A year in the gutter: that thin straight canyon where one page meets the next

Inside the old barn, I waited in the doorway of the small room we called the milk house. Behind me the stainless steel bulk tank took up much of the concrete floor, and two Surge milking machines sat on the linoleum-covered bench fixed to the wall. I tapped one boot against the other to coax some feeling back into my toes and looked down the line of fourteen Holsteins standing side by side. Arthur Godfrey’s soothing voice drifted from the old AM radio next to the compressor in the wooden framework suspended from the joists above the row of cows.

With the heel of his right hand, Dad hit the latch on the top of the stanchions, and one by one, the Holsteins backed out, each swinging her bony hips one way and her head past the belly of the cow next to her. They stepped across the gutter and clomped toward me before turning and easing over the sill and into the blistering-cold January morning. Steam rose from their backs, and the frigid sun turned the snow-covered cow yard into a blinding sheet. Dad followed the last one past me and out the door, climbed on the Super M idling near the gate, and pulled the manure spreader next to the barn. I grabbed the shovel leaning against the wall, stepped into the gutter, and in the yellowish glow of three fly-specked incandescent bulbs overhead, carried shovelful after shovelful of cow shit over the concrete and pitched it into the spreader.

Nearly fifty years have passed since those Saturday mornings in Minnesota, and even though I was twenty pounds lighter then and my hair was longer — it was the ’70s, after all — in some ways little has changed. I still love the howl of a blizzard, the heft of a good hammer, melted butter dripping from an ear of sweet corn, the full moon reflecting off the snow and brightening a winter night, sundogs, and especially the way a book both conceals and reveals the world. The latter is, of course, where I’ve spent much of my life: sinking between the pages of hardcovers and paperbacks and into that thin straight canyon where one page meets the next, which is, aptly enough, also called the gutter.

And given some of what I’ve read over the past year, the name fits. It’s not that they’re badly written books. Far from it, really. It’s just that they dig into subjects that anger and stun me with details of the ignorance, greed, callousness, dissembling, and self-absorption of the guttersnipes in the White House. It’s documentation of a disaster I can’t and we shouldn’t look away from. It’s context and evidence and the opening chapters of a dark history written in every day’s headlines. And despite the fear, the fire and fury, the lies, and collusion described by Woodward, Wolff, Comey, Harding, and others, I find that knowing is better than not knowing, so I read.

But just as one book leads to another, so, too, one lie leads to another and to the growing sense that so much American “progress” and “greatness” has come at the expense of truth. Lies are the source of much deception, tragedy, and suffering, and as I grow older, more of the curve of my life traverses or is touched by tangents of that larger history of deception. Lies are at the root of Edward Snowden’s flight to Hong Kong and then Russia in 2013, the trigger that set off the gunfire that left 39 dead at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York in 1971, and the moral superiority and redefined promises necessary for killing, displacing, “civilizing,” and incarcerating Native Americans — an ongoing disaster that did not end at Wounded Knee in December 1890 or in June 1975 or at Alcatraz in 1969-1971or at Standing Rock in 2016. So I read to make sense of lying and of my life in the context of that history.

The best writers, however, lie for the sake of beauty, what has been characterized as the artful lie. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for instance, a novel I should have pulled off my shelf and read and reread years ago, is, according to the author, based on a newspaper story about Margaret Garner, a former slave accused of killing her own child. Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I read several years ago and reread in September, relates the story of a nerdy New Jersey boy and several generations of his family whose lives are intertwined with Dominican history under the ruthless dictator Rafael Trujillo. And though they’ve taken liberties with the facts, these novelists neither take nor threaten our liberty. Instead, they reveal the truth that others’ lies conceal.

And here at the end of another year — content in my small condo overlooking the river, separated from that barn in Minnesota by decades, and months after I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s powerful Between the World and Me for the third time—I rest my hand in the gutter of another book, both fearing and hoping that it never runs empty.