A Whale Song

for first quarter moon

Grandpa Ole and Uncle Chuck in front of their house on Slee Street in Kenyon Minnesota.

There’s a philosophy, rooted in Native traditions, that asks us to consider the next seven generations in every decision we make. It’s a concept that requires expansive perspective in order to bring it into how we live. It makes me think about my father and his father before him. How my grandfather’s work as an ironsmith helped to create the built world we know today. And thinking of that reminds me of a tiny beautiful book, a novella that is pure atmosphere, that both my dad and I loved called Train Dreams by Denis Johnson.

The story follows the life of a main character, Robert Grainer, an orphan sent west on a train, becoming all kinds of laborer; lumberjack, trestle builder for the expanding railroad, and any other physically demanding work he could take on to make a living. As my dad listened to the audio version of Train Dreams and I read the paper version, we kept circling back to the same thought: this was Grandpa Ole’s story. The men in the story, like my grandfather, likely never considered the generations ahead, yet they had a huge impact on our world today.

Reading the prose felt like wandering through a fog of earlier times—surreal, the line between memory and dream blurred into a song. It describes great swarms of men that took part in massive deforestation and road, dam, and house construction as the Pacific Northwest received a huge influx of new residents. The dream did not shy from the disturbing, leading readers through mobs of white workers punishing a Chinese laborer by throwing him from a bridge and Grainer splinting the broken leg of a wolf girl who may have been his lost daughter. The book giving us a liquid rendition of manifest destiny through one man’s life.