Ralph Thurston
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The seventeen essays of Leaving the Bucket: Searching for the Sacred in Addiction give a philosophical close-up of living inside, outside and around the context of rural alcoholism and other forms of addiction. The collection is an insightful look at what drives an individual toward change while paradoxically leaving him in a static context that seems impossible to exit. Set in rural Southeast Idaho in the late 1970’s, the book chronicles the simultaneous eruptions of a tavern in a teetotaling Mormon community and the author’s interest in Dionysian pursuits. With reflections on topics ranging from the vulgar to the sacred, the book illuminates the internal wars that lead to “addiction,” the knotted behavior which has been called a disease by modern medicine but which may instead be an intense version of the drive toward historical change—a drive perhaps mimicked at all levels of existence, from the personal to the social to the ecological. Detailing what happens when the urge to change meets the lack of opportunity to do so, Leaving the Bucket will leave its readers’ thinking as changed as the community it describes.
Ralph Thurston writes reflective non-fiction from his five acre cut flower farm in Blackfoot, Idaho, where he lives and works with his wife and inspiration, watercolorist Jeriann Sabin. His essays have been published in such diverse publications as Growing For Market and The Georgia Review, and his most recent effort, No Sage: Essays From the Margin, which wove its way around his work as farmer, trapper, and apiarist in a rapidly changing Southeast Idaho, was a finalist for the 2002 Idaho Book Award.
HABITS
The Aberdeen-Springfield Canal was built near the turn of the century, in good part with mule teams pulling scrapers. At noon of the long workday the laborers stopped for a prepared lunch, and it’s said the mules halted without prompting precisely at that hour, not budging even if the lunch whistle had not blown. Mid-stride, mid-load, as regular as the German philosopher Kant—by whose daily walk the villagers could set their clocks—the mules had come to habit and dutiful rhythm.
Seventy years later, parked on the canal bridge just a couple hundred yards behind Joe’s Bar, I unscrew the cork from a bottle of wine. Beside me, Johnny deftly rolls a joint. We are, like the mules, expressing one sort of habit, but unlike them trying to break two greater ones—a task Kant may have insisted impossible. He believed those two habits, our senses and our reason, color our perceptions so strongly that rather than truly apprehending a ding an sich—a thing in itself—we only witness its appearance, as phenomena.
I take a drink, peer out over the bridge railing. The canal’s craggy bottom lies exposed by the winter chill—rocks protrude, small basins stipple its surface, dried and frozen moss blankets what thin sheets of ice do not. Divested of the summer’s river water, the canal is just one phenomenon overlying another more honest. It is a surface assumed real, a habit experienced so long that its users believe it inherent, even instinctual, as it ebbs and flows through two counties, a banked and seasonally emptied artery of human agriculture.
Johnny’s Italian grandparents and their relatives settled here not long after the canal was built. Westward from here, the Beninis and DeGiulios and Drogheis own most of the rock ridden land—clear to the unfarmable desert. It’s said that when asked why they chose such poor farmland, they reply it reminds them of whence they came. I suspect other reasons, perhaps there being no better land left.
