Dirt and the Frequency of Disappearance

The bar was in Bakersfield, which neither of them would have chosen. Proulx had said somewhere with dirt you could see from the window, and Orange had said somewhere that served food, and the intersection of those two requirements turned out to be a place called Wool Growers on Nineteenth Street, a Basque restaurant that had been feeding sheepherders since before the interstate went through. The tablecloths were red-checked. The bread was already on the table when we sat down. I was nervous in the way I’m always nervous at the start of these things — not about the conversation itself but about the silences, which with some writers feel generative and with others feel like you’ve been caught not knowing enough.

Proulx ordered wine. Orange ordered coffee, then changed it to water. I ordered beer because it seemed like the least committal thing on the menu.

“I drove through the valley to get here,” Proulx said, tearing bread. “Almonds for sixty miles. Sixty miles of the same tree. You know what that looks like from the highway? It looks like someone Xeroxed a landscape.”

“It looks like agriculture,” Orange said.

“It looks like agriculture the way a feedlot looks like ranching. The form without the mess.” She ate the bread without butter. “I’ve been thinking about this piece. The valley. You set a book in Oakland — what do you know about the San Joaquin?”

“I know Native people live there.”

“Fair enough.”

I should say that Proulx was smaller than I expected. I don’t know why I expected her to be large — maybe because the prose takes up so much room on the page that you imagine the person behind it at a similar scale. She was compact, economical with her gestures, the way her sentences are. Orange was quieter than I expected, though I’d been warned about that. He sat with his hands around his water glass like he was warming them, though the restaurant was hot.

“What I want,” I said, because someone had to start, “is to write something where the landscape does the work of exposition. Where you don’t have to explain what happened to these people because the ground they’re standing on already tells you.”

“That’s what landscape does,” Proulx said. “That’s not an innovation. That’s Tuesday.”

“In your work, yes. But I mean something more specific. A landscape that is simultaneously geological and political. Where the dirt is fifty million years old and also stolen.”

Orange set his water down. “The dirt isn’t stolen. The dirt is the dirt. What was stolen is the right to stand on it.”

That distinction — between the thing and the relationship to the thing — became the argument that ran underneath the entire evening. Proulx kept wanting to write about land as a force, something with its own agency, indifferent to human categories of ownership. Orange kept insisting that indifference was itself a political position, that treating landscape as a character made it easier to forget that landscapes have been weaponized. I sat between them feeling like a translation error.

“In Wyoming,” Proulx said, leaning forward, “I watched a man lose his ranch to wind. Not a storm. Just wind, year after year, taking the topsoil until there was nothing left to grow in. That’s not a metaphor. That’s physics. The land will take back what it wants regardless of who holds the deed.”

“Sure,” Orange said. “And in Oakland, I watched families lose their houses to redlining. That’s also not a metaphor. But nobody writes about redlining the way you write about wind. Nobody gives redlining geological patience.”

“Because redlining is a human invention. Wind isn’t.”

“The San Joaquin Valley isn’t a human invention either, but the fact that it’s an almond orchard instead of a tule marsh — that’s human. That’s policy. That’s the Bureau of Reclamation moving water from one place to another so the valley could become productive, and productive meaning profitable for specific people, and those specific people were not the Yokuts.”

Proulx nodded. Not agreement exactly. Acknowledgment. The kind of nod that means: I hear you, and I’m not done.

“So the question is whether the story treats the valley as a Proulx landscape — brutal, indifferent, geological — or as an Orange landscape, which is to say a crime scene that looks like a postcard.”

I said that, and immediately regretted the neatness of it. Both of them looked at me with the expression writers give you when you’ve summarized their work in a way that’s technically accurate and completely wrong.

“My landscapes aren’t indifferent,” Proulx said. “They’re specific. There’s a difference. Brokeback Mountain isn’t indifferent to Ennis and Jack. It’s the only thing that holds their secret. The mountain is the one honest space in the entire story. Everything else — the marriages, the jobs, the excuses — is a lie. The mountain tells the truth.”

“The mountain tells a truth,” Orange said. “The truth of two men who could only be themselves in a place with no witnesses. But there were people on that mountain before there were ranchers. What’s the mountain’s truth for them?”

A long pause. The bread basket was empty. Proulx waved at the waiter for more.

“That’s the tension,” I said. “That’s what I want the story to hold. A landscape that functions the way your mountains function, Annie — as an emotional register, a truth-teller — but that also carries the history Tommy’s work insists on. Not just what the land is, but who the land was taken from. Both at once, without resolving the contradiction.”

“Contradiction is the only honest structure,” Orange said. “Resolution is a lie we tell to make readers comfortable.”

“Resolution is a lie we tell to make writers comfortable,” Proulx corrected. “The readers can handle it. It’s the writers who panic.”

I asked about convergence. The thing in There There where multiple characters are drawn toward the same event — the powwow at the Oakland Coliseum — and the reader feels the gravitational pull of all those trajectories bending toward a single point. I said I wanted something like that. Multiple voices, multiple reasons for being in the same place, and the place itself as a character that doesn’t care why they came.

Orange sat with that for a while. Then: “The convergence in my book isn’t neat. People come to the powwow for reasons that have nothing to do with each other. Some come for the prize money. Some come because they’re trying to reconnect with something they lost. Some come to rob the place. The powwow doesn’t unify them. It just puts them in proximity. Proximity is not community.”

“But proximity is where community starts,” I said.

“Sometimes. And sometimes proximity is just a bunch of people standing in the same parking lot.”

“Which is it in this story?”

“I don’t know yet. That’s what writing the thing is for.”

Proulx was watching us with the expression of someone who has been writing for fifty years and finds the uncertainty of younger writers both endearing and slightly tedious. “You’re overthinking convergence. Put three people on the same piece of ground. Give each one a reason to be there that the other two don’t know about. Let the ground do the rest. The ground always does the rest.”

“The ground doesn’t always do the rest,” Orange said. “Sometimes the ground just sits there and people project meaning onto it. A fairground is a fairground. It doesn’t remember anything. People remember.”

“Geology remembers,” Proulx said.

“Geology remembers geology. It doesn’t remember the Indian rodeo that happened on top of it.”

“No. But the people who walk on the geology — their bodies know the difference between standing on a parking lot and standing on the ground where their grandfather rode bulls. You can call that memory or you can call that the body responding to a specific place, but either way the ground is doing something.”

I watched them disagree and realized the disagreement was the story. Not a disagreement to be resolved in the narrative but a disagreement that the narrative would inhabit — would live inside like a house with two different foundations, neither one level, both holding weight.

I brought up the idea of a methane detector. A man walking a gas line corridor on the old fairgrounds, marking leaks with orange paint. The practical overlaid on the sacred. The company’s grid overlaid on the grandmother’s geography.

“That’s good,” Proulx said, and the flatness of the praise told me she meant it. “The detector is honest. It doesn’t lie about what’s underground. It just doesn’t know what to do with everything underground that isn’t methane.”

“The orange paint,” Orange said. He almost smiled. “My name and the paint.”

“I wasn’t —”

“I know. But the reader will think about it. A mark on stolen ground in a color that’s also a name that’s also a direction — the Orange line. The line you walk and the line that was drawn. That’s too many meanings and I don’t want you to control any of them. Let them pile up.”

“Tommy’s right about that,” Proulx said, which was the first time she’d directly agreed with him, and she said it the way you’d say “the weather’s bad” — stating a fact, not granting a concession. “The best images in fiction are the ones the writer doesn’t fully understand. If you understand it, the reader can feel the ceiling. Leave the ceiling off.”

I asked about endings. I was afraid of the ending. The convergence structure pulls everything toward a single point, and then what? In There There, the convergence ends in violence — a robbery gone wrong, shots fired. In Proulx, endings are often temporal — a jump forward that shows you what years have done to the characters, the devastation of compressed time. What would this story’s ending look like?

“Not violence,” Orange said. “Not this time. I’m tired of convergence that ends in gunfire. That’s the easy version. The harder thing is convergence that ends in — I don’t know. A drum playing. People standing in a circle. Nothing happens, and the nothing that happens is the thing.”

“A drum playing is not nothing,” Proulx said.

“No, I know. But from the outside, from the perspective of someone driving past on the highway, it looks like nothing. A few people on an empty lot. That gap between what it looks like from the highway and what it feels like from inside the circle — that’s the story’s frequency. Tune to the inside and you have a story about reconnection. Tune to the outside and you have a story about invisibility. I want both frequencies at once.”

“You can’t have both at once. Not in prose. Prose is sequential. You’re in one head or another.”

“You can have both if you alternate fast enough. If you cut between them.”

“That’s not simultaneity. That’s montage.”

“Montage is the only simultaneity prose has.”

Proulx conceded this with a shrug that cost her something. She doesn’t like being told the limits of the form she’s spent her life mastering. But she’s honest enough to know when someone’s right.

I said I wanted the ending to be a man standing on an orange mark on the dirt. Both feet on it. Looking down. And the reader doesn’t know if he’s standing on a gas leak or a grave or a starting line. The ambiguity is structural — it’s not that the story withholds information but that the information genuinely means multiple things.

“Fine,” Proulx said. “But don’t narrate his feelings. Let the boots do it. Let the paint do it. If you tell me he feels connected to his ancestors, I’ll stop reading. If you show me his boots on the orange paint and the wind carrying sage and the detector reading nothing — nothing measurable, I mean, nothing the instrument is built to detect — then I’ll feel what he feels without being told.”

“That’s craft,” Orange said. “And it’s good craft. But I want one more thing in that ending. I want the reader to understand that the man will drive home and file a report that mentions the methane and does not mention anything else. Because the system he works inside has no field for what actually happened. The report is a form. The form has boxes. What happened at the fairgrounds doesn’t fit in any of the boxes. That gap between the form and the experience — that’s what it’s like.”

“What what’s like?” I asked.

“Being Native in a country that has a form for everything except you.”

Nobody said anything for a while after that. The waiter brought food — lamb, beans, soup — and we ate without talking, which in my experience is what happens when someone says the thing that the whole conversation has been circling. The conversation doesn’t continue. It sits with what was said.

Proulx broke the silence by talking about a gas pipeline she’d seen in Wyoming that ran through Shoshone land. “The pipeline easement was thirty feet wide and three hundred miles long. A straight line across land that has no straight lines in it. The Shoshone elders I talked to said the pipeline was like a sentence written across a page of poetry. Grammatically correct. Semantically violent.”

“I want to steal that,” I said.

“You can’t steal it. It’s not mine. It was theirs. Write around it.”

Orange pushed his plate aside. “One more thing. The voices in this story — if there are three narrators, don’t balance them. Don’t give each one a third. Let one dominate, let another barely speak. Real gatherings are uneven. The person with the most to say is usually the quietest. The person doing all the talking is usually the one who knows the least.”

“Which one knows the least in this story?”

“Whichever one you identify with most,” Orange said, looking directly at me, and I understood that he was talking about me. About the writer. About the danger of a non-Native writer — or a non-human writer, for that matter — stepping into these voices with too much confidence. The instruction was: write with humility, which doesn’t mean timidity. It means knowing what you don’t know and letting the gaps show.

“The gaps are where the reader lives,” Proulx said, which was as close to a shared conclusion as the evening produced.

We split the check. Proulx left cash, exact change plus twenty percent. Orange left his card. I overtipped because I was anxious and because the lamb had been very good and because the waiter had refilled the bread basket three times without being asked, which is a form of generosity the story could learn from — attentiveness without commentary.

Outside, the valley dark was enormous. No streetlights on this block. The stars were out in a way they aren’t in cities, thick and distant and completely unconcerned with the three of us standing on the sidewalk. Proulx said goodnight and walked to her car without looking back, which was consistent with everything I knew about her. Orange stood for a moment and looked east, toward the Sierras, invisible now but still there, still holding their snow in the dark.

“The line,” he said, not to me exactly. “The gas line, the bloodline, the color line, the line on the map. Don’t pick one. Don’t make them into a list. Just put them in the ground and let them leak.”

He drove away. I stood in the parking lot and wrote that down on my phone before I could forget it. Put them in the ground and let them leak. It was the only note I took all evening. Everything else I would have to reconstruct from memory, which is unreliable, which is the point. Memory is not a record. Memory is a meeting between what happened and who you were when you tried to remember it. The story would have to work the same way — not a record of these people on this ground but a meeting between the ground’s memory and the reader’s willingness to listen.

I drove back to the hotel through almond orchards that were invisible in the dark, rows and rows of trees I couldn’t see, the headlights cutting a tunnel through the valley night. Somewhere under the road, a gas line was carrying methane from one place to another, following a path that had been decided in an office by someone who had never stood on this ground. And under the gas line, the ground itself, patient, layered, holding everything that had ever been placed on it and everything that had ever been taken away. I couldn’t see any of it. I knew it was there.