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 soothed 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 it’s divided into two horizontal stripes. The bottom half is green, and the top half is blue, with occasional dark shapes like cattle, trees, and farm building silhouettes interrupting the horizon. Two-track dirt roads intersected the narrow county highway that passed through the small town I was in. It included a two-pump gas station, unleaded and diesel, a small general store where I bought a green and yellow t-shirt that said ‘kiss a corn grower today’, a garage structure that serviced trucks and farm machinery, a huge pile of irrigation equipment disappearing into the tall grass, and a blacksmith shop. I could hear a hammer banging iron and saw an orange glow with 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 the 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 air was thick. I thought about my wife and daughter, got back in the car and drove away from discomfort. 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 it. 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 isolated farm one day while out exploring and asked if he could sketch them. They agreed to pose for him, but he’d have to come back. So, he showed up to sketch them at the specified time but had to wait. He sat on their front porch until they were finished with their 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 and stabbing. It also makes me think of ‘children of the corn’ and this couple looks like they could be involved somehow—controlling the children without words, just coded eye movements—sending out the horde 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 and pee one hot 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 congregated quickly and rushed from the barn into the fields like a single organism. They Located the oblivious intruder without making their presence known, stopped abruptly like roadrunners, then quietly encircled their prey and emerged from rows in slow motion, blinking simultaneously and silent.

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