Herb and Harry were the names of our two steers, the one a Hereford, the other a Holstein. They did not do much but stand, bovine and stoic, from one day to the next. They sculpted strange rolling shapes into the salt lick with their fat blue tongues, and delighted, with minimal expression, in the delivery of fresh hay. My father liked to joke that they were 'out standing in their field', and they were. They excelled in matters of bovinity, one could not dream of surpassing them. That there was not much to do in the role of bovine did not diminish their excellence, and did not increase their strangeness. In fact, it made them so much more familiar, so much more like me. I was seven, and I did not do much either. I had no known talents, and it would be a long while yet before I would get the idea to try to write. I spent my time taking the world in, watching the animals, mostly. Sitting in the pasture as Herb and Harry grazed nearby, and calling them, in imagined conversations, by their names.
I do not remember when these two appeared, but I do recall, as if it were yesterday, the day the deep-freeze was delivered: a freezer, waist-high to an average adult, as long and as wide as a comfortable bed. It was a descendant of the old ice-boxes that had brought the miracle of long-term food storage to the sweltering Central Valley of California already in the 1920s. Fifty years later, every household in Rio Linda would have in its kitchen a vertical refrigerator with a small freezer compartment at the top, but only a special few would have a ground-dwelling vault, a shiny white tomb dedicated solely to the preservation of sweetmeats and tissues in an eternal solid state, installed with pride by toothless men with tool belts in a corner of the family garage.
We were of indeterminate class. We inhabited a defunct chicken farm, inherited from the Scandinavian grandparents of my mother's side. My father, born in Southern California to a renegade Utah Mormon and an Arkansas dustbowl migrant, was exposed to big ideas and the hope of some upward mobility thanks to a naturally curious mind and also in part to a stint in naval intelligence (involving the transcription of Chinese and Russian radio signals) followed by the GI Bill and graduate study. My mother, born in Sacramento to Minnesota Lutherans (softened by the pseudomystical fun of Shrinerdom), went to law school by night, with the dream of eventually helping the poor white women of the trailer parks of Rio Linda escape their abusive relationships. When the JD in family law was finally earned, and nailed to the wall of the strip-mall office, she would discover that the local economy still functioned mostly by barter, and she would receive, in remuneration for her services, a 1978 AMC Pacer, home grown tomatoes, a vicious goat named Snowy (of whom we have not heard the last), and many a hand-scrawled misspelled Post-It note of gratitude.
There were some lean times in the Valley, and though San Francisco was only a two-hour drive away, though Michel Foucault was just down the road at Berkeley, where my own mother had been an undergraduate at the end of the 1960s, speaking of technologies of the self and the liberatory potential of pleasure, I recall a Central Californian childhood in which the cycles of drought and flood still played a role, in which the desperation of James Agee's interbellum South had been translated Westward with little change. While my parents were not themselves peasants or 'harvest gypsies', to speak with John Steinbeck, the simple fact of their choice to settle in Rio Linda, California, was sufficient to pull us downward, classwise, and to ensure that in all of my subsequent motion through elite East Coast institutions and centers of metropolitan sophistication, I would never, for a second, be free of the singular thought: you are from Rio Linda. You are white trash.
by Justin Erik Halldór Smith | Read more:
I do not remember when these two appeared, but I do recall, as if it were yesterday, the day the deep-freeze was delivered: a freezer, waist-high to an average adult, as long and as wide as a comfortable bed. It was a descendant of the old ice-boxes that had brought the miracle of long-term food storage to the sweltering Central Valley of California already in the 1920s. Fifty years later, every household in Rio Linda would have in its kitchen a vertical refrigerator with a small freezer compartment at the top, but only a special few would have a ground-dwelling vault, a shiny white tomb dedicated solely to the preservation of sweetmeats and tissues in an eternal solid state, installed with pride by toothless men with tool belts in a corner of the family garage. We were of indeterminate class. We inhabited a defunct chicken farm, inherited from the Scandinavian grandparents of my mother's side. My father, born in Southern California to a renegade Utah Mormon and an Arkansas dustbowl migrant, was exposed to big ideas and the hope of some upward mobility thanks to a naturally curious mind and also in part to a stint in naval intelligence (involving the transcription of Chinese and Russian radio signals) followed by the GI Bill and graduate study. My mother, born in Sacramento to Minnesota Lutherans (softened by the pseudomystical fun of Shrinerdom), went to law school by night, with the dream of eventually helping the poor white women of the trailer parks of Rio Linda escape their abusive relationships. When the JD in family law was finally earned, and nailed to the wall of the strip-mall office, she would discover that the local economy still functioned mostly by barter, and she would receive, in remuneration for her services, a 1978 AMC Pacer, home grown tomatoes, a vicious goat named Snowy (of whom we have not heard the last), and many a hand-scrawled misspelled Post-It note of gratitude.
There were some lean times in the Valley, and though San Francisco was only a two-hour drive away, though Michel Foucault was just down the road at Berkeley, where my own mother had been an undergraduate at the end of the 1960s, speaking of technologies of the self and the liberatory potential of pleasure, I recall a Central Californian childhood in which the cycles of drought and flood still played a role, in which the desperation of James Agee's interbellum South had been translated Westward with little change. While my parents were not themselves peasants or 'harvest gypsies', to speak with John Steinbeck, the simple fact of their choice to settle in Rio Linda, California, was sufficient to pull us downward, classwise, and to ensure that in all of my subsequent motion through elite East Coast institutions and centers of metropolitan sophistication, I would never, for a second, be free of the singular thought: you are from Rio Linda. You are white trash.
by Justin Erik Halldór Smith | Read more:
Image: uncredited
