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Fiction from Web del SolFuture Tense
Michael Martone
Somwhere in all those episodes of Star Trek there is a
mention of Captain Kirk's birth. It took place in Iowa,
of course. You fill in the attendant mythology of values
that this shorthand would lend to a character, to the
character's character -- hardworking, honest, independent,
loyal. All of it. Steve Miller wrote to the producers of
the show claiming kin. Sure, why not? they said.
Riverside it is. Plans were made then for this annual
festival in the summer, part of the schedule of festivals
of harvesting the various species of local produce, the
circuit of centennials, the founding of railways that no
longer survive. All the Days -- Norwegian, Swedish,
Czech, Dutch. The signs on the outside of town were
changed. They once read: Riverside -- where the best
begins. Now a Trek has been substituted for best, a line
painted through lightly so you can see both, hedging the
bet. The population is 826.
Okay, I admit I've watched Star Trek in its endless
reruns. I love the parts where Kirk, the boy from Iowa,
rages when his crew has been shanghaied from him. His
crew like Odysseus's men are always succumbing to the
eating of the lotus, easily accepting the paternal and
protective care of some alien superior race. And Kirk
rages. It never works for him, this future of bliss. He
tells us. He tells his crew. He tells the sad-eyed
aliens too. Man, he says, must struggle. Human beings
must always be improving, perfecting, restless and
unsatisfiable. It takes awhile for the crew to stop
acting like kids, to grow up and act like adults. These
grown men in funny outfits. And these children here
pretending in my imagination, exactly duplicating the
stories they have absorbed from TV. The scripts of
television are their scripts. Life is already becoming,
will always be becoming, lived somewhere else.
Time is all mixed up here. "Here" is Riverside, Iowa,
and the reason Time is all mixed up has to do with the way
people here are forced to talk about the town's main
attraction. Well, it isn't quite an attraction yet.
There is a committee working on that. But what will be
the attraction once they get it going is that Riverside,
Iowa is the future birthplace of James T. Kirk. James T.
Kirk is a character from Star Trek, a television show
about the future that was canceled years ago. This adds
to the confusion. People have to talk about the
television series in the past tense, fondly,
nostalgically. It's over and done, existing in reruns.
But the people of this small Johnson County town are
planning events that will have happened (is that even a
tense?) sometime in the next century.
By all accounts this was Steve Miller's idea. I spent
a rainy spring day looking for Steve Miller to ask him
about it -- to get the history of this thing that will
happen. As I looked for him I visited the sites of
importance in the future boyhood life of a made-up boy who
would become, in his own future, a Starship Captain.
During that day in Riverside, Iowa, I did transport back
and forth in this warp in time, but also I traveled
through the thin membrane of fact and fiction. I saw what
had happened and what will happen and what people had
wanted and wished to have happen, to have happened, to
have had happen.
In the consignment store on First Street, I picked
through an old cigar box full of yellowing decals and hand
lettered buttons that said things like "Riverside Iowa The
Future Birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk." The woman
who ran the store helped some older women exchange
condensed novels for other condensed novels.
"I've read that one. And that one. And that."
"That was a good one."
On the decal was a silhouette of the town -- a low
bushy outline of the tops of trees and the water tower and
the steeple of the Church of the Assumption pushing
through. The message was Trek your way to Riverside Iowa,
in a futuristic organic type. But that skyline was
instantly recognizable as that of another town time forgot
-- sleepy and shaded, holy and watered. Riverside does
have a pleasant seat rising in steps from the valley. The
river is the English. The abandoned railbed follows the
river's trek. First Street, the highway, a step higher,
runs parallel east and west. And above that the red brick
fronts of the town, the terraced lawns of the dice-white
houses above and beyond, and beyond that the massive
Assumption and its lesser buildings -- convent, rectory,
academy and school -- on the very summit of this old
round-shouldered hill. It must have been lovely. It must
have been obvious when some unremembered town founders saw
the place for the first time and founded. This is, this
was the place, their place.
It isn't a town that time forgot. That implies that
nothing changed, changes, of course. I was looking up at
the town from an elevator in the valley. Sparrows were
diving into some spilled and spoiling corn on the ground.
The tracks were gone, the roadbed nearly invisible now.
The stores all gone on First where the sidewalk is still
raised wagon-bed high above the road for the easy exchange
of goods. There are a few bars. A branch bank. The
consignment shop. Water from the rain is running down the
streets that lead up to the church, the heavy clouds it
seems a few inches above the steeple's point.
"It came to him in a bar, I think." The woman who ran
the consignment shop was telling me about Steve Miller's
idea. "Something had to be done. Look around," she said.
She had grown up in Riverside, remembered the farmers
coming to town and the Amish in their wagons. The
birthplace is right next door, or will be, she told me.
"Last summer during the first festival they put up a
little marker. I don't know if it made it through the
winter. I haven't looked." She said she was still
surprised they came -- the busloads of strangely dressed
people who watch the television show and go to things like
this dressed like characters from their favorite programs.
Aliens walked the shattered sidewalks. They wore capes
and mail and green make-up. They came from Chicago, a
busload. A woman from Los Angeles flew in in her own
plane. The camp grounds were guarded by kids carrying ray
guns. They bought decals and stickers.
But I could tell she was unsure of the idea.
"Something has to be done," she said again.
"It works, doesn't it?" I said, "I mean, I came because
of it, I guess." I was out of season though, she said,
laughing a bit. Next week, March 26th, would be the
actual birthday.
There is not one Kirk listed in the Riverside phone
book. Most of the names look like German to me. Steve
Miller is trying to find a family named Kirk to move to
town, the angel Gabriel with an annunciation. That is
what the secretary in the city attorney's office told me.
"He's trying to get somebody here to change their name.
Anything." The attorney is leaning in the doorway of the
office professionally involved in the finer points of the
statue saga. Steve Miller wants to have a statue built in
the park of the young James T. Kirk leaving Riverside for
the space academy. William Shatner, who played the
character of James T. Kirk, won't give permission to use
his likeness since his likeness is now a policeman on
another television show. And the lawyer wonders about
this -- who owns the likeness of a made-up person, whether
they need to ask permission of the actor at all. I can
tell he has thought about this in his spare moments. To
him and to his secretary all of it is so curious. They
tell me to go look at the pile of rocks in the park. That
is where the statue will be, of the Young Kirk going off
to space.
"Where do they go?" I asked about the young people of
Riverside. They are going away, obviously, and their
leaving is not commemorated. There is nothing here for
them to do. It is literally a sleepy little town, most
folks driving up to Iowa City to work, driving back here
for bed. As we talk we keep running into the time
problem. The town's only claim to fame is something that
has yet to happen, that will never happen, that they want
in a half-hearted way to make happen.
There are little statues of Mary housed in little
grottos in many front yards. A Catholic town. The blue
of her robes is often bleached and bled to a robin's-egg
blue. And on the breasts of some of the figures is a
dollop of red, the heart that remembers so much, a spring
flower pulsing in the shadows of the brown evergreens.
The Church of the Assumption is something. It is on the
Registry of Historic Places. The woman in the consignment
shop said that people came from all over the countryside
to build the church. It is red brick, huge yet
functional, vernacular and honest. If it were even older
than it is, even though it is registered as historic,
maybe people would come to Riverside to look at it and
leave a few dollars behind in this town. Mary, above the
main door, is at least twice the size of life. She is
being taken into heaven whole, her clothes billowing,
suggesting a sucking whirlwind, a midwestern twister. Her
clothes wrap back around her and cling to her upraised
arms. Her clothes are becoming clouds. Her flesh too --
clouds, air, pure white heaven.
I've been told that I can buy a vial of Kirk Dirt. It
has been scooped from the birthplace. Steve Miller owns
the lot that will one day be the birthplace. As I walked
from the city attorney's to the lot that will one day be
the birthplace, I did kind of get into the spirit of the
thing. I imagined children playing in this alley which
still is a cinder alley. Of course my imaginary children
were imagining within their games the people they would
become, stopping now and then to rewrite, in elaborate
collaboration, the history of their future and starting
over again now more confident, more clear about where they
were heading.
There were no children in the alleys playing. In the
drizzle, I did not look too long for the stick that was
supposed to mark the future birthplace. There was junk in
all the backyards. Old rose trellises needed painting.
Clotheslines sagged with the invisible weight of ghost
laundry. Here and there on some rooftops and backyards
were the satellite dishes all pointing up to space.
It is plain, isn't it? Obvious to you now that this
town will not survive to the future, to the time, if there
will be one, of the miraculous birth. The birth that the
rebirth of the town is staked on. Riverside will be lucky
to make the next century. You know it. The people who
remain know it. And Steve Miller, wherever he is, maybe
he even knows it too.
Up the road to the west is Kalano, Iowa, another small
town. It is thriving. I stopped there for pie, and the
cafe was closed, only for remodeling, to expand. The town
has two Main Streets. One is for the cars. The other is
for buggies and the horses. The Amish materialize in the
alleyways. Do thier business. And disappear. Sure,
people come to catch a look at them. The stores all have
the Amish culture captured in charms and mementos of
impulse purchases, souvenirs of the simple. But the
tourist dollar, however large, cannot explain the health
of the town. It is not the attraction of the Amish but
the Amish themselves who drive the town. When they spend
money they spend it here -- the dry goods, the blacksmith,
the hardware. It is an economy that sustains itself. It
is a mistake to say it is living in the past.
Riverside, a few miles away, is nostalgic for its
future. Its scheme for survival is a paradigm of many
towns and cities where convention centers and shopping
malls are only less-original lures for someone-else's
expendable income. These developments are models of
recreation, not creation. Life is a species of
entertainment in this model, not part of a community which
sustains and enriches itself and which is a part of a
larger community that does likewise.
Steve Miller, wherever he is, believes as many of us do
that out there somewhere is a great new universe and that
we should all go. Steve Miller is acting to save what is
left of his dying town, I am convinced. What is sad is
that his hope rests on a birth that never took place and,
even in his wildest dreams, never will.