearly unbearable for one of them without the other. My own brother's absence right now is therefore unignorable. Most days, in Nashville, I can pretend that he's out in the world somewhere, just as he always was, but in the midst of a crisis his absence is glaring, a great big Joey-shaped hole right at the middle of everything.

So yesterday I went out looking for him. Chichi had been pretty unresponsive the previous day, both Kate and Tina had flown home, Kent and Denise were heading back to Texas, and my mother had gone to work - everyone was trying to get on with living - and there wasn't much point in lurking around the house. In fact, there was a positive incentive to flee the house, since the home health-care ladies tend to favor a very high volume on the television that they watch in between visits to Chichi's bedroom, making it rather difficult to sit quietly with one's thoughts - or, indeed, the thoughts of anyone else - for even a few moments.

Early yesterday morning, then, I took Chichi's car out for a long drive. My first stop was Starbucks, a place that I'm normally much too good for, in order to buy a CD. I needed a CD because the only thing I had on hand was my mother's Fleet Foxes CD (a gift from me last December - a favorite of Joey's that, unlike many of his other favorites, I imagined she might enjoy), and I wasn't optimistic about my radio choices out in western Oklahoma, my intended destination. Usually I'd go to a record store for that sort of thing, of course, but they were all closed when I set off 8:30, and I couldn't think of anywhere to go - if I'm too good for Starbucks, I'm much too good for Wal-Mart or Target - until I remembered the Starbucks gift card that had been in my wallet for about five years and then further remembered having once seen a Decemberists CD at a Starbucks somewhere. So off I went, gift card in hand, to the local Starbucks and bought the new Paul Simon CD and a small (er, "tall") cup of coffee. Then I set off for Woodward.

I had been to Woodward once before, as a teenager, when my mother and Joey and I had driven to Denver via the Oklahoma Panhandle, but we had only passed through on the highway. Woodward is about 2.5 hours away, the only town of any size in that part of the state, and I knew nothing else about it except that it's not far from the area in which my German ancestors had settled, early in the last century or late in the penultimate one, and scraped out an existence in and around a sod house or two. My idea was to drive around this area and see if I could find any traces of what the area would have looked like a hundred years ago, and then to drive south through Roger Mills County and the Antelope Hills, one of the few areas of topographical distinctness in what is otherwise a flat and barren prairie.

It was a serendipitous day from the beginning. Arriving in downtown Woodward - a downtown that, unlike so many in that part of the state, had a number of thriving businesses and even a bit of foot traffic - I parked the car, walked around a corner, and happened upon the Polly Anna Cafe, a diner dating probably from the twenties or thirties that is the sort of place that was once common in all of these small towns. I sat at the counter, which hadn't changed any since it was installed, and ate eggs and hash browns with a cinnamon roll on the side. The latter was smothered in butter and then heated, so that when the waitress brought it to me it was sitting in a pool of melted butter, reminding me of the butter burgers Joey and I once ate in Milwaukee. As we had on that occasion, I showed it no mercy. On my way out, I noticed two calendars, gifts of local businesses, hanging behind the register. In Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon posits that the more calendars hanging behind a cafe's register, the better the food. I'd say that's about right in the case of the Polly Anna.

After brunch I walked around Woodward for a few minutes. It was very windy and nearing 100 (with 5-15% humidity, according to the radio man), so I didn't linger long, but on one sidewalk I did spot a large chalk drawing of Snoopy (tattooed, with a do-rag), so I knew that I'd come to the right place.

Next I drove over to Gage and Shattuck, the little towns near which my ancestors had lived. Gage often merits a mention on the local weather reports when the temperature gets unusually high, but it merits very little else. Shattuck is a bit more prosperous, but still rather forlorn. After I filled up the tank there I stumbled on the Shattuck Windmill Museum, an outdoor museum displaying a spectacular range of metal windmills that had once been used by settlers in the area to pump water (many smaller windmills still stand on their original locations all across Western Oklahoma, pumping nothing these days and usually not even spinning, but continuing to mark the spot of the original settlements, like pins on a map). All the windmills were spinning mightily in the blast-furnace wind, and as I wandered among them I found a reproduction of a sod house buried in a hillside - not, perhaps, unlike what my own ancestors would have lived in - and it struck me that to live in something like that would be to live a lot like a prairie dog or a ground squirrel, coming out into the desert heat to forage for food and retreating into a half-submerged hole to rest and sleep. There was also a little gift shop, with a couple of friendly ladies minding the place. The museum and its setting reminded me of visiting the giant twine ball with Joey in Darwin, Minnesota, another quirky monument in a desolate prairie town. Only on that occasion the gift shop had been closed and we had to be content with a few inadequate photographs of a giant ball inside a gazebo. We had, of course, driven well out of our way to get there, stopping for apple pie along the way, but we both agreed that it was worth the detour. In Shattuck, I bought a couple of postcards from the ladies in the gift shop and headed on my way. If I'd had more cash I would have bought a few hand-sewn windmill-shaped doilies and given them away as gifts.

Driving south out of Shattuck I put on the Fleet Foxes CD (I had, amazingly, had an NPR signal for most of the drive so far) and prepared to explore the Antelope Hills and the Black Kettle National Grassland. I had never been a huge fan of the Foxes, possibly because I hadn't spent enough time with them, but Joey loved them, especially their live shows, which he saw three times. He encouraged me several times to go see them - their harmonies, he said, were especially remarkable in a live setting - but I have never yet done so. I also hadn't ever really listened to their lyrics, but as I rolled down highway 283, through a landscape that looks like this,

I listened more carefully. It turns out many of their songs are about death, and quite a few are about brothers. The one that really caught my attention, as I topped a hill onto a magnificent view, is "Blue Ridge Mountains," which goes, in part, like this:

My brother, where do you intend to go tonight? 
I heard that you missed your connecting flight 
to the Blue Ridge Mountains, over near Tennessee. 

You're ever welcome with me any time you like, 
Let's drive to the country side, leave behind some green-eyed look-a-likes, 
So no one gets worried, no. 
So no one gets worried, no. 

But Sean don't get careless, 
I'm sure it'll be fine. 
I love you. I love you, 
Oh brother of mine.  

And so I knew that I had once again come to the right place.

Coming into the town of Cheyenne, I followed the signs to the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site, Oklahoma's only National Park Service site, which commemorates not a battle but a massacre of Cheyenne Indians by George Custer and his troops in 1868. I had read about the new visitor center there, which, unusually, is rather more sympathetic to the massacred than to the killers, but I hadn't expected to come across it on this trip (my atlas was from 1998). So I spent some time in the visitor center and walked through the massacre site - more briskly than I would have liked, since I wasn't wearing sunscreen and we had clearly bypassed 100 degrees some time ago - before pointing the car toward home. I listened to the Fleet Foxes again, then I listened to Paul Simon, and then I was home.

I had dinner with my father when I returned to Oklahoma City. We met at Ingrid's Kitchen, a German cafe and bar, and shared a basket of currywurst, which is a street-vendor delicacy that Joey and I had first sampled in Berlin (he had subsequently intended to read a book about currywurst, The Invention of Curried Sausage by Uwe Timm, but I don't know if he ever did). Then I went to visit my grandmother, who was alert and talkative for the first time in days. She told me - whispered to me, actually, since this was all she could muster - that she remembered Tina and Kate being there, remembered them talking to her and reading to her when they weren't entirely sure she was listening, and generally acted more like herself than she over the previous few days. I told her about my trip and about some other things, and we chatted for a longish time before more visitors arrived. It was the final serendipitous event of the day, and it convinced me to stay here for a couple of days more.

I recently learned the word bummel (via Jerome K. Jerome's novel, Three Men on the Bummel). It's a German word that's difficult to translate, but it approximates to a meandering stroll without fixed destination but which must end at a given time and place. In spirit it is akin, I suppose, to bumming around. Joey and I went off on many a bummel together (indeed, we even did so in Germany), and he went off on many more without me, alone and with others, though he sometimes fudged that last part about ending the journey at a specific time and place (just ask Tina about their first big road trip together). If I may get corny about it, it occurs to me that life itself is a bummel - or it should be, if you do it right. For Joey life was most certainly a bummel, an aimless and pleasurable ramble, and my life with him and without him is, or can be, much the same. I wish to hell he were here to visit Chichi right now, but I'm pretty sure I wandered into his path yesterday, and that will just have to suffice.