American Backyard:

the American landscape, revisited

I thought of all my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing about.
--> Jack Kerouac

Please see the links below for excerpts from American Backyard.

The snow has stopped and eaves drip with the illusion of a thaw. To the east, our neighbor’s camouflage army surplus truck sputters in the driveway, refusing quite reasonably to conquer the huge drift blocking the road. Every motheaten decrepit barn in sight sags ominously beneath the fresh snowfall. Across the street, a woman calls her dog, echoed by the tiny voice of her daughter: "HERE DOG!" … "he-ere, dog!" In Acworth, you can hear things like that. Three miles to the west, the Connecticut River (also the Vermont border) mutes and narrows its flow; a tree as old as the house cracks and tumbles, splitting the ice and the silence.

There’s a poem in here somewhere, but Frost probably got there first.

To the south, our backyard slopes into a wooded glen, where two targets—one plywood, one heavy Styrofoam—await our next firing binge. Meanwhile, the plumber is banging away in the cellar, and we’ve been told to avoid the sinks, to urinate outside, and generally to "hold it in" until further notice.

So there’s nothing to do but write. And a good thing too. This rotten manuscript has been hanging over us like an admonishing ghost, and we’ve come to a borrowed house on borrowed time to put it to rest. A month ago we graduated from college with tentative job offers in a deathbed industry (the printed word) and a decent spell between the end of school and the beginning of work. Before us, and behind us, we've got several years' worth of toil, a 150-page manuscript that nobody but a few credulous coeds wants to read, and enough rejection letters to keep the woodstove busy for three weeks.

Which is all for the best. Because we’re scrapping the book those letters are about, jettisoning our heady "manuscript," writing off the prototyping that consumed us for a semester, and starting—for all intents and purposes—from scratch, cranking out the book in three weeks.

We've holed up here with a limited number of crucial supplies: $100 worth of groceries, thirteen notebooks, forty DVR tapes of interview footage and no way (at the moment) to watch them, two laptops, a record player, twelve LPs, as well as eight sturdy cartridges of carbon dioxide and 500 paintballs. These are to be used with the two solid-blue rifles a well-wisher lent us for judicious use in the countryside, just in case a situation arises and we need to wield our second amendment rights in defense of our first.

SPLAT! Neon orange on blue Styrofoam. SPLAT! A sunburst on the hanging plywood target, radioactive drips on snowy ground. SPLAT! Jackson Pollack in Day-Glo. "Get inside and write!"

Very well then, a sprint to the finish. Make an assault on entrenched wisdom, banish the fogs of memory, get back to the real thing. A heavy promise, but we’ve got the guns to back it up.

And if all else fails, there’s always the road.

Excerpts:

The New Orleans Bargain: A Survivor’s Guide

Press Release: Intrepid Traveler Devoured by Beachcombing Mountain Lion

A Word on Women