The Enchanted Bluff

Whenever I'm wandering around the Hill and have some time to kill, I tend to stop into Elliott Bay Books, the sort of wonderful, comprehensive local-institution bookstore every city should have, for a bit of browsing.

I hadn't read Willa Cather in ages.  At some point, she appealed to me greatly, along with all the other American regionalists, but as my literary tastes expanded into the wilder, weirder worlds of French surrealism and portent-laden postmodernists and the Japanese avant-garde, she got left behind.  So I picked up her collected stories, and opened up to page 64, her 1909 story "The Enchanted Bluff."

I first read it at a tiny used bookstore back home.  Along with a handful of other businesses constantly on the edge of folding, it occupied a section of the ground floor of the Sheldon-Munn, the town's once-grand railroad hotel now converted into tiny apartments for the elderly and impoverished.

You walked in through a creaky door, and the place was covered in industrial carpeting, with piles of books on the floor, mildewed volumes of long-forgotten onetime bestsellers.  Books by Josephine Winslow Johnson and Gene Stratton Porter and James Gould Cozzens.  Stories of Christian virgins in peril that must have once belonged to the schoolteachers and small town lawyers of Story County, Iowa some 80 years earlier.

I spent frigid winter days combing through musty shelves of dog-eared, yellowed Signet Classics and Modern Library editions filled with faded pencil scrawls written in Iowa State dorm rooms a generation or more ago.  Put together a stack of two-and three-dollar paperbacks, and walk home through the snowdrifts.

Like all teenagers, I was unsure what I wanted out of life, but was quite sure what I wanted wasn't this: high school in a dreary town centered around a land-grant university and ringed by meth labs.  So I read Thomas Pynchon, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg.  In cracked and moth-eaten trade paperbacks, I could envision my world centering around a tiny apartment on a narrow street in Montparnasse, a rough-hewn cabin in the forests of Northern Wisconsin, a life of jumping trains and bumming rides.  Each dusty book represented a hazy, impressionistic dream.

Which brings me back to Cather.  "The Enchanted Bluff" is a lovely, wistful story about a group of boys hanging out for the last time on a sandbar.  The summer is ending, and the narrator is about to leave town, and he tells a story about a place in New Mexico called the Enchanted Bluff.  They all make plans to go there.  They never do.

Memory is shaped by the stories we tell each other, the symbols and phrases that run as motifs through all human interactions and relationships.  The mythic, the ideal level.  The Enchanted Bluff isn't a real place, and it doesn't need to be.  It functions as a symbol that is sustained even as the actual relationship falters.  And as we remember our relations, our images of the actual people we once felt something towards-- whether it was love, friendship, or enmity-- become blurred, impressionistic.  What remains: symbols, narratives, old photos, souvenirs in attic boxes, ghostly images floating on the edge of memory.