On the Anniversary of that Inevitable Day


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East and West reach across to touch at the freeway.  On both horizons: windmills so far away that look like toys, whirligigs gesturing at the edge of the earth.

*
I read a poem once premised on the idea that once a year we live through the day on which we will die – a date just as real and distinct as the date on which we were born, but unknown to us.  I think the poem may have been by W.S. Merwin.  That day is like the prime meridian, a silent, featureless landmark accessible only to the imagination (if accessible at all) – as our lives revolve, we pass over that line unaware.

**
I bought tickets to see the Des Moines Opera Company perform Alban Berg’s Wozzeck.  My companion was unable to attend and, so, I went alone.

***
Perhaps, I have driven around Des Moines twenty times in my life.  The capitol building with its taut, constricted dome is the first thing you see.  The freeway makes a loop to the west and, then, south.  Empty zones full of jungle and gravel pits with aggregate pinnacles and tilted, ladder-like conveyors funnel inward from the north toward the city.  Huge brown rivers are coiled in those empty spaces, fetal-shaped oxbow lakes and marshes full of white birds with long stilt legs flank the muscular streams – it floods in these places and, once, I drove past Des Moines when the city was a mere island, surrounded on all sides by enormous expanses of glittering water, rivers hidden under the vast bland lagoons made by the deluge.

****
Three or four times, I have exited the freeway and gone into Des Moines.  Once, I was with a law partner and we met with claims representatives in a downtown tower to discuss our firm defending liability cases brought against the insurance company’s policyholders.  The chief claims manager was a little bald man who smoked a pipe and had owl eyes under thick glasses.  On another occasion, I was going to Kansas City, but was ahead of schedule and so searched the downtown area for a used bookstore – without success if I remember correctly.  Once, I went to the art museum in a renowned building by a famous Finnish architect.  After a long drive, one evening, I pulled into Des Moines and ate spaghetti and meatballs at a restaurant at the edge of the modest skyscrapers downtown.

*****
I was surprised that the opera tickets were for a performance space in Indianola, another river valley town 15 miles to the south of Des Moines.  Indianola has about 14,000 residents but there is a college there in a leafy residential part of town and the opera was sung at the concert hall on campus. 



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I was born in Chadron, Nebraska.  I can tell you my birthday.  I will leave it to my readers to research my deathday.  My father attended Iowa State University at Ames, 33 miles north of Des Moines.  As a baby and, then, toddler, I lived with my parents in Ames.  My father studied mathematics.  We had a German shepherd dog named Frieda.  The dog had to be put down for some reason that I don’t know.  I was relieved when Frieda went away because the dog was big and, when she jumped on me, I went sprawling to the ground.  The vet station was part of the college.  The floor was concrete, incised with gutters in which water was running. 

*
I have a Labrador Retriever named Frieda now.  I walk my dog every day.

**
On the road to Indianola, I listened to a compilation of ballads called “People Take Warning”.  These were songs, mostly recorded between 1925 and 1933, about natural disasters, fires and floods and great ships sinking at sea, locomotives hurled off the tracks, bridges collapsing into rivers, droughts and celebrated murders.  The music was sizzling in a hot grease of static.  I listened as hard as I could, giving my ears good exercise, but could only decipher about half the words yowled by the old banjo players to guitar and jug band accompaniment. 

***
The Rest Stop midway between Des Moines and the Minnesota border was dedicated to Iowa boys killed in the Civil War at some forgotten battle in Louisiana.  Strange black bulbs, like the heads of asparagus, germinated from the hot field behind the toilets.  It was some sort of art work wrought iron sculptures around a small slab of limestone carved with these words:  On Fame's, camping ground / The tents are solemnly spread / For here will be found / The silent bivouac of the Dead.

****
Off Interstate 35 at the second Ames exit, west-bound on 30 toward Boone.  Grey buildings nudging one another and the deck of a big stadium cantilevered over a lower slope of seats, all empty now: Jack Trice stadium.  Jack Trice was a black athlete, an animal husbandry major.  He played football as a tackle for the Iowa State Cyclones.  On October 6, 1923, he was badly injured in his first football game, stomped and punched by members of the Minnesota Gophers.  Minneapolis doctors thought Trice was fit to return by train to Ames.  But he died of a collapsed lung and pulmonary embolism two days later.  Accounts vary as to exactly what occurred in the game.  It is clear that Trice stayed at the downtown Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis the night before the football game but was not allowed to eat in the restaurant with his all White teammates.  ISU didn’t play Minnesota again for fifty-two years in protest of murderous behavior by the Golden Gophers.

When he was dressed to be put in his casket, a neatly folded sheet of paper was found in Jack Trice’s suit pocket.  The paper contained words written Radisson Hotel stationary:

My thoughts before the first real college game of my life.  The honor of my race, family, and self is at stake.  Everyone is expecting me to do big things.  I will!  My whole body and soul are to be thrown recklessly over the field tomorrow.  Every time the ball is snapped, I will try to do more than my part.  On all defensive plays, I must break through the opponent’s line and stop the play in their territory.  Beware of mass interference!  Fight low with your eyes open and toward the play.  Watch out for cross-bucks and reverse end-runs.  Be on your toes every minute if you expect to make good.  Jack

*****
Is there a Ballad of Jack Trice?


*** **
There are many ballads about train disasters.  One of the most famous is “The Wreck of the Old 97.”  The Old 97 was a mail express that derailed on the Danville line.  The song refers to a real crash that occurred in 1903 on a curve uphill from the Stillhouse Trestle.  In the ballad, the engineer is pressured to speed in order to make up for earlier delays.  When he loses his air brake, we learn: He was goin’ down grade makin’ 90 an hour / When his whistle began to scream! / He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle / All scalded to death by the steam.  Ballads of this sort must point a moral and, so, the balladeer ends with these lines: So come you ladies, you must take warning / From this time on and learn / Never part on harsh words from your true lovin’ husband / For he may leave you and never return.

*
Kate Shelley (or Shelly as she sometimes wrote her name) was shanty-Irish born to a tenant farmer in County Offaly, Ireland. When she was 1 ½, Kate came as an immigrant to the United States.  Her family settled on the frontier, in Iowa near the village of Boone, in 1865.  The country was wild then, with Indians and wolves, and the Shelley family homesteaded 163 acres near Honey Creek, a little stream that runs in a deep ravine down to the much larger Des Moines river.  Farming was difficult and the crops failed several years and Kate’s father, Michael, went to work on the Chicago and Northwestern railroad, then, laying track and building trestles over the rivers near the homestead.  Michael died of consumption in 1878.  Kate and her mother worked the farm, plowing and harvesting, often without the labor of draft animals.  Kate had four siblings, but her youngest brother, James, drowned swimming in the broad muddy waters of the Des Moines River.

**
On the night of July 6, 1881, when Kate was either 16 or 18 (her grave’s dates don’t match the baptism records in County Offalay), a savage thunderstorm darkened the skies.  The wind blew down trees and there were torrential rains.  People reported that timbers from a railroad bridge were floating in the Des Moines River.  The station master thought that the high trestle over the Des Moines River might be down and so he telegraphed for a Pusher locomotive to come out and inspect the line.  The Pusher never made it to the Des Moines River – the small trestle over Honey Creek a few dozen rods from the Shelley cabin had collapsed.  The locomotive crashed into the swollen Honey Creek.  Two of the men on locomotive drowned and the other two clambered up on top of the engine, seizing hold of the branches whipping overhead while the warm, muddy flood waters fanged with fallen trees rose up around their ankles.

***
Kate Shelley heard the crash of the locomotive into Honey Creek.  She ran to the side of the swollen stream and saw the men trapped on the engine.  She said that she would bring help and, then, dashed across the wooded promontory where the Des Moines River curves around the point of land.  Through the driving rain, she saw the high trestle, a hundred feet or more above the dark, turbulent river.  Another train was scheduled shortly and Kate was afraid that it would also plunge into Honey Creek where the bridge was down.  In the flashes of lightning, Kate could see that the high trestle, about 220 yards long, seemed to be still intact.  So she started across the rail bridge.   The wind buffeted her and she had to drop to her knees and crawl across the open trestle.  Debris in the river was battering the bridge and she felt the timbers trembling under her.  Wind-driven rain blinded her and, several times, she couldn’t see to go forward.  She clutched at the rail, but, slowly, inched forward.  Of course, if she couldn’t clear the trestle before the train arrived, the locomotive would run over her.  In the distance, she heard the wail of the locomotive’s steam whistle.  She continued her crawl and reached the opposite bank of the river just in time to hail the locomotive and bring it to a stop.  She reported that the bridge was out on Honey Creek.  The train inched across the high trestle, stopped on the other side of the river, and Kate, then, led a rescue party to the creek where the bedraggled survivors of the wreck were pulled out of the foaming flood. 

****
Photographs show a lanky girl with a horsy pig-tail and big teeth.  She has dull, unimaginative eyes.  I suppose that if she had been a person with a vivid imagination, she would never have attempted her crawl across the deadly high trestle bridge.  The Chicago and Northwestern rewarded her with a barrel of flour, 100 dollars, and a lifelong railroad pass. A few years after her exploits, a temperance reformer paid her tuition to college.  She didn’t do well in school and returned to the shanty near Honey Creek.  A Chicago bank paid to have the ramshackle farm improved and lifted a mortgage that was in arrears.  In 1903, she was appointed superintendent of the tiny train station at Moingona, two miles from the farm near the creek.  Kate Shelley didn’t marry and died in 1912 from complications of a ruptured appendix. 

*****
People wrote ballads about Kate Shelley’s adventure on the trestle over the Des Moines but the songs have been forgotten.  In 1991, a children’s book was written about her exploits.  But it is now out-of-print.  The Boone County historical society maintains the abandoned station at Moingona as a museum in her honor.  But the roof leaks and the collections have been spoiled and the museum is never open, even by appointment. 

*** **
You can’t really tell the story of Kate Shelley without falsifying it.  In my account, I describe her crawling across the trestle in the direction of the oncoming train, the Scranton occupied by 200 souls.  In fact, she crawled across the trestle in the opposite direction toward Moingona so that she could alert the station master there.  He sent a telegraph halting the Scranton before it reached the high trestle. She carried a lantern onto the trestle but the wind blew it out.  I imagine the lone girl staggering down the tracks and waving a lantern in the face of both storm and the black iron jaws of the locomotive.  In fact, she crossed the trestle so that the stationmaster could alert the oncoming train to the collapsed bridge at Honey Creek.   A map displayed at the Moingona Station, now the desolate Kate Shelley museum explains the story – but it isn’t really very clear. 

*
Moingona is a tic-tac-toe grid of gravel roads on the hillside over the Des Moines River.  In mid-summer the trees and foliage are thick and you can’t see either the river or the famous high trestle – the old iron girders now doubled by a modern viaduct that runs alongside the old structure.  The station house is pushed into a notch of clearing cut out of the undergrowth.  There are no tracks nearby – either the place was moved or the spur into Moingona is now gone.  Some outdoor exhibits tell the story of Kate Shelley.  The building smells of defeated, collapsing timbers and rotting shingles.  The drive-way to the building ends at the green wall of the jungle.

**
A sign marks the trail to the Mill Creek Bridge.  I follow the trail down hill.  It has been raining daily in this part of the world and the trail in the green shadow is slick.  Mosquitos make a froth around my eyes and my wrist wears a bracelet of them.  The air is steamy, congested, tropical with rot.

***
Below the hill, a turbid stream exhausts itself in deep mud.  Someone has thrown a plankboard bridge over the stream – it’s a couple of parallel two-by-fours spanned by boards, about eight feet long and simply lying in the ooze.  About a third of the cross-members are rotted-out.

****
I venture out onto the plank walkway.  The boards groan and feels spongy underfoot and so I’m afraid to take more than a couple of steps on the little plank bridge.  The forest is tangled on all sides and swarming with mosquitos and the breeze-less air is steamy.  I’m no Kate Shelley – this eight-foot long bridge has defeated me.  I step back onto the slippery mud bank.

*****
The Mill Creek bridge is overhead.  It’s so entangled in vine and underbrush that, at first, my eyes have to adapt to the boreal shadow to detect the structure.  The bridge was built in 1871 from crumbling fieldstone and it is high as a house, a tawny vault of rock that looks like an Etruscan tomb.

*** **
You can’t see the either the Shelley High Trestle or the old Wagon Wheel bridge over the Des Moines from Moingona.  Highway 30 ducks down into the river valley and crosses on concrete piers about forty feet above the tense-looking angry brown flood.  In this area, the river bends sharply in one direction and, then, another. Presumably, the Wagon Wheel bridge, one of the oldest spans in Iowa, juts across the river somewhere around the hairpin bend. 

*
My receptionist, Angie is from this part of Iowa and she’s familiar with the railroad trestles over the Des Moines River.  When she was in High School, kids drank beer on the sand bars sheltered by the big skeletal structures. 

**
About ten years ago, Angie’s brother was with some kids under the Wagon Wheel bridge.  This span was built in the 1870's for cart and wagon traffic.  It was a long deck, just wide enough to support a single lane of traffic, fenced by iron girders bolted together on both sides of the thoroughfare.  The bridge was old by the turn of the century before World War One and clumsy-looking, but it served its purpose.

***
The boys drinking under the bridge in August 2010 found a book bag with some papers, notebooks, and toiletries.  The book bag was lying on the edge of the river under the span.  A few yards away, the boys saw something round, about the size of a chicken carcass, and englobed with flies.  It was someone’s head.  A heap of rags covered a torso with arms outstretched nearby.  The kids were horrified and ran to a nearby farmhouse to call the cops.

****
The head and body proved to be a suicide.  Someone had tried to hang himself from the side of the bridge.  But the drop was too long and the suicide’s neck was pulled apart so that the corpse fell in two parts under the Wagon Wheel bridge.

*****
The suicide wasn’t identified for more than a week.  No one local was missing.  The dead man turned out to be someone from Chicago, a resident of Cook County, Illinois.  Angie told me that her brother still has nightmares about that afternoon to this very day.

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I drove around in the countryside near the brawny-looking Des Moines River.  But I couldn’t find the Wagon Wheel Bridge.  Later, I learned that an ice dam under the bridge’s piers had taken the span down in March of 2016.  Today there’s no trace of the bridge remaining.

*
I took Highway 17 south past Madrid, the location of another renowned high trestle – it’s now part of a bike path – and, then, onto the freeway west of the City.  The opera was in Indianola and so I drove down to an exit in the green, sweltering country and went east through tropical-looking valleys toward that town.

**
Signs by the roadside: When you die, you will meet God and The World will end soon.  More enigmatically: End Eminent Domain Abuse!

***
Out of Oskaloosa or Iowa City, a radio show called Daddy’s Doghouse, broadcast from the VA hospital: “When a Man loves a Woman” and some tunes by Janis Joplin.  My car catches the radio signal only on the crests of the hills.

****
At the Warren County Fairgrounds in Indianola: a Monster Truck Rally.  Girls in bathing suits washing cars for a fundraiser in the Hy-Vee grocery parking lot. 

*****
The opera is performed in a auditorium on a college campus in the middle of town.  The campus occupies a couple of acres in the middle of a residential neighborhood with quiet sidewalks and two-car garages.  I park between some classroom buildings with steeples and mansard roofs.  The sidewalk leads along a greensward under old trees.  Ahead of me, an elderly man forges forward confined in his walker while his wife trudges dutifully alongside.

*** **   
Johann Christian Woyzeck served in the Prussian army until he was 38.  He, then, retired to his home city of Leipzig – this was around 1818.  In Leipzig, Woyzeck began a relationship with a woman named Johanne Christiane Woost.  The former soldier supported himself by serving as a barber and making wigs.  Woyzeck had a son with Fraulein Woost.  But he suspected her of infidelity and beat her up.  The police arrested Woyzeck.  He served eight days in jail for domestic abuse.  Released from jail, Woyzeck had nowhere to go.  He begged on the streets.  On June 2, 1821, Woyzeck cut Fraulein Woost’s throat, killing her.  He was immediately arrested and confessed.  Woyzeck had been hallucinating before the murder and some of the authorities thought he was insane.  A physician, Dr. Clarus, was commissioned to examine him and write a forensic report as to his criminal responsibility for the murder.  Dr. Clarus met with Woyzeck five times and, ultimately, concluded that the former soldier was sane when he killed his common law wife.  An appeal from the murder conviction followed, another doctor saw Woyzeck, and, then, Dr. Clarus met with him again for another five sessions.  Once more, Dr. Clarus affirmed Woyzeck’s sanity.  The criminal was executed by beheading in the Leipzig city square on August 27, 1824.  This was the last execution in Leipzig prior to the Nazi period.

*
Georg Buechner was born in 1813 in Darmstadt.  He is one of the greatest prodigies in German literature.  While studying medicine, Buechner wrote a vehement revolutionary tract, Die Hessisches Landbote (The Hessian Courier) – he was only 21.  The tract calls for immediate revolution and begins with instructions that any person caught with the brochure on his or her person will be imprisoned and, possibly, executed – so readers are advised to destroy the tract if apprehended by authorities.  Buechner followed this political agit-prop with two plays, Danton’s Tod (“Danton’s Death”) and Leonce und Lena, a comedy a bit after the model of Shakespeare’s As You Like It.  Both plays are monuments of German literature and were published before Buchner was 23.  He, then, wrote a harrowing, partly non-fiction account of madness, the prose piece “Lenz” – the novella describes the German poet and dramatist Lenz, who went mad, suffering a breakdown in the mountains.  Buechner also published scientific essays on the cerebral nerves (he wrote in a letter “I spend my days dissecting cadavers and my nights writing plays”) and on the nervous system of the barbel or catfish.  (He also translated two plays by Victor Hugo and wrote hundreds of letters).  During his last year, Buechner became interested in the case of Johann Christian Woyzeck, read the trial transcript, and, also, studied the competing forensic reports as to Woyzeck’s state of mind when he killed Fraulein Woost.  Ultimately, Buechner prepared four manuscripts comprising scenes to a play about Woyzeck.  He died before he could assemble the fragments into a definitive edition.  Typhoid killed him when he was 25.  Woyzeck is a play that exists outside of its time – it is more fierce and didactic than Brecht and more despairing than Beckett.  It also seems a kind of dead end – nihilism has no place to go after Woyzeck.

**
Woyzeck was rediscovered in the 1870's on twelve sheets of paper densely covered with tiny, illegible handwriting.  Various editors have stitched the fragments into different editions.  The play was first performed under the direction of Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1914 – that is, a hundred years after Buechner’s death.  The avant-garde composer Alban Berg saw the play and forged it into an opera that was first presented in 1925.  The opera is atonal, written according to the 12-tone row system, and requires a large orchestra.  The music is either a whisper or a shriek. 

***
Berg’s opera is called Wozzeck.  This is because no one had reliably deciphered Buechner’s handwriting and missed the “y” in the name.  Because the name was spelled wrong, many years passed before the Leipzig trial records that Buechner used for his material were identified as relevant to the drama. 

****
The question that Woyzeck and the opera named Wozzeck consider is the much-vexed issue of free-will.  Did the murderer act as a result of free-will decision to kill his common-law wife?  Or was he the victim of forces, including the onset of mental illness, that stripped him of any ability to resist the hallucinations and savage jealousy urging him to kill the woman.  Buechner imagines his title character as a kind of automaton or marionette – a man programmed, as it were, by misery of various kinds to commit the murder that resulted in his execution.  The military has turned Woyzeck into a robot designed to follow orders.  Religion has filled his head with apocalyptic imagery.  To earn money, Woyzeck has agreed to serve as an experimental subject conducted by a physician – he has been eating nothing but beans for the past six months and this diet has weakened him.  Sexual jealousy further tilts poor Woyzeck into a state of madness in which he cuts his Fraulein Woost’s throat.

*****
In an early scene in the opera, Wozzeck and his friend, Andres, are gathering sticks in the forest.   They come upon a sinister-looking pond surrounded by mushrooms growing in strange circular patterns.  Wozzeck recalls that someone was wandering in this clearing in the woods once and saw what they thought was a hedgehog.  When the wanderer approached the creature, he saw that it was actually a severed human head.  The head gnashed its teeth and slowly levitated into the air. 

*** **
Strangely bright outside after the gloom of the opera.  Old people on the sidewalks walking in the green shadows cast by the trees.  Even the shadows seem radiant so brilliant is the light. 

*
North to Des Moines through verdant valleys – small farmsteads, fields of corn and soybean, ditches decorated with wild flowers.

**
South of downtown Des Moines, the highway becomes a long avenue running through old, dilapidated neighborhoods.  Most of the signs are in Spanish: Zacatecas Motors and Aztec Car Repair.  The heat has emptied out the streets.

***
Eight-hundred yards from the capitol building, the road runs over a long viaduct.  I expect to see a river in the broad green channel below but instead it is simply an empty space, a kind of campagna, with groves of tattered-looking trees, mounds, a road running below toward a single rotting grain elevator poking up from the fields like a broken tooth.  This area was once, I suppose, lined with many railroad tracks and, presumably, there were a dozen or more grain elevators next to the sidings, switching lots, and rows of taverns and whorehouses next to the huge trainyard.  But the tracks are gone and the grain elevators torn down except for that last structure standing utterly alone in the strange, empty valley where the wind blows and the tall grass trembles along the deserted rights-of-way.

****
My CD, People Take Warning, has ballads about crime: rapes and murders, enraged women killing their lovers, bandits gunned down by railroad cops.  Sudden death is all around

*****
People all take warning / And don’t forget to pray / You may well meet your maker / Before the break of day.

*** **
Floyd Collins died in a lonely sand cave:   Young people all take warning from Floyd Collin’s fate / And get right with your maker before it is too late / It may not be a sand cave in which we find our tomb / But when we go to the Maker we will meet our doom.

*
A school burned down: You could hear the children screaming / As the flames were rising high / Oh Daddy get your baby / Don’t let your baby die.

**
A plane crashed: On a happy-go-lucky flight they went / Alaska’s not so far away / Light-hearted Will Rogers and brave Wiley Post / Never dreamt fate would call that day.

***
I stop for supper in Clear Lake, Iowa.  Signs lead me to the Surf Ballroom, a flat windowless box of pale brick in which the half-circle of a vault makes a cresting wave over the famous dance floor.  After Buddy Holly played here, he boarded a small plane for a flight to Fargo.  The plane crashed in a cornfield a mile or so away and Holly, with most of his band was killed. 

****
When you reach my age, every road that you travel may be your last.  I wonder if I will ever drive to Des Moines again.  Was this trip to the city the last time I will go to that place?  The city will be in its valley surrounded by floods, the highway will run straight and true, people will still await the curtain’s rise in a crowded theater, the fields will remain green and grey with tall corn and soybeans, the brown river will still nudge the concrete pylons, but I will be gone.

*****
An outlaw bold encounters a female sheriff – the woman points a Thompson submachine gun at the bad man: I’ve had my worldly pleasures / I’ve faced down many a man / But it was down in Texarkana / Where a woman called my hand... Young men, young men take warning / Oh take my last advice / If you start the game in life wrong / You must surely pay the price.


July 2019