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English Studies Forum
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The True Point of Beginning Trevor Dodge
"Nothing written for pay is worth printing." --Ezra Pound
1. In Between the Vivisecting Nothing After spending however many tens of thousands of dollars chasing a master’s degree in writing and literature, I found myself teleported back to my hometown of Twin Falls, Idaho. Months of sluggishly searching want ads and casing Job Service postings quickly brought me to what I was already beginning to fear: my only saleable job skill here was that I could type reasonably fast and passingly accurate. My typing skills netted me a nominal, hourly-wage job typing insurance forms for a land title and escrow office. Here I was instructed in the costly lessons of typographical errors, where the simple transposition of degree or direction literally referred to a parcel of land my employer had no right to insure as having “clear” or “free” claims to title. After a year of doing nothing but typing and reading and re-typing legal descriptions for forty and fifty hours a week, and developing sciatica, myopia, and a mild case of carpal tunnel syndrome, my duties shifted to present-tense adventures, outside the fluorescent light and Berber carpet of the place I called Work. My job today is to “inspect” the parcel of land at 310 W 350 S, to mediate and, in some degree, help determine whether or not Seller Whomever-A is the legal owner of “real property” located thereupon. Part of this job entails looking at how fence lines have been strung, where hot tubs have been buried, plumbed, and wired, and evidence that freshly-poured concrete foundations do not encroach upon Seller Whomever-B’s claims to his/her own “real property.” Another part of this job entails snapping an instant photograph with a grimy Polaroid OneStep camera, as if the poor resolution and seeping color of resulting 2D image could serve as proof that Seller Whomever-A’s real property located at 310 W 350 S, Jerome, ID is in fact real. I plunk the button on the OneStep and the picture pops out like so much smoldering bread from a toaster. It’s right here I’m beginning to realize that in any land sale transaction, the land itself is irrelevant. All the fissures, drain patterns carved in mud, grass, bumps and knolls and natural debris have been successfully left out of my picture-toast.
2. In Medias Res We are here.
You are exactly where you are. Bob is a former Marine and tank commander during Gulf War I. Now Bob is a Title Officer in Twin Falls, Idaho, and current owner of the navy blue pickup truck I’m driving. I’ve just clicked off the radio. A few moments ago you and I were jostling down Jerome County road 300 W in said truck, listening to said just-clicked-off radio, watching for 350 S, the last right-hand turn for a square mile. Wadded in my hand is the plat map of a quarter acre parcel of land the Title Officer ripped off a laser printer in his office, located in the two hundred block of Third Avenue, “downtown” Twin Falls, Idaho , where maps and legal descriptions for every chunk of rock and dust mite in both Jerome and Twin Falls Counties are painstakingly archived and indexed. Half an hour ago he handed me this map and his mini-bolo tie keychain. Three days ago he would have also flipped me his cell phone, but it has recently come up stolen. The map’s street address reads “310 W 350 S, Jerome, ID .”
“Go find that. Ain’t got time to inspect it myself before it closes this afternoon.” Exactly twenty-six minutes later, here we are, supposedly where we’ve meant to be. The Title Officer is also exactly where he’s meant to be, clicking a legal description of this place into his office computer back in Twin Falls :
For prose so precise, it is utterly ugly, clearly banal by intention. Take no mind to the fact that what appears on sight to be a paragraph is nothing more than one subordinated run-on sentence, its direction and focus changing in absolute geometric precision without kindness or candor, its path taken leading the reader exactly back to where (s)he started. Here there is no road not taken, for there is only one road. We might only imagine Robert Frost poring over a similar metes and bounds description, grimace encrusted on his boyish late-thirties face, before deeding over the family farm in Massachusetts, transplanting his family in England, and there publishing his first book of verse to the eager ears of Pound, Abercrombie, and Hulme. This legal description also brings to recollection Wallace Stevens’s first real day job as an insurance claims adjustor for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Perhaps he wrote poetry to breathe something back to life, to assure himself that language’s “necessary angel” was far removed from the real-world provinces of the law and economics. As Stevens climbed the ranks into Hartford’s higher echelons of management, clearly his passion and necessity to write poetry increased in almost a direct ratio. This is the kind of high Modernist irony that rests uneasily when visiting Idaho’s most popular gravesite, namely that of one Ernest Miller Hemingway.
3. The Language of Ownership The title insurance and land escrow business in the United States has its roots in two quintessentially Western thought systems: ownership and naming. As the nation bullied itself towards the Pacific Ocean, the fledgling government saw a need for a system to keep land claims bound and sealed within the letter of the law. In 1784, Thomas Jefferson helped bake the “rectangular survey” system. Also called the “township” system, Jefferson’s proposal divvied all newly-acquired territories into six-mile squares (“townships”), which themselves would be subdivided into one-mile squares (“sections”). The end result: thirty-six perfectly symmetrical brownies of land, ready for private ownership. A year later, in 1785, Congress passed the “Northwest Ordinance.” This sought to “dispose” of the “territory ceded by individual states to the United States, which had been purchased of the Indian habitants” using the township system. West duly won. Using the Western Territory as a sort of metaphorical legal pad, the township system homogenized thousands and thousands of square miles of disparate land into legalese, effectively erasing any previous title or claim by the indigenous peoples living there. This epistolary eviction established a national survey of base lines and meridians, literally marked in chain across the surface of the earth:
One net result of this is a precise legal description for any “here” one might imagine, the claim to which can be bought and sold. Another sad result is the creation of the only landscape writing that holds any true currency in this country. Keep in mind that the transfer of so-called “real property” never actually involves the physical movement of anything. The language of “real property”—that spoken by financiers, real estate agents, and insurance brokers—is not concerned with the ephemera of landscape in its various physical forms; rather, “real property” usually refers to any housing that has dug itself into the earth, temporarily burrowing there until the next natural disaster or Learning Channel-inspired remodel.
4. [A]toll: Bridge US Highway 93 clefts the lip of the snarling Snake River Canyon, buoyed 486 feet above the river by nearly 4,500 tons of trussed, arched steel. This current incarnation of the I.B. Perrine Bridge replaced the narrower, cantilevered bridge before it, precariously erected in 1927 as a toll bridge between Twin Falls and Jerome counties. In 1966, engineers inspected the bridge, concluding that a new structure would be needed to handle increased flows of traffic and commerce between the two counties, as well as to the awaiting onramps of Interstate I-84 just four miles to the north. After seven years of political and logistical planning, in May of 1973 the groundbreaking on a second bridge began; eighteen months and 8.6 million dollars later, its skeleton stretched a steely arm from rim to rim. The replacement bridge’s thick armature was constructed from what’s known in the industry as “weathering” steel, an untreated frameworking material deliberately left to the elements to rust. Constructing a bridge from weathering steel beats nature to the punch; here, a natural corrosion is not only encouraged, but accelerated; one form of rust used to guard against another. A quarter century later, in the year 2000, Idaho’s Fifty-Fifth Legislature introduced and passed H.B. 494, an amendment to Idaho Code 40-5, in which the bridge would be officially (that is, legally) called the “I.B. Perrine Bridge.” Idaho Code 40-513A, “Designation of the I.B. Perrine Bridge,” argues:
“Negligible,” H.B. 494’s Fiscal Note reads, would be the cost of two signs at either end of the bridge, “estimated to be less than $500.” Unspecified, of course, were the “costs to erect” said signs. Also lacking in H.B. 494’s careful wording was an equally careful proofreading. For as much time, expense and effort went into making sure that the I.B. Perrine Bridge (“people in Jerome County and Twin Falls County call the bridge ‘Perrine’”) was called de jure what it was already called de facto , H.B. 494 actually—in the technical, legal, semantic sense—renamed the structure as the I.B. Perinne Bridge. Negligible: the fact that I.B. Perrine (the man, not the namesake) did help finance a bridge near Twin Falls , but it was on the polar opposite side of town, in a markedly smaller gorge called Rock Creek. Negligible: Land baron I.B. Perrine brought irrigation and electricity to the high desert through copping stock in the then-recently constructed Milner Dam, which he and his fellow land baron friends milked to create the Twin Falls Canal Company. This public works project, financed with the federal dollars of millions to the profit of the few, enabled the regional political bosses to carve up the corpse of the Shoshoni empire into tiny towns they named after themselves; by the Roaring 1920s, the townships of Buhl, Burley, Kimberly, and Jerome stood as namesakes for their Canal Company daddies. The sprouting of bean and potato towns above the canal tracts quickly became commonly referred to as the blossoming of the “Magic Valley.” In flooding the desert floor and stringing high-tension wire above it, Perrine and his cronies performed economic sleight of hand tricks. But such magic doesn’t come easily, and certainly doesn’t come for free. Ask the nearly ten thousand Japanese-Americans who were interned on 33,500 acres of high desert scrubland here, from August 1942 – October 1945. Six miles north of the desperately mis-named microtown of Eden (population 314) in eastern Jerome County, the Lake Minidoka Relocation Camp saw the magical reappearance of over 7,000 citizens who had vanished from their Seattle homes, with another 2,000 teleporting from Portland. From September 1942 to July 1945, Japanese-Americans here published a camp newspaper, The Minidoka Irrigator. 98.7 percent of Lake Minidoka’s internment population pledged their fealty in “loyalty surveys” to the United States, and nearly 600 Japanese-American males were conscripted into the armed forces to fight against Hirohito’s expanding empire. Magic. Eden. Irrigator. What’s in a name? Negligible: In 1994, Seattle area artist/poet/teacher Munio (Takahashi) Makuuchi publishes his poetical memoir, From Lake Minidoka to Lake Mendota and Back to the Northwest Sea. From Lake Minidoka chronicles his earliest memories of childhood internment in the desert north of Eden, racial harassment as the first Japanese-American student in Twin Falls’ Bickel Elementary School, his family’s struggles in the South Park migrant labor camp (a poor, industrialized area cris-crossed by the Oregon Short Line Railroad, and within a rock’s throw of Perrine’s Rock Creek), his father’s broken spirit upon realization that the family would never be able to return to their former home in Seattle, and the son Munio’s eventual triumph as a self-taught painter and poet. Negligible: Makuuchi first discovered art at Lake Minidoka, when he began folding scraps of the Irrigator into the shapes of birds and airplanes. “For with them,” he would later write, “I would soar over barbed wire fences and machine gun towers to places one could only dream about.” Negligible: During the flurry of Liberty ship construction from 1941-1945 (these ships—described by Franklin Roosevelt as the “dreadful-looking objects” and “ugly ducklings” of the United States’ wartime fleet during the second world war—were built like many of the prefabricated, cookie-cutter communities which sprang up in southern California after the war: quickly, inexpensively, and with all the drab aesthetics of a Henry Ford-styled assembly line, in the effort to make up in part for the decimation of the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor), nearly three thousand vessels were produced, each one costing two million dollars, and each taking less than seventy days to assemble. The U.S. Maritime Commission’s task to manufacture three thousand ships in five years was only as daunting as the task of naming them. The two essential criteria for having a “liberty” ship named after you:
As bullet-proof a criteria number one might seem, the Maritime Commission mistakenly violated their first rule in christening Hull #3140 the Francis J. O’Gara. O’Gara was a WSA Purser on the Jean Nicolet, and thought dead after the ship was sunk by a Japanese submarine in 1944. Imagine Maritime’s surprise upon discovering O’Gara a year later in a Japanese POW camp. Criteria number two—like most auspices in the naming of things—is intentionally subjective. While I.B. Perrine had an indelible mark on the history and culture (most certainly on the economy) of southcentral Idaho , it’s harder to make the case that he had the same influence on an entire nation. Or maybe it’s not, depending on how you’re holding the map. Negligible: A few months before mistakenly naming Hull #3140 the Francis J. O’Gara, the United States Maritime Commission christened Hull #2976 the I.B. Perrine. Negligible: On May 22, 1956 the United States Navy acquired the Francis J. O’Gara, assigned Navy Hull #YAGR-10, and dubbed Outpost. Retooled as a roving radar base for detecting airplanes during the Cold War, Outpost served a Caribbean tour in the 1960s, scouting the seas and skies for nuclear weapons during the C uban Missile Crisis. Negligible: historical significance vivisected by historical fact. Does the omission of one “r” and imposition of an extra “n” dismantle a bridge? Can an obvious typographical error corrode history? In the technical, legal, semantic sense of dismantling and corrosion? Yes. Nevertheless, H.B. 494 passed the Idaho House of Representatives unanimously, sixty one votes to none, with nine members not present. Nevertheless, in 1966 Outpost is returned to the Maritime Commission—and rechristened Francis J. O’Gara—as a team of engineers prepare their final recommendation to dismantle the 1927 incarnation of the I.B. Perrine Bridge. Nevertheless, upon publication of From Lake Minidoka, Makuuchi delivered complimentary copies to the Twin Falls Chamber of Commerce and the Twin Falls Public Library, inquiring whether either entity would be interested in helping preserve his story. Both declined. Despite his domestic and international success as a painter, printmaker and instructor, Makuuchi was unsuccessful in his 1998-1999 flurry of letters, phone calls, and email messages to have the local community college sponsor a retrospective of his work. A year later, Makuuchi died in a Seattle hospital, from complications of stroke. Nevertheless, in the year 2003, only two Liberty ships have survived military scrapyards. Nevertheless, upon returning to their Seattle and Portland area homes, thousands of unwitting Japanese-American Sellers-Whomevers found their real property claimed, retitled, and reinsured by new Owners-Whomevers. For whom the bridge tolls…
5. Celeste “People don't own land or houses,” Celeste told me. “People own mortgages.” Celeste worked in the Twin Falls office’s Escrow Department and lived in Jerome. She was one of the commuters the 1966 engineers had in mind when they advocated the construction of an insta-rust bridge across the Snake River Canyon. In her What I Think I’d Like To Be When I Grow Up phase, she had taken a few photography and philosophy classes at the College of Southern Idaho. Before she became Mrs. Whomever-C and started her real life as an escrow officer, she snapped pictures of parking lots, shopping carts, and abandoned merry-go-rounds. She also occasioned into Twin Falls’ Rock Creek Canyon to photograph an area called “The Faces,” where the area’s homeless and transients scratched human-like characters into the concrete used to seal the north wall of the canyon for a now-defunct bridge financed in part by I.B. Perrine’s Twin Falls Canal Company, and geographically the polar opposite of where Perrine’s namesake bridge now spans the Snake River. The old bridge became known as the “Singing Bridge” for the thin hum of car tires against its steel surface, the sound of which became amplified as it thumped between the shallow canyon walls. In the late 1990s, the Singing Bridge gave way to its replacement, the “Victory Bridge.” No state initiative was made to officially recognize or preserve the name “singing.” Celeste’s observations about Twin Falls stemmed from her suspicion that any town vised between two river canyons has a tendency to keep its insiders inside, and any outsiders outside. Despite her dyed-in-the-wool Catholicism, Celeste was, on occasion, a remarkable nihilist. She always asked me who really owned everything; who really owned the Wal-Mart across the river in Jerome, the community college, half-way houses, Big K, hospitals, animal shelters, recycling centers, Taco Bells, observatories, lawnmower shops, RV parks, car dealerships, banks, mattress factory, Barnes & Noble, gas stations, retirement homes, courthouses, Pizza Huts, grocery stores, airport and railroad, Motel 6s, fairgrounds, post offices, cellular phone stores, and FBI buildings. I told her she really didn’t want to know. But most of all, Celeste was interested in who really owned the cemeteries: “So say I buy a burial plot in a private cemetery.” “And say I pay like twenty grand for it.” “And I get title insurance on the plot.” “And say I die.” “According to the will I recorded and filed with the Probate before my death, when I die I’m lowered into a hole the mortuary I’ve prearranged to administer my funeral has dug in my plot.” “And say sometime in the future the cemetery is sold to a developer who wants to build a tee box for a new golf course on my burial plot.” “Would the title insurance company—on behalf of my heirs—be able to sue the developer and impede the construction of the new golf course?” Go ask Francis J. O’Gara, I tell her.
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