James Burke: Swan Peak

Dear Mr. Roboshow,

We got us an Airstream and seventy acres of alfalfa in a place that doesn’t need mentioning. We raise buffalo and red angus and provide rough stock for rodeos that probably come to your town. The point is I wanted to thank you and Mr. Purcel for all you done. Jamie Sue and me sing duets sometimes in saloons, but mostly we write songs and one or two has been recorded, although our names are not necessarily on them.

Tell Mr. Hollister I appreciate the trust he put in me and I’m sorry for causing him any trouble. I hope things have worked out for Miss Candace, too. If you don’t mind, burn this letter. Jamie Sue says hi and says she apologizes for being rude to you, but sometimes you were a pain in the neck.

She didn’t really say that.

You ever seen the Royal Canadian Rockies? I’m writing a song about them. Everything Woody Guthrie wrote about is still up here. Every morning when I wake up, all them big blue mountains fall right through my window. Don’t let nobody tell you Woody’s music isn’t still on the wind.

Your bud in E-major

The letter was unsigned.

Ridley Wellstone and Sally Dio? Their families had been in business together for decades, in the same kind of symbiotic alliance that had existed in the nineteenth century between the street gangs of New York and Boston and the blue-blood families whose names have been polished clean by success and the passage of time. Sally was under indictment when his plane crashed into the mountainside on the res, and he needed a new identity, one that would allow him access to all the resources he had amassed through his partnership with the Wellstones. Ridley, on the other hand, needed Sal’s connections to the hotel and casino industry in Nevada after Ridley had lost a fortune during the collapse of the oil market in the early 1980s.

The last I heard, both of them were going down for at least twenty-five years. But who cares? As players in the building and the deconstruction of empires, they’re merely ciphers. Jefferson in his letters to John Adams foretold their advent long ago. Perhaps the greater problem is their constituency. A confidence man chooses only one kind of person as his victim – someone who, of his own volition, invites deception into his life. Eventually we catch on to charlatans and manipulators and ostracize or lock them away. But unlike the fifth act of an Elizabethan tragedy, order is seldom reimposed on the world. The faces of the actors may change, but the story is ongoing, and neither religion nor government has ever rid the world of sin or snake oil.

Clete joined Alicia Rosecrans in San Diego, then she left the FBI and went back to the Big Sleazy with him. Molly and I went back home, too, but I couldn’t rest and I still don’t and I can’t explain why. Maybe it’s the times. Maybe I cannot rid myself of images of towers burning against a blue sky, the smoke an ugly scorch at forty-five degrees, the tree-shrouded neighborhoods of New Jersey just across the Hudson River. Maybe, just as in Clete’s dreams, I see us all inside a maelstrom, past and present and future, the living and the dead and the unborn, all part of one era that is so intense and fierce in its inception and denouement that it can only be seen correctly inside the mind of a deity.

In the late fall I went west again, this time by myself, and visited the café in the Cascades run by Troyce Nix and Candace Sweeney. There was already snow up in the mountains, and the larches had turned gold among the fir and pine trees, and log trucks boomed down with giant ponderosas were gearing up for the long pull over a pass to a sawmill town on the Washington coast. I wanted to tell Candace and Troyce that I was just traveling through and coincidentally had found their café. In actuality, I didn’t know why I was there. Maybe it was because of the clean smell of the air, the boulders encrusted with the skeletons of hellgrammites in the creek beds, the bluish-white outline of the Cascades themselves, the autumnal suggestion of death on the wind, followed by winter and, with good luck, another spring.

When I place my hand in a cold pool and fingerling salmon nibble the ends of my fingers, I know the pool will freeze over and the fingerlings will live under the ice until May, when the ice will thaw and the adult salmon will swim into the river’s main channel and eventually work their way out to sea. All of these things will happen of their own accord, without my doing anything about them, and for some strange reason, I take great comfort in that fact.