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“It’s rare to read in serious literature accounts of people doing this kind of labor 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.” Debut short story collections that make one want to jump and shout — collections of the caliber of William Saroyan’s The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze or Nelson Algren’s The Neon Wilderness — don’t come along every day, and when they do, they’re cause for the literary world to celebrate. Bruce Patterson’s Walking Tractor has the fresh, authentic, and original voice of both those great American writers, and like them, he comes out of the American working-class and speaks directly to it, from the heart, from the conscience, and because he has the ability to give voice to people who have none in the larger world. Set in northern California’s Anderson Valley — a land of lush green rolling hills, stands of redwoods, ranches, and (lately) vineyards and wineries — Walking Tractor is a series of 24 stories based on the working life of Mr. Patterson, a Vietnam veteran who in 1968, at the age of 18, served as a rifleman with the 173rd Airborne Brigade and then came home angry and disillusioned to a country that did not welcome him back. Patterson needed a place to heal, where he was free to turn his back and walk away when life and people got too hurtful, and he found such a life as a logger, woodcutter, rancher and farmer in Anderson Valley. And among the people he worked with, and for, he found true honesty, kindness and a deep understanding of what this business of living is all about. His stories pay tribute to purely American characters like Lester Seymour the half-breed Pomo Indian “catskinner” on his first job setting choker; Eva the mistress (a kind of modern “Miss Kitty”) of Cloverdale’s old Lockhorn Saloon; her place was nicknamed the Lockjaw because, when she was tending bar, nobody could get in a word edgewise; the loincloth wearing, cheese-craving “Wildman of Pardaloe Peak;” and Ole Claude, the one-time rodeo tramp and Yorkville Ki-oat-knowing cowboy who loved to make fools of government trappers. Yet Patterson can also be an acid social critic when he has to, as in his tale “Horse Women” about the new fancy breed of citified and snooty female horse trainers. But Patterson’s laughter is always gentle, his tolerance broad, and his respect for everyone, even people he doesn’t like, unimpeachable. Walking Tractor achieves many things. It does for Anderson Valley what Steinbeck did for the Salinas, memorializing its people and terrain in prose that is deliciously evocative and at times uproariously funny. It tells intimate details of jobs most people know little about, such as hook tending or timber felling, with such precision that the reader almost feels he’s ready to hire on for a day’s work himself. It is illustrated with 28 of Patterson’s own striking color photos of Anderson Valley, beautifully reproduced, that are themselves worth the price of the book. But most of all, together the stories compose the autobiography of a unique American man, whose personality, however scarred, shows itself indomitable and inescapably lovable. |
