Rich Imaginations

John Steinbeck claimed that he camped overnight near Alice while touring the country on a trip made famous by his best-selling book Travels with Charley. He added that a Shakespearean  actor had camped near him, and that the two of them spent the night visiting. Some scholars dismiss this episode as a product of Steinbeck’s imagination. Who knows, maybe someone in Alice does.

A state historian and scholar Clay Jenkinson reminds us of this trip. He is following the route Steinbeck took in 1960 and is writing of it on his internet site, “Listening to America.” I doubt he stopped at Alice either, unlike the rocker Alice Cooper who did a few years ago. While Steinbeck mounted a custom-built camper on his pickup, Jenkinson pulls a modern Airstream behind his.

In Travels with Charley Steinbeck commented about crossing the Missouri River between Bismarck and Mandan: “I came on it in amazement. Here is where the map should fold. Here is the boundary between east and west. On the Bismarck side it is eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of eastern America. Across the Missouri on the Mandan side, it is pure west, with brown grass and water scorings and small outcrops. The two sides of the river might well be a thousand miles apart.”  

At first glance he didn’t like our badlands in the western part of the state calling them the work of an evil child. But as twilight descended those buttes and ravines took on a different personality and he felt he was “trapped in color and dazzled by the clarity of the light.” After he came to terms with the badlands, he realized the colors of the area were “lovely beyond thought.”

Steinbeck might be best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning The Grapes of Wrath. It told the story of the  Joad family, down and outers from Oklahoma, who were devastated in the drought, dust storms, and depression of the 1930s. Forced to leave their farm home, the book tells of their trek to California for employment. The people and hardships they faced in this novel came across as being very real. It took his skillful writing ability and imagination to make it so.

The family did not find any welcome mats. When and if any of these “Okies” found work, they experienced exploitation in the prevailing system of agricultural economics. Steinbeck received criticism, even to the point of being a communist, for having his characters promote labor unions which didn’t sit well with the real-life establishment. He was also criticized by parents and teachers for his writing foul language, sexual content, and violence. 

If readers want another other side to the story they only need to find a copy of Elmer Kelton’s book The Time It Never Rained. Set in the 1950s, it centers on an old Texas rancher who refuses government aid during a drought lasting several years. He is not about to lose his dignity by accepting government help, never quits, and hangs on, even though it’s broken him and he is too old to start afresh. It is one of the great books of western literature.

Authors have to exercise their imaginations to give us writing like the examples mentioned above. It’s not just writers, though. Without thoughts of a better life, we might still be in the stone age throwing rocks at animals to get something to eat. Look at the phrase commonly used in farm country, “making hay.” Simple enough? Over the years it has gone through a lot of changes brought on by someone’s imagination looking for better ways to do it. The old Egyptians made sickles by taking a large jawbone from a cow and inserting flint-knapped stones in the tooth cavities. It moved them one step beyond pulling it up by hand.

With the new-fangled product of iron blacksmiths poured and pounded out long curved cutting knives called scythes and attached them to wooden handles. After the grass was cut and dried, the process of gathering it up and carrying armfuls of it to a stack gave way to loading it on hay racks, thereby handling larger amounts pulled by horses.  

Machines kept growing better and larger. Imaginative thinkers dreamt up the idea of  a reciprocating sickle for a five foot mower which utilized ground traction from a bull wheel to power its cutting action. This size soon gave way to seven foot models that took its power off a tractor engine, which simply said is a power take-off.

Swathers, field choppers, discbines, and on into the future to where else? How we handle the hay changed from towering stacks of loose hay to round bales to square bales picked from the field by bale hook swinging men walking alongside a flat bed trailer, to hydraulic picking machines. We didn’t mention the different methods of gathering the hay after it had dried, for instance dump rakes, side delivery rakes, or wheel rakes.

We’ve strayed quite a long way from the opening where we talked about Travels with Charley, but creative minds, not just authors, give us something new, such as in the agricultural world and science, music, sports, and entertainment.  Imagination stokes thought and empowers us to dream beyond the limits of what is.