The Order in Which We Do Things: The Poetry of Tom Wayman

Garrison

Garrison A man is running across Wyoming. Away out on the high plains, nothing around him but the wind and sky, a man runs along the paved shoulder of the great Interstate crossing Wyoming from west to east. Cars pass him; the faces of children stare out of rear windows. And trucks pull by, the drivers high above the road watch him run a long way ahead as they approach and go on. Garrison is running across Wyoming. He has always run. He ran in military school and in the Army’s summer camps. “They wanted us to get up at 5:30 A.M. So at 5 I’d be up doing laps. They couldn’t believe it.” He went to college on a scholarship for track. “I was good, but I wasn’t that good. I never could get into competition. I’d place, but I think I only won in a meet once or twice. I just liked to run. We’d have a good time, me and a few others. I remember one relay where the first guy on our team was great, the second guy was good, then they gave the baton to me. I ran full out, but I lost most of the lead we had. When I passed to my friend he could see we weren’t going to win: he was even slower on that distance than I was. So he ran one lap then out of the stadium into the dressing room and was sitting outside having showered and changed when the coach caught up to him. The coach didn’t know what to do. He’d never seen anybody run right out of a race.” The Poetry of Tom Wayman / 15 Now Garrison strides down a long hill in the afternoon sun, his T-shirt plastered to his back, above the pavement, face contorted with the strain. “At college,” he says, “I used to run down from the jock dorm about a mile to a little amusement park where they had this miniature railroad parents would take their kids on for rides. There was a cinder track that paralleled the train tracks so I’d run on that. Pretty soon a train would come up behind and I’d put on a burst of speed to see if I could beat it. The guy at the controls of the little engine would open the throttle nuh nuh nuh-nuh nuhnuhnuh and I’d tear ahead trying to do better. People on board would shout and wave but I had to leap a couple of ditches and in any case by the time I ever got to the park I’d already run a ways so I wasn’t exactly fresh. “One day, though, I got into strip and drove my car down. I got out and hid in the bushes on the further side of the worst ditch. When the train came around the corner I leaped out and yelled in the driver’s ear Let’s go and took off up the track. He opened her up nuh nuh nuh-nuh nuhnuhnuh and took off after me, the people screaming and cheering as he drew closer. They thought they were helping win the race but actually they were just sitting there yelling and he would have gone faster if they weren’t aboard. Anyway, that time we were neck and neck when we got round to the ditch again.” 16 / The Order in Which We Do Things His feet, in Wyoming, pull the asphalt behind him, stroke after stroke, breath hauled in and pushed out with his long legs; eyes blue under the blue sky. He went to graduate school in ROTC, studying education. He listened to what people said about the War and asked the Army about it, so they let him go. After that, he asked his professors about their work, too, bringing his hound Ralph into classes and offices, using the dog as a point of reference in discussing teaching techniques. He was living then at the edge of town in a tiny cabin, and running miles along the country roads and laps around a tree-lined campus oval. Until he quit, got a job working demolition, then in the southern part of the state went logging.“The only thing political down there,” he says,“was the Birch Society meetings. So I’d...