Month: November 2023

We’re having a smallish (26×30) new building put up on our site. At the moment, the foundation footing and frost walls have been poured, and the excavator is here to backfill and level around it before the slab insulation is laid and the finish concrete work is done.

Oakley Allen has been in the excavation and logging business for seven years, after having spent about thirty before that working for his uncle’s well-drilling business (he started there when he was twelve). The crew consists of Oakley and his son Levi… and a remarkable array of equipment. Have a look at this photo, taken at 11am today.

From left to right, we have:

• a Ford F350 one-ton pickup with a dump bed
• A Chevrolet Silverado 3500HD one-ton pickup with a dump bed, plow and plow hydraulics
• (obscured by the two posts) a New Holland Super Boom Loader
• (obscured by the big excavator) a Wacker Neuson EZ28 excavator
• a Deere 160C LC excavator

Their big tandem-axle dump truck wasn’t in use today. Plus he’s got hand tools ranging from saws and shovels to pneumatic tampers.

This two-person business has equipment that, if all bought new today, would cost well over a million dollars. The concrete contractor, Tony Genier, has at least that much equipment of his own, plus the occasional arrival of a vast concrete mixer from JP Carrara. Then the electrician Eric Haynes, the teams from Green Mountain Power and Vermont Television, Dillon Hepburn who dropped the trees that were trucked by Jordan Martelle to the Woodell and Daughter sawmill to be turned into frame members by our general contractor Glenn Tarbell. This simple one-room building will have had twenty people on the site at one point or another, supported by at least five million dollars worth of equipment.

And that, friends, leads us to today’s vocabulary word: amortization. (A word that hardly any of these folks would use.) Once you buy an asset for business production, you need to pay it back a few dollars at a time through charging more for its use than you paid for it. (The self-employed contractor or small farmer is, without having ever read Marx, teetering right on the border between the MCM and the CMC economies.) I wrote a novel not long ago (called & Sons, after the common business names of so many small contractors) centered on a Nebraska corn farm that made over half a million dollars in commodity sales in one season, but only netted its owners the equivalent of about eight dollars per hour. Lots of money comes in, and almost all of it goes out without having stayed in the contractor’s pocket for even a minute.

During the California Gold Rush, most of the fortunes weren’t made by miners, but instead by merchants and suppliers who sold stuff to those miners. So too John Deere and New Holland and Chevrolet have made their money up front, and Oakley and his son scramble from one day to the next to try and earn it back. It ain’t makin’ any money just sittin’ there, one might say in the vernacular. You learn to run it all, you learn to repair it all, and only then do you get to practice your specialization.

There’s no moral to the story today, just a new appreciation for people who learn a trade and then have to learn to run a business alongside it.

Example One. I’m having some jaw pain this week. I’m pretty sure that I can track it back to dental work I had done about eight months ago. Other dentists have wanted to take out that oddly placed eyetooth since I was about twelve years old. It was never really in the way, wasn’t doing anything, but my new dentist thought that its absence would help me clean in a less crowded location.

Well, of course, all the other teeth around it had been held apart for fifty years, leaning against that harmless little canine wedge. So now that it’s gone, everything else is moving a little bit. (That’s the principle behind orthodontics, of course, that your teeth can be moved at glacial pace.) It hurt a lot about three or four weeks after the removal, was fine all summer and fall, but now we’ve hit a new moment where those subterranean forces have reached a tipping point and need to find a new resolution. Invisible and unnoticed for six months, and then all at once, an uncomfortable week of motion. 

Example Two. One of our neighbors attempted suicide last week. He wasn’t successful, for which we’re grateful, but it took all of us by surprise. But now that we’re hearing from his family about what’s gone on over recent years, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone at all.

He always seemed pretty close to his animal nature, doing the same thing day after day, week after week, season after season. He worked around town, mowed lawns, plowed driveways, unchanged for the dozen or more years I’ve known him. But on Thursday, he hit a new moment where his subterranean forces reached a tipping point and needed to find a new resolution. Invisible and unnoticed for a decade, and then all at once, an uncomfortable night of truth.

Example Three. On December 20 and then four days later on Christmas Eve 1940, two earthquakes occurred beneath Ossipee, New Hampshire. There was a lot going on underground, of course—anywhere there are mountains, there’s been some kind of geological thrust. But it seems also that there had been: 

• a collapsed volcano 120 million years ago which made vertical breaks in the stone; 
• the perimeter of the former St. Lawrence Sea or Mer de Champlain, which would have borne the weight of trillions of gallons of water but has been relaxing since the sea’s recession ten thousand years ago; and 
• a likely meteor strike in Charlevoix, Quebec about 45 million years ago, which formed permanent shear fractures in the rock structure for hundreds of miles.

But in December 1940, all of those subterranean forces reached a tipping point and needed to find a new resolution. All of it invisible and unnoticed for millennia, and then all at once, an uncomfortable week of shuddering.

Why Are We Talking About This? Everything that happens has precursor events. Some we know about, some we don’t. But as narrative writers—whether fictional or memoir—we have the difficult task of making moments of great change simultaneously surprising and inevitable. 

“Foreshadowing” is a technical term that makes it seem like we’re winding up a music box that’ll play some tinny tune when we lift the lid. John Irving’s The World According to Garp has always struck me that way, cleverly designed but devoid of lived care. What we’re really doing, I think, is following our characters’ concerns—within the social context around them—to their logical conclusion. The work of narration is selecting from the details we’ve found to highlight the ruptures that will ultimately fail, the subterranean forces that reach a tipping point and need to find a new resolution. All of it invisible and unnoticed, and then all at once, an uncomfortable moment that reveals what everyone had hoped would be unseen. Or maybe never knew at all.

Of course, the event of rupture is followed by something. There is an aftermath of an earthquake, both collectively and individually. We rebuild the way it was, or we remodel from what’s left, or we leave town altogether for some place where the land seems more stable. 

Think of how much stress we can bear, right up until the moment we can’t. And then think about all the work it takes to move forward from the collapse. That’s where the emotional weight of the story lies.

In her essay “In Praise of Panic,^[1]” novelist Stephanie Danler writes about the necessity of staying close to your own core emotions. In one jokey passage, she writes:

Writing can be taught. It’s not magic. It’s a technology for communication, and one can only hope it is our most enduring one. The best way to become a better writer is to read as widely as possible and then find a subject that keeps you up at night. There, I just saved you two years and fifty thousand dollars on an MFA.

But jokes aside, I think we can only write well about things that keep us up at night. We talk about a writers’ themes, but I think those are only externally applied names for the writer’s barely-identified inner obsessions, the itch they just have to scratch over and over again.

Joan Didion wrote five novels and ten books of nonfiction between 1963 and 2021. They’re all different. They’re all about different places and times and characters. But at the root of all of them, I think, is the question of what we do when we discover we’ve been lied to. So many of her stories are about someone who’s been betrayed: by their culture, by their men, by political forces that emerge from across the horizon, by their belief that they’ll be protected by beauty or money. To use a sports analogy, she writes about people who learned the rules and played the game, had some early successes—and then all their points were taken off the scoreboard and the rules changed, never again to be explained at all. 

That’s a reasonable thing to write about for a girl born to Sacramento wealth and political power in the 1930s and ‘40s, who saw everything about California’s social structures come apart in the 1950s through 1980s. Someone took her silver spoon away, and she never recovered. (And I say that as someone who deeply admires her work. Joan Didion taught me how paragraphs work.)

Walter Tevis wrote six novels, all of which are about someone with an early sense of mission and mastery, a clear arc toward success, derailed by one’s own distractions and vices, but later (usually, not always) to recover a more mature version of that first mission. 

• Eddie Felson, the pool player distracted by gambling and gamblers, who remembers in the end why he plays.
• Thomas Jerome Newton, the alien who comes to take Earth’s water for his dying planet, and discovers alcoholism instead.
• Beth Harmon, the chess prodigy who loses her drive to drinking and uppers and anger, but who emerges with a purer respect for the game and her talents. 

That’s a reasonable thing to write about for a boy with rheumatic fever who lived in a children’s convalescent hospital for a couple of years, a boy who became a man who lost a prodigious writing talent to two decades of gambling and drinking and teaching college. A man who finally quit it all, moved to Manhattan and wrote for four brilliant, scorching years before dying way too young. 

Every writer has only one tale to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.

James Baldwin

Kenzaburo Oe’s work is inescapably linked to his life as father to a disabled son. Nevada Barr’s mysteries are all about a person who deeply loves the innumerable forces and expressions of nature, but whose National Parks job inevitably brings her into disappointing contact with mere humans.

Write what you know, they say. I know nothing of being a championship-level athlete at the end of high school, or of raising an adoptive daughter. I know nothing of driving a plow truck or raising field corn, of running a tavern or being a structural engineer. But I do know what it means to look like I’m doing okay from the outside, and know that I’m collapsing inside. I know what it means to have my work not pay off, and have to build a new life from old skills. I know what it means to have to choose between a good thing and another good thing.

Write what you know. Find a subject that keeps you up at night. Every writer has only one tale to tell.

And you may not recognize what that is for a long, long time.

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^[1] In The Sewanee Review, Fall 2023.