A couple of months ago, I applied for a scholarship to the Surprise Valley Writer’s Conference, a scholarship given in the name of Steve Turner, a journalist, novel writer, and raconteur whom I knew nothing about. I thought I knew about Steve Turner, because I mistook his name for that of a totally unrelated poet. So I introduced myself with effusive praise for my mistaken poet rather than researching just who this Steve Turner fellow was. Lazy and ignorant in one fell swoop. Somehow I received the scholarship anyway.
In the weeks that followed, I have done my best to make an acquaintance with Steve’s (and I have come to think he was the kind of person who would not mind me being familiar) work. But, as these things go, the impetus for honoring the man was the passing of his life. Which made it necessary to work backwards in time.
Thus I began by reading mostly memorial remembrances. Mostly from other professional writers whom he had aided in his role as a founder and grievance officer of the National Writer’s Union. They bespoke a bulldog of a man, beloved by his union brethren (And sistren—he was from Santa Cruz after all.) and a reliable champion in their efforts to be paid justly.
I have to admit, though, that as a writer alienated from making my daily living with words, the language of unions, their process, is opaque to me. It is a matter of not possessing the proper ear for the dialect. But what I did understand was the reflected impact of a man who insisted upon the dignity of labor. The butt in chair, notebook in hand, contract fulfilled, mechanics of the writing life.
My own cash-in-pocket work usually involves my hands and my back, as I know Steve’s once did; I cleared brush, hauled garbage, and installed solar panels to make gas money from Big Sur to the conference in Cedarville. I got on food stamps to scrimp a few more dollars away and I left the coast with fingers crossed that the fuel pump in my truck might not fail yet again. But I brought an extra just in case.
I read through Steve’s study of the eastern Washington dry wheat culture, Amber Waves and Undertow: Peril, Hope, Sweat, and Downright Nonchalance in Dry Wheat Country, as I went about my chores. And here I began to connect in a direct way with his word craft, his skill as a writer. The passage below is one that I came back to again and again:
So the lineup of old trucks so neatly parked out on that Providence Road place testified to a family’s mode of thriftiness—wear it out before you replace it—as well as affection for favored equipment that transmutes into a mechanized form of pethood. But the Providence Road display also measured a crucial development in the changes that have made modernity what it is.
It’s an obvious fact that those trucks, and the vehicles that preceded them, needed roads. And it is roads—dirt, macadam and rail, and their precursors, the trails—that have changed this land so completely: the roads and what they’ve brought, what they’ve enabled, and what they’ve killed—right up to the present.
One could argue that the best way to preserve some sort of purity in human communities is to isolate them. But that doesn’t happen. The flow of people and goods from one place to another—for trade, settlement, or conquest—has been a primary component of recorded history. So also in the Big Bend. For many hundreds of years before Europeans arrived, colored beads, flints with durable cutting edges, and other valued goods were moving in slow exchange from as far as South America to the native tribes in the Columbia Basin.
What I love about this is the sly, sinuous way that the writer expands his lens from a farm equipment boneyard to its context with warmth but not nostalgia. It strikes me that the sensibility here reflects a man who both drove trucks and cared about what he was hauling. Who moved his mind, in some fashion, like the land he was writing about. Plain wrought, but filled with contour; visceral yet saturated with the sweep of time.
I have worked among eastern Washington wheat farmers, and found them a particularly leery and laconic people. This was exacerbated in that my job there—mapping the power grid of entire counties from the cab of a truck—might have been custom designed to elicit suspicion. And the fewer power connections a place might have (a dryland farm has not even the three-phase transformers needed to move irrigation water) the greater the hostility I was met with.
In other words, there are a lot of people whom dryland farmers don’t want to explain themselves to. And merely driving a truck to their door doesn’t unlock much in the way of insight. So it is no small thing to me, the reportorial skill within Amber Waves. But it is the reporter here who impresses me.
I’m told that Steve was a champion of the little guy, the working folk in general. But there’s a tough love in his reporting, a compassion rather than a mere sympathy. An absence of the privileged nostalgia that distorts many do-good portraits of rural inhabitation. These qualities inform a righteous politics rather than flow from it. They are, in themselves, a solidarity.
I am reading Steve’s Night Shift in a Pickle Factory as I finish this essay, mulching the reading and writing together. Let me mention a few things about the little book itself, green as a dill spear and sized to fit in the pockets of ordinary workaday clothing. It reminds me of that era—the late 70s and early 80s—when a crop of earnest small presses arose to slake the thirst of a generation thirsty for pragmatic, hands-on knowledge. Be it how to cut firewood, grow vegetables, repair one’s car, build one’s own home. A time when books could be more revolutionary and when revolution was understood to involve both muscles and words.
Pickle Factory is both hilarious and stomach turning; I don’t think I’ll be heading down to the store for a jar of relish anytime soon. A reluctant ode to the day in and day out of factory labor, the idiocy of The Boss, and the ways in which human beings adapt to being treated as pieces of machinery. A slice of life in a little package sound on the inside and out.
So my inquiry into Steve Turner’s work leads me, for now, to this place: a factory floor slick with pickle pulp and broken glass, rendered by a writer both at odds with and in tune to his surroundings. As it began with an act of sloppiness, I’ll refrain from offering an ill-digested conclusion to my incomplete investigation. I will say, though, that the process itself has been a second reward after first receiving the scholarship.
Reflecting on his time packing pickles at the Brogan’s factory, Steve writes: But not liking the place hasn’t meant not liking the experience. I can tell you I saw that coming. That this was a man who reveled in labor shared with others even as he refused to be anybody’s fool. A writer whose good name has recently filled my stomach and improved my own tool box of word craft. A life and work I would offer my solidarity to.
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