Part One: Alexander’s Field
By Richard Odell
“People seem, but things are.” Rainer Rilke
It all went back to the war.
My parents’ eastern Washington origins were always somewhat murky, to me. More often, when they spoke of past times, they referred to their days at High Point, a war-time housing development in southwest Seattle, built for the city’s burgeoning ranks of war-time factory workers. The homes were modest, though the acreage was choice. Close by was a true high point, with a view of the Cascades to the east and the Olympics to the west, and down in the Sound, green-forested islands.
One day, the locals watched a pillar of black smoke rise from the northern limb of the nearest island. My parents would someday move to that island, and within a few years find themselves, by choice of housing, connected by an overgrown lane to the source of that pillar of smoke, a mansion that now lay in ruins. I was but five months old. Discoveries lay in wait.
This would be their second of Island rentals, tucked into the corner of fallow farm acreage. Its sizeable shed, likely once the shelter of trucks, tractors, and fruit boxes, now stacked to the rafters with steel gratings, our landlord no farmer, but a bridge builder. In those days, there were yet roads to lay out and bridges to build. He would later sell the house to my father, but his presence remained on the land.
His name was Alexander, and as I grew, and heard my parents speak of him, it seemed they did indeed whisper of some fabled figure. Not that I had heard of the legendary Macedonian, but rather, something in my parents’ tone of voice told me to be mindful of Alexander.
The leftover beams of his mythical works, massive truckloads of 12 x 14s, 8 x 8s, and 6 x 6s, arcane constructs of no ongoing use, and cavernous steel culverts – these last a skateboarder’s dream, had there been skateboards back then –were arrayed in the open grasses behind the shed, there to remain as engaging hangouts for us kids and our friends, and, more often, staging grounds for the lonely fantasy.
To my childish mind, my family seemed honored to curate these monuments, while no personal appearance on Alexander’s part would ever arise to deflate the image I had of him, this Mighty Doer of Great Works.
These feelings were likely enhanced the day my mother left me off at a babysitter’s house down the hill from us, towards the ferry. The sitter, Mrs. Dunn, was a round, soft woman who sat me in her lap while she read to me. I remember this moment only for what occurred at right angle to it, as a monstrous noise arose on the highway beyond the front lawn. In full view of us, a trailer-truck, straining like The Little Engine That Could, was scaling the hill from the ferry with an enormous, red steel culvert on its back.
At the top of the hill my family lived, and I would arrive home later to discover that same culvert now at rest in the back field. Alexander had spoken, and a distant, public spectacle had been delivered into the intimacy of my home life.
I should be startled, today, by how clearly I remember each of those mute and stolid lumber piles, as if each had its own, strange name, which I still cannot guess. Youthful fantasies, misgivings, random thoughts flowed unabated through my unlicensed mind, as I posed atop the gray beams, or studied their surfaces, softened and feathered by sun and rain.
It calls to mind a correspondence of the poet Rainer Rilke, whose works I once frequented, in which he recalled his torturous years miscast in a military academy. He was bullied by all, there, without exception, to where he sometimes found peace alone in some corner, with some small, finely crafted object, a teacup or a flower, he could study and admire. “People seem,” he wrote, “but things are.”
The steel culverts, too valuable, would eventually be reclaimed and hauled away, as would the steel gratings in the shed. Scotch broom, elderberry, and alders would, in the course of my youth, shoot up through the gaps of Alexander’s monuments. I would leave the island, returning 16 years later to find a house, and a broad, green lawn, where the monuments once had been.
Yet Alexander lived on … somewhere, and in time I would at last get a glimpse of our hero, as he sat in a Buick Regal in my mother’s driveway. His end upon him, too old to drive or to get out of the car, his wife had brought him by on tour through the far-flung remnants of past campaigns. I couldn’t make out his features through the glass.
Coming next: Part Two, The Falcon’s Nest
