The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [101]
The fact that so much of my work is directed outward, to publications, colleges, and organizations in the urban areas of the nation, can’t help but set me apart from the people I live with in an agriculturally based society. And my perceptions of them, and the place in which we live, can’t help but be altered by links with the world outside that are a necessary part of surviving as a writer in isolated circumstances—modem, fax, FedEx, and my preferred “snail mail.” Often I am a stunned observer of the ways in which my worlds collide. The first time I had a poem printed in the New Yorker, I was startled to hear the pastor at Spencer Presbyterian announce it in church on Sunday, as one of the “joys of the congregation.” His gesture made me more a part of the Lemmon community, even as it separated me from it.
Having to frequently come and go from Lemmon, as most of my paying work is elsewhere, has reinforced my sense both of rootedness and displacement. It’s because I’m acclimated to the relative calm of my small town that I usually enjoy (at least for a few days) the sound of traffic in the charged-up, urban intensity of mid-town Minneapolis or Manhattan. I enjoy the feel of being an anonymous one among many on a crowded sidewalk or subway platform. And sometimes I am enlarged by unexpected connections that surface between my rural place and the city. During the Gulf War in 1991, I happened to be in New York City, and my conversations with cab drivers centered on the young people we knew who’d been sent to fight. Urban poor, rural poor, for whom the military represents opportunity. One cab driver, a pleasant Jamaican immigrant, had picked me up at a ritzy address and had a hard time believing that I knew people who were in the war. He told me he had a nephew and several cousins in the Gulf.
One summer day, not long after I’d returned from St. John’s, I took part in a conference call among writers scattered across America. To begin, our chair had asked us to “go around the room,” a cyberspace room, stretching from California and Oregon all the way to Connecticut and upstate New York. I stretched out in a favorite rocker to take the call. Just a few days before, near the crest of a butte some forty miles from Lemmon, a place with a view of nearly sixty miles to the south and west, my body had been totally absorbed in giving a rattlesnake enough room. I’d scared him up at dusk, after a spectacular sunset, and while I couldn’t see the snake at all, instinct told me where his rattling had come from and I quickly backed off.
It was a good night, all in all, and even the rattlesnake’s presence felt like a blessing, a West River welcome after I’d spent nearly a year in Minnesota, writing up a storm and consorting with trees and lakes, blue herons and loons. All is forgiven, the rattlesnake said; watch your step. I received another kind of welcome at a social and hymn-sing held at Hope Church, a country church I love. It sits in the middle of a pasture, and as the pickup trucks were arriving I was hugging everyone in sight—people I hadn’t seen for many months, ranch men and women in their best jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots, some moving stiffly, seemingly suddenly older, little kids who seemed to have grown about a mile, new babies. We were also keeping an eye on the sky. It was overcast, and it didn’t seem as if the sunset would amount to much. Wait a few minutes, one of the old-timers said. Soon the eastern sky turned pink, bathing our faces in rosy light. I had my back to the west when I felt the light change, as