Bob Lowell found a motel forty miles up the highway. He'd turned the light on and found the room so dingy that he'd turned it back off. Then he had laughed at himself in the way you do when you've had too much to drink and watch your own behavior as if it were that of a stranger's. He turned the light back on and set the bag of burgers and a single bottle of beer on the bedside table. They were the classic old-fashioned hamburgers wrapped in wax paper and smelling of butter and onions. But he noticed that the table was chipped metal enamel, covered with a film of dust, and it put the food in an unfavorable context. It reminded him of how greasy the grill had been at the tavern where he had bought them a few miles back, and this further reminded him that he had the tendency to unduly romanticize taverns and other such things.

He turned the television on, turned the light off again. As he sat on the frayed chenille bedspread to remove his shoes, he decided that staying in this motel was an atonement for his romanticism. It was a half-built place, like he'd seen in so many sections of northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Places where he imagined people had come to live or people had always lived and didn't want to leave because they believed in the beauty of the land and further believed that the beauty would care for them. But the truth was, there is competition in the commerce of beauty: for every man who wants to build a pasty stand on the highway, two more will have the same idea, and many of them will be unable to make a go of it. And in his travels he had seen the beginnings of these enterprises: the abandoned framework of an out-building, the support timbers already gray from the weather, and a sign in the house adjoining that read: PIES FOR SALE, and beneath that one, KNIVES SHARPENED, and beneath that, SMALL ENGINES REPAIRED.

He watched a National Geographic program on television about a variety of oceanic wildlife only recently discovered. Until this year, oceanographers had lacked the technology to dive into the deep habitat of these beings. They were strange, blind, ephemeral organisms swimming under the lights of underwater cameras, and the narrator in slow, measured tones spoke about their origin, postulated that these species were older than any ever seen before by man, and through study of their primitive natures there was much to be learned about our own.

Lowell was reminded of another National Geographic article he had read several years before, an article about regions of the world where for some reason people were more likely to live into their hundreds. There were photos of elderly folk in the Ukraine, but the photo that left the most lasting impression was one of an ancient brickmaker in the mountains of Mexico who was 130 years old. The writers speculated that his longevity may have resulted from the continuous exercise involved in his traveling up and down the mountains, or from the altitude, or perhaps even from a diet of little fat and many starches.

Most shocking to Lowell was a photo of the man's feet. They had been utterly transformed — wide and gnarled, with the toes spread apart like fingers. This was because of the many thousands of days he had used his feet to mix mud in a large trough, kneading it over and over so it would be soft enough to shape his bricks. Lowell had remembered looking at the photo several times feeling a fascinated horror. Why? he kept asking himself. But it was really the man in the picture he was asking — Why did you do this?

And this made him think of Lakeund. He had been hungrily eating the first hamburger, but remembering the whole scene in the bar — the jagged glass being pressed into Harley's arm — tainted its flavor, and he set the remainder down on the napkin in his lap. What was wrong with Lakeund? What if they had begun the conversation in the bar in a different way? What if they had all begun by putting their cards on the table, begun by saying we are all very sad, even Harley is sad. And Lowell would have said, "I am, too. I make a career out of knowing what people want, and I'm always wrong. People don't know what they want. We get a glimmering sometimes, but we're fooled. The original sensation is too often replaced by what's immediate, what is available at the time."

Mary LaChapelle, The Meadow Bell
Copyright © 1988 by Mary LaChapelle. All rights reserved.

Posted 1 February 1997

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