Glimpses of Towns

(image: a piece of a road-map of Sweden, including
Söderfors)






My goodness, Washington (the state) is flooding. The combination of much recent snow in the high country plus what we call "The Pineapple Exress"--lots and lots of warm rain from the Pacific--have made many rivers burst. The nearby town of Orting is in danger of going under water. It also has the dubious honor of being in the path of a major lava-flow, should Mt. Rainier decide to wake up. Fire and rain, indeed.

Of course, I picked this day to ride the train north to Bellingham, pick up a car, and drive it back. Things went fine, although even Interstate 5 was covered with water in places, and there were menacing signs about side-highways being closed.

I stopped in the small town of Darrington to get a bite to eat--and thought of Richard Hugo, who dearly loved to visit the small towns of Washington and Montana and write poems about them--well, not really about them so much as about the responses they generated in him. In The Triggering Town, Hugo advises not knowing too much about the towns. He encouraged poets to make all sorts of (unfounded) assumptions. So if I were following his advice, I would assume that the waitress who served me food came in second in the homecoming-queen contest.

Many moons ago, in Sweden, I stopped briefly in Söderfors, Sweden, a former steel and manufacturing town (no doubt some things are still manufactured there), and based strictly on a few observations and a lot of impressions, I wrote a "triggering-town" poem. As both a reader and a writer, one must assess such poems as poems, not as journalistic reports--unless of course the poem really does present itself as an historical poem--and then a different set of legitimate criteria come into play. I remember that a municipal clock wasn't keeping the right time--a charming detail, as far as I was concerned. I remember being exceedingly fascinated by the color of bricks used in many buildings in the town: black. Perhaps the clay used to make the bricks was full of iron or another kind of mineral/metal. . . . On the train-ride today, I saw some "violent brown-black water" rushing off hillsides and out of culverts. . . .

. . .And here's hoping the rivers in Western Washington crest soon and recede quickly, as I post the Söderfors poem:

Söderfors, Sweden


Brown mortar, black bricks, buildings
from industry’s youth.

Two girls walk along a narrow
sandy path over the dam. Violent brown-black
water rushes through
the spillway. A sign cautions.

A gull nests in a granite slab.
(Incubation is a branch of geology.)

Reach for the black bricks—
to know them. Their texture is glass.
They were cooked to the point
at which manufacturing gives way

to beautiful compounds. Söderfors
is a silent town. Its cast-iron clock
is ornate and wrong. Bright green,

nearly lime: that used to be the color
of a rusting Saab parked all by itself.


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Food, Gas, and the Oxford Comma

We drove one of our aged Volvos to Bellingham yesterday so that our trusted mechanic could work on it. Bellingham's 90 miles north of Seattle, which is about 50 miles north of where we live, so you can see how eccentric our auto-mechanic arrangements are. After we drop off the car, we take Amtrak home. Amtrak's arrangements can be eccentric, too, however. From Bellingham, one takes an Amtrak bus to Seattle, and then one may take either the Sounder, a local commuter train, or the Cascade, which goes all the way to Portland. Why Amtrak is unable to schedule a regular train from Bellingham to Seattle remains a mystery, at least to me.

On the way, I saw a sign that read as follows:

FOOD-GAS
LODGING
NEXT EXIT

I think the choice to put a hyphen between FOOD and GAS was ill-advised because doing so makes "food" function as an adjective modifying "gas." Consequently, the sign informed me that methane gas in some form (one doesn't want to spend too much time reflecting on the subject) was available by means of the next exit.

If I were in charge of writing such signs, I probably would have written "Food, Gasoline, and Lodging: Next Exit," but more letters and punctuation translate into a bigger sign and greater expense. I understand. Still, I prefer the series of three, with the comma before the "and"--a comma known in some circles as the Oxford comma because it is favored, I assume, by many British writers and editors.

For about three years (quite some time ago), I wrote a books-column every two weeks for a local metropolitan daily. The copy I wrote was apparently fairly "clean" because the copy-editors rarely edited it significantly, although of course the headline-writer also gave the column its title. After I'd been writing the column for about a year, however, a copy-editor called me and said, "Look, in almost every column of yours, you use the Oxford comma, and I take it out, so how about you stop using it?" He was pretty ticked off. I don't blame him. I should have been more sensitive to the fact that the AP Style Manual does not recommend using the Oxford comma. I agreed that, from that point forward, I'd leave the Oxford comma out of the columns I wrote.

On occasion, the absence of that comma may cause some confusion, but that's pretty rare. I think I just like the symmetry and tidiness of the comma: X [comma] Y [comma] and Z [period].
Probably we shall never see the following road-sign:

FOOD, GAS, LODGING, AND THE OXFORD COMMA: NEXT EXIT.

The Memory's Trains

So I had to drive up near the Canadian border, in a car, and take the train back. It was like a Hitchcock movie. Right after I got on the train, I tried to think of the last name of my wife's first boss when we first moved here, 25 years ago. I knew it began with a "B," but my memory blocked the rest. One tactic my memory used was to put the name, "Shirley Bassey," in place of the boss's name. (Shirley Bassey sang "Goldfinger.") I was angry with my memory, so I worked on the problem for about an hour, off and on.

Then I gave up, and I told myself that when my wife picked me up at the train-station, I would ask her the name, surrendering to my misbehaving memory.

I was standing outside the Amtrak station, waiting to be picked up and thinking about this and that. Then I saw my wife in the car, and I remembered that I needed to ask her the last name of her former boss. At that instant, and only at that instant, the name popped into my memory.

I believe there is something like an elaborate switching-yard in the brain, where memories are lined up like trains, but they have to wait until the track-switcher lets them through. I imagine a train-yard about a million times more complicated than the ones in L.A., Paris, London, or Vienna.

The memory-switcher stalled that name until the switcher was good and ready. I saw my wife, and the train was let through. Probably about 100 years from now, the switching-yard of the brain will have been mapped carefully, and someone will be able to explain exactly what goes on with a delayed but suddenly triggered memory. All aboard!