Caitlin Lorraine Johnson

St. Louis

As soon as I was old enough, I started to take long walks through St. Louis. Our neighborhood is entered through wrought-iron gates attached to stone columns, but the gate is always open. Other neighborhoods have closed gates, and instead of columns, narrow stone gatehouses for watchmen (long since replaced by numerical codes). The public is not always allowed to walk in those neighborhoods, although they are beautiful to walk in, with tall trees that achieved their grace with years. The houses are so carefully built that they seem less like homes and more like representations of people as they would like to be seen, strong and beautiful—houses built for a world where age means accumulation not loss.

The poet Howard Nemerov liked to walk through those neighborhoods, ignoring the signs marked private. Nemerov often wore a denim jacket and jeans while he walked, his gray hair wild above his soft blue eyes. Someone saw him walking from their window, complaints were made, and he was banned (despite his Pulitzer, his Guggenheim, his two appointments as Poet Laureate of the United States). Perhaps he thought of those trees and those neighborhoods when he wrote of, “the file of giant trees / whose order satisfied and stood for some / euclidean ancestor’s dream about truth.

The ban outraged a lot of people and other neighborhoods put up signs saying, “Howard Nemerov is welcome to walk here.” They welcomed him with pride. As a formalist poet, interested in balance, I hope the latter gesture softened the snub in his mind.

I also love to walk in the Botanical Gardens, especially on weekdays after school field-trip hours, when I can walk the oval Japanese Garden’s raked gravel paths and pretend that it is mine. The St. Louis Botanical Gardens, Shaw Park, and Tower Grove Park were all donated to the city by Henry Shaw. Shaw’s will stipulated that the head of the Gardens be provided a house on the grounds and a carriage (now car). These practical gestures also provided future directors with the two components most necessary to love his gardens, or to love anything—closeness and the ability to turn away.

If places retain the tone of their occupants, Henry Shaw must have been a lovely man. In early evening, golden light hits a walkway enclosed by white blossoming trees and the faint sweetness of their smell envelops you. Shaw’s papers reveal that he used dashes instead of periods—no endings, just breaths. So, I assume he would be pleased that many locals still refer to the Gardens affectionately, respectfully, as Shaw’s Gardens.

I rarely walk by the Mississippi, that brown and muddy river referred to with the reckless femininity so often designated by men to hurricanes and nature when she’s larger than a park and harder to shape to hand. She is a mighty river. Huckleberry Finn belonged to no other waters, but the casino boats attract a rough crowd. The son of a family friend was robbed at gunpoint. The robber told him to withdraw money from a nearby ATM. He began to cry, told the robber how worried he was about paying off student loans and finding a well paying job, that he didn't know how to make anything out of himself now ... or maybe ever. The robber took the bills, walked a few steps, turned around. He braced himself for a shot, but instead, the robber handed back half of the money and ran away.

The Mississippi River gives off a similar aura of decency limited by desperation. It has an unsentimental, practical, we’re-in-this-together-but-me-first mentality that feels more real and secure than generosity. Or maybe these are just things I want to believe, because I think people are shaped by the landscapes they grow up in.

Horses

The first thing I learned about horses was to hold my hand flat when I offered one a treat. Horses will bite into a curved hand, just as every living thing instinctively explores a curve, looking for more. When the hand is flat, the horse sees what it holds. When there is nothing left, it walks away. In this, horses are smarter than people. They leave when they have nothing left to gain.

Even stretched flat, the hand I held out was not taut like a sheet stretched from either end. No one else’s hands anchored my own, so I held them loose. My shirt was un-tucked, blowing in and out from my child’s soft belly, stuck out proudly. Later, my hands were covered in calluses from holding the leather reins of a horse’s bridle between my fingers. I tucked in my shirts, so the breeze would not obscure the lines of my body, and I held my hands flat when I offered something.

At school, everyone was surprised by the roughness of my hands. So often strength shows itself in the way of someone forcing him or herself to the front of the line. Riding does not teach that sort of strength.

2.

The colors of horses have such lovely names: roans, bayes, sorrels, paints, palominos, dapple-grays … My horse was a chestnut, a rich orange-red color that deserved a nicer name and got one, called Sampson. The first time I rode him, we approached a jump at lulling canter—the gait that inspired rocking horses, because it rocks you forward over ground, in a way that feels more natural and effortless than breath. He halted abruptly before the jump and I fell over his head and hit the ground hard.

Dust yourself off, take the reins, get back in the saddle. All the phrases of riding are phrases of repetition. So, I took Sampson over the course of jumps twice more. It has to be twice. The first repetition convinces the horse that you are not afraid of its strength. The second convinces it that you know your own.

3.

However long you own a horse, you should not sit while it grazes on wispy blades of grass or walk behind it to get something, or ever turn your back … You can’t blame a horse that kicks or bites or throws you. And you cannot blame yourself. It’s not personal. Accidents happen when you ask an animal to act contrary to its nature. And it is against a horse’s nature to bend to a will other than its own.

People want more malleable boundaries. We want to love each other without fear, without caution. And often we lose so much more than someone else when we lose—we lose who we are without them. Horses never let me forget that as soon as I lost myself in something else, I had nothing left to offer.

The Boy Story

When Becca died, I had trouble thinking of anything else. I took long walks up the gravel roads to the music building. The building was an old stone house on the top of the hill that many students said was haunted, because the rooms had unexpected drafts of cold air and doors would open on their own sometimes. And perhaps because of that rumor, or because of the long walk, the building was almost always empty on winter nights. I’d open the heavy wooden door to a practice room and sit on the piano bench.

Since I do not play piano and cannot remember a tune, I would press the softest keys in a gentle pattern until the sound of it silenced my thoughts. I liked the feeling of my fingers against the smooth surface of the keys. Sometimes I’d run my hands across them without pressing down, feeling the spaces between the white ones, then the blacks. The white keys were bigger and closer to each other, and there were more of them. But when I got outside, the opposite was true. The stars were merely pinpricks of white in a black sky, and by the time I got back to my room, the silence I had created was gone.

If I wrote then as I do now, I would have described that time through my attempt to recreate a song I didn’t know the words to, on a piano I couldn’t play. But at the time, I needed something else. So, I wrote a series of anecdotes about a family of four young boys who lose their father. Every morning, the oldest boy asks where his dad is, hoping to get a different answer. One morning his mother says, “When someone dies, they go around the next corner. And no matter how quickly you run, they’ll always be just one corner ahead.” So the boy begins to hate corners. When he grows up, he moves to Wyoming, where he can see the land spread before him in every direction, for miles.

I wrote the “boy” story in a blue spiral notebook that I carried everywhere. When I went with friends to coffee shops with large windows, they would read and I would write. I began writing in pencil, but the lead began to smudge. The words became less distinct, grays overlapping each other and running into the white margins. Then I switched to pen but made too many mistakes and covered the pages with thick scratch-outs that looked like wounds. Eventually, I typed out what I had. I didn’t think the repetition of a piano would comfort a little boy, so I gave him a train:

The night after his father’s funeral, Tommy sat alone in the kitchen, because the yellow walls made him feel safe, and he didn’t know what else to do. His mother took him onto her lap, even though he was almost too big now. She rested her chin on the top of his head and smiled slightly. His hair smelled like her coconut shampoo. She’d been running out more quickly than usual and now she knew why. They looked through a few books, one about a bear who wakes up at a construction site, one about the wind telling a child stories about her neighbors. Neither interested Tommy, and he asked his mother to tell him a story about trains. She told him trains never end, they go and go forever, like the sound, repeating itself and moving forward…Tommy didn’t believe her, but then he never looked for the end of one either. When Tommy saw a train coming, he watched it approach and then turned away.