Photo by Rashid Zakat
Written by Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela
To celebrate the release of our latest issue, RUIN (57.3), we’re sharing the Story Behind the Story for Slovenly Wilderness by Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela, including an excerpt from the story. Make sure to get a copy of RUIN to read the full story. You can also subscribe to PRISM, so you’ll never miss an issue!
This story is based on a couple of true stories. These were culled from conversations with one of my best friends, Nate, a brilliant former train-hopper, now a doctor at Columbia University, who once led a training on fermentation at an international anarchist gathering in Peru. The first was an off-hand mention of a fantastical joke that Nate and his ex-boyfriend had shared. I was immediately stunned, and I stopped him with, “Whoa wait, the symbolism!” He was confused by my excitement as I rambled about how the hypothetical baby captured so much of what humans struggle with. When he figured out what I was getting at, he just shook his head, rolled his eyes, and said, “writers are thieves.” I smiled big and explained that if he didn’t say anything else, I’d be able to make it up. He smiled back, and I knew I had permission.
For a couple of months, I mulled on how to tell the story because I wanted to avoid a “look at the freaks” narrative. It wasn’t until I stumbled onto rereading Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, which is told from the perspective of the town, that I figured out my approach. The “normals” would be the freaks. When I showed the first draft to my friend he asked if I was sure I’d never hopped a train because I’d gotten the details right. It was a testament to the power of listening. I’d known a few train hoppers over the years, and I’d been curious and collecting details (I later hopped trains from Denver to Amarillo). While the community I created is arguably a bit over-romanticized, I wanted to honour the play and possibility that so many folks in such outsider communities are drawn to. The title was inspired by the writer Joy Williams, who gave me feedback on an early draft. She also told me to look at the poem, “Anecdote of the Jar” by Wallace Stevens which complemented the story in a curious, almost fated, way.
The story within the story—the boxing scene—was added after I’d thought I’d finished. This scene was also inspired by a detail I caught in something Nate said. Again, I stopped him. I probably said something about how it exemplified the fuckery of America, or capitalism, or both. Again, he probably smiled to give me permission. However, unlike the jar, this story wasn’t a hypothetical. Nate and a few friends of his had actually done this when panhandling for money. My father was a boxer. His father was a boxer. And I am a low-key aficionado, so I also weaved aspects of boxing’s long and complicated history as a human sport.
An Excerpt from “Slovenly Wilderness” (57.3 RUIN)
I
We joked about it long enough that it was real before it was real. Something we believed in. We’d hoped we had that kind of power. That we would win despite the fact that it had never been done before. But when Ringer emptied that jar—the jar that had held their love, that we’d been rooting for just as we always rooted for exceptions—we all wondered about our futures, knew things wouldn’t be the same, started to worry that we couldn’t live this life forever. But before, during those months when the jar was full, it was as if we’d created it too, and we took pride in the accomplishment. Holding the jar up to the light, we would inspect it, check its progress and wonder how nobody had ever thought of this before: maybe, just maybe, we could change creation.
If we clung to one idea more than any other, it was that life was worth living. Really living. If you’re gonna do it, do it. We believed that by embarking on a new life, the perdition—of clocking in and out, of abusing your kids, of sleeping next to someone you hate for thirty years, of buying the next new thing, of all of that—could be avoided. That we were addicted to the road and the rail didn’t change anything. Only made our compulsion worse.
We needed the spaces we’d found, needed to keep travelling and have options, always at least two paths to take, and in the bigger yards, like the one in South Dakota, up to twenty. The moving picture framed by the open door of the boxcar. Natural markers of where we were: live oak, pine, and ash. Bloodroot, sage, and nettles. We travelled to cranberry, apple, cannabis, and seaweed harvests for seasonal bits of money. We learned about our environment and, most days, we understood what the sky was telling us about the coming weather. Even when the bulls pulled us out of the cars and locked us up in county jail, we felt unconfined. The landscape passed us as we passed it, swelling ground and cut edges, satin ribbon rivers and machine-made holes filled with water. From the well of the Forty-Eight we watched the trees, and imagined how, if we were still, it would be the landscape skating by. Nature and space and days of it.
Insistence of what life could be, that we could make it however we wanted.
We were not the first and we respected those who came before. When we ran into holdouts—elderly men, always men—we helped them in and out of the boxcars when we could. We took note of the few Freight Train Riders of America tattoos we saw—FTRA with a simple line of track. Though they were sketchy and almost never had all their marbles, we liked to witness these men, to exchange a few words and in doing so find a bit of approval from our something-like-elders. And just as they had watched us, we watched a new generation arrive. They were louder. Seemed more daring, less careful. Some of us had seen them lose limbs. We muttered about how this was not a joke, how there were ways to do things. Once in a while we realized this was a sign not so much of our experience, as we liked to believe, but of our age.
Because for most of us this was not a mere phase. It was not simply a subject for parental dismissal. No, it was something else, something marvellous. When we stood up in the doorway of the boxcar and looked out at small towns, highways skirted, and plains and mountains and valleys and hills, we thought about promised land and how maybe in owning none we could own it all—despite the fences and barbed wire.
Sure, it was a strategy of isolation and those don’t work out so well historically. We recognized that it wasn’t the answer, but what if we could make it be? For now. Despite. But sometimes in small-town diner conversations with farmers’ wives doubling as waitresses, we remembered that the world wasn’t as bad as life before we caught our first train had added up to suggest. But we couldn’t go back to those ways now we had created our own. Ultimately, once chosen, once addicted to this life, we weren’t sure we wanted to recover.
We focused on the romantic because we could. Running with a train, hands on the rails of the ladder, catching a car on the fly. In our collective memory and framing: sun always shining and big blue skies. Eating wild blackberries in northwest train yards until we were full, because around there they grow anywhere where the ground is disturbed. Folks like Ginger could scamper up to the top of a Fifty-Two and reach down and pull you up so we could all be on top of that second stacked box, lying on our backs as the train slowed through towns and cities, wind through our hair, watching stars shoot and glow.
A multi-disciplinary artist and the founder of Thread Makes Blanket press, Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas and lives in Philadelphia. Her work has been supported by many rad people and projects. She recently released No Otro Lado, a conceptual reggaeton album about U.S.-Mexico.