Geography Lesson
Dale Ritterbusch



Where a man or woman chooses to live says something, something telling beyond its geography.  I suppose we could bring in terms like self-realization or self-actualization or maybe there is this criminal impulse necessitating a life lived alone or apart before that impulse achieves fruition.  Perhaps a knowledge of inchoative evil, of flourishing inhumanity, blossoming indecently or possibly a monastic or spiritual intent, uncontaminated by material concerns.  Hence, the abandoned homestead or ranch house in the middle of nowhere.  Walking across the landscape of the Southwest, southern Colorado or New Mexico, one expects a few adobe ruins from the time before Anglos settled in massive numbers, massive being a relative term for those who value solace and the beatitudes of solitude and a natural existence—even chimney smoke on the horizon gives the itch of something entirely too close, virtually burrowing under the skin.  But, from a later date, a ranch with only walls standing—collapsed rafters eaten by the elements  or scavenged for fuel—seems almost an act of injustice.  And the well, dry as the bleached skull of a steer, appears so shallow it wouldn’t take more than a summer’s drought to turn the place to ruin and despair—except no one would feel despair living there, dry dust in the lungs the usual affair and possibly a dry or dessicated longing, the object of which is most often unknown.  But there is, peering into the well, a doll, its dress covered with dust, looking up, staring back, its eyes open and blue.  Doll parts not unusual to find, their maiming a rite of passage, a way of working and staging the world, but a whole doll and the eyes open?  Aren’t the eyes supposed to close when the doll is reclined?  And what of the girl?  She must have outlived the doll, outlived the purpose of nurture and care.  Perhaps she gave it a bath, washing the dust from its face before the journey began, before it sank, but surely she would have undressed the doll, undressed it the way the landscape lay undressed to her practiced eye, the naked land enticing her, barely a moment of shame, and lust rising in a swirl of omnivorous dust.

About the Author:
Dale Ritterbusch is the author of Lessons Learned and Far From the Temple of Heaven. He is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and twice served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the United States Air Force Academy.