Tag Archives: American prose

/versation, 2024, aesthetic, essay, nonfiction, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, the no-scape

no escape [on the Ohio River Valley Gothic]

2 February 2024 / 0010 hrs

No matter what I’ve told myself over the years, I’ve always been steeped in this kind of Gothic. A childhood in the rust belt around folding farms and closing steel Mills, all just a few degrees separated from day-to-day existence… but close enough that I had a front seat to the sort of geographic necrophilia that happens in the country.

I can never quite meditate it out of my bones.

The Gothic that makes for good television is a more urbane kind a Gothic that lacks that determinism. It’s a Gothic without determinism. It languishes and chokes like the endless summers and New Orleans. Undying, but never quite replenished. Strangled.

This Gothic that infects me, this Ohio River Valley Gothic, is imbued with that determinism. It means you know where you are and hang the fuck on, no matter what. Grit your God damn teeth, spit and keep moving. There’s no escape from pain. What escape exists is only temporary and comes with a hefty price. Better to grit and hang on.

The Southern Gothic languishes in the past. the Midwest Gothic is all hard and deterministic, ike the high desert winters. But the Ohio River Valley Gothic waxes in wanes. It ebbs and flows. It both languishes and is bone and sinew built with determinism. This is what the river brings, deposits like high water mud and driftwoodbone and garbage from up river. It rides in on cross currents.

—

no escaping the massive corn fields
etched into the imagination. 

we take turns playing scarecrow
as the water rises, biding time

in the company of grackles.
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2024, essay, nonfiction, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose, river life, the no-scape, Working Class Literature

Swing Shift Watch: The Time Between

This is the transition hours. She’s.next to me, askeep. I’m dressed for work and drinking coffee, waiting for the first of my two overnight watches for the week. We had a nice supper together.: bow tie pasta with roasted tomato, pesto, and sweet Italian sausage. One of those suppers that was so good, we talked about it an hour after, along with ways to make it even better or change it up a bit. This is what we do.

An old standard from classic BBC TV is playing on the TV: As Time Goes By. I’ve been watching this show for years. I first watched it on PBS when I was a kid. Saturday nights . The Red Green Show, As Time Goes By, Keeping Up Appearances, Have You Been Served?, Waiting on God, Last of the Summer Wine. I introduced Amanda to these shows after we got togther. I never get tired of them. I don’t know why. I’m not what you’d call an Anglophile. But there’s something comforting about them.

She’s sleeping hard. It’s been a long week for her, and it’s only Wednesday. Me getting back to work on the wharf after my hip replacement surgery has been an adjustment for both of us. She likes having me around, and I like being around, though I do get antsy if I stay around the house too long. I don’t light out on the road anymore, so I pour that into work, into the river.

On Swing Shift, we only sleep at the same time 2 nights a week. This makes the time between that much more important.

I’ve got about an hour left before I need to finishing puttering around and leave for work. The weather is warmer, but wet. From the weather reports I’ve read, I expect more thick fog and then rain after 4 in the morning. I pay attention to weather forecasts and river forecasts, even when I’m not working. Work didn’t make me this way, being on the road did. The weather and river patterns give me something to obsess over. It’s a sort of passive obsessiveness, always running in the background.

I’ll leave soon trying not to wake her up, and disturb the dogs as little as possible. She’s deep into one of her complicated dreams. I’m going to head out to mine soon enough.

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2023, essay, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose, river life, the no-scape, Working Class Literature

Stand By

When I can’t sleep one of the dogs usually stays with me. Tonight it’s Nala, the husky mix. They’ve been keeping watch over me during the days while I’m recovering from hip surgery and Amanda’s at work. They’re good company, and I fully expect some temper tantrum from them… Nala in particular… when I go back to work.

I probably drank too much coffee today. I drink a lot of coffee in general, but I’ve been pretty good at dialing it back while convalescing. The idea has been to stay on the same wake / sleep schedule as Amanda. Been doing pretty good too, until today.

It could be the coffee or it could be that I feel like I’ve been away from the river too long, my recovery is going really well, and I’ve wound myself up about getting back to my life. Grateful as I am that the surgery has been successful and the recovery is going as well as it can, and as blessed as I feel that Amanda has been so amazing through this whole ordeal, most days my brain is just rattling around in my head.

My curse is a particular itch. In the past it sent me out on the road. Working on the river, on the Belle of Louisville, somehow scratches that itch. And as I round out the 4th post-surgical week, and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, I’m anxious to get back to my life. It reminds me of working the firebox on the Belle, keeping the boiler pressure at 180, waiting for the telegraph to tell me it’s time to launch.

And it’s not just about getting back to the boat. I’m anxious to spend time with my wife that isn’t a perpetual post-op. I’d like to visit my daughter and her family, get back to the perpetual hide-and-seek game with my granddaughter. I’d like to visit my mother ln Cincinnati and my brother in Cleveland. I want to start walking everywhere again and do so without the hip pain my surgery fixed.

But for now it’s me, Nala, and some cheesy TV. I’m sitting in my chair, feet up on a pillow on top of a small footstool. I’m down to one or two painkillers a day, and I’m finished with the post-op blood thinners. Life is good. The boiler’s up, the wheel is spinning, and I’m just waiting for the call to come down the telegraph to launch.

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