Heat — Field Notes — craig davidson

I was hypnotized by the flames and drowsy from the heat of the stone fireplace because I sat so close to it. My feet rested on a wooden stool that was even closer, so I couldn’t keep them there very long because my flip flops were hot and thought they might melt. I didn’t know for certain, it hadn’t ever happened before, but they looked like they were starting to change shape, and my feet were hot, so I scooted back.

Our log cabin rental felt like a small lodge. It smelled like one too — good smells like wood, fire, smoke, and evergreen. It had huge roof timbers, log cross beams, heavy wood chairs and table, two vintage couches upholstered in leather, a couple of woven rugs on the floor, antlers, mounted walleyes on the walls, and large windows that were divided into thirty-two square panes. It was built in the early part of the twentieth century and felt like it could be in a national park, or a scout camp somewhere.

The light was low because there were no overhead fixtures. The main room had a few areas of warm ambient light scattered throughout from lamps, and the expansive glow of our fire. When I looked up from my drawing and my wife looked up from her book, our eyes met. Hers reflected orange just like the flames in front of us. I knew she was warm and hoped she was happy. Except for the sound of her turning pages, my drawing, and the crackling of the fire, it was quiet. Quiet enough that if we listened hard, we could hear wolves howling in the distance all night long. They were faint, but they were out there.

The moon slowly moved across the expanse of windows shifting the color of the glass from black, to dark blue, to light blue, before it disappeared behind the shore trees on Burntside Lake. We fed the fire until after midnight, when the wood I’d split was almost gone. Eventually we slipped into our hand-built log bed with a soft, queen size mattress, a thick homemade quilt, and pillows with perfect densities. We left the bedroom door open so the sound of the waning fire and occasional howling would soothe us while we slept.

Songs :: You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go and Buckets of Rain by Bob Dylan, See the Changes by Crosby, Stills and Nash, Spellbound by Poco, Steady On by Shawn Colvin, and The Book of Love by The Magnetic Fields

I was on a road trip a few years ago that took me west through the entire state of Iowa where I discovered the state is divided into two horizontal stripes. The bottom half is green, and the top half is blue, with occasional dark shapes and textures interrupting the horizon like cattle, trees, and farm building silhouettes. Two-track dirt roads intersected with the narrow county highway that passed through the small town I was in. It included a two-pump gas station, one unleaded, one diesel, a small general store where I bought a green and yellow t-shirt that said ‘kiss a corn grower today’, a garage structure servicing large trucks and farm machinery, a huge pile of irrigation equipment that was disappearing into tall grass, and a blacksmith shop. I could hear a sledgehammer banging iron and saw an orange glow with occasional sparks flying out of the door. Much of the ground surrounding these places was packed dirt, stained with oil, gasoline, and other industrial fluids.

After refueling, I took one of the two-track roads out into a field with all my windows open. I stopped, got out and was surrounded by late summer corn way over my head. It was unsettling, like when I get lost in a maze and think I’ll never find my way out, or when I can’t immediately locate the car in a multilevel parking ramp because I forgot where I parked. I imagined Iris Dement singing Our Town, or Leaning on the Everlasting Arm because the melancholy was thick. I thought about home and my family, but they weren’t anywhere near me, so I got back in the car and tried to drive away from the discomfort, but couldn’t because then I thought about the painting American Gothic.

My knowledge of Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic has been incorrect from the start. I never bothered to learn the full story behind the painting. My American Art history professor must have spoken about it, but I don’t remember what he said, and I’ve made huge assumptions about what I thought the painting depicted. I assumed Wood somehow discovered this married couple on their farm one day while out exploring and asked them if he could sketch them. They agreed to pose for him, but he’d have to come back later. So, he showed up to sketch them at the specified time but had to wait. He probably sat on their front porch until they were finished with their afternoon bible study at the kitchen table. It was hot, humid, and quiet except for the cicadas and the mumbling he could hear through the screen door.

None of that happened though. It isn’t a portrait of a husband and wife at all, it depicts a father and daughter. Wood came across this house randomly with a fellow artist and felt moved to draw it. Then later asked his family dentist and his sister to pose for him. They weren’t even in the same room. They were sketched separately. That’s how he constructed his painting. He wasn't documenting an existing situation. He assembled separate elements and combined them to form this open-ended story about fictional people in Iowa.

Regardless of Grant Woods intent, or my assumptions, the painting makes me uncomfortable. Maybe it’s because the pitchfork automatically implies poking, or stabbing. It also makes me think of ‘children of the corn’ and these two look like they could be involved somehow, controlling the children without words, just coded eye movements—sending out the ‘corn’ herds to track down trespassers that stray into their fields. Someone might have pulled over, gotten out to stretch their legs and entered the rows of corn to find shade one hot summer afternoon. They thought they were far enough away from the farmhouse that they wouldn’t be noticed, but they miscalculated how easy it is to see movement in the distance on most Iowa farms. The children were summoned and they congregated quickly and rushed from the barn into the fields almost like a single organism. Locating the unaware intruders without even making their presence known, they stopped abruptly like a roadrunner. They quietly encircled their prey and emerged from the corn in slow motion, blinking simultaneously and silent.

Songs :: Our Town and Leaning on the Everlasting Arm by Iris DeMent, and Revelator by Gillian Welch