SOURCE: Walker, Elinor Ann. “Infinite Remoteness in Rock Springs.” In Richard Ford, pp. 118-32. New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000.

[In the following essay, Walker elucidates how images of loneliness and vast space allow for an exploration of human fallibility and connection in Ford's Rock Springs.]

Richard Ford's Rock Springs (1987) includes stories published in magazines and journals between 1982 and 1987. A bleak and uncompromising look at lives changed by choice and circumstance, the collection features many first-person male voices whose stories evoke themes present in Ford's other works. For example, Russ, the narrator of “Sweethearts,” acknowledges another character's empty moment (see chapter 4 on The Sportswriter) and discusses how words may fail (see chapters 4 and 5 on “Great Falls” and Wildlife). Though certainly not in any kind of southern literary sense, place exerts some influence here; the wildness of the physical landscape corresponds to the unwieldy lives of the characters. Cars, trains, and other means of transit figure prominently in these narratives set in the western part of the United States, often in Montana. By traveling, the characters seek to escape the poor decisions they've made in the past, but often they find themselves stuck in the same predicaments that they flee, if only because of their own repeated mistakes. They do not adopt Frank Bascombe's more rarefied tone; instead they speak of evading jail, hating their parents, committing meaningless sexual acts to stave off loneliness. In short, they occupy a different societal space; lacking money and opportunity, the protagonists here have little leisure time to mull over philosophical quandaries, but somehow Ford evokes their desires to know, do, and be more than their lives may permit them. Faithful to the details of each scene, Ford opens wide the worlds of the dispossessed, the criminal, the bereaved, and the disappointed. These stories are, in fact, the ones that earned Ford the title of “dirty realist.” Despite the spare prose that describes the empty lives that fill these pages, the questions that plague these characters find their origins in the complexities of existence. Even as he casts a cold eye on these sometimes sordid lives, Ford continues to probe the depths of loneliness and assess its effects on those whom it strikes.

LONELINESS REALIZED IN “CHILDREN,” “COMMUNIST,” AND “OPTIMISTS”

All three of these stories share themes and stylistic traits with “Great Falls” and Wildlife. Each narrator speaks in retrospect—in two cases here the narrator is in his early forties—recounting some moment in his youth, usually when he was about 16, when he suddenly grasped the magnitude of each person's isolation on this earth. Accompanying this realization is the understanding that the adults he knows have failed, sometimes professionally and personally, to conduct themselves responsibly when faced with difficult circumstances. Such knowledge contributes to the narrator's isolation, his awareness of his relative smallness versus the universe's incomprehensible breadth, and his concession that much about life exceeds the boundaries of his control. As I suggest in the previous chapter, the very act of telling his story in some sense functions as the character's redemption from an otherwise desperate state; this act allows him to reconstruct this particular time with poignancy but without regret.

In “Children,” the narrator George recasts part of his sixteenth year in 1961, when he and Claude Phillips, who is half Blackfoot Indian, take a strange fishing trip with Claude's father Sherman's prostitute, a young girl—just 16—named Lucy. Sherman is a full-blooded Indian, violent and unpredictable, and both George and Claude avoid him whenever possible. The story takes place near Great Falls, Montana, where wheat farmers have found themselves broke and cropless, and a general air of desperation reigns. The place's remoteness complements the lives of its inhabitants. George speculates that “I have thought possibly it was the place itself, as much as the time in our lives or our characters, that took part in the small things that happened and made them memorable.”¹ George and Claude have met in an amateur boxing club; they spend a lot of time together, but George acknowledges that there is much about each other that they do not know: “You did not learn much of other people in that locality, and though Claude and I were friends, I would not say I knew him very well, because there was no chance for it” (70). As George remembers this time and tells the story, he characterizes Claude as a boy remarkably like his father, prone to small acts of violence and sudden outbursts of temper. Sherman has in fact been in prison twice before the events that George describes. Casting himself more as an observer, George tells how he begins to grasp youth's transience and his own tenuous relationship to the world around him.

Sherman's request starts the story in motion. He orders Claude to go to a motel where Sherman has spent the previous night and pick up the Canadian girl Lucy. Sherman has to get home to his wife, and he wants to keep Lucy off the streets. Meanwhile, George reveals that his own father works on the railroad and is gone two nights at a time; his mother has left some time ago. When Claude stops at his house on the way to the motel, George gets in the car to accompany him, even though both boys are supposed to be in school. Parental supervision is noticeably absent, but seeing Sherman with Claude does not arouse any longing in George. Instead, he watches in fear as Sherman hauls Claude around by the hair, trying to command respect through sheer physical force. Finally, Sherman gives Claude some “shut up” money and tells him to take the girl fishing, and the boys' adventure begins.

The trip reveals the differences between the boys, finally suggesting that their friendship arises primarily out of their shared circumstances rather than any true kinship. Drinking from a bottle of Canadian gin that they find in Sherman's car, they are already slightly drunk when they pick Lucy up for their excursion. Claude adopts a tough-man pose, making fun of Lucy, ridiculing George's parents, and telling her that George's father also was unfaithful to George's mother. George does not believe that this is true. The only truth he acknowledges in Claude's words is the statement, “This is wild country up here. Nobody's safe” (82), a dire pronouncement. Nonetheless, George knows that people have left that part of Montana, and he figures his mother has felt the same way: “She had never liked it, and neither my father nor me ever blamed her” (82). Claude continues to show off when they get to the water, where he proceeds to brag about causing the fish pain. Oddly, he makes George kill and clean the first one, and as Claude attempts to clean the second, it twists around so that its fin jabs into Claude's hand. Angrily, he curses it, aware of Lucy's gaze, and making George think that perhaps he will do “something terrible—say something to her or do something to the fish that would make her turn her head away. … He was able to do bad things easily” (91). But instead Claude gives the fish to Lucy, who without flinching jabs it with the knife and heaves it through the air and back into the water, where it will be too maimed to survive.

Claude attempts to command Lucy's attention through small but violent acts, but George demonstrates more of a willingness to talk to her and figure out what exactly has brought her to this moment. Their conversation, however, leads to little communication. While Claude has been showing off his fishing skills, Lucy tries to coax secrets from him and make him admit things he's done that have made him feel shame. George cannot think of anything, except for not caring when his mother left: “We didn't need her. She didn't need us either” (89), he tells Lucy, though he admits in his narrator's voice that neither of those statements was true. When Lucy invites him to kiss her, he does, and their exchange—like Lucy and Claude's will also be—is simply physical. George acknowledges that their words bear little relevance to what each is thinking. For example, Lucy utters meaningless endearments to George even as she turns her attention to Claude the next minute. Claude threatens to kill her, since no one knows where she is, but fearlessly she offers to take off her dress, a gesture that Claude accepts. Soon George realizes that he should leave the two alone, and he retreats to the truck, where he waits for them to finish whatever sexual activity they have engaged in. In spite of George and Lucy's attempt at conversation, the level of intimacy between the boys and Lucy stays very superficial.

George concludes several things about his experience. One, he knows that for Lucy shame is just a feeling like any other; the word does not mean the same thing to her that it does to him. He detects that Claude uses the word in another context also, wishing that he could marry Lucy, believing that he could love a woman better than his father, a fact that is a “shame” (98), he says to George. When he sees Lucy naked, George also realizes how young she is, “But it did not matter because she was already someone who could be by herself in the world” (94). This ability does not characterize himself or Claude, he knows. He does not want to be alone. As he waits for Claude and Lucy, he tries to think about something other than himself; “I realized that was all I had ever really done, and that possibly it was all you could ever do, and that it would make you bitter and lonesome and useless” (96). Instead, he focuses on Lucy and his mother to involve himself in some selfless act. All of George's efforts to understand others suggest that he does not want to grow up to be like the adults whom he knows, their lives narrowed by their own selfish points of view.

As George admits, the story ends up better than it might have, but his accompanying realizations offer little protection against loneliness. The two boys decide to drive Lucy to Great Falls so that she does not have to go back and wait for Sherman, who probably wouldn't show up anyway. There they give her their money and the “shut up” money that Sherman has given Claude. As they drive back, George experiences another realization: “I thought Claude was a fool then, and this was how you knew what a fool was—someone who didn't know what mattered to him in the long run” (97). As Claude talks on about what he could provide for Lucy if only he were older, George recognizes the separateness that divides them even as they have been united momentarily in their one act of kindness to Lucy. George remembers that at that particular moment, he began to be aware of his life going by, “fast and plummeting—almost without my notice” (98). He wonders how he and Claude will fare in the world and how they will get out of that place and those circumstances, thoughts that inspire him to observe that “Outside was a place that seemed not even to exist, an empty place you could stay in for a long time and never find a thing you admired or loved or hoped to keep. And we were unnoticeable in it—both of us” (98). He concludes his tale by acknowledging that he and Claude were “simply young”—mere “children” as the story's title reminds the reader—and did not know even as much as they thought they did at the time. Presumably in retrospect he speaks from another place, at least figuratively, where he has not been overcome by the wide emptinesses around him and between him and those he counts as friends.

The vast and unfriendly spaces that divide one person from another exert a kind of pressure akin to the landscape's emptiness, and the fear sponsored by this kind of emptiness leads to violent impulses in some and deeper introspection in others. The narrators of these three stories all encounter these divisions, finding themselves forced deeper into their thoughts even as they witness strange and unaccountable acts by others. In “Communist,” the speaker Les also recounts a time in 1961, when he was 16 and his mother 32, and when his mother had taken up with a boyfriend named Glen Baxter, the communist of the story's title, whose greatest joy was hunting. Just like the fishing trip in “Children,” the hunting scenes in this story inspire certain realizations by its narrator. When Glen startles an entire flock of geese, he fires recklessly into the air. The scene is at once beautiful and gruesome as the sky is filled with birds whose feathers fly like snow. When the flush is over, Glen realizes that he's wounded a bird, but he refuses to go after it even as Les's mother begs him to. Finally, he makes a great show of killing it, firing repeatedly at it with a pistol. Les recalls, “A light can go out in the heart. All of this happened years ago, but I can still feel now how sad and remote the world was to me. Glen Baxter, I think now, was not a bad man, only a man scared of something he'd never seen before—something soft in himself—his life going a way he didn't like.”² Les himself wrestles with this awareness: “And what I felt was only that I had somehow been pushed out into the world, into the real life then, the one I hadn't lived yet” (233). He reveals that he's never gone to college, he's had a series of bad jobs, and he's done hardrock mining. When the story ends, he tells the reader that he's 41 years old, and that he “has not heard [his] mother's voice now in a long, long time” (235). Nonetheless, like other of Ford's narrators, he remembers that time “without regret” (235). This story is the final one in the Rock Springs collection, and its conclusion echoes the endings of most of the other stories. Here, the world's remoteness has not abated, but Ford's narrator speaks into its void.

In “Optimists,” Frank tells a similar tale. He describes a time in 1959 when he was 15, and he tells the story because, he says, the events were so unimaginable to him before they actually happened. This was “the year my parents were divorced, the year when my father killed a man and went to prison for it, the year I left home and school, told a lie about my age to fool the Army, and then did not come back. The year, in other words, when life changed for all of us and forever—ended, really, in a way none of us could ever have imagined in our most brilliant dreams of life.”³ Once again, the narrator sees what turns out to be a senseless but irrevocable act of violence, an act that seems to startle its witnesses into the rest of their lives. Intimacy having failed, violence seems to supplant it. And Frank, like Les and George, finds himself alone in the face of what seems to be an empty and unpredictable world.

Despite the fact that both Frank's parents, Roy and Dorothy Brinson, were optimists (as in the story's title), both find their lives taking turns for the worst. Suspicious that his wife has been having an affair with acquaintance Boyd Mitchell, Roy punches Boyd out one night when Boyd and his wife are playing cards with Dorothy. Drunk, Boyd has insulted Roy, a gesture that Roy takes personally. The narrator acknowledges sadly that when Boyd is drunk “he did not even know what he was saying, or what had happened, and that words just got loose from him this way, and anybody who knew him knew it. Only my father didn't” (178). The blow that Roy delivers happens to hit Boyd just right in the chest, killing him almost instantly. Frank says, “I began to date my real life from that moment and that thought. It is this: that situations have possibilities in them, and we have only to be present to be involved” (181). Thus his father's actions implicate Frank in this drama that he has not chosen for himself.

Roy had had a bad day when he punched Boyd Mitchell in the chest; earlier he had seen a man killed on the railway and had not been able to do anything. This regret and his feeling of impotence haunt him. Frank feels similarly paralyzed. He's watched his father commit this act and has not been able to do a thing to stop him or change the end result. Later he sees a picture in the house that he has always assumed to be an image of himself with his parents, but he figures out in the wake of Boyd's death that it is actually his father with his parents, whom Frank has never known. To some extent, then, he must see his father differently from that moment on, as a man who has had a life that Frank could not influence much, despite his desire to help him. “What mattered was, I felt, that my father had fallen down now, much as the man he had watched fall beneath the train just hours before. And I was as helpless to do anything as he had been. I wanted to tell him that I loved him, but for some reason I did not” (185). Doomed thereafter to observe his parents' lives from a distance, Frank knows that the way he views the world is forever changed.

In spite of his father's explanation to his mother, which is intended to be hopeful, “It's just a coincidence, Dottie. It's wildlife. Some always get left back” (187), and his mother's exhortation to Roy to “Be an optimist” (187), their life together disintegrates. Roy's words prefigure the title of Ford's 1990 novel Wildlife, offering some kind of evolutionary explanation for his predicament. Through those words, Roy abdicates, at least in some sense, his control over his own life. What Frank must then witness is the death of his parents' relationship and the eventual drunkenness of his own mother, whom he encounters in the street when he is 43 years old, and who tries to tell him then, of all times, that Boyd Mitchell never loved her. Her words, like so many other gestures in the story, are finally futile, mistimed, and misplaced. But she wants Frank to believe her, and he promises that he does. “And she bent down and kissed my cheek through the open window and touched my face with both her hands, held me for a moment that seemed like a long time before she turned away, finally, and left me there alone” (191). Thus Frank concludes his story, told many years later, of this one year in his life that changed everything.

Like “Children,” “Communist,” “Great Falls,” and the novel Wildlife, this story pivots on a retrospective male voice that describes the moment its speaker found himself thrust into adulthood. The adult speaker tries, somewhat ironically, to make sense of adult actions that resist explication. Failed by his parents, each of these sons learns firsthand that he faces life primarily alone and that he alone is accountable for the choices that he makes. Even this perspective, as harsh as it may seem, renders these stories more hopeful than others in this collection, which feature grown men—adult versions of Claude Phillips, perhaps—who continue to make poor decisions, seemingly unable to put together the obvious strands of cause and effect to see the whole picture.

ON A ROAD TO NOWHERE IN “ROCK SPRINGS,” “SWEETHEARTS,” AND “EMPIRE”

Earl certainly fits the profile of the adult male who cannot make his life productive in “Rock Springs,” the first and title story of the volume, which he narrates. Heading south to Florida to make a new start with Edna, his girlfriend of eight months, and his daughter Cheryl, Earl makes a mistake and knows he's making it. Rather than ditching the stolen car that he is driving in a timely fashion, he holds on to it one more day. Already having been in prison for stealing tires, Earl cannot afford to get caught again, and he knows it. But swept up in what feels like good fortune, he drives the car one day longer than he should, at which time the car begins to overheat, leaving him, Edna, and Cheryl with no other option than to stop in the next town, Rock Springs, Wyoming.

Two events occur that change Earl's outlook. First, Edna tells him a story about a monkey that she won in a bar one time while she was rolling dice. She liked the monkey fine until the day that a Vietnam vet came into the bar where she worked as a waitress and told her that monkeys kill people. Strangely influenced by this customer's passing words, Edna submits to her fear and ties the monkey to a chair that night with a piece of clothesline. Sometime during the hours that follow, the monkey falls off the chair and hangs herself because Edna has made the cord too short. Edna refers to the story as a “shameful” one, and an “awful thing that happened to [her].”⁴ Preoccupied by the car and hoping to get to Rock Springs soon, Earl fails to respond to the story with as much sympathy as Edna has expected, leaving her to comment, “You've got a character that leaves something out, Earl” (9). The conversation seems to mark a turning point in their relationship. Earl senses Edna's waning interest in him, her impatience for a better life, and he suspects that it won't be long before she leaves him.

The monkey's story reveals some things about Edna, too: first, that she is prey to irrational fears; and second, that she believes that this “awful thing” has happened to her. In other words, she fails to accept responsibility for the choices that she has made that have helped the monkey to its fate. Furthermore, the monkey's story mirrors Earl's life: he, in effect, hangs himself, not literally, of course, but figuratively. One bad decision leads to the next, and the next, and the next.

When they finally reach a trailer park in Rock Springs, Earl encounters an African American woman whose strange kindness also affects him. She lets him use her phone even though her husband is not home, trusting that he won't harm her. As she tells him about her life, Earl finds himself lying to her, making his life better than it is and casting himself as an ophthalmologist relocating to a practice in Florida. She commiserates with his “bad luck” with the car; “We can't live without cars, can we?” she asks (13). Indeed, in many of these stories, the car (or train) suggests at once freedom and entrapment, speed and the mechanistic grooves into which modern lives get stuck. Earl phones a cab and thanks her for “saving” him, to which she replies, “You weren't hard to save, … Saving people is what we were all put on earth to do. I just passed you on to whatever's coming to you” (17). Of course the cab does not prove to be Earl's salvation, but he remembers the woman, later comparing his life to hers even though he knows very little about her. For the time being, he must acknowledge that there is always “a gap between [his] plan and what happened” (17), but that is as close as he comes to taking responsibility for his mistakes.

At story's end, as he is about to steal another car in the Ramada Inn's parking lot, Earl speculates that in truth not much separates him from any other regular guy except the ability to dodge trouble and forget the trouble that occurs anyway. He poses final questions to the eyes behind motel room curtains that might be watching him and wondering what he was doing as he peered into cars: “Would you think his girlfriend was leaving him? Would you think he had a daughter? Would you think he was anybody like you?” (27). It is his humanity—and fallible human nature, at that—that connects Earl to others whom he encounters. But to Earl there is also some crucial difference. As he explains,

I thought that the difference between a successful life and an unsuccessful one, between me at that moment and all the people who owned the cars that were nosed into their proper places in the lot, maybe between me and that woman out in the trailers … was how well you were able to put things like this out of your mind and not be bothered by them, and maybe, too, by how many troubles like this one you had to face in a lifetime. Through luck or design they had all faced fewer troubles, and by their own characters, they forgot them faster. And that's what I wanted for me. Fewer troubles, fewer memories of trouble.

(“Rock Springs,” 26)

Of course Earl can't really know the nature or number of troubles that have befallen those whom he's met only briefly, such as the woman at the trailer park, but to speculate in this way relieves him of some measure of accountability. Like Edna, he embraces the notion that to some extent life has just happened to him. And like many of the adult characters in Rock Springs, Earl gives up sovereignty over his own life without even realizing it, ascribing what happens solely to “luck or design.” Thus he ends up where he began: in trouble.

These stories often target the thin line between criminal and law-abiding behavior, in each case finding the origin of the slip from the latter to the former in the moment a man allows control over his life to be loosed from him. Such a moment can sneak up on a man the minute he ceases to be aware of others and his environment. Russ describes it well in “Sweethearts,” which chronicles his and his girlfriend Arlene's trip to take her former husband Bobby to jail. As Russ observes Bobby, he realizes how easily he, too, could find himself lost:

Somehow, and for no apparent reason, your decisions got tipped over and you lost your hold. And one day you woke up and you found yourself in the very situation you said you would never ever be in, and you did not know what was most important to you anymore. And after that, it was all over. And I did not want that to happen to me—did not, in fact, think it ever would. I knew what love was about. It was about not giving trouble or inviting it. It was about not leaving a woman for the thought of another one. It was about never being in the place you said you'd never be in. And it was about not being alone. Never that. Never that.⁵

Russ describes here what his fictional cousin Frank Bascombe would call “seeing around”: the peril inherent in not being in a moment but instead imagining yourself in another moment, maybe with a different woman, in a different life, as if that life would be better than the present one. Before one knows it, Russ speculates, a man has let go of one thing for another of dubious value, finding himself where he never thought he'd be. Originally published in 1986 in Esquire, “Sweethearts” came out during the same year as The Sportswriter, so it's not surprising, then, that Ford had these notions on his mind. Thematically, “Sweethearts” picks up other motifs of the Rock Springs collection, including the dangers of being alone and the somewhat transferable nature of love. Not much is impervious to time, these stories suggest, leaving the individual to make sense of his life under circumstances that constantly change.

“Empire” finds its characters in transit once again, this time from Spokane to Minot by train. Told in the third person, this story centers around Vic Sims, an Army veteran, and his wife Marge, who are on their way to visit Marge's sister Pauline, who is suffering from mental problems and has been institutionalized briefly in Minot. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Vic is a kind of compulsive adulterer, a man who commits the very acts that Russ warns against in “Sweethearts.” Although he loves Marge, Vic can't help but wonder what other women will be like. Repeatedly skirting the consequences of many poor decisions, Vic somehow has managed to avoid exposure, even after he slept with his next-door neighbors' friend Cleo while Marge was in the hospital and the neighbors were out of town. Cleo turned out to belong to a biker's group, Satan's Diplomats, whose members later threaten Vic. Nothing comes of the threats, and Vic goes on with his life and his infidelities, concluding that “Things you do pass away and are gone, and you need only to outlive them for your life to be better, steadily better.”⁶ So when Vic decides to sleep with a female Army captain on the train while Marge rests in their cabin, the reader is not surprised. Their encounter is typically meaningless and desperate, the captain echoing Vic's shaky philosophy: “you can do a thing and have it mean nothing but what you feel that minute” (143). This kind of attitude allows Vic to write off his brief affairs as momentary lapses of judgment, finally insignificant compared to his love for Marge. Upon his return to bed with her, Vic traces the scar from her surgery, finding there some measure of life's unpredictability: “This can do it, he thought, this can finish you, this small thing. He held her to him, her face against his as his heart beat. And he felt dizzy, and at that moment insufficient, but without memory of life's having changed in that particular way” (148). Unlike Earl in “Rock Springs,” Vic can look away from trouble and forget it, shedding his own insufficiencies in the process.

The story's ending provides the only clue that Vic's life is slipping from his control, just as it threatens to do for many of these characters: “Sims felt alone in a wide empire, removed and afloat, calmed, as if life was far away now, as if blackness was all around, as if stars held the only light” (148). Like many passages in Rock Springs, this one closes the story without judgment or censure. Ford's language, though precise, does not impart goodness or badness upon this moment that Vic Sims experiences, leaving its meaning somewhat ambiguous. He is calm, but he also feels alone in the dark. The conclusion's other significant image is that of a fire moving across the railroad tracks ahead of Vic and Marge's paused train, its heat reaching them nonetheless, and them powerless to staunch its flames that “moved and divided and swarmed the sky” (148). Often Ford leaves these characters isolated at story's end, facing an inscrutable sky or open space, and pondering their tiny lives dwarfed by the universe's vastness. Here, too, Ford contrasts the train with the wilder place that surrounds it, pitting the man-made against that which defies human control. As the character George remarks in “Children,” the location itself sometimes exerts as much pull upon its inhabitants as their fellow characters do; like gravity, these landscapes work upon the characters in ways that they cannot control. Constricted by the circumstances that befall him and the choices he's made, Vic, like Earl and Russ, seems unable to transcend his life except momentarily, even then made dizzy by the mere sight of Marge's scar, a reminder of all the forces that keep him earthbound.

A MATTER OF TRUST IN “WINTERKILL,” “GOING TO THE DOGS,” AND “FIREWORKS”

The moments of connectedness between one person and another prove brief and fragile in Rock Springs. In “Winterkill,” “Going to the Dogs,” and “Fireworks,” all three male protagonists find themselves changed by encounters with others that they have not expected. “Winterkill” takes place primarily in two of Ford's favored locales in this volume: in a bar where speaker Les first drinks with his wheelchair-constrained buddy Troy and meets Nola, and then by a river where the three go to do some late night fishing after a few drinks. In the bar, Troy begs Nola to tell them a love story, and she proceeds to recount details of her husband's death of heart failure after she discovers that for quite some time he has had a mistress. Despite this turn of events, Nola claims that “you need to be trusted. Or you aren't anything.”⁷ But like other characters in this collection, she is able to say to Les, “I'll. … Just do a thing. It means nothing more than how I feel at this time” (162). The significance of each decision is thus measured relative to the moment it occupies, a code of conduct that surely leads often to betrayal. The three embark, though, on a relatively innocent fishing trip that culminates in Troy hauling in a large, cold, dead deer from the water's depths. Later, back at the place that Les shares with Troy, Les hears his friend's wheelchair bump as it rolls into Troy's room, accompanied by Nola's drunken laughter. He concludes, “I thought we had all had a good night finally. Nothing had happened that hadn't turned out all right. None of us had been harmed. And I put on my pants … and with [my fishing rod] went out into the warm foggy morning, using just this once the back door, the quiet way, so as not to see or be seen by anyone” (170). Les's words, though on the surface more optimistic than many uttered by characters in this volume, expose his desire “not to see or be seen.” Keeping to himself seems to be the stance he has adopted; he has already confessed that he would just as soon lie if it would prevent someone from being unhappy. He concludes he's trustworthy nonetheless, thinking of Nola's words and pondering the “matter of trust” (169). He knows that he can be counted upon to behave a certain way in a certain situation, that he can be trusted to respond appropriately. And so he does as he leaves Troy and Nola alone, having realized that “though my life … seemed to have taken a bad turn and paused, it still meant something to me as a life” (169-70). Possessed of himself, Les can leave the two to their coupling; his trust in his own life redeems what would otherwise be a lonely moment.

The speaker in “Going to the Dogs” does not fare so well. His wife has left him, and he's already bought a train ticket to Florida to “change [his] luck.”⁸ As he waits for the snow to end on the day before Thanksgiving, he becomes the host for two female hunters who come to his door looking for his landlord. Glad of the company, he talks with them a while. They both are heavy women, but he finds one, Bonnie, vaguely attractive, enough so that when she attempts to seduce him, he consents readily. Although he thinks it odd that she should make such an offer in front of her friend Phyllis, he observes that Phyllis seems used to it. In fact, Phyllis offers to tidy up the place while he and Bonnie are in the bedroom. For this narrator, the matter of trust proves a matter of loss, for of course Phyllis steals his train ticket while she “tidies up.” Trusting these two, mainly because he is desperate for company, leaves this speaker with no way out of his current misfortune. When he sees that there is “nothing but some change and some matchbooks [where his ticket should be], … [he realizes] it was only the beginning of bad luck” (108). Having made the decision not to think beyond the current moment, as so many of these characters do, he loses at least one possible future.

“Fireworks” focuses on the momentary redemption provided by its main character's decision to trust his wife. Out of work for a while, Eddie Starling meets Lois at the bar where she works for a drink after a long day right before the Fourth of July. Earlier, she has met with her former husband who was just passing through, and Eddie has had to fight off jealousy over their encounter. Meanwhile, he has received a collect call from someone he doesn't know, a young man named Jeff who begs for help from his “Dad” and pleads for the charges to be accepted. Eddie's decision not to take this call haunts him all day and is only momentarily relieved by the sight of Lois dancing in the rain with a lit sparkler when they get home after her shift. Her movements make “swirls and patterns and star-falls for him that were brilliant and illuminated the night and the bright rain and the little dark house behind her and, for a moment, caught the world and stopped it, as though something sudden and perfect had come to earth in a furious glowing for him and for him alone—Eddie Starling—and only he could watch and listen. And only he would be there, waiting, when the light was finally gone.”⁹ The way that Lois's fireworks “caught the world and stopped it” here recalls the “glistening one moment” that Frank Bascombe describes at the end of The Sportswriter. The key difference is that Frank's moment depends utterly upon his solitude and a degree of comfort with himself that he has struggled to achieve. In Eddie's case, however, his experience of timelessness takes its energy completely from Lois's movements and her presence, both of which make up her gift to him. As her audience, Eddie recognizes that her performance is only for him, just as the words that she has spoken minutes before were meant to promise. She has told him that she loved him and that that is the reason that she is with him and not her former husband Lou Reiner. At least momentarily, Eddie accepts Lois's love as a gift that she offers freely; his own independence day, then, at least from the nagging fears of unemployment, missed connections with the mysterious Jeff, and potential ruptures caused by Reiner's return, ironically is contingent upon dependence upon someone he trusts.

Through its unflinching portraits of lives that hinge on momentary decisions and mistakes, Rock Springs illustrates the traits of realism that critics have been quick to label in Ford's fiction. Ford renders these very ordinary lives to the page without judgment or moral censure. His characterization are emotionally and psychologically consistent. Faithful to small details, each story recreates a specific time and place for the reader, and Ford does not shy away from dire consequences here. At the same time, whatever happens is not quite as random as the characters themselves would imagine. Ford provides enough information about his creations to suggest that their misfortunes find root in their own pasts or personal failings. Although many of these narrators and protagonists believe that luck and design often govern their lives, their stories subtly protest otherwise. More than anything, the stories in Rock Springs profess human fallibility; whatever connections that one human being can sustain with another here are tenuous. Though Ford of course provides no morals for these tales, one can be gleaned, and that is that life requires a kind of diligence from its participants. When these characters fail even for a minute to keep watch over their own territories, everything familiar is apt to slip away, literally or figuratively lost to the dark emptinesses all around them. Ford often cites “‘the infinite remoteness’ that underlies us all,” borrowing a phrase from Ralph Waldo Emerson to describe the human condition (Walker, 141). Spare and grim on the surface, the stories that make up Rock Springs share images of loneliness and wide open spaces illumined only briefly by the flare of meaningful connection between one character and another.

Notes

1. Richard Ford, “Children,” in Rock Springs (1987; New York: Vintage, 1988), 69-70; hereafter cited in text.

2. Richard Ford, “Communist,” in Rock Springs, 232; hereafter cited in text.

3. Richard Ford, “Optimists,” in Rock Springs, 171; hereafter cited in text.

4. Richard Ford, “Rock Springs,” in Rock Springs, 8; hereafter cited in text.

5. Richard Ford, “Sweethearts,” in Rock Springs, 68; hereafter cited in text.

6. Richard Ford, “Empire,” in Rock Springs, 136; hereafter cited in text.

7. Richard Ford, “Winterkill,” in Rock Springs, 162; hereafter cited in text.

8. Richard Ford, “Going to the Dogs,” in Rock Springs, 99; hereafter cited in text.

9. Richard Ford, “Fireworks,” in Rock Springs, 214; hereafter cited in text.