Westward Denim

Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Photos/Harrison Blackman.

Retracing a complicated journey westward during the COVID-19 pandemic

By Harrison Blackman

In my closet hangs a vintage Levi’s denim jacket. The collar is frayed and yellowed. Along the sleeves, the gold stitching is starting to come loose. The denim was a rich blue once, but decades of sun has bleached the color out of it. Some quick Internet research suggests the jacket is from the 1970s. I don’t like to travel with it, and I’ve never washed it. It’s had a good run, and I want it to keep running.

This jacket belonged to my great-grandfather, William Harold Blackman. He went by Harold. I’m named after him, sort of. And his jacket fits me perfectly.

In 1902, Harold Blackman was born in Hoxie, Kansas. In 1920, he graduated from Lincoln High School in Los Angeles.

A hundred years later, and I’m driving to Reno from Maryland to begin my last year of grad school during the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, when the pandemic hit the US, I fled to my parent’s house in Maryland. So in July I’m coming back.

We take two cars. In one, I’m with my younger brother. Our plan is to drop him off for his first year in a grad program in Boulder. In another car are my parents, and from Boulder they’re going to take me to Reno. In whichever car I’m in, I’m wearing a Levi’s jacket, but not my great-grandfather’s. It’s a bit stiffer. It has hand pockets. This one was not manufactured in America, but Bangladesh.

And now, halfway through our journey, I’m in Kansas. I’m standing at a rest stop on I-70 in the middle of this very central state, and just over the horizon hundreds of wind turbines tower over endless fields of green. Those modern devices seem to have been pulled from a stereotypical sci-fi landscape that fuses agricultural nostalgia with the promise of a technological future.

But after I’ve lathered Purell on my palms and pass the keys of the Subaru Outback to my brother for him to take over the wheel, I try to imagine what this place was like in 1902, when Harold was born; what it was like about a decade later, when the Blackmans pursued the American dream westward and moved to Indio, California, well ahead of the Dust Bowl and The Grapes of Wrath.

In the sepia photographs which survive, Harold and his parents wear the heavy formal clothes of extras from There Will Be Blood, though they were ranchers, not oil drillers. What led Harold and his family to Southern California? And why is traveling westward so emblematic of the American conception of progress?

Harold and his wife, Ruth Wilson, graduated in 1926 from the University of Southern California (USC). I found their commencement program online. The graduation was held at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, built only five years before. In 2028, the Coliseum may host part of the Olympics for the third time. Time passes. Privilege persists. I’m the latest in a long line.

Harold grew up to be a general physician in Riverside, California. Though Ruth graduated cum laude in liberal arts from USC, back then the only path forward she had was as a teacher. What would she have been able to do had she been born a few decades later?

My brother and I keep driving. The sun, ever so slowly, starts to fade into a sickly formation of clouds. Every once in a while on the horizon we see the outlines of massive silos, industrial ships fixed forever in their Kansan locations. The Swiss modern architect Le Corbusier called American grain elevators “the magnificent first-fruits of the new age.” Uh-huh.

At the same time, though our route remains a rigid line, we can sense the gradual incline as the invisible but impending Rocky Mountains approach, rising from the plains. What did Harold and his family see on the railroad (if that was what they took), as they departed their ranch ahead of World War I, as they gave up all the pretty horses they may have once owned? Did they think they were making progress?

As my brother and I drive deeper into the heartland, our destination is a Marriott on the Colorado side of the state line. A billboard advertises a local airport that promises aviation access—not to Denver, but to Los Angeles. How many people in Kansas are trying to escape the state, get ahead of themselves?

When I was a kid my conception of Kansas was as the protagonist of a children’s book by Laurie Keller, The Scrambled States of America. The book starts with a regular day in the USA, where all the states, personified as individual anthropomorphized characters, were happy. “All the states, that is, except for Kansas,” the narrator Uncle Sam intones, adding, “He was not feeling happy at all.” Kansas then bemoans to his friend, kind-hearted Nebraska, “I just feel bored. All day long we’re just here in the middle of the country. We never GO anywhere. We never DO anything, and we NEVER meet any NEW states!” So the states get together and choose to switch places, and in the swap Mississippi and Nevada become star-crossed lovers.

Despite Kansas’ literary plight, the reason we need to get across to Colorado is because Kansas won’t even let us stay the night. Due to contemporary COVID-19 restrictions, travelers from Maryland have been prohibited from staying in Kansas hotels. To make forward progress, we have to pass through.

In school we were taught that American colonists and pioneers moved west, displacing Native peoples state-by-newly-formed state, picking up everything as they proceeded, leaving the past and all those communities in between behind. For my family, the past begins in southern California, my great-grandfather’s destination. Until my parents moved eastward, and I now reenact the archetypal journey westward by automobile in the matter of days.

Earlier in our trip, we visited the Cahokia Mounds outside St. Louis, a Native settlement larger than London in the Middle Ages, pyramids of dirt with vistas across the Midwestern horizon. Then we passed through the Gateway Arch, the sleek and curving monument to American conquest and unfinished pyramids, a monument to picking up and moving on and taking away, over and over again.

What gives Americans the right to take and discard land so easily? Has any other society been so callous? Then again, these Americans who moved west, they did so in search of a better life. Like the states in that children’s book, they wanted to switch places. They were searching for windmill and grain-elevator utopias, star-crossed love, the adventure of crossing a continent. What did it cost?

By the time we cross into Colorado, it’s dark, and the only light on the horizon is a massive set of billboards, an unsettling shrine to Donald J. Trump. I adjust my denim jacket. Not my great-grandfather’s jacket but my own, from Bangladesh.

The next day we leave early to finish the first leg of our journey, to Boulder. We move my brother into his housing to begin his graduate program. I continue on with my parents to Reno. I button my jacket. It’s time to move on. To make progress.

When I’m done with Reno, or when Reno is done with me, I’ll go someplace else. Maybe westward, maybe back east. Maybe somewhere in between. But I’ll keep moving. The spirit of Harold will continue long after me through his American denim. And yet I can’t predict the fate of this other jacket, from Bangladesh.

Harrison Blackman is an award-winning writer, editor, and journalist based in Reno, Nevada. An MFA candidate and writing instructor at the University of Nevada, Reno, Harrison graduated from Princeton University in 2017 with a degree in history. His writing has appeared in The Oxford Climate Review and regional publications in New Jersey and New Mexico.

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Kathleen KuoOctober 5, 2020CComment