Old Songs in a New Cafe (14 page)

She built her own house, a small L-shaped affair, mostly out of donated materials. Well, “built” is a little too strong, too
finished. The house is sort of emerging here and there as funds permit. The posts supporting the structure are not on the
square, but that bothers her little. “My great-grandfather lived in a house like this; it wasn’t square, it didn’t fall down,
and he was very happy. You have to get away from the kind of mind-set that worries about those things.” Well said and noted.

“Everything for the house seems to come in $300 chunks,” she moans. “Everything costs that much, for some reason.” The next
$300, whenever she accumulates it, will go for a well. For now, she hauls water in buckets from Cedar Key.

After that, maybe a better electricity setup. Her only supply of electrical power is carried by two extension cords running
from a temporary construction electric pole. One cord goes to the house, the other to a freezer containing food for the birds.

But her private war against suffering is what really matters. She finances that and her own expenses by working part-time
as a desk clerk in a local motel, by writing an environmental column for the
Cedar Key Beacon,
and by selling copies of her book,
A Naturalist’s Guide to Cedar Key, Florida.

As people learn of her work, donations trickle in. Some of the money comes from local folks, some from people in Pocatello
and Minneapolis who own property in Cedar Key, subscribe to the
Beacon,
and read her column.

She spent $1,250 on her birds last year. She figures $3,000 a year would permit a first-class operation by enabling her to
build better confinements, purchase higher-quality food for the birds, and acquire additional training for herself. Her monetary
needs seem shriveled in comparison with the large government grants regularly handed out to academic researchers. Without
degrees and credentials, though, she feels that kind of money is beyond her reach. “
Crud
entials,” she sighs.

No matter. Harriet Smith is an expert at making do. Conventional thinking has it that high levels of purchasing by some swirling
mass of procuring organisms called “consumers” are necessary to the well-being of the U.S. economic system. If you believe
that, then you probably will find Harriet a little dangerous. By example, she is subversive in a gentle fashion.

Harriet watches the rise and fall of life in the marsh to the east through windows that were given to her. In fact, most of
the house is constructed of scraps and discards. Sometimes she’ll return home and find a used door propped on the stoop. Or
the phone rings and someone asks, “I have an old water heater. Do you have any use for it?” “Sure, bring it out; I’ll convert
it to a solar water heater.”

So what’s the point of it all? What’s it mean in the long run? Harriet is quick to respond to such patently stupid questions.
“Most of the animals are injured by some human activity,” she observes. “In some tiny way, ever so slightly, I tip the scales
the other way. I talk about birds anywhere, anytime. People become aware of the birds, know their names, and call me when
they see injured birds. Once that starts happening, people become more aware of what they’ve got here in Levy County; they
realize how special it is.”

She sees Levy County as one of the last few wilderness areas in Florida. “It’s eleven hundred square miles, and it’s absolutely
fabulous. Essentially every habitat in Florida is here. I sometimes think, ‘Fence off Levy County.’ “

As part of her bird lectures and columns, she actively promotes her own brand of hard-headed environ-mentalism. Plastic is
one of her favorite targets—she absolutely loathes plastic. “It doesn’t work to tell people they ought to recycle and not
use so much plastic. You’ve got to show them how. ‘Here,’ I tell them, ‘here are five ways to stop using so much plastic’
I go to the grocery store and say, ‘Don’t give me those damn plastic bags. What’s the matter with you, Harry? Why do you have
those things?’”
Fearing a full-blown lecture, Harry shakes his head and reaches for something else, anything.

It’s early evening now, and the flashing cursors on all those computer terminals are far behind her. They blink somewhere
in another time. Harriet feeds a small eastern screech owl recovering from a broken leg and an eye injury. The little guy’s
beak clicks rapidly in anticipation as he waits for her to prepare his ration of stew meat marinated in a vitamin solution.

While she feeds him, Harriet looks out across the scrub tree horizon. Out there, she knows, the white ibises, the yellow-billed
cuckoos, the ducks and owls and eagles and ospreys and the rest are up against the power of a technology-choked civilization,
and they are losing.

She knows that out there the birds are flying into utility wires, eating mercury-laden fish, and slamming into automobiles.
And out there in the island rookeries and along the beaches, the wry and earnest pelicans are tangled in the trees and hobbling
along the sand, fighting the fish hooks and monofilament line.

So Harriet Smith works through the Florida days alone. She’s trying to get $300 together for a well. Trying to buy better-quality
food for her birds and to find a home for a brown pelican with only one wing. Trying to open up our heads and pour some sensibility
in there. She’s trying to tip the scales ever so slightly. Not much, just a little bit.

Harriet operated her seabird rescue center from 1987 to 1991. Eventually, she just plain wore out, trying to earn a living
as a house painter while caring for and supporting the birds at the same time. The range of species at her center had expanded,
and she was spending $25 a week on meat for her birds and animals. There came a moment when she stood looking at a red fox,
a barred owl, and a Cooper’s hawk. All of them were meat eaters. The choice had come to this: feed them or feed herself. She
closed the rescue center.

I saw Harriet recently. She looks better, not so tired. She’s running the Cedar Key Book Store on C Street and conducting
two-hour boat trips as a naturalist. On Friday mornings she gives talks on the natural aspects of Cedar Key. What about the
birds, the animals? Several people in town have permits to transport injured creatures to other places where they can be cared
for.

Harriet figures it would have taken $10,000 a year to keep the rescue center open. That would have allowed her to buy the
proper equipment she needed, hire an assistant, and provide food for the birds and animals. But the money wasn’t there. It’s
never there for the important things. I thought about that as I walked along the streets of Cedar Key on a quiet morning in
February of 1993. I thought about it while I watched pelicans coming in from the islands and saw new condos going up along
the shore.

______________________________________

S
tanley Walk and Allen Kru-ger, proprietors of the Sportsman’s Lounge and related enterprises in St, Ansgar, go unbounded.
They subscribe not to limits and are unmoved by small-town demands for convention. Moreover, even in our darker times, they
believe in Iowa and have little patience with those who feel otherwise. So, to them, it seemed perfectly natural to have an
autograph party at the tavern to celebrate the publication of a new book dealing with Iowa.

Now, those of delicate, patrician tastes might see contradictions, or at least curious impropriety, in this idea—books and
taverns and all Not Stanley Walk, not Allen Kruger. “Get the author to commit, and we’ll handle the rest,” they said to the
Iowa State University Press. “All right, let’s do it,” the author replied. Up went the flyers in the grocery stores of Worth
and Mitchell counties. Arrange a radio interview on one of the local stations with the author. Get announcements on television
and in the papers. Post signs, talk about it, plan and promote.

The weather turned rough in early November. Snow squalls throughout the day of the signing. Cold, and windy, and wet. The
boys playing cards at the big circular table in the back never did figure out what was going on. By ten in the morning, there
were piles of new books in plastic shrink-wrap stacked on a table. Some guy with long, gray hair—probably a liberal, the card
players guessed—showed up with a pen and started signing copies of the book for people from such alien civilizations as Osage,
Mason City, Fort Dodge, smaller Iowa towns, and southern Minnesota.

At lunch, a choice of beef or chicken, the author read an essay from the book to forty people who had paid $7.50 to eat and
listen. One of them, a veterinarian, said, “It was a religious experience.” The author’s mother sat at the head table and
recognized all the people in the story, herself included.

By afternoon, on a Saturday in early winter, it was a tableau straight out of everybody’s vision of how America ought to be.
Part Norman Rockwell, part Thomas Jefferson. In booths along the wall and tables down the middle, people were sitting quietly,
drinking coffee or sipping a beer, reading the book.

For some reason, a number of political figures, elected and otherwise, had shown up. Their presence resulted in a kinetic
discussion of what those folks like to call “issues,” along with an impromptu strategy session for last-minute campaigning.
Proponents of keeping Brushy Creek just the way it is, in the face of threats to build a dam in the wilderness area, arrived,
commandeered a booth, and argued their cause to all who would listen. Next to them, other folks were planning a conference
on rivers. The author signed more books, and the boys playing cards at the big circular table in the back were getting even
more confused, swiveling around between hands just to keep track of things.

Among the guests was the author’s high school typing teacher. While signing her book, he reflected that she probably had as
much to do with getting the book finished as anyone else. An Osage man claimed that he and several other hunters had sworn
off goose hunting after reading one of the author’s polemics on the subject, Upon hearing that, the author offered to print
“Civilized Adult” across the man’s forehead, but that was judged to be unwise, somewhat overdone,

KGLO television, from Mason City, clanked in with cameras and cords, requesting an interview with the author. The man with
the questions wanted to talk about economic development and computers; the author wanted to talk about shooting pool and rivers.

Snow blew down the main street of St. Ansgar as a fortyish woman with silver hair and a nice smile pur-chased a book and covertly
inquired, “How can I get you to read the rest of the book to me?” The author replied, “Just ask, I’m easy.” Mike, whose last
name disappeared along with a scrap of paper, wants to show the author secret places along the Cedar River. Great. Spring
will be perfect for that.

Stanley Walk beamed, served the customers, and carried more books from his office to the signing table. Allen Kruger argued
politics. Stanley and the author talked about a poetry reading at the tavern, with maybe some music to go along with it. Sounds
good. It’ll get done sometime. By 3:30, the demand for literary sustenance was tapering off. The author packed up his pen,
and his mother, and drove south along blacktop roads, while the politicos stayed behind to discuss issues and, in Shakespeare’s
words, figure out how to “circumvent God.”

Stanley calls with the tally. Ninety-six books were sold that day. That’s nice, but slightly irrelevant, not what’s important
here. The point is there are people out there who write or play music or do theater or create visual beauty or have problems
to discuss. And there are people out there who want to read the words or listen to the music or see things of beauty or participate
in the solving of nasty dilemmas. The predicament is one of brokerage, of getting all those folks together.

It can be done. Stanley Walk and Allen Kruger did it, and life became a little richer for everyone concerned because of it.
The ideal of a literate, caring, sensitive, and participative society is attainable, at least in Iowa. All that’s required
is a little brokerage. We proved that on a snowy November day in St. Ansgar.

______________________________________

D
o you remember Perry Burgess? Pm his brother.” I had just autographed a book for a man in a Marshalltown, Iowa, store and
looked up.

Of course I remembered Perry. Instantly I could see him, forty years back along the cambers of my recollections. Dusty flatlands
afternoon, high summer, Rock-ford, Iowa. Perry in work boots and cutoff jeans, shirtless, red bandanna tied around his head,
good muscles. Slightly untamed and pretty close to what the counterculture folks looked like two decades later.

Perry, though, was permitted his quirks. Even in the hairy-chested culture of rural Iowa, where short pants on men were considered
a telltale sign of unsteady masculinity. He was special, you see. He could handle the pounding heat of the kilns at the brick-and-tile
plant in summer. As I recall, not many could. Maybe just him. He monopolized stamina. And that counted for something. Allowances
could be made for Perry.

He carried his head at a slight angle; a bad eye might have caused that. Perry grinned a lot in those days, grinned at kids
like me on the street in my old sneakers and jeans. I grinned back. I liked Perry. I liked his toughness and his style. I
liked his good humor in the face of the brutal days he spent in the kilns. My mother has always remarked that my heroes were,
well, a little different from those of other boys. I liked Kenny Govro, cat fisherman; Sammy Patterson, billiards player;
and I liked Perry Burgess, kiln stacker.

When the annual softball game between the local merchants and the plant workers came around, it was understood Perry would
be on the mound. “Perry ‘The Dipsy-Doodler’ Burgess.” That’s what he liked to be called in the weeks preceding the game. That’s
how the cardboard signs advertising the game listed him. That’s what the local newspaper called him in announcements.