The Peavine Quarter

I have been a car nut for many years. In America this is a common enough enthusiasm, but I think I came by it in a somewhat unusual way.  In the first place, I developed my interest later than most boys do, later than those who are going to develop an interest, that is. At the outset, I actually resisted cars and driving. When I took Driver Education my sophomore year, I would rather have forgone the pleasure. I did poorly in the course, and I drove little and unwillingly for nearly a year after that. In the second place, when I finally did become interested, it was primarily in old and odd cars, long before I paid much attention to the new and the glitzy.

Consider, for example, my first car. In September 1957, my dad found a 1926 Ford for sale at a price that was right and brought it home. It was nobody’s idea of practical transportation, a toy, but my dad had the family car on the road all week so I drove the old Ford a surprising number of miles. I like to brag that I am probably the only person of my generation who can claim to have learned to drive in a Model T. Sometime during the two or three years I owned the Ford and ministered unto its various mechanical infirmities, I was bitten by the bug.

I think, though, I had been “primed” some ten years earlier by the first car, an old one even then, that ever impressed me. I don’t mean the first car I remember — that distinction belongs to our green 1941 Hudson — but the first one that really impressed me.

In first and second grades I attended a private school in a large Midwestern city. The Academy, located as it was on Summit Avenue, was considered to be the city’s best, to offer advantages that no other school did. One of the main advantages was school-provided transportation for first and second graders who lived more than a mile and a half away. And that was an important advantage, for my dad (even then) had the family car on the road all week, and between our house and The Academy lay Selby Avenue, then a main arterial.

The transportation provided was in the form of The Coach. It was a Packard limousine, the kind with the extra set of folding seats rearward facing in the backseat area and a partition with roll-up window between passenger compartment and driver’s compartment. The rear seats were done with a gray ribbed wool cloth of some sort, the front with leather. I remember the inside best, its smells of hot oil and old grease in summer, of wet wool and damp dust in winter. The car must have pre-dated defrosters, for a plastic frost-shield glued to the inside if the windshield and a small fan bolted to the wood-grained art-deco dash provided all the view to the outside that the driver had in the coldest weather. The chauffeur was a small man, or else the steering wheel and floor-mounted gearshift were enormous; I think the latter.

I can’t remember its outward appearance well enough to be certain of model or year. It must certainly have been either a Super 8 or a 12. I think it was a 1937 or 1938. I know that it was “Brewster” green, a shade so dark as to appear almost black, but with deep, deep color in full sunlight. It had side mount spares.

We lived in an upstairs apartment then, and in the morning I would stand in the cold and dark at the bottom of the stairs looking around the edge of the lace curtains that always smelled of the city’s coal smoke.  Pretty soon The Coach would glide up, its big headlights shining yellow in the new snow.  Then off through the dark city, brick, cobblestone, and deep ice-ruts rumbling somewhere underneath the big car. Between home and school, the sun would rise and break through the winter haze,  the loud orange light ringing off the red brick walls, the black slate and green copper roofs of the “failed monuments” of Summit Avenue, glaring from the blank windows of houses arrayed up and down the river hills, saturating with Kodachrome fire the iron of ornate street lamps and the icy tracery of bare trees. Sometimes in the middle of High Bridge, fog would obscure both banks, and with no trusses or cables overhead for reference, the car would seem suspended in space for a few moments. And on the coldest of mornings, there was nothing to see outside, only the frost feathers that covered all the glass of the car save for the one small hole the chauffeur peered through, sitting rigid in his grey uniform and white gloves.

And maybe twice a winter, The Coach would come in the afternoon and carry us down the long treacherous chute of Ramsey Hill to Municipal Auditorium for a matinee performance of the St. Paul Symphony. I remember on one such afternoon the thick spring snow like an explosion of feathers, The Coach waiting at the curb, the snow melting and turning to steam on that long hood that always seemed to stretch out there in perfect perspective to the vanishing point of some picture-road. Mothers brought family cars to help with the transportation on such occasions, but I always ran for The Coach. What Buick or Chrysler could compare?

It was an old car even when I knew it, so that when I got my Model T years later, old cars already had a sort of romance for me. I didn’t know anything about cars when I was in first grade, but I knew class when I saw it. The Coach was an old car then, a relic from the world of Summit Avenue, White Bear Country Club, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, not long in his grave. It was the first car, old or new, ever to impress me.

LeRoy Hanson’s basement apartment was  a block from campus.  You  climbed a half-flight of steps from the street, entered the side door of the trim grey bungalow, and descended into another world, not quite what our proper Lutheran college probably had in mind for us.

It was a basement — no, a cellar without pretensions — hence “the hole.” Rooms were divided by board partitions that had once been painted institutional green. Over the years, however, black stains had soaked through the paint; any or all of the rooms might have been coal-bins at some time. Additional partitions had been provided by blankets nailed to ceiling joists — the shower and the octopus-like furnace had been thus draped for modesty.  The linoleum on the concrete floor had been worn to scraps and trod with grime until it was all one dingy color.

The small, high windows let in just enough light to make the place seem gloomier by day than by night. The living-room’s window was south-facing, and on bright winter days, its shaft of sun, made visible by dust motes and cigarette smoke, would trace a rectangle of light across the floor from west to east as the day progressed.

The inhabitants were all bachelors, Norwegian farmer and otherwise, so housekeeping was a sometime thing. Furniture, when struck with the hand, gave off billows of dust. Books, magazines, sheet music, and compositions reached the angle of repose on every surface and began to cascade onto the floor. The quart jars that served as ashtrays were generally emptied only when they became intractable smudges. A plant once sprouted from the kitchen wall behind the trash can. It lived for some time and grew to surprising height, spindly, sickly, and pale. It was photographed, painted, and written about. The curious came from all over campus, and perhaps beyond to see this marvel.  We named it Le Fleur de Mal.

I hope I have not presented a picture of unremitting squalor. Had we been asked, we might have admitted that there was a certain Dostoevskian gloom about the place, however, and I think we reveled in it.

None of this explains what made Hanson’s Hole the most important place in my undergraduate education. After all, crummy, substandard, overpriced little apartments are an enterprise that springs up around every campus, large or small.

But this crummy little cellar apartment was an institution, and unique of its kind, due in large measure to the people who lived there and who frequented the place.

LeRoy Hanson was older than the rest of us by several years. His brothers and sisters had all married and gone before he was born. So he got to stay home and work the farm. When his mother died, he sold the machinery, rented out the land, and enrolled at Augustana. He was 32.

He was a quiet man who had read and thought a great deal during his life of isolation on his little farm, near his little town, in his little church. He cultivated conversation but spoke little. Summers, he disappeared for weeks at a time into the Badlands, but during the academic term, he held court in his apartment. The Hole was probably the closest thing to Gertrude Stein’s salon that Sioux Falls ever knew. I am sure that was LeRoy’s intention.

His roommates were nearly as individualistic as he was, at least the ones who lasted. There was his cousin, Mark Gulickson, and Sam Wang who came from Hong Kong as a pre-seminary student, but within a semester changed his major to art. The last I heard of him, he was teaching photography at Clemson University. Mark and Sam both vied for the favor of tall, slim Sigrid Running, with the long, straight brown hair and enormous eyes of a blue so pale they seemed colorless grey. Mark followed her to Europe the summer after graduation and followed her all over the continent on his decrepit motorcycle that ate a valve every time he came close to catching up.

And there were those of us who did not live there, but frequented. Charlie Pedersen, guitarist and lutenist who lived in his car for a month in Berkeley because he had been accepted to an Andres Segovia workshop but had no money for lodging.  Suave, urbane, consummately hip Jerry Aistrup, who knew Sam Francis and Robert Creely and Neal Cassady,  who could lecture on art and jazz by the hour,  who slowly orbited the country in his VW bus — New York, Sioux Falls, San Francisco, Sioux Falls, etc. The sisters Kinney, social work majors  from Baltimore who spoke a barely comprehensible neighborhood  dialect that sounded like lowland Scots with a barrier island drawl. Ratliff, who taught me more about the craft of poetry than anyone else ever has. Mary Overdahl, who followed Ratliff to San Francisco — but that was later when I was living in Reno. Ron Janssen, who introduced me to Pound’s Cantos. I recently came across one of his books: translations of Can Xue’s stories, Dialogues in Paradise. Bob Nelson, “Bobby Buddha,” who made his living playing poker and ghost writing research papers out of his head.

I think we all regarded ourselves as Boswells to Hanson’s Samuel Johnson.

The phonograph records in the apple crates: Joan Baez and Bob Dylan — the complete canons to that point; Respighi, Prokofiev, Gershwin; Bream playing Bach; poetry readings, Ferlinghetti with jazz accompaniment and Rexroth’s lament for Dylan Thomas.

The pictures on the walls: Andre Gide, casting a sidelong glance, peering slyly from the wall behind LeRoy’s Morris chair. Ezra Pound looking down from the ceiling. Art by lots of artists. Sam’s predominated  — photos,  oils, prints, and especially his ink-drawings over watercolor wash. There was one in particular — two people on a park bench, beneath a streetlamp, beneath a towering elm, all done in not more than a dozen strokes.

Shelves that grew heavier every autumn with agates and petrified wood. Plant presses. Shotguns, fishing tackle, and guitars in the corners.

Games that we played: pick a poem at random from The Norton Anthology, read it aloud, and see who can first identify it. Eventually, we had to find other anthologies with other selections. We tried the same thing with music, but the record supply was a real limitation. Nevertheless, at one time I got to know my Brandenburg Concertos pretty well.

It seems that for so many college students, academic pursuits are one thing, social activities are something unrelated. But if Hanson’s Hole was the scene of an occasional riotous party, it was always a place where art and literature and ideas were discussed. Small talk could not stay small for long in that crowd of raffish intellectuals and those of us who aspired to be intellectuals. It was a crummy apartment in a cellar, gloomy, musty, and dark. But at least as much as Augustana’s classrooms, at least as much as the library, it was to me, at that time in my life, a place of genuine enlightenment.