American Diorama by Tom Schabarum
When I was a little boy there was an open pocket in my bedroom’s bookcase. I made dioramas in it at Christmas with cut-out people, or army men, and cotton snow surrounding little cardboard houses strewn with colored lights. I’d spend hours on them, and they’d last through the season. I envisioned myself in their perfect splendor, everything arranged just how I wanted them. From my fingers came a visualization putting order on what amounted to chaos in my world. I exerted control over the little landscape.
At fifty-three, what I couldn’t control was the aftermath of my triple bypass, my six stents, and a myriad of debilitating health incidents. My life became irrevocably made up of daily heart drugs, a map of scars across my chest and up my arm, the despair of so many days in hospital among dying folks decades older. I gained a myopic view of the world, boxed, and framed by the proximity of my support system, the hospital and pharmacy. For years, I was afraid of venturing out and my thoughts turned inward toward a past of family strife, bullying and depression. All of which caused me to make a diorama of our home so I could contain myself in it.
Slowly, we ventured out in our Airstream trailer, the silvery hull a mirror of America, as its funhouse road colors, winter-gray cities, and southern green fields streamed over the rounded corners. It was a traveling home we could live in, stocked with prescriptions and comfort. In the ensuing years, we traveled farther until we crossed the country after our bouts with COVID and my seventh stent was placed. We felt safely inoculated for a few months, and I steeled myself to at least let go and escape the box I’d created. We met all kinds of people – vagabonds, retirees, young internet warriors, quilters, and drunks. All of them gloriously unmoored from homes they’d given up to being endlessly on the road.
The last two weeks, coming home, I knew my time away had been too long and my emotional well-being had frayed. These past two years I’ve played Jenga with my life and I’ve worked hard to not slide the wrong piece out. I’ve continued writing everything down. As Kerouac said, I was mad to be saved.
At Christmas, over the years, I’ve collected miniature Airstream ornaments and placed them all in a line on our fireplace mantel – my diorama of Airstreams. Now, after selling our trailer, it reminds me of all the people we met in over-stuffed diners, curios shops, and in campgrounds across the country. I’d always seen the world in pockets, in little squares as in photographs. Every frame filled my gathered vision of America: people on the road, a river running between towering red rocks, sunsets among the Everglades’ cypress trees, a ghost fence on the outskirts of Virginia City, Montana, weathered signs along William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways. I could contain my world in one-sixtieth of a second. Always looking, always seeing, always aware of the frame. Chaos contained. On a quiet road, I fall into a sort of meditation and stop time.
I’ll string colored lights across my vision of the world so that it is lit with possibility.
Artist’s Statement
American Diorama is adapted from, The Historical Heart, a memoir of linked essays that explore the aftermath of having a triple bypass at 53. I’ve always been enamored of the highway from an early age – road trips up and down the coasts, the Southwest and across the country. Writers like Barry Lopez, Wallace Stegner, Raymond Carver, Willa Cather, Louse Erdrich and Rick Bass inform my view of America. The road can be a place of healing, of seeing with unobstructed clarity and emotion. It seems that all my writing, whether fiction or poetry, contains a drive, and characters escaping or finding out how to love or let go. It’s the basic element of freedom that allows memory to bubble up or tear oneself apart. The discovery contained in the open road, music blasting, light striking the window, for me, is the path to healing.
Tom Schabarum is the recipient of the 2010 Creekwalker Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, Crab Creek Review, Floating Bridge, Flights, Cathexis Northwest, pifmagazine, K’in and The Breakfast District among others. His essays Speech Therapy from The Historical Heart was recently published in Cold Mountain Review and The Education of a Favorite Son in Out Magazine. He’s published three novels: The Palisades (Lambda Literary Award Finalist, 2010), and The Narrows, Miles Deep, which was selected as a best book for 2011 by Felice Picano in Lambda Literary. Airstreaming was published in 2012. Tom holds an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College, Vermont. He lives with his husband in Seattle, WA.