Stormy Weather Fever Reading

Northern Utah this week has been a beautiful mess of thunder, lightning, and double rainbows. I escaped several times this week to my dead grandfather's old garage past the yellow blossom thorn bushes and into his cemetery of massive rusting Caterpillar construction equipment; Gardner, Inc. semi-trucks with breaking hinges and rat droppings on the chapped leather seats; aging tractors my grandfather built practically from his own two hands. It has been haunting and poignant. I want to walk to the cemetery down the lane and lie across his grave, the communion between himself and mine being as raw as it has been as I've retraced his old haunts, slept in his old bed in his old room, kept my clothing in the drawers he once kept his. There is a small brass key I found behind his chest that I like to try in different locks around the house and yard.

I've been reading Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, too, climbing into the driver's seat of Grandpa's CS-323C Vibratory Soil Compactor to get out of the rain, to sink deeper and deeper into Brontë's fever dreams about Heathcliff and his Catherines, of Mrs. Nelly Dean and her clever, humble, tender narration of her several masters and her sideline participation in their selfish bourgeois dramas. I couldn't help but fall victim to their temper tantrums and their angry, vengeful, bitter, torn hearts and subsequent acts of passion. I despised, then pitied, then revered Mr. Edgar Linton and his poor stupid younger sister. Even when I found Heathcliff's demeanor and choice of actions to be despicable and demonic, I wept for him and cried real tears when he dug graves and tore into coffins to reach, in any possible way, the love and light he had selfishly tried to tuck away since his horrendous, abusive boyhood.

I wept for Hareton and fell in love with his Yorkshire accent. I even felt for awful Hindley when Nelly saw his boyish ghost sitting innocently atop a stone wall in the thick of the foggy moors. I am so grateful for Emily's ending to her only novel as I thought for sure the story would have no redemption or hope after all as I neared the closing chapters. I was far from disappointed.

I feel spooked and morbidly active. I dozed as I finished the novel, lying prostate on the antique sofa in my grandma's parlor, waking to the claps of thunder and lightning flashes that echoed through the huge windows overlooking the dirt road running west from the house. I read during a heavy downpour of rain about Heathcliff starving himself on the wet moors beyond the Heights and following the ghost of his other half, his blood soul sister to the kirkyard and back to the house and back to the woods. I know it isn't right, I know these things aren't true--soulmates and such--but I sank my teeth in anyway and bit hard against Heathcliff's agony and wasted revenges and felt Emily should not be critiqued for creating his character in all his monstrosity. His tragic tale manured the soil in his death for what progeny was left of the Earnshaws and Lintons and I think the young people at the close of the novel know more of gratitude for peace and tranquility than they could have otherwise. A beautiful, haunting tale, and one that I will keep by my nightstand for future windy dark afternoons and feverish illnesses.

I will also add that the whole story would have been moot if the society of the novel was not so entirely restrained to two households in the middle of nowhere, to the extreme isolation that cousins had no choice but to marry cousins.

And to follow up from my last blog post, The X-Files movie sucked. Sorry David Duchovny. If any of you all want to really experience the X-Files, go buy seasons 1-3 and enjoy episodes starring more celebrities than you might remember from the 1990s.....Seth Green plays an awesome long haired hoodlum in one of the very first episodes and I just watched a Season 3 episode last week where Jack Black plays the long-haired nerd who owns a Video Arcade and dies in a pile of his own quarters. That episode is also nice for the Sonic the Hedgehog level 1 music playing consistently in the background, not to mention the James' songs that hit the jukebox just before another victim bites it. Revisit them! You can't be disappointed!