The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023
Route

						—Cheney to Brewster, Washington
	

Out of the timber and into wheat-field horizon and 
				dry-board barns to Davenport comes

a freedom, George Jones “He Stopped Loving Her Today,”
				and Elwood the old Crown Vic’s new studs

humming the sunwarm November highway, those “letters dated 1962”
				until “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain” comes and kills me

again, kills him again, Grandpa, blues blue as this living day.
				Good as it is, pulled off at Dean’s Drive Inn, cinderblocks

like a summer’s stack of hay under new pole-shed roof,
				what I want to say’s not this road at all, much as Vet’s Day flags 

flying the two blocks of town’s telephone poles 
				and the two girls off school walking their mukluks 

across the gravel parking lot make a kind of company.  
				What I want to say’s tucked back in the forty-years-ago 

mountains of Idaho behind me. The farmhouse kitchen.
				Cold enamel of that sink at the little window

overlooking the fir-shagged, summit-ridge sunrise over Butler.
				Cold of surface-well water from the tap, just enough 

for the soap-sudded plastic dishpan because a surface well 
				can always run dry, though ours never did. His clear emerald

Skin Bracer bottle catching the sun on the sill. Snap of cedar
				kindling in the cookstove. Woodgrain sheet paneling

holding the nail where my own flannel, hand-me-down shirt
				hung, that paneling my uncles put up when a little money

came in when I was too young to remember the walls before,
				all the way into the sitting room with the nails

where his guitar hung with Grandma’s homemade paintings 
				of other country scenes. Yellow leaves, water wheel, a lane. 				

An empty cattle trailer rattles by and the only thing for all this loss
				is more road, Willie’s “Angel Flyin’ Too Close to the Ground”

speeding after me, willow ditch, and the cop-shock dip and lift
				and almost soar of a disused railroad crossing 

past a forever-sidetracked wooden boxcar, Northern Pacific, 
				with a wooden door like the ones he built 

way back in mythology to make the down payment.
				Eighty acres. The log-camp kitchen skidded onto the ridge

and left there for a farmhouse, the barn, alfalfa field up the hay road
				through tamarack and fir and cedar thick enough for him

and four sons on cross-cuts to make the payments.
				I got what I wanted. The cabin in aspen—

the site I picked walking with him when I was twelve,
				where he carved Jon’s site 1979 

with his Old Timer pocketknife into the grey-speckled bark
				and the scar rose rough beside the metal roof

I screwed down and the window from which I could watch him
				and Grandma with her walking stick

after the mini strokes, walking from the farmhouse up the two-track
				that led through the woods nowhere else but here. –There.

Here Edna’s in Davenport has a huckleberry milkshake and 
				good glass on three sides but I drive past.

Marty Robbins’ west Texas cowboy is weary but can’t stop to rest,
				gets his one final kiss and Felina goodbye 

just past the gazebo park across from Napa and Wheatland Bank.
				Uncle Steve cut that window in the cabin wall of tamarack 
							
logs he fell and I skidded behind the Farmall H, 
				and when, looking back to check the choker cable’s hold

on one of those stringy-bark-slick logs, I high-centered on a stump,
				it was Steve who crawled under with the same chainsaw

he’d used building his house too, up his own road into the woods
				from Grandma and Grandpa’s, and cut away at the stump until

the cracked and sun-faded rubber of that big tractor tire
				settled back plump onto the pine needle mulch forest floor.

Steve’s still up there. I’m not, excepting a weekend 
				now and then. “Stay on the Farm Jon.” Among the last words

Grandpa ever said to me, reaching up over the chrome rail
				to take my hand in the softness of his. “Stay on the Farm.”

And “Yes” I said. “Yes.” For all those walks we took on his trail.
				For my name on the aspen. My flannel shirt on the nail

above the kindling box beside the kitchen woodstove.
				That house is gone now. A few years sinking into its hand-dug

cellar and Steve couldn’t stand to pass the slow-rising tide 
				of grass around the wreck so took it all at once with the dozer.

So now, when the tunnel of cottonwoods opens at the end
				of the county road and the slow-crackle of my tires

climbs the driveway from the mailbox past the rusted flatbed log truck, 
				there’s nothing there on the ridge beside the two huge firs.

“Proceed to the route,” Mapquest insists over John Prine
				who doesn’t remember me or the Farm when he sings

that objects in the mirror may appear closer than reality,
				and a hawk stalls and dives into sage

and I am alone. Outliving everything I knew to love
				when I was learning how. How it was to sit in the chrome

and vinyl lawn chairs with coffee in the glass mugs and visit.
				Visit. Where’s that verb gone? Sit and visit.

Who am I supposed to be this far from that? What am I out here 
				looking for, sentimental about big cars and old country music? 

Meanwhile, that copper Beemer’s getting impatient behind me,
				so it’s off for the broke-down rest stop, a cold seltzer

and a slice of pizza from tinfoil in the cooler. The picnic tables
				have little roofs with weathered shingles that cup

and curl and grow moss and make me think
				of the cedar shakes back before the barn fell in.

It rises so high in my memory the high hay door
				with its pully hangs open in the sky and gaps in the roof

show moments of that same blue like cloud breaks. 
				I’m a fool, I know, but it’s hard to go there now,

to stand in deep grass from the seeds of long-gone hay
				by the low, tin roof of the pumphouse 

and cut firewood from a logging slash pile beside all that 
				empty where the barn should be. No evidence

but the timothy rising a little taller, the green a little thicker there.
				“Proceed to the route,” she says brightly.

The idea was to be a cowboy. And he did run a few head of Hereford.
				For a while, anyway. I’d cut the bail twine and spill the hay

from the tailgate of Uncle Richard’s turquoise Chevy
				crawling low gear across the frost

in the field out past the outhouse. Ten years
				that truck sat up on blocks behind the machine shed

and me without the money to make it go again and now 
				it’s off the place. Steve saw it once at Lost in the Fifties

(though it’s a `65) restored and running again in low
				down Cedar in Sandpoint. If only I’d had the money.

If Grandpa’d had the money maybe the barn and house
				would still stand. Old Wobbly that he was, 

once he bought the place he never worked to make 
				someone else money again. And there never was much

in cross-cut stud logging and a yearling steer or two every spring.
				So the cellar stayed dirt, slowly rotting the old skids

under the house, tilting the bedroom floor two two-by-fours under 
				the headboard feets’ worth, and the barn roof thinned like his hair, 

and now he’d still be gone from the place even so.
				So what else did I expect? Decaf from the Corner Café

in Creston, but not the black and chrome cookstove.
				It’s a South Bend, not a Monarch like ours,

but much the same otherwise. Only here repurposed 
				as a side table for silverware and coffee cups.

Maybe Milton got it wrong. Maybe there’s no seraph
				at the gate with flaming sword. Maybe there’s no gate,

and Eden’s open but the timber’s been thinned out, brush piles
				left to molder, the old bower an abandoned homestead.

Knapweed, vetch and sapling pines taking back the pasture
				for Chaos. The easy company of angels over.

God simply gone. Maybe that’s the Fall, not distance.
				Making exiles of us all and leaving our maker’s name

on the mailbox. Which is also ours—the name and
				address, always to remind us of the loss.

How, for example, did Donald Hall stand it, going back to Eagle Pond? 
				The grandparent summers right there and nowhere.

Privilege, the new poets would rightly say. Poor, white,
				twentieth-century, ivy guy faced his loss

did he? Okay, fair point. And yet I think of him,
				looking out at that barn as it always was 

from the old house, much the same. With his Eve
				who’d never been before so loved it all new.

And then alone. Snow filling the space between.
				The same Glenwood stove ticking beside him.

With school out the café’s crowded. One family has pushed several tables 
				together to make one long one. The girl at the counter

tells me her class just painted the 20 on the hill,
				a big job, rearranging all the rocks from the 19

and giving them a fresh coat of white. Big job
				keeping up with time, as long as you can, while

 the metal roof’s green oxidizes a softer shade
				and the road bends for the grain silos and straightens

alongside the tracks through thousands of acres of stubble
				and past a parked, red, eight-wheel CASE tractor taller 

and no doubt worth more than our old farmhouse ever was.
				But never mind. The point of the Farm was never money,

though Steve puts up a couple hundred round bails
				from neighbors’ fields these days, still runs a few Hereford 

and keeps up the fences more or less. What my grandpa 
				meant for me too with those dying words of his.

And sometimes it’s good, staying there, as our nameless woodstove
				warms the damp from inside the cabin

and the whorls and knots map the logs exactly
				as when he used to stop and sit for a visit.

When I gun Elwood for the hill through the woods
				and the rear tires slip a little on wet dirt and pine needles

past the Mossy Rock and the High Centered 
				Tractor Stump and the green metal roof comes into view

bowered in aspen between boughs of huge fir,
				there comes a feeling like fear, turning the bolt

and lifting the latch and kicking a tap with the toe of my boot
				to loosen the door I built that always swells tight

against the frame. Always, that anticipation. That emptiness.
				Everything unchanged. His old chair at my desk at the window.

Candles in their holders. Always that stillness. That cold air.
				Amy and I never ran power through the woods up there.

We wanted a deeper seclusion. Anya’s bathwater
				warming on the woodstove. The quiet. Antique flicker

in candle and lamplight. And besides, we were all but broke.
				Which explains half the ceiling still insulation backing

where the spendy tongue-and-groove cedar ran out.
				And that phone jack just below the steep steps

up to the loft? The line that still runs, long dead now
				underground uphill from where the farmhouse was,

was among the first from the Universal Access Fund
				in `97, just the kind of government program we need more of 

everyone on the Farm agreed. The year Anya turned two
				we moved the eighty-six miles to Cheney,

snug up against campus, and let our Idaho number expire.
				But all those others—names and numbers in pencil

and marker and pen—are still on the wall. Grandma and Grandpa
				263-6571 in Sharpie among them. “Anya’s up

from her nap,” we called to say. “Come on up any time.”
				Sun on waist-high daisies. Grandma’s walking stick.  

December of `67. The phone lines ended at the Evans’.
				Art gets the call, snowshoes the county road

to the mailbox at the end, hollers up
				to the house on the hill, “Roy and Helen!”

They appear in the back door. “You have a grandson!”
				Big reaching waves. It begins. The Amtrak

riverbends through mountains of darkness. Steve
				waits for me in the Sandpoint depot lot. The red pickup’s

exhaust rises in amber lamp atmosphere. Pure Prairie League
				thinking I could stay with her, as I turn

Amy in the cabin kitchen candlelight, fresh batteries
				in the boombox for a while, maybe longer

from the Crown Vic’s six Kenwoods, “Return to the route,” and 
				another seltzer from the cooler she packed on the seat beside me. 

Everything’s an elegy. Spray of starlings
				from the fenceline, low over the road

and up. The John Deere lifting his ten-bottom plow
				at the pivot, ten clean blades catching sun.

Mud-crusted cattle. Feedlot. Sage and tumbleweed.
				High volt towers walk their lines to the horizon

day after day after day after day after the yesterday
				that’s dead and gone, and the tomorrow out of sight.

Willie again. Clean and clear as `79. Turquoise 
				pickup’s wheel in my worn-work-gloved hands.

All I want is back there. And then twenty miles of scrub rangeland
				past Grand Coulee the phone pings Anya’s text.

School’s stressing her out. Do I have a minute to talk? 
				Anya, in washbasin bathwater Amy and I warmed

on the woodstove. Anya, on the far side of the continent
				from me. Down a gravel side road along tumbleweeds

crowding against sagging barbed wire, I park in the sage and get a signal.
				And with the first, distant silhouette glimpse of mountains

under a golden-horizon evening I return to the self
				and love far out beyond where I once belonged.

My daughter’s voice. From her dorm in a city.
				My voice to calm her. It’s night there.

Dropped phrases. Dropped call. The callback fails.
				I turn Elwood’s big engine, turn around. “Return 

to the route,” and drive faster, glance down to check for signal 
				at each long rise until finally her text pings, I’m doing better,

thanks! :). Talking helped. Going to try to get some 
				more work done. Love you. Not another

person anywhere. No tower to stream my Pandora station.
				Dusk filling the dry creek drainage, borrowed time

of Elwood’s cop-motor and cop-tires the only music
				for the long downgrade when big cars and old country 

have both had their day. About time, the new poets rightly say.  
				And if Hugo’s Buick found its forward-most gear, 

it’s no less crushed and bailed and shipped off for scrap iron.
				That much less the wound we’ll make, I know,

with all our latest hunger. But “believe you and I sing tiny and wise,” 
				I said to gray coffin atop the grave, “and could if we had to 

eat stone and go on.” And if Grandpa had to die inside
				between the chrome rails, what better way than singing

with his sons and grandson, “Oh give me a home”
				sweet morphine-smile “happy trails to you”

those blues still blue when we sing from this valley he
				is leaving, remember, remember the cowboy

who loved us so true. There’s a photo somewhere.
				Black and white. I’m six or seven. He’s beside me.

Our mud boots and long coats. Farmhouse behind us.
				Our shovels. We’ve been filling the ruts

in the driveway, cutting back the dirt bank to widen the curve.
				Looks like a December. No snow yet that year.

No hard freeze. Soon we’ll cut a Christmas tree.
				Over the bridge at Bridgeport, all that nickel-dull shimmer
	
of the Columbia with low-gliding raven, I touch the screen.  
				Four bars. The buffering wheel turns. Bright, familiar notes.  

“Almost heaven” comes and for a change I let it.
				“What is West Virginia?” the Middle Eastern student

shooting hoops on the student family housing court
				with my friends and me asked as he sang,

reminding me of what I considered my home far away.
				I always inserted “northern Idaho”

where the song came with record crackle
				in the little living room, which I could conjure

with the county road gravel sound, forest opening 
				to the weathered-from-white farmhouse on the hill,

velvet green timber rising beyond, from my boyhood
				apartment bedroom so far away. And so I drew and drew

that scene, rooflines and windows, fenceposts,
				fir and pine and tamarack, and mailbox from memory. 

And I wrote. A little like this, in fact, except then
				it was only distance I was trying to cross,

to the place I might belong. That song. Anthem
				of my flannel shirt on the nail. Morning kindling snap

from the Monarch. I heard it once in Scotland, with
				Uncle Steve and Cousin Jennifer, his daughter, raised

on those eighty acres, Grandpa and Grandma’s house
				after school, in the White Hart, oldest Inn

in Edinburgh, Graeme E. Pearson nearing the end of his set
				of sing-alongs—“Loch Lomond,” “The Skye Boat Song,”

“Dirty Old Town”—and improbably everyone at their loudest
				most vehement for the Mountain Mama! finale,

asking country roads to take us all home. Steve, Jennifer and I
				shouting along, exchanging incredulous smiles, Grandpa

four years beyond our ever going home to tell him.
				And again in Scotland, at the Highland wedding reception

of my other-side cousins Megan and Jon, the Celtic band
				on a break, the dancefloor still crowded

for “Islands in the Stream” and “Nine to Five” and Anya 
				teaching her cousins the Cotton Eyed Joe line dance

and then some dance beat and the floor fills all the way in,
				kilts and tartans spinning, cheers and “Almost Heaven!”

A dance version?  It’s come to this, the song
				Anya proudly told me was written by an alumnus

from her university, homesick for Massachusetts.
				Which has almost as little ring as northern Idaho, so

West Virginia. But home is home, right? Narrow
				Highland roads along loch, over the pass, 

and into the glen. The county road now called Beers-Humbird 
				after the first family farm after you make the turnoff 

and the lumber company that skidded that camp kitchen
				cut to cut across the valley and left it

for a farmhouse on the hill and sold off the land
				in quarter sections and eighties. This stretch 

of State Route 17, no doubt, for someone. Home
				a ranchstead, out of sight down one of the rare 

mailboxed, gravel sideroads. For years I didn’t listen. Hit next
				when any John Denver came on, the heart I knew them by 

not up for it after Grandpa died and Grandma moved
				to Lilac Plaza in Spokane and the house

went cold as the weather. So it’s crazy to feel so lonely?
				Pasty Cline understands across fifty-eight years

in the darkening interior around me. So it’s crazy to think
				my love could hold any of them? Driving onto the Farm,

eighty-six miles home from teaching, those few years 
				we all lived on the place, past the lights in the old house,

and up the steep hay road through the woods to oil-lamp
				and candlelight in the cabin window. Stars.

Unbroken darkness across the valley and up Butler Mountain.
				Everyone I’d ever loved alive.  

It’s almost night on the open, empty range, the sensual
				skin-curve hills. Hawk quill stuck in the dash vent

like an inkwell. The end of Idaho in darkness behind me.
				Moving to be whole again. My Mapquest arrow

pointing beyond confusion. Blue route road and new land
				scrolling down. A freedom. Amy and Anya loving me

all the way into the dusk orchard hills, apple cider air,
				neon red motel clouds, and “Arrived” of Brewster.
JONATHAN JOHNSON‘s poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry, published in recent issues of Ploughshares, Southern Review, Witness, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, Missouri Review and Gettysburg Review, and read on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac. His story, “Spotted,” also in this issue, is from his collection-in-progress of stories set in Marquette, Michigan, The Little Lights of Town, other stories from which appear in recent issues of Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and Bellevue Literary Review. His books include the poetry collections Mastodon, 80% Complete (Carnegie Mellon, 2001), In the Land We Imagined Ourselves (Carnegie Mellon 2010), and May Is an Island (Carnegie Mellon 2018); and the memoirs, Hannah and the Mountain (Nebraska, 2005) and The Desk on the Sea (Wayne State, 2019). Johnson migrates between the Northwest; his hometown of Marquette; and his ancestral village of Glenelg in the Scottish Highland where his cousins are still crofters.
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