Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

And now I want to show you a book. Here it is. It’s a novel by Theodore Dreiser called The Genius . I have not read it. It’s Roz’s book. I saw her — I heard her voice — and then one day I knew I loved her. I’ve never been able to read novels the way she does, though. I get about three pages in and I say, Where’s my Merwin? Where’s my Kunitz? Where’s my Debussy? I can happily read memoirs or diaries or collections of letters, but not novels. Roz has read hundreds of novels. It didn’t bother her that I didn’t read them, but maybe I should have tried.

I’m going to open this book. I’m going to pick a page at random, and I’m going to read a sentence. Here we go: “He wore an old hat which he had found in a closet at Mrs. Hibberdell’s, a faded, crumpled memory of a soft tan-colored sombrero which he punched jauntily to a peak and wore over one ear.” Page 330. Of The Genius by Theodore Dreiser. Thank you. That is all.

• • •

“HI, SWEETIE,” said Roz, when I called. Her voice was soft and perfect — one hundred percent Roz. I could hear her smiling. She said she was doing better. “They sent me home with Vicodin and it gave me some very lurid dreams and made me forget to breathe, so I’m not taking it anymore. The pain came back, but it’s bearable and better than the not breathing. Lucy’s taking very good care of me.”

“Good. When can I come see you?”

“Give me a few days. I need the fog to clear.”

“Take it very easy,” I said.

“I am,” she said. “It’s so nice not to think about the show. They’ve got a new person who’s covering for me.”

“That’s good.”

“I’m going to sleep now.”

“Okay.”

It’s been hot and dry this week, and I thought it was time to set up the traveling sprinkler and water Nan’s tomatoes. I stood watching it chuff in its slow and steady tractorish way around her tomatoes as the chickens pecked under some rhubarb leaves, unconcerned about the strange Sears machine in their garden. I’d bought an extra hose at a garage sale — better that than anger the yellowjackets. The sprinkler sprays in steady sixteenth notes. You can whistle Rossini to it if you want. Maybe I should tell you more about it.

The traveling sprinkler is a heavy metal slow-motion techno-dance-trance device with two white cast-iron toothed rear wheels that dig into the turf, and a sort of baton or helicopter blade on top that spins. The hose screws in at the back. The hose water flows at full pressure into the tractor’s anus, or rectum. Up through the tractor the water goes and out the little holes at the end of the spinning whirlies, flying in a glittering bagel of sinusoidal shapes out over the garden. From certain angles it makes a close-range rainbow, and that’s all very nice. But here’s where the wizard mind of the innovator comes in: The spinning rotates a central post fitted with a helical thread, or worm gear, that engages with the sprockets of a driving gear that pulls two floppy hooking levers forward against the teeth on the rear wheels. First one lever pulls the right wheel forward an inch, and then the other lever pulls the left wheel forward an inch, and in that way the tractor alternatingly propels itself slowly forward, like some sort of very deliberate water clock — or like Stanley Kunitz’s tortoise, “ancient and crusty, more lonely than Bonaparte.”

But that isn’t the really beautiful part of this invention, this three-part invention that Bach would have loved to water his Lutheran tomatoes with. The beautiful part comes in front, where there is a small, seemingly atrophied wheel. This wheel is curved so that it can fit over the hose. Thus the tractor, as it moves along, is compelled to follow the route of its own motive force. The hose becomes the guidance system. Consider for a moment the power and the glory of that.

You may say, well, obviously it’s propelled by water, and obviously it follows the hose. But it wasn’t so obvious in 1909, when Benjamin Sweney got a patent for his sprinkler. Sweney’s sprinkler sprinkled and moved forward at the same time, but it didn’t do anything with the hose except drag it behind. Not enough. Viggo Nielsen, an Australian, got his tractor sprinkler patent in 1933. It sprinkled and moved and it rolled the hose up on itself. Not quite right, either. Then came a Nebraskan freethinker, John Wilson. Wilson got two water sprinkler patents. His first sprinkler looked like an old-fashioned bicycle, with a large wheel in front and a small wheel in back. The large wheel was a gear, pushed by a pawl — a word later made famous by Richard Eberhart, in his poem “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment.” But Wilson wasn’t satisfied. The second patent, applied for in September 1941, was for a sprinkler that looked the way the traveling sprinkler looks now. That’s when it all came together. Just before World War II, Wilson disassembled a piece of dairy equipment called a cream separator and used a piece from it as the driving gear in the middle of his machine, while in front he put a small loose wheel that wanted to go wherever the hose went. Now the source of the sprinkler’s power was the route it took: the link back to its past was also its future. You could buy more hose and make long twisty routes for it to follow, even up slight grades if you wanted. As long as you didn’t set the hose up so that there was too sharp a turn, the sprinkler would go anywhere. It was the trustiest little hardworking machine. And if you got tired of watching it, and went inside after a while, as I used to do, to make a sandwich, the tractor, this Great American Invention, would finally arrive at the moment when the two universes of forward and backward time would collide at the faucet by the house.

National Walking Sprinkler of Nebraska made Wilson’s machines, and they still do. They made them for Sears and that’s where my father bought his. Everything about it is immediately understandable. It’s what America did before it threw itself wholeheartedly into the making of weapons that kill everyone.

I have been trying to write a poem about this sprinkler for years, because I like it so much, and I’ve never managed to do it. What a joy now to wind it around Nan’s tomatoes and watch it, in all its intuitive clumsy ungainly beauty, do some good.

• • •

RAYMOND TURNED in the driveway while I was standing watching the sprinkler. “Hey, hey,” he said. “That’s a handy little machine.”

“Isn’t it? I don’t often get a chance to use it. I’m terribly sorry about your grandmother.”

“Oh, thanks. It’s very sad.”

“How’s your mother doing?”

“She’s okay, I think.”

We looked at the sprinkler twirl. I asked him how his music was progressing.

“I’ve got a new song,” he said.

“Can I hear it?”

We went up to his room, which had a poster of Bob Marley on the wall and a corner filled with a multileveled shrine of musical machinery. There were two important-looking squarish studio speakers with yellow cones. Raymond played me his new track, called “Promises Burn.” He played it loud, but even so I couldn’t make out all the lyrics, which went by fast. I heard the chorus, though: “Lips say words and promises burn, so can we.” It was a genuine brainworm, and I said so. I suspected that Raymond had been through some recent unhappiness with his girlfriend, but we didn’t talk about it. He showed me how he’d used three vocoder tracks to mix pitched synthesizer sounds in with his singing, and he revealed a neat trick for reversing a piano note using a virtual guitar pedal, so that it plays backward: yeet, yeet, yit!

“There’s so much to this software,” I said, shaking my head. I told him I’d been working on some dance songs, but they weren’t finished. “If you ever want to try making a song together, just let me know.”