The Great American Road Trip

Destination: Idaho

Book: Five Skies by Ron Carlson

As I read Five Skies, I realized I was learning something about my father, that I had never thought about before. That’s the way it is with novels that rise above the ordinary. Literature teaches us something about the people we know, as well as bringing to life  places and people we don’t know.

“Measure twice, cut once,” my father would say. His strict father, a tin smith who worked on furnaces and ductwork, insisted he do things right. “Live so that the world will be a little better when you leave.” Although my father never had formal training as an engineer, he had the soul of an engineer.  I remember him making diagrams for how to plant a vegetable and flower garden. I remember the care that went in to getting a home improvment project built well.

The main character in Five Skies, Arthur, is called an engineer, because that is the way he approaches his work.   Idaho Author Ron Carlson could have been describing my father when he wrote this passage:

“It cut across his grain to use a tool for the wrong purpose.  Arthur Key had never used a wrench as a hammer once in his life or a pliers as a hammer or a pliers where a fitted wrench was the right tool.”

Any time I am tempted to hit a nail with the handle of a screw driver, I hear my father cautioning, “Always use the right tool for the right job.” And these similarities between Arthur Key and my father got me thinking about the “why” of this concern with doing things right, and I realized that like Arthur, things had gone terribly wrong at one point in my father’s life, and he felt compelled to keep things as orderly as possible, to keep life under control.

The novel Five Skies itself  is crafted like a careful workman’s project, using words instead of wood and metal. Nothing is wasted. It all fits perfectly. Just like the project they are working on, the life stories of the three men slowly take shape.  They talk plainly like working men would, but the speech is purely poetry.  A family grows as the three strangers fill their roles, the young man, the middle-aged man, and the older man. For all of them, work is the center of attention.  The work provides solace, it provides a sense of worth, and it provides something to fill empty spaces and shut down thinking about the unpleasant past. Arthur says, “I believe in work.”

Arthur’s profession before he took this pick-up job on the rim of a canyon in Idaho, involved creating illusions for movies. But even illusions take careful craftsmanship.

“He hated magic.  It made people careless and hopeful, and he had a low tolerance for anything that disregarded cause-effect.”

I remember my father’s disdain for jazz music. “How do they know when they are finished?” All three men are here working on this project in order to shut out something in their past, and Ron Carlson reveals the stories slowly. We learn about them as they learn about each other, and the young man, Ronnie, gains confidence as the others become father figures teaching him about work and life.

Idaho–with its mountains,  cliffs, rivers,  weather, and, yes, the skies– becomes a character in this novel. The men learn to read its story, too, and it alternately charms them and betrays them.

The go for a picnic in the canyon:

The river came through this park winding in a perfect S and the sand and willows and twenty gigantic cottonwoods were half in the shade. The air rode down the river fragrant with water and willows.

Ken and I have taken road trips through Idaho–from north to south through mountain passes and over lava fields, and from east to west across the bottom of the state through rich farmland and plains, and the pretty cities of Twin Falls and Idaho Falls. It is a beautiful state that beckons you to explore sparsely populated landscapes.

The top picture is from Flickr with Creative Commons license. (Click on the photo to see more of the photographer’s work). I shot the picture of the tools, and retain the rights. The mountain pass picture is furnished by the Idaho Tourism Office.

What is the first comes to mind when you hear “Idaho?” Well, okay, the second thing, after “potato”. Have you been there? What did you see?