the professor's house

I am in the midst of planning a bike trip in southwestern Colorado, starting in Durango and ending in either Durango or Montrose or Grand Junction. I'll be going alone, right before Labor Day, and hauling all of my camping crap with me. This may be a very bad idea. Yesterday a cab grazed my right arm as it sped past me on Dearborn Street. I caught up to the driver and asked him why he hadn't given me more clearance. I took a tone that was more wounded than angry. He screamed at me. "This is a city! What do you want me to do!" he said. "Give me six more inches so you don't kill me," I said. "Why would I want to kill you!" he said. His eyes were red. He gunned the engine and sped off as soon as the light changed. This is the scariest part about biking, the drivers who refuse to acknowledge that their recklessness could scatter you like the seeds lifting off a dandelion head.

Nonetheless, I feel very compelled to go to Colorado. I want very badly to see the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park. I didn't understand where this irrational feeling came from, until I recently remembered that one of my favorite passages in one of my favorite books, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, focuses on the protagonist's discovery of and relationship to cliff dwellings in the southwest. Willa Cather traveled to Mesa Verde National Park in 1915 and stayed for a week. Out of that experience came Tom Outland's story (in The Professor's House) and an article on "what Mesa Verde means" for the Denver Times. I know my imagination is more romantic than reality, and my experience of Colorado probably won't be revelatory but dangerous, exhausting, or merely banal - maybe I will focus more on the clouds of gnats swarming at dawn than the sunrise - but I haven't anything better to do and I might as well see.

I bought another copy of The Professor's House because the first was Stephanie's. It arrived today. The quality of the printing is so poor that it is intrusive - it is like the Dover Thrift edition of the Dover Thrift edition. The publisher put an unnecessary statement underneath the title: "This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race have changed before allowing them to read this classic work." Also, all the diacritics are messed up, as if the document was created in one word processing program and opened up in another, and nobody bothered to edit it: "That summer Charles kept him for three weeks in his oleander-buried house in the Prado, until his little brig, L'Espoir, sailed out of the new port with a cargo for Algeciras. The captain was from the Hautes-Pyrénées, and his spare crew were all Provençals, seamen trained in that hard school of the Gulf of Lyons." This is distracting.

Still, what a pleasure to read:

The thing that side-tracked me and made me so late coming to college was a somewhat unusual accident, or string of accidents. It began with a poker game, when I was a call boy in Pardee, New Mexico.

One cold, clear night in the fall, I started out to hunt up a freight crew that was to go out soon after midnight. It was just after pay day, and one of the fellows had tipped me off that there would soon be a poker game going on in the card-room behind the Ruby Light saloon. I knew most of my crew would be there, except Conductor Willis, who had a sick baby at home. The front windows were dark, of course. I went up the back alley, through a tumble-down ice house and a court, into a 'dobe room that didn't open into the saloon proper at all. It was crowded, and hot and stuffy enough. There were six or seven in the game, and a crowd of fellows were standing about the walls, rubbing the white-wash off on to their coat shoulders. There was a bird-cage hanging in one window, covered with an old flannel shirt, but the canary had wakened up and was singing away for dear life. He was a beautiful singer - an old Mexican had trained him - and he was one of the attractions of the place.

I happened along when a jack-pot was running. Two of the fellows I'd come for were in it, and they naturally wanted to finish the hand. I stood by the door with my watch, keeping time for them. Among the players I saw two sheep men who always liked a lively game, and one of the bystanders told me you had to buy a hundred dollars' worth of chips to get in that night. The crowd was fussing about one fellow, Rodney Blake, who had come in from his engine without cleaning up. That wasn't customary; the minute a man got in from his run, he took a bath, put on citizen's clothes, and went to the barber. This Blake was a new fireman on our division. He'd come up town in his greasy overalls and sweaty blue shirt, with his face streaked up with smoke. He'd been drinking; he smelled of it, and his eyes were out of focus. All the other men were clean and freshly shaved, and they were sore at Blake - said his hands were so greasy they marked the cards. Some of them wanted to put him out of the game, but he was a big, heavy-built fellow, and nobody wanted to be the man to do it. It didn't please them any better when he took the jack-pot.

I got my two men and hurried them out, and two others from the row along the wall took their places. One of the chaps who left with me asked me to go up to his house and get his grip with his work clothes. He'd lost every cent of his pay cheque and didn't want to face his wife. I asked him who was winning.

"Blake. The dirty boomer's been taking everything. But the fellows will clean him out before morning."

About two o'clock, when my work for that night was over and I was going home to sleep, I just dropped in at the card-room to see how things had come out. The game was breaking up. Since I left them at midnight, they had changed to stud poker, and Blake, the fireman, had cleaned everybody out. He was cashing in on his chips when I came in. The bank was a little short, but Blake made no fuss about it. He had something over sixteen hundred dollars lying on the table before him in bank-notes and gold. Some of the crowd were insulting him, trying to get him into a fight and loot him. He paid no attention and began to put the money away, not looking at anybody. The bills he folded and put inside the band of his hat. He filled his overall pockets with the gold, and swept the rest of it into his big red neckerchief.

I'd been interested in this fellow ever since he came on our division; he was close-mouthed and unfriendly. He was one of those fellows with a settled, mature body and a young face, such as you often see among workingmen. There was something calm, and sarcastic, and mocking about his expression - that, too, you often see among workingmen. When he had put all his money away, he got up and walked toward the door without a word, without saying good-night to anybody.

"Manners of a hog, and a dirty hog!" little Barney Shea yelled after him. Blake's back was just in the doorway; he hitched up one shoulder, but didn't turn or make a sound.

I slipped out after him and followed him down the street. His walk was unsteady, and the gold in his baggy overalls pockets clinked with every step he took. I ran a little way and caught up with him. "What are you going to do with all that money, Blake?" I asked him.

"Lose it, to-morrow night. I'm no hog for money. Damned barber-pole dudes!"

Now go and buy this book, and then read this informative criticism.

You're welcome.