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©Poems of R.F.Mueller- Other Times, Other Thoughts
THE ODYSSEY OF GLOOMY GUS
( in honor of a favorite uncle, August Deschler )
Look out into the night, into the star-embossed pre-ragtime sky, where Orion's drift is hailed not by motor sounds, but by the far-seeking steam whistle's cry. Few wires yet to sing in the zero wind, nothing to master the great owls gliding overflight, and there beyond the snowy field's sullen drifts, the shadow-grated woods still holds its witnesses to the Menominee hunter's snowshoe tread, a few years only from the passage of the myriad pigeon wings. It's Christmas time and you are four months' old. Yours is the legacy of blind emergent time with no gift of airwave's electrifying news but only newsprint some days behind. Born into heaven's monopoly of what is to be, your choices are worn and forking roads with all else obscured beyond the horizon's bend and on this night by drifting snow. Tomorrow and in the years ahead there will be rumors, advertisements in thumb-worn print of work to the north and west in ranches, lumber camps and mines. Born into labor's day in the expansion empire's time, how will you make your way? Born into labor's time and place but still an incline will draw you to the printed word. Yet as your eye follows the staccato page you'll not ignore the waving branch, the plume of cloud. Hear now the warrior wind that creeps across the frozen plain, through cedar, ash and pine and down the farmstead lanes. It snaps the clapboard covers over hewn logs in the glittering night where old houses cluster thinly. But the spring wind will bring back again the green-gold peace of sugar beets and oats, here where the dairy barns are red and neat, Germans beside the `Wolf and Poles along the Peshtigo; while there below the Big Lake the ice-shelled rapids already churn the squatting mills to vertigo. And listen, listen then also for the water that will always be your backdrop's sound, or at least its silent glint, water rushing in rapids, millraces and over dams, dark muskeg~-oozings of wild streams walled by balsam fir and spruce against the granite's glitter, water lapping in slowly-heaving log booms and stilted, cliff-encircling flumes. More intimate water that you'll know also, boggy beneath osier banks, where a boy will learn from you something of its muskrat-heaped shells and the startling, contrary history of those locked in rocks of nearby hills. Still, unspoken will remain the deepest thoughts you'll pass along. Now as you sleep the sleep of children beneath the cold rafters and hear faintly the knock of frost across the fields, so also rest the shimmering ores of the new iron age, the gravel banks in the winding eskers and steep-walled kames beneath fresh logging burns where young aspens filter to yellow spring's first light. And you rocks: keep-soundly for five decades yet your Pre-Cambrian sleep, then stir to the portentous tread of the summer geologist and winter miner, to break out in a ferment of girders, engineer-banked interstates and final, fatal gantries pointing to the sky. For good or ill, here is your epic part in time! As a boy I awoke to the tapping of father's shoe hammer and the east window's light. O light of my youth's longing beyond the nagging unrest of that quiet scene in those luminous days when rumors were everywhere. Stories of fortune's trails, in school and in all my reading - and from the returnees, the walking wounded with tree-felled arms and legs and horse-inflicted limps but with the crazed mountain vision still in their eyes. Such were the restless century's fields drawing all needles north and west out of my little room. In Montana the ranches were so far apart you could ride for days, and where we chased the cows among the sage-blown, snowy hills, and at night in the slat-walled firelight spoke of other things, of home and all that family brings. But with the spring I headed west again across the shining Bitterroots on to the Palouse with wheat homesteads in a milder clime. There I knew lots of big men, tall as nightmares and strong. Though small I kept up with them all day in the sun, staying in the fields till last seeing, then slept quietly in my sweat and dreamed of my brothers and sister - till we rose in the sparrow-voiced dark and later saw the hills in soft light and away off dark pines waving. Time came when Taft was elected and I, then wandering worker to the nations in British Columbia, marveled to see two hundred foot Douglas firs march up the wet snow mountains and come down like bullets in bent-barrel flumes to the rivers. There I learned to log the big trees and be handy as a millwright so that the slap of belts on pulleys and the whine of saws became my music, where between nursing donkey engines and growing sure in my calk boots I twice pulled comrades from the stygian ponds. There also on Saturday nights we sought the boardwalk clubs floating in the bark-laced mud for beer and ale and whiskey enough to thin a logger's blood. And so I grew my first beard in tree-hidden camps and wild little towns where women were scarce and informal times. Yet more than once I got to know a face, a form, that set my thoughts skidding, but always lost courage in the end. Yet could I have ventured in what for me was sweet excess, beyond those starved dreams there in the lonely bunks of the world, I'd have given up all the bright dawns of new country risings and all the rumbling music of rails in those far blue mountains. But then came the war to a century only in its teens, and I like others was swept along, first again to the scene of my youngest dreams, the picture farms, the rivers that flowed to lakes with sandy summer shores. Then when the notice came I left for camp, and for once no train ran north and west for me but south and east, in time through limestone hills and finally the deep south's pineland plain. No neatness there but lapsing farms with shambly tumble down of ornate eves and porticos and at the end the rows of tents like play shapes ruled in baking sand. And there we learned to force march and shoot but mostly did nonsense kinds of work, yet were always near the half-familiar Georgia woods, our happy refuge from the discipline that some of us were born to laugh away. Then after sidestepping the plague of flu that brought so many comrades down, it all ended with the war, and again I saw that which I'd given up for lost: those bright green hills and skies of coldstream blue, that only home I'll ever know. From the first I was of an independent bent, surviving like a dandelion in that priest-hoed garden, and fossils were more to me than tracks of thunderbolts in Adam's world, ages of rocks evidence of time before the rock of ages. Yet sometimes at night I thought of when it all would end and felt a hollow here inside, but it was a hollow ghosts could never fill. And so my life moved on with each day precious because it was me, and yet almost as seen through another's eyes, like those arrivals on fine spring days at my sister's, leaving all the weekday wheels and pulley belts behind and roving over that lush green earth I sometimes longed to possess, there in those ice-sculpted hills, still with a trace of boundless wilderness. There was one year when the sun beat hot all spring without rain, and I turned up the dried marsh for corn that ended ten feet high in the black peat, made raised vegetable beds and lavished great patches of pumpkins and melons while neighbors' crops withered in the highland dust. O but to relive those bygone days and hear once more the first birdsong before the new day's rising, to stand strong again in those fields and follow the crow's awkward flight against the wind-shaped white of cloud. Those were the Hoover days when I joked about eating sawdust but lost my job in earnest, and each week had to borrow enough for a package of Plowboy. Then it was that old Dick stayed away, avoiding me for the money that he never would repay. His was a whole business down the drain - and the mill where I'd worked. But the loss of job and money never cost me a sleepless night - or at most nearly none when like a child I whiled away my gardening sojourn there in the 30's summer sun. After all the years it's not hard to say what counted most with me: to see the world come into flower and leaf in May, the flight of a rabbit in the snowy woods, a child's eyes where I was welcome. Always it was the working life and nature's unbounded sweep that gave me joy - and a job well done, to stand back and view it then! What's life for? In a way it's nothing but a show but big, a gale that blows with lightning, cold rain, and then a jagged patch of blue again, ever warring with the clouds, yet all motion directed toward some end, but an end we'll never know, like the winged wedges in the fall that make us wonder where they go. Yes, everything has changed, is changing, as did the great pineries I once saw - all gone. And in the mills where we used the river's flow, now electric motors run. The passenger trains that fed our delight in the passing scene - all turned to scrap, while everyone sprouts wings. Each year the metronome beats louder, faster, and where our hope once sprang from the sound of bright new hammers, we cower beneath \ the time bomb's throb - that shakes the world and makes the children cry. A poet once wrote that he could hear America singing, another praised what the Wright- boys did off Cape Hattera's shore. O I too could hear the singing power of what was and what could be, and great it was. And I saw us get it all! In the mountains of the Pacific coast I cut the firs, in the chattering mills tended the machines that cut the straight run beams, the scaffolding of factories, the roundhouses and workshops of tycoon's dreams. But what for? All this to serve no lasting end, all this to make a hole? No. I didn't live to make it so! But was it worth it then, the nights spent in the little rooms with shirts hung over chairs, the wrinkled suit in a dingy closet, the few blankets, the bundle of precious papers in the drawer, worn shoes beneath the bed and little more? How could I stand this life above some tavern's late night din with raucous voices getting tight? Was it worth it? Hell yes it was! Those voices in the bar belonged to friends. The room gave me as much shelter as I ever needed and privacy to read and think. It was my base of operations you might say, from which I roamed as free as I might be. No one ever told me what I could do when I was there, and I came and went just as I pleased, cashed checks and deposited in banks or spent it on a round of drinks. Yet it cuts me deep each time I think of friends, the burden of one who's lived so long, enough to pass a joke at many a boardinghouse table, to see come into view familiar houses on so many milltown streets and know the welcoming smile of the men and women I got to meet; but also to see time's hard hand bend a back and seam a face and fell them one by one while only I lived on. And now I stand on this lonely pinnacle of age, look back on so great a voyage in time, yet scarce enough to answer the few questions that were mine. And even where answers were clearly given the questions themselves have changed like spotted chameleons to my vision! Men are men when they can decide, whether for life and death or heaven and damnation. Hemmed in by circumstance their spirits narrow and their courage fades, then less than men, fear drives them till they die. Fear death? Indeed I do, and when it comes the arrow of my life may circle back again to childhood's terrors of the night and all the ageless fears learned by me then. But now, just now, as I view the scene with rational eyes, I greet the world and relish each new gift of day, and in my mind I dare adventure still, free and unafraid. annotation
This poem attempts what is possibly the impossible, the encapsulation of a life in formal stanzas. And unlike most of this collection it leaves me with little satisfaction as to style, although, barring some license, I believe it is true to its subject. This man "Augie" or "Gloomy Gus" was unusual in his culture and as one with his background, in that he was given to bold though gentle spoofs of religion and all its practitioners. Products of a generally questioning mind, these opinions were never hidden from even the youngest children, and may well have been a factor in the early formation of my own opinions on the subject. He was, despite an outdated and limited education, well read, particularly in science, and was the first to acquaint me with the fossils that abounded on our farm. I remember, also, with almost total recall, how, on a walk together along the swamp stream, we found a pile of empty water snail shells, that he attributed to the foraging of a Muskrat, which had also left its droppings. I've never since, on seeing such shell piles, failed to think of him and the original incident. I first became aware of him when he visited us while I was very young and he had a secure position as a foreman-millwright in a paper roll plug factory in Menasha. On those occasions he usually arrived with a large meat roast for our Sunday dinner. At those times also, he would delight me by holding me on his lap while he read the "funnies", and on departing again for town he invariably gave Mother a sheaf of greenbacks.
He was loyal to his friends, which made him vulnerable to sob stories. An example was his disastrous loan of money, to his employer "Chick" L during the Great Depression, and which left him destitute and temporarily dependent on relatives.
For some time, during this period, he lived with us, unsuccessfully seeking local work, but growing huge vegetables, particularly in a dried out part of the marsh. In one place, along the stream, he constructed elevated beds with black, peaty soil dug from the stream channel.
This was also the time of Prohibition, which gave rise to strange events, as when an isolated barn about a half mile from our house sprouted a tall smokestack, which then began to spout black smoke around the clock! From this and the increased truck traffic on the road past our house, it soon became clear that this was an illicit distillery, and my desperately unemployed uncle considered seeking work there. However, before he could apply, the place was raided by federal agents, who destroyed the still and dumped the mash in a nearby forested wetland ( part of one of my favorite haunts,"Bauer's Woods", where I learned to identify many native plants ), which then for years marked the event by a stand of dead trees.
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