Professor
and chair of the Department of English William Gruber received
the 2001
Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize for creative nonfiction from
the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College
for his collection of essays, On All Sides Nowhere: Building
a Life in Rural Idaho. As part of the prize, Gruber attended
Bread Loaf in August 2002. Below is an excerpt from On All
Sides Nowhere. For additional information, read about Gruber
in Emory
Report.
“Idaho
first registered on my consciousness at the movies. In the summer
of 1960 I was sixteen, and in the middle of August of 1960 there
was no place in suburban Pennsylvania to find air conditioning
except in supermarkets or theaters. I could not spend summer
days amidst the cabbages and canned goods, and so to escape
the heat I went with my friends as often as I could to the movies;
one of the movies I sought out in August of 1960 was an elegy
for the waning days of modern civilization, On the Beach.
To
the filmgoing public in 1960, keenly aware that despite all
the best intentions the cold war could suddenly turn hot, the
movie was perfectly credible. It was set only a few years into
the future; a calendar on the wall read, ominously, “1964.”
Nuclear war of undisclosed origins had killed everyone in the
northern hemisphere, and now, as a lethal cloud of radiation
spread slowly over the planet, one of the last surviving groups
of humans clustered in Melbourne, Australia, to await the end.
It was an intoxicating, almost carnivalesque, experience; Gregory
Peck played the romantic lead opposite Ava Gardner, and at one
point in the film, Peck, the taciturn commander of a nuclear
submarine, tells Ava Gardner about his origins. In answer to
her question about his childhood home, he replies with a single
word that at the time seemed more homiletic than informative:
“Idaho.”
Whose
decision was it for Peck to claim Idaho for his birthplace?
Of all the possible states the script writer could have chosen,
why that one? And it was a choice: for the record, Peck was
born in La Jolla, California, and his character in Nevil Shute’s
novel from which the movie was adapted comes from Westport,
Connecticut. Peck’s “Idaho” drops like a stone
into a well of unknown depth; it falls without trace, without
echo. It is a piece, apparently, of purely gratuitous information.
Why
Idaho? The name resonates oddly with Melbourne and San Francisco,
the environments of On the Beach. Those places set the
mood of the film. To Americans in 1960, Melbourne was alien,
exotic, and San Francisco brought to mind the glitz and romance
of California. Set in that context, and set against the despairing
hedonism of humans who number their remaining days according
to the drifting global winds, “Idaho” seems dissonant.
Its sound is stark, but as Peck speaks it it sounds also moral
and attractive. It seems to express Peck’s loneliness,
his longing for the purity of childhood and for the innocence
of a world before the Bomb. None of the familiar mythic names
of the American West, not Texas or Oregon or Colorado, would
have the same aura of pure expressivity. My guess is that the
name “Idaho” was chosen for its semantic emptiness.
The name made sense because to most people Idaho” meant
nothing, and, meaning nothing, it could stand in for the infinite
pathos of a world that would shortly cease to exist. Idaho was
then, and in some ways still is, a geographic What You Will,
and as a result the name “Idaho” becomes a kind of
cultural Rorschach test for whoever happens to reflect on it.”
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