Hemingway once said, “You can only write about what you know.” And the unspoken corollary of that is, if a writer is writing about himself, the character he creates will only be as authentic as he himself is. Bruce Patterson passes both those tests with flying colors.
When you meet Patterson, you wouldn’t immediately take him for a writer. But then a lot of people didn’t take Jack Kerouac—with his blue jeans and checkered shirts—for a writer either. Patterson is a big man; and unlike a lot of big men, he doesn’t come across as awkward, but rather seems extremely comfortable in his skin. In fact, a lifetime of hard work outdoors has put him on familiar terms with just about every muscle in his body. You can tell he has used every inch of what God gave him, used it again and again, felt the pains and pleasures of it, known its strengths and limitations, and made peace with where it’s taking him.
That’s a lot for a man to learn, and the sad thing is that a lot of intellectuals, so called, spend a lifetime trying but never learn just those very basics. By contrast, a lot of workingmen can’t help learning them because it’s part of the job—goes with the territory, as they say. The irony, of course, is that most workingmen are not able to articulate what this life in the flesh—and in God’s green earth—is all about. They grunt and sigh, smile at their kids, belch after a good meal, and go to bed early to be rested for the next day’s labor. But that is where Patterson is the exception.
It’s hard to figure where—toting an M-60 through the jungles of Vietnam, setting chokers and felling big tree redwoods, building barns and fences all over Anderson Valley, as well as raising kids and being a reliable partner for his wife of thirty years—Patterson learned to write so well, but he has. His language is simple but intricate, as his brain follows out each detail of a day’s actions and observations—just like laying tiles in a floor, as Ford Madox Ford once described good writing. Each word, Ford said, should be as inevitable as where you have to stick that next tile, and that’s how Patterson’s stories feel. He takes you with him, step by step, through the days of his life—and what is even more remarkable, he makes you feel the beauty of that life in your bones, just as he feels it.
While he’s almost always writing about himself, two big themes quickly emerge in the stories of Patterson’s first book, Walking Tractor. The first is the dignity of the workingman, of hard, physical labor, the kind that makes you sweat and groan and work up a well-nigh insatiable appetite—the kind that leaves your muscles aching for days, the kind that wears a man (or woman) down, not the body-building of some showman in a gym or the half-hour workout of someone trying to slim their hips and stomach. This is the kind of work you might spend months recovering from. It’s rare to read in serious literature accounts of people doing this kind of work that don’t patronize or demean them. Steinbeck did it, of course—wrote of ordinary workingmen as if they were to be honored and respected as much as knights and princes. And Bukowski wrote of workingmen as if they are the essential cogs that keep the world turning. Patterson does both.
The second big theme is his love of country—of hills, ravines, creeks, clouds, hawks, oceanwinds, and, above all,
stands of giant redwoods. Like any lover, he knows the country he lives and works in—every inch of it, every aspect, every hidden secret—as if it were the body of some woman he’s loved well and will never forget. I remember walking through Hendy Woods State Park near Boonville with him, and him showing me a thousand things I might otherwise have missed—like “barber chairs,” redwoods that split dangerously down the middle as they were falling, and the heart wood of long-fallen redwood trunks that you could carve posts out of that would last a thousand years “if you keep them dry”—pointing all this out as if he were a rich man proudly showing me his million-dollar living room.
First off, he made me appreciate the extraordinary quiet at the base of a group of sky-high redwoods. Almost pinned there by the weight of that hush, as I looked up at the blinding light streaming into the huge cavern of forest darkness, I couldn’t help but feel I was inside a cathedral. But Patterson brought me out of that reverie with an immediate laugh, telling me it took two men and a boy to see to the top of those lean, shaggy, still-growing titans. That is the other thing that enriches both his talk and his writing—his love for the native myth of woods and country—the art of local storytelling and, above all, the tall tale that so fascinated Mark Twain. If you’re a bit too serious, or you’re not prepared to read about coyotes who go joy-riding in pickup trucks or herons that give each other the skinny on where to get the best fast-food frogs, you just might find yourself walking off a cliff in one of Patterson’s stories.
But Patterson isn’t just a humorist, and he isn’t just one of what they call the “West Coast bucolic” writers. Like Twain, unquestionably one of his heroes, Patterson’s stories show a profound social conscience. That’s hardly surprising considering the years he put in with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War as a peace activist or the time he spent in the South doing Civil Rights work. He also did enough time as a poor kid, a street thug and outcast because of his stutter, on the gang-ridden streets of L.A. to understand that a lot of what a person becomes is determined, not by genetics or a democratic form of government, but by the money in your pocket and the power—whether in fist or by way of influence—that you can wield over others. In “Stomping Fleeces,” as in many of the stories, there is the profound understanding—of one who has been there himself—of how the system conspires to keep poor people poor. “Working the plantation type of agriculture like they’ve got down there in the San Joaquin, it didn’t take me long to figure out that there was no future in it,” he writes. “To the contrary, the longer you stayed a farm worker, the poorer you got.” It’s clear that he 
writes, not just because he wants to document what so many millions in the underclass have to go through every day, but also because he believes in the power of the truth to make a difference—to wise people up, to give them the means, and yes, the power, to change their own lives for the better.
For sure, Patterson is an angry man. He’s angry at the death and pain that’s still happening from the Vietnam War, and he’s angry at the new wave of needless death and pain that’s currently being inflicted by the American government in Iraq. You’ll hear his voice rise, and just about see his hackles raised on the back of his neck, when he talks of such things. Patterson, clearly, is not a man you want to anger too far, but he’s not a brawler, and his weapon of choice—at least today—is the written word. He told me he worries that he comes on “too macho,” but the truth is, I found him one of the gentlest men I’d ever met—a lot more like Hoss Cartwright than Big Bad Leroy Brown.
This is a man who will delicately fondle the Pomo Indian child’s pestle he found in his garden one day, and whose voice will crack with emotion when he shows you the stepping stones that he made by hand with Ensenada rocks he gathered on Baja beaches with his Irish grandmother. He carted those thirty-pound stones by hand all over the country, to wherever he’s lived, to preserve them; and if you ask, you’ll find there’s a story there too—for stories seem to be embedded in everything that surrounds the man. He’ll tell you how during his formative years this grandmother was his surrogate mother, and how she died suddenly when he was just back from Vietnam, still recuperating in an Army hospital.
This is also the man who has wandered the hills of Anderson Valley for years listening to every story an old person would tell him, so that he can preserve their words and their lives for posterity. He is the secret planter of 4,000 redwood trees in a much-scarred creekside valley near his home, so that generations to come will know the same beauties of a massive redwood forest that he has known—though they will never know the quiet, loving conscience of the man who planted them. And he is the man who once helped lift an entire 1868 Mendocino County barn several feet off the earth so that he could put a real, lasting concrete foundation under it, making sure it would last at least another century or so.
It’s evident that what Patterson is doing in his stories is very much the same kind of effort. He has loved all the places he’s been, and all the people he’s met—from Lester Seymour, the “catskinner” who taught him how to rig a “straight hook” of logs and “pop them out of the woods” without getting himself killed, even to “old Leon,” who got him “accidentally drunk,” then ditched him by the side of the road and made him walk home several miles in the middle of the night—so much that he wants to keep them going for at least another century or so, at least in the minds and hearts of those who’ve been lucky enough to receive his memories, through ink on paper, as their own.
Copyright 2006 by Gerald Nicosia
