SAGEBRUSH APE

Thursday, March 27, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Sagebrush Ape: Survival of the artist

By Heidi Walters

I just looked out the window into a patch of desert that extends from my apartment into the hills. There's a man out there, swinging a golf club into the early morning, into spring-green creosote and yellow-blooming brittlebush and ruddy rocks. It's the middle of March, and the United States and Britain are bombing Baghdad. The man sets a ball on the desert floor, swings his club up through a flash of sun, then swipes downward and knocks the ball into the far-off shrubscape. Two verdins busy in a large acacia pu-puh-peep in the long space after the swing.

The next time I look up, the man is gone. Morning continues. It is still March, and in the Middle East civilian Iraqis hunker down under a monstrous barrage of bombing, soldiers march and fly and bomb and crash and die, Israelis seal their lives in plastic and tape. In America people golf, go to work, pump iron at the gym, watch the war on TV and analyze it with their mouths full, march in protest, worry about their soldier relatives, condemn the French, fret about the Germans and Russians, worry about terrorists, and pressure-cook unwilling Turkey into opening its flight space. The world spins, and the forces of time and memory work to reinforce old grudges, tear down old alliances and form new ones, preserve sheltered ignorance, broaden understanding.

And in the end--or, in the next pause between wars--who will we like, who will like us?

Take France, for instance. Will we forgive it for not joining our Iraq war? Will France recover from our condemnation that it is "old Europe" and should make way for new Europe? Will Las Vegas radio station KXNT 840-AM bring out the fighting tank every year to ritually smash French food and drink? Will Francophiles in America have to drink their wine in secret, burn their copy of Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence, travel to "unspecified Europe," forego brie, shun Gauguin and Rimbaud? Give up s'il vous pla”t and résumé and that cute little French café out on the edge of Death Valley?

Probably not. France, still, for many Americans, is synonymous with art. And art rides through all turmoil to emerge pure and strong. It even shines during the chaos. The folks preening at the Oscars know this--Nicole Kidman said the reason she ventured to the Academy Awards during wartime is "because art is important" and honoring it "is a tradition that needs to be upheld."

We will remember the Cézannes and Baudelaires long after the current growth of Francohatred has withered to dust and idiotic statements from the likes of Nevada Congressman Jim Gibbons, who has declared that "France...does not deserve to be in the United Nations," have faded to silence.

That man swinging his club through the blooming desert this morning made me think of this essence of France we Americans hoard. Civility and leisure. A light-infused tableau. Art and the "art of living." And southern France, like here in the Mojave, is unbearably sweet this time of year. The shrubs in the hills are beginning to flower into color and fragrance. Sunlight shimmers white on the towns. Le mistral--here, the spring wind--tousles and exasperates. Our verdins and pheobes return to the scrub, while there the rossignol sings all night.

One bright March such as this, I delivered a small, medieval harp from its birthplace--my sister and brother-in-law's house in a town in West Sussex, England--to a couple in southern France. The light, narrow, pale-wood harp was but a few days old, carved after the form of an old harp my sister, a harpist, had no doubt sketched from a painting in some gallery or church in some World War II-bombed city and brought back to her harp-builder husband.

The harp was so slender and small it fit in the overhead bins on the trains I took to a town near the stone village of Upie. It was in a thin cloth case. I spoke very little French, but found that carrying a small harp grants you immunity from scorn. People are nice to you. The presence of art, sometimes, removes boundaries. When I finally arrived and Marcel drove me from the station to their stone house in the country, the harp became his wife Elisabeth's. She shyly secreted it away, and Marcel said we would not hear her play it yet because she would need some time to make its acquaintance.

I stayed for five days. Marcel and Elisabeth fed me home-grown greens and black currant liquor and ice cream. They showed me pictures of their lifetime hobby: dressing in authentic 13th century costume and playing music on period instruments. Marcel took me on walks and showed me a waterfall and carpets of violets. One evening we watched Charlie Chaplin movies, perfect understanding among us, and later Marcel brought out his violonne and played a series of haunting tunes.

"This one is for spring," he said. Then, "This one is summer" and "This one is autumn." He didn't play winter, probably because it was getting late. Every night there was the nightingale. And finally, on the last morning, I awoke early to the soft, muted sounds of someone playing a harp in a distant room.

When it was time to leave, I lamented all the things I hadn't seen: the high mountains, the lavender fields of summer, the snow in the winter, the filming of a soap opera in the small stone village down the road. Elisabeth sympathized, said "Une autre fois, une autre fois." "Another time, another time."

I think there will be another time.