The Buzz on life
Burrowed deep within my sleeping bag and a few additional comforters, I find a tunnel within the folds and poke my head through. I let out a breath and a ghost appears above me. It drifts away, as if trying to coax me along with it, until it loses patience and decides to disappear without me. The teal light of the sunrise, still too weak to penetrate the drab seventies curtains, finds its home within the fabric itself, as if this old run-down camper was actually some product of the future, its curtains emanating an illuminated charge from the sun.
At dawn, my home is too cold for a ghost, but I get out of bed all the same.
Since committing to Master’s degree in social work this past summer, I have been spending my time doing one of two things. Either I am out there in the world of people, working as a clinical therapist, trying to understand the realities of the world and the people in it, while I make my way through the thousands of words to be read and written for my graduate classes. Or else I am here, secluded in this ancient camper trailer, trying to rationalize how a 31-year-old man with no savings account, and few relationships of his own to speak of, could be in any way qualified to help others. As you’d guess, there are good days and not so good days. There are days when I know I have something to offer, and days when I think I’m fooling myself. And often, the weather has something to do with it.
I light a burner underneath a pot I filled with water the night before. I look at the miniature ice-skating rink inside of the pot, and smile at the small piece of learning that went into it. The problem was that all my water would freeze solid within various containers I had strewn about the camper, thus becoming quite useless in assisting the morning routine. The solution was simple enough, but even now, these small moments of learning, when caught and appreciated, keep me mindful of the creativity it has taken to live the way I do. I light a second burner and huddle over it with my hands cupped over the flame, not so different than a homeless man huddled over a burning trashcan, and like him, I think of little more than the fact that my hands are warming… my hands are warming.
I reach for coffee from a small shelf above, but my thawed fingers are clumsy and dislodge a tomato that falls with a quickness that seems inappropriate so early in the morning. The sound is not a thud but a surprising pang… a very concerning pang.
The tomato is frozen through. I look deeper into the cupboard and see dark brown bananas, yellow just 8 hours prior, now solid as bat handles. I pick up the tomato and knock the chilly orb on the side of the stove. It replicates the sound… “pang, pang, pang!”
24 hours later, and I’m walking alongside highway 191 toward the only lit window in town. A temporary truce seems evident in the calm early morning, the desolation of winter and tranquility of fall both in agreement that no battle would be waged today, at least not yet. Once close enough I see that the cafe is called Mitch’s, and there is a small fireplace inside. Then, walking in, a sign: “no cards accepted.”
I take a seat at the counter, near as I can to the drip coffee machine in the corner. Two white-bearded men have the table nearest the fireplace, and their grumbles are a low drumming in all the corners of the cafe. A trifecta of waitress, dishwasher, and cook, has the place alive and warm at 6:30am. I’d imagine it’s the kind of town where men grab drip coffee from their wives’ counter at 5am on their way to the oil fields, or else the farm, the ranch. Not such a feminist thought, but in Wyoming, it would be as close to the truth as one could guess. This is legit Trucker Country. I’d imagine the population of a few hundred to actually live in homes spread out over thousands of acres, and you would have to squint from the road to see them. Once spotted, you might see that there’s a pull-behind camper hiding next to a long-surviving barn. You’d see the fields beyond, scraped into the lines and shapes of past crops, and you’d see the Wind River Range far off in the distance, another world of craggy white peaks, furtive elk and slumbering bears, of high mountain lakes full of sly fish, the progeny of Finis Mitchell, who at the turn of the century cast out into the Winds and stocked every lake he discovered.
I hand over all the cash I have to the waitress as she approaches, a measly dollar. “Maybe just a coffee?” I say. “I’m just waiting for a tow truck, if that’s alright?”
“I just feel awful you walked all the way here and we can’t get our card scanner to work,” the waitress says. “We may have to feed you yet.”
She’s wearing a light blue Budweiser t-shirt below a simple blond ponytail, and her face is un-made and smiling, like most of small-town America. She puts my dollar on the bar.
When did she spot me through the window? But then I wonder how many folks are walking up and down these streets at dawn. An image comes to me of that early morning fisherman in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row — the mysterious man who walks into town from the sea everyday just before sunrise. Not so different, maybe, would be the inquisitive eyes of this tiny town in the middle of Wyoming.
In a moment a small white mug of coffee is steaming in front of me on the counter, a faded “this Bud’s for you!” making its way back to the kitchen.
The morning of the frozen tomatoes I packed up the camper, hitched it to the truck and drove south towards the Utah desert. The first semester had come to an end, winter had finally come, and my unpaid internship wouldn’t begin again for another six weeks. For the entire semester I had channeled every want and desire into this moment — when time would be mine again and I could spend my days traveling and climbing throughout the American west.
Unfortunately, that trajectory pointed me strait into a blizzard. Wyoming’s plains make for the bleakest of storms, and 40 miles later the realization hit me behind the wheel that I was risking my life to keep driving. A gust of wind caught the camper and it slid across the black ice and into the oncoming lane, my truck pulled adrift along with it. I gathered myself in a hurried panic and pulled off the road. 35 miles into a 1400-mile round trip, and already the panels of my camper were bent permanently to the wind, rime taking form along rows of 40-year-old staples that had survived, until now, undisturbed within orange-rotted plywood.
I slept that night in a frustrated rage, wondering if this camper was in any shape to be hauled clear to Utah. It was as if every decision I’d made in the last three years had been presented to a midnight tribunal in my mind, my decisions laid bare before a much more resolute and critical judge. And the judgment was harsh. I wondered, for the first time it seemed, if my 94’ Silverado truck (a “brand-new” $3000 purchase) was worth it. If this camper literally disintegrated on the highway, torn away piece-by-piece by the wind, just the truck would be left in the morning. The thing has 225,000 miles, for god’s sake. I had no money for rent, no money to repair the truck. Simple means and low expenses, simple means and low expenses… my life on a government loan… What in the hell was I doing here? How did it come to pass that this was my life, the life I had chosen?
In the morning, after hammering in a few nails to re-secure the paneling, I gave a quick prayer and turned the key. I hoped to get a head start to Moab, but less than five minutes later my alternator belt burned through a stalled pulley in the engine and I was no sooner begun then ended again, prior still to the sun that would likely fail to penetrate the dark ceiling of cloud over the Wyoming plains.
The wind continued to howl in the darkness as I stood on the side of the highway. I tried with little success to embody the highway’s slumbering contentment underneath the ferocious wind and snow. Waving two solar lanterns in my hands, I hoped to flag down the next truck to pass.
Soon after I was thawing out in the shotgun seat of Mr. Taft Dalton’s 350-liter Dodge diesel truck, headed towards Farson and highway 191 towards Rock Springs. Taft works in livestock management, a full-time and life-long cowboy. He also happened to ski patrol at the ski area just outside Pinedale, Wyoming, where he was headed that morning. I mentioned to him that I grew up in Steamboat Springs, a ski town in Colorado. I also mentioned the Clark Ranch, where I used to work checking head of cattle and setting stable posts into the Earth, and how I sometimes had to use a car-jack to pull up the massive riverbed stones that slept underneath the stable’s pitch-black soil.
“It’s not easy to live in America,” was all he said.
Looking out the front windshield, I watched as the sun rose and, regardless of my pessimism, attempted to pierce through the clouds.
Twenty miles later, Taft swung off the road and dropped me off at a truck stop in Farson, one of the four or five buildings that made up the entire town. I thanked him again and wished him some good turns at work. He nodded and pulled away.
Every building was dark but for a small cafe I could make out down the road. I called AAA and made my way there.
A group of four comes into Mitch’s diner and a young man yells out “hey Mary!” as they make their way to a booth. With his arm around his companion’s shoulder, I notice the handgun tucked into his belt above the back pocket of his jeans. A muffled “hey Jerry!” echoes out from the kitchen. As they move to a booth by the window I see a small display selling baseball cards in the corner, and vintage Coca-Cola signs pinned up on the wall that really are from decades past. The simple countertop with its basic napkin dispenser, salt and pepper and mini silo of sugar on offer — I can’t help but feel that there could be no smaller town than this, no more local a diner. For this reason I’m not very surprised when, a few minutes after his friend leaves, the white-bearded man abandoned in front of the fireplace turns his head and looks at me. At this point I already know: by being friendly with Mary, I’ve betrayed my alacrity to engage and make conversation — which is exactly why he comes here each morning. I’m glad for it, and prepare a smile while he scoops up his mug and makes for the seat next to me…
His name is Buzz, and he moved to Farson over thirty years ago. I try and do some quick math: what does that equate to in cups of coffee drank at Mitch’s?
He explains that he’s from Massachusetts. “Two daughters, two ex-wives and one dead son,” he synthesizes. His life story begins with his service in Germany, where he served as the driver of a laissez-faire commander that let him bowl and drink on duty. Buzz smiles and chuckles at the reverie, and looks down at the counter. When he looks up again, his face and words are made sober, matter of fact:
“I worked in construction when I got back, until I fell 30 feet from a ladder.” The injury left him disabled.
“And then kaput,” he growls. “I became a drunk. Didn’t have no reason to not be a drunk, so I was a drunk.”
“Hun,” Mary has returned dutifully to refill our coffee. “Here is a menu, if you want. Just eat something, maybe.” She’s soon pulled away into orbit around the cafe.
Buzz got a phone call from a friend out in Wyoming a year or so after his accident. The guy said there was a hauling and rigging job open and it could be his. Said there was an airport close — could be working tomorrow if he really wanted. Said the pay was good — the oil industry in Wyoming was just picking up steam.
“And by golly, if he wasn’t right!” Buzz says. “I was here two days later. Had that job until I retired a few years ago — 30 some-odd-years moving all kinds of equipment from one place to another. I’ve been all over — you know there are some people here who haven’t made it farther than Rock Springs? Sent money back to my wife and kids, and it was more than I ever thought I’d make. Soon enough, my wife, she says to me, ‘Buzz, we ought to move out there.’ My daughters say the same thing. Next thing I know they all pack up and that’s that. Been in the seat ever since.”
Buzz tells me of all the different things he’s moved — bulldozers and airplane wings, portable homes and crane wheels “the size of Jupiter!” He goes into minute detail on all the logistical problems he’s faced, as if I know what it takes to rig this and tow that, and he tells me of the jolly pranks his co-workers and friends played on him though the years.
“There was this time back in 89…”
We sip our coffee.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development began in the late 1930s, thought up by a physician named Arlie Bock from Harvard. He was concerned with the question: what constitutes a well-lived life? What, in the end, makes us happy? What keeps us healthy, and promotes well-being? He believed that the medical research of the time focused too much on sick people and understanding the symptoms and diseases of the body. Instead, Bock wanted to focus on the long-term, subjective feedback of subjects who were not sick. His subjects were healthy and fit, ready to embark on life, and his study would keep track of their lives and their physical health in an effort to find consistencies. Today, it is considered the most longitudinal study on human development ever done in America, and possibly anywhere in the world.
Harvard’s project eventually combined two separate studies: The Grant study, which focused on 268 Harvard sophomores from its 1939–1944 classes, as well as the Glueck Study, which focused on 456 inner-city youths from the downtown tenements of New Jersey. All participants were male, but when the two groups were combined, diversity presented itself.
In the end, a diverse range of personalities, abilities, and socio-economic beginnings, of mostly British, Italian, and Irish background, cast off into the baby-boomer epoch of American history to paint its own picture of human strength, frailty and nuance.
Still today, many of the study’s original subjects participate in physicals and interviews, telling of their choices in habit, diet and exercise. They tell stories of their greatest triumphs and most profound failures, and of their battles in love and marriage. They expound on their roles as sons, brothers, husbands and fathers, all so that we may learn what it takes to be happy.
In the late sixties, George Valliant took over as lead architect for the Harvard study, and it was as if the study had been given his living, breathing heart. For the rest of his career, Valliant would navigate the nuance and gravity of these men’s lives with one question in mind: Is there science behind what can lead us to happiness?
What he found was that in observing these men’s lives, he was also able to observe how each man responded and adapted to adversity. Their ability to cope with pain and conflict, as well as great achievement and recognition, became the fulcrum on which a life would be balanced.
Buzz tells me about how the job he found in Farson threw him back on the wagon, too.
“I stopped drinking, cold turkey. My wife, she’s a gal, she takes care and saves most all the money I gave her. I stopped spending money on booze and instead, we start buying snowmobiles, four-wheelers, jet-skis. I give my wife a big fat roll of cash one day after a red-eye gig outa Rock Springs, and she says to me, ‘Buzz what am I gonna do with this?’ and I says, ‘golly if I know, but I aint got no use for it!’ ”
The main take away of Valliant’s lifetime of work with these men is relatively simple: alcoholism is one of the most destructive forces in a person’s life, and over the course of a lifetime, high intelligence and great wealth do not really matter. In fact, it might be even more basic. In Valliant’s most recent synthesis of the 70-year study, Triumphs of Experience, Valliant presents the evidence of literally hundreds of lives and makes one final conclusion:
“Happiness is love. Full stop.”
Turns out, a person’s ability to develop intimate, lasting relationships with others is the most significant contributing factor to a life’s gratification or regret. While there are myriad factors that influence a person’s lifelong trajectory, in the end, you’re happy if you have someone to love, and someone who loves you.
Buzz smiles when he tells me about his daughters. “My oldest, she has three kids of her own. She’s been living in Rock Springs for a while now, so I see her and my granddaughters when I can. Don’t you know it, but before I retired, I would let my grand-daughters ride on my lap and steer the truck!”
I imagine his white beard tickling the back of his granddaughter’s neck, the wheel a massive hoola-hoop in her hands. Picturing the two of them moving all kinds of equipment from one place to another, I can understand why he’s beaming with pride.
Mary returns to the counter with a plate of sourdough bread and hot cereal, which I did not order.
“I just can’t help it. I hope you don’t mind, but you should eat breakfast.” She puts two plates in front of me and I notice two little cups perched at an angle against a bowl of oats: brown sugar and raisins. On the other plate are two slices of sourdough moist with melted butter, with two small plastic boxes of grape and strawberry jam.
She’s pulled into orbit again before I can muster up something polite to say, and then Buzz, his voice intimate and intensified with wide eyes that lock onto mine and hold me hostage, until I began widening my eyes, too, in suspense, in response to this total stranger who has now become my closest confidant, continues the story of his life…
It is an interesting time to be a graduate student in social work. At first, the trepidation was contagious among us in class as we witnessed the rise of Donald Trump, and the transparency of his rogue disinterest in the value of our nation’s unity. But now that contagion of anger and nervousness and resistance has subsided into something else. Now there is silence in the classroom where there was once such impassioned vitriol; now no one recognizes our country and its strengths, its valiant ideals, and no one knows what to do. I dare say: it feels as if my classmates and I have stopped believing in our country.
Sitting shotgun again, this time in a tow-truck headed back to my camper, the plains have become an opaque brightness under the white clouds. When the truck arrived outside of the cafe, Buzz gave me this look as if, now that we’d met, I’d be carrying something with me for the rest of my life. He looked hurt that he couldn’t keep talking, but satisfied that at least he’d shown me enough of his life to affect the rest of mine.
“Good luck, son.” He said.
Beyond the hate and fear that has been planted throughout our country by so many irresponsible and dishonorable leaders, what remains true is that we all have values that are deeply important to us. We want our lives to have meaning, either for ourselves or for others. Or both. There are those of us who live in large cities, and those who live in tiny towns like Farson. Those of us who enjoy a large wealth but struggle to find happiness, and those of us who live on a shoe-string every day, blissfully happy. I think of those frozen tomatoes, and scrapping by on a student loan. I think of all the folks who don’t even have the opportunity to go to college, let alone grad school. I think of the elderly members of a psychotherapy group I facilitate at Lander’s behavioral health center, who week after week tell their stories of loneliness and loss. I think about my other clients, too, who so often wonder if they will ever find that one thing called happiness. I think of my parents, and my brother. I think of White America, Black America, Hispanic America, Muslim America, Straight and Queer America, male and female America. I think of indigenous America, and the more than 550 Native American tribes that hold sovereignty within U.S. boundaries. I think of Donald Trump, republicans and democrats. I think about the penchant our country has for always finding a way to turn oppressed groups loose on each other like loyal, ignorant animals. I think of our country’s social welfare history, and the public opinion that shapes our laws and policies. I think of our government’s attempt to balance its obligation to its citizens with its most sacred religion: capitalism.
And then I try and breathe.
The fabric of our country appears so threadbare, and as each strand frays from the whole, I wonder what might save it. Thinking about Valliant’s work, maybe what will save it is the simple love between people. But how many of us see the value in this? How many of us believe that beyond our own desires, values and opinions, what is most important is also what is most at stake — that if we put our own aspirations of career and fortune and achievement above relationships, intimacy and friendship, all of us will be living in mansions cut off from the world of people, crying in desperate want for something money can’t buy?
Over a rise and around a bend, I spot my home on wheels alongside the highway.
“Is that you?” The man at the wheel chuckles as he nods to the forlorn and forgotten-looking rig.
“Sure is.” I say with a smile.
