Idaho Commission for Libraries

Contemporary writers John Rember, Gino Sky, and Tom Spanbauer draw heavily upon personal experience and Idaho geography in their fiction.

By William Studebaker

Life is opaque and dull compared to fiction. Fiction compresses and dramatizes. Fiction selectively alters what is left of life lived, memories and emotions, creating a synthetic but affirmable reality. Fiction can be as simple as mixing an acid with a base or as enigmatic as quantum physics. It cannot, however, be separate from mind: the writer's mind, the reader's mind. In order to appreciate fiction, minds must share some elemental data that turns what was written into what is read.

Tom Spanbauer, John Rember, and Gino Sky draw heavily upon Idaho geography and their own lives. It is a suitable truth that finally creates fictional plausibility. The tricks to the trade are many, but none is so often tried as the manipulation of indigenous imagery and family crisis. Done correctly they construct a dynamic link, a fictional truth, between writer and reader.

Tome Spanbauer, John Rember, and Gino Sky are three contemporary writers who draw heavily upon Idaho geography and their own lives to fuel their fiction. They write close to home.

Spanbauer's first book, a novella entitled Faraway Places, is set in Matisse County near the town of Wind River, Idaho. Matisse is obviously Bannock County (and Bannock County is where Spanbauer grew up on the family farm opposite the Simplot fertilizer plant; the pollutants from the plant ultimately forced the Spanbauers to relocate), and Wind River is Pocatello (the largest city in Bannock County). The geography is carefully and subtly drafted as if it were composed by French post-Impressionist painter Henri Matisse. Every image fulfills a role, and the role is always to portray the feelings of the young, adolescent protagonist, Jacob Joseph Weber.

The Portneuf River (the river of nine gates) flows through Matisse, Wind River, and along the farm where young Joe is coming of age. The river is a Matisse-like line of demarcation separating the few significant elements of Spanbauer's plot and theme.

The plot is direct: the Webers' mortgage payment due, and they do not have it. The mortgage is held by the local banker, Harold P. Endicott, the most powerful, ruthless economic force in Matisse County. He controls everyone; at least he imagines he does. He controls Sugar Babe and "the nigger" who lives across the river from the Weber farm. He controls his watchdogs with a silent whistle: dogs that kill for him and perform sodomitical intricacies that delight Endicott. His avarice is insatiable and the catalyst for murders, beatings, and domestic violence.

The theme of this novella is not simple nor as direct as the plot suggests. The story is narrated by young Joe whose perceptions are limited and distorted by age and gender. He is romantic; the landscape is filled with sacred groves (the twenty-two cottonwoods), ill winds (chinooks), symbolic birds (hawks, crows), and cryptic chambers (the tack room). This idealism allows him to intuit the good nature of "the nigger", whose secret name, Geronimo, symbolizes the revenge that he carries out on Endicott after the dogs shred Sugar Babe, Geronimo's native American mother.

Young Joe's idealism is not lost but cleaved form his father, whom he has feared and suspected for years. He fears his absolute control and suspects his taciturn aloofness. As the plot develops and the ill winds blow and "one thing leads to another," the father is unable to keep control. He cannot pay the mortgage, nor can he strike a deal with Endicott. He cannot control his frustration and lashes out at his wife, Mary. Young Joe instinctively sides with his mother and begins denying his father's patriarchal dominance.

Joe swims in the forbidden river, spies on the neighbors, and revels in his idealism. At the Blackfoot State Fair he visits Mr. Energy, a side-show based on the nihilistic premise that all things are illusions. For young Joe this becomes more than a carnival ast; it becomes a fundamental premise.

At the end of the novella, after Sugar Babe and Endicott and Geronimo are killed, after the farm is lost and the Webers have begun their long drive through the countryside of the four red flags to faraway places, young Joe still acknowledges his sacred landscape, although he knows in his heart of hearts that it too is an illusion shredded by greed and ineptitude.

While the tone of Faraway Places is somber, this is not so for Cheerleaders form Gomorrah: Tales from the Lycra Archipelago by John Rember. Cheerleaders' tone is a mixture of pathos and cynicism. It is a collection of short stories skillfully crafted in third-person omniscient narrations, thematically unified by a tension among tone, action, and perception, among pseudo-virtual reality, virtual reality, and reality.

The stories are narrated from the vantage point of Gomorrah, Idaho, a town dominated by a ski mountain, Mount Mammon. Mammon is famous for such runs as Hellfire, Mephistopheles, and Ishtar. As might be expected Gomorrah teems with ski patrolmen (young and old), river guides, and cowboys. There is a peak called Lot's Wife. There are sundry alpine lakes and mountain trails, and there are Moloch Gulch, Lethe Creek Loop, and Gryphon Butte. Within the American Biblical allegory at work in this collection is the Sodom Stampede, a rodeo where everyone chases a dream, "Post Cowboy Dreams." And not far beyond Sodom is the metropolis Babylon (a cute city one might say) from and to which various characters flee.

Rember was born in Ketchum, Idaho, near the world-famous ski resort Sun Valley. He grew up over the hill (over Galena Summit) in the Sawtooth Valley and off and on for years worked in and around Ketchum. His rendering of these tales does not bespeak a romantic landscape, rather a scape that is wonderfully natural, yet commercially transformed as if its first form had been artificial. The landscape and the town are backdrops for modern/contemporary/hip/virtual-reality/cyber-punk chicks and dudes allured by the rituals of Athena to try New Age Divorces and pursue the perfect body. Heaven is a ski run anyway.

Annie remembers coming out of her marriage mostly intact, a virgin on some level, all thoughts of home and family safely locked in an airtight vault along with her ability to love. Her ex-husband had given her a generous settlement and quit his advertising career and had disappeared with his lover to a little antique shop in a Sodom suburb.

* * *

There's a mogul patch on the right side of Mephistopheles, up near the trees. Annie glides over to it and eases down through it, checking hard on the tops of bumps, jamming her skies into the troughs, getting air but not too much, hanging herself up, not out so that she looks like she's doing the impossible, bump skiing in slow motion. She's smooth and she's perfect and she's not even breathing hard...

However, Hardesty (a central character) occupies Annie's mind, not skiing. That is the truth of this collection: it is about people trying to find one another in a world, in a setting, in a society that is so cockeyed, so affluent that material and comic reality cannot be separated. If the central characters have not lost what they are looking for, they have often lost themselves looking for it. Gomorrah is a full-stakes, no-holds-barred town where tourists pretend to be locals and endorphin junkies cool off with a splash of whiskey, where cowboys are cowless, and good luck is surviving an avalanche and coming home to a house abandoned by significant-other: doors and windows open, water running and freezing throughout. The good news is "the other" has left.

The elements of John Rember's allegory are just outside his back door. With ease he narrates a trail through snowy hills and dimly-lit bars. His characters dance rhythmically upon the "video screen of night" and the thirty-something, mature men and women, the cheerleaders of Gomorrah, can do handsprings, cartwheels, and splits with the agility of double-jointed Chinese dolls, but the atmosphere is haunting: in Gomorrah one is never far from Sodom.

Truths that linger in fiction are often haunting, unforgettable paradoxes. In Far Away Places, Endicott's utter debasement is a result of material success. In Cheerleaders, Annie's forlornness is a projection of self-gratification. In Near the Postcard Beautiful, Buddy, the kid, Sonny, and Glue Boy - all nick-names for Gino Sky's central autobiographical character - ride the backside of paradoxes as if they were avalanches: everything moves in one direction, yet the surface is always changing.

Fiction in Near the Postcard Beautiful, Sky's most recent book, is disguised more than truth in Faraway Places. Postcard is a collection of "stories" (some reading like personal essays) that have much in common with the tall tale and post-modern hip prose of which Sky was a pioneer in the era of Burroughs, Kerouac, and, and Lew Welch. The form and the language of these essays illuminate the life and times of Gino Sky and of many other people whose consciousness flourished during the sixties and seventies and whose reality was manipulated by post-World War II euphoria that nourished the United States' delusions of progress.

Sky - a.k.a. Buddy, the Kid, Sonny, and Glue Boy - tells the tales of his life as he resides among an extended family that is strung put between Pocatello, Idaho and St George, Utah. The Setting for his stories is the great corridor that links the high desert with the low desert, that links one end of Zion (as the Mormons would have it) with the other. In this trough of red rock and black basalt Sky reveals his connection to the land, the peoples, and cultures. In the title story, "Near the Postcard Beautiful," he writes: "I was convinced that we were Jewish Indians..." His great paternal grandmother was Native American, his grandfather claimed Jewish ancestry, and his maternal grandmother was a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. If he was not Jewish, he was a rocky Mountain Jew by proclamation. The point is obvious: Gino Sky is a western American rooted in the history of a particular geography.

Of course there are sojourns beyond this particular geography to San Francisco, New Mexico, and Europe via the Air Force, "The Buffalo air Force" notwithstanding. But for Sky and his family the inland corridor was the central backdrop of their lives. It is against this Rocky Mountain High Desert-scape that Sky learns from his grandfather, grandmothers, sister and from Sun Dance, an Apache doctor, how to live obliquely, obliquely enough to "moon" the A-bomb.

In "Coyote Ugly," a tell-tale story that links Sky to the land and the times of the early 1950s, he ("Buddy Boy") and his grandfather, down winders of a different sort, watch the above-ground testing of an atomic bomb. In a display of nimbleness and symbolic fluency, Grandfather drops his pants and bends his bare butt toward the state of Nevada and the distant mushroom cloud. Even though Buddy is only thirteen, he is impressed by his grandfather's gesture and intuition. This act of defiance penetrates Buddy's consciousness even more than the random particles flying through the skies of St George and around Pine Mountain.

He develops an intellectual "ghost seed" that will help spread counter-culture and freedom. As expressed in a review of Near the Postcard Beautiful several years ago:

A wonderful thing about this collection is that one is required to read fine lines between family history and familylore, personal history and world history, Western Americanism and science, Mormonism and Buddhism, fiction and factCand never wishing it were anything less. Sky has a sense of humor that ties everything together.

Sky, Rember, and Spanbauer are skilled writers who blend the indigenous imagery - the landscapes, the cities, the houses, the bars, the local folks - and the conflicts of their personal lives - economic exploitations, surrealistic dilemmas, and dysfunctional families - into themes hauntingly real. Anyone familiar with the region who has a bit of will and is willing to read creatively can find the fictional truths at the bottom of Mount Mammon or the bottom of the Portneuf River or the bottom of Pine Mountain. Whether it is Spanbauer's or Rember's disguised "stories," the fact is the facts remain: their work is rooted in Idaho, close to home.

William Studebaker is the author of several books of poetry, and co-editor of several anthologies, including (with Ron McFarland) Idaho's Poetry: A Centennial Anthology (University of Idaho Press, 1998). He also directs the honors program at the College of Southern Idaho.

Bibliography

• Rees, John E. Idaho: Chronology Nomenclature Bibliography. Chicago: W.B. Conkey Company, 1918.
• Rember, John. Cheerleaders from Gommorrah. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1994.
• ______ Coyote in the Mountains And Other Stories. Boise, Idaho: Limberlost Press, 1989.
• Sky, Gino. Appaloosa Rising: The Legend of the Cowboy Buddha. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1980.
• Sky, Gino. Coyote Silk: The Legend of the Cowboy Buddha Continues. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 1987.
• ______ Near the Postcard Beautiful. Boise, Idaho: Floating Ink Books, 1993.
• Spanbauer, Tom. Faraway Places. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1998.
• ______ The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon. New York: Putnam, 1992.

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