The Age of Clear Profit: Essays on Home and the Narrow Road

By John Griswold

At age fifty, when many hope to slow down, and what’s left, as the poet Kobayashi Issa once wrote, is “clear profit,” John Griswold was starting over—-again—-in a position he had worked decades to achieve. His family moved down the Mississippi Valley, expecting to create a good life with new friends.

What they found instead was a society “organized tightly by race, church attendance, and family name,” which in its corruption, laissez-faire corporatism, gun love, and environmental degradation foretold the heightened problems of the United States in an era of deepening political division.

Taking his cue from classical Asian poets such as Basho, Griswold begins to journey, to gain perspective, and to find his own narrow road. He travels around the rim of the Gulf of Mexico and to writers’ homes in Russia and New Mexico; attends the protests at Standing Rock; walks the Basho Trail in Japan; and reports on the wholesale slaughter of a Texas rattlesnake roundup and the cruel weirdness of the Angola Prison Rodeo.

Over eight years, Griswold bears witness, pays homage, and finds he is able to define and speak with gratitude about what is most important to him: his children, wholeheartedness, and the act of trying. In the gap between complexity and a little peace and quiet, there is a way to profit anew.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780820362823

John Griswold

JOHN GRISWOLD is a staff writer at the Common Reader, a publication of Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of A Democracy of Ghosts; Herrin: The Brief History of an Infamous American City; and Pirates You Don’t Know (Georgia). He has also written extensively (as Oronte Churm) at Inside Higher Ed and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He lives in the St. Louis metro area.

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Facing the Beast

December 1994–January 1995

I first met my old friend Frenchy in the mid-1980s, when I showed up still wet behind the ears from dive school. He ran a U.S. Army dive detachment in Virginia, and when he saw my paperwork, which showed I was born in Saigon, he was surprised and amused to find I wasn’t Vietnamese. He had done two tours in Vietnam as a helicopter crew chief before he became a deep-sea diver.

My father had been assigned to South Vietnam on a USAID mission in 1961, as he would be later to Afghanistan. He, my mother, and sisters moved to Saigon, and I was born there eighteen months later, on Ho Chi Minh’s birthday. When the violence escalated, we were ordered back to the States. We planned to return, but the war roared up, and my family dissolved.

I liked and respected Frenchy from the start. He taught us how to work, but he loved a good time too. He was a voracious reader and history buff and liked to travel and see new things. When he asked me to be on a team he was taking to the Republic of Panama, I extended my enlistment by a year just to go.

When I got out of the army to go back to college, we lost touch for a while, but in 1994 he found where I was living and called me. We caught up and started imagining a trip to Vietnam together. Nineteen ninety-five would be the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war and of the country’s reunification. With President Clinton about to normalize U.S.-Vietnam relations, we wanted to see the country before everything changed yet again. More importantly, I think each of us wanted to face it, for our own reasons.

Face what? My journal of the time doesn’t say. I cleared my desk at work so a temp could fill in while I was gone, but I had the feeling I wasn’t coming back.

There was no official diplomatic Vietnamese presence in the United States then. Frenchy was still active-duty U.S. military, and having Saigon on my birth certificate might have been expected to raise questions on both sides. But we got our visas, left in December 1994, and traveled through Vietnam for a month—to Ho Chi Minh City, Dalat, Nha Trang, Danang, Hoi An, Hue, Hanoi, Hai Phong, Halong Bay, and back to Ho Chi Minh City—by commercial jet, turboprop, hard-berth train, minibus, car, motorcycle, scooter, bicycles, boats big and small, and on foot. It was the first of many trips together.

A monk at the Trúc Lâm meditation center in Dalat, a popular mountain town, asked, Excuse me, what is your job? He had been an ARVN lieutenant and learned his English, about the time I was born, from an American military adviser, whom he said he loved very much. After the war he spent three years in a reeducation camp. When he got home, his father was dead, and he, his wife, and children all became monks and a nun.

I said I was in advertising. The monk looked at me blankly, so I said, Writer.

He asked if I meant a writer of books. I had written some stories in college, but I was a copywriter. I hoped to change that.

I felt like a fraud keeping a journal and carrying a recorder on that trip, but Frenchy encouraged me. He told me stories, acted like a character, and never scoffed or showed impatience when I took time to jot or mutter notes as we were transiting, waiting for a meal, having a drink, or getting ready for sleep.

Because I didn’t always understand what I was seeing or what was worth writing down, the journal is uneven and describes encounters with food I know well now, explains temples with ideas taken from signs, and inexpertly evaluates Vietnamese infrastructure. It details a dogfight in a restaurant and captures us being goofy a lot. When we exchange a hundred dollars in currency, we laugh ourselves silly over becoming millionaires. I try on Frenchy’s voice, outlook, and sense of humor, which were a living version of some old American sensibility Twain knew well.

I didn’t understand how, having seen all the local sights and fatigued by hours of walking, we might find ourselves bored and stranded with nowhere else to be, like characters in a Chekhov story, but I note the glare of sun on water, the clack of stones in the surf, the abandoned villas near the beach with the French pillbox filled with shit.

There are impressions of mildly uncomfortable travel, beer we didn’t really want, drunken laughter, stories we told about things not in front of us, books started and put down, books finished, postcards written to remind others we still existed.

I mention that a disc in my back ruptured on the first night but didn’t write the emotional content—how afraid I was that I had ruined the trip for us both or that I might need surgery in Vietnam. I don’t mention how I took so many thousands of units of army ibuprofen, in an attempt to mask the problem, that it could have been fatal.

Still, I was catching glimpses of the thing.

The two men who drove us an hour and a half on their scooters to montagnard villages in the central highlands spoke at least three languages. One had been mentioned in the New York Times as a helpful guide; he showed us the article. He had been a high school French teacher before the war. The other had degrees in biochemistry and psychology but was not allowed to practice after 1975. Both made it a point to say that they had not had to go to a reeducation camp. When I asked what year the camps closed, one pointed to prisoners doing roadwork and said they still existed.

We wound down the mountain on their little 50cc bikes, past rice paddies where water buffaloes with children on their backs threshed grain. A Taiwanese company made straw huts from the rice stalks and grew mushrooms inside in the sawdust from rubber trees. A field of gladioli for Tet grew nearby.

About one hundred Protestant Chill people lived in the first village. They had built thin-sliced log homes and subsisted on slash-and-burn farming of manioc. The children yelled No! when we tried to take photos. Their chief asked us repeatedly for eye medicine. Across the road was a tomato farm run by a company from Hong Kong.

In the second village the people made moonshine, grew robusta and moka coffee and cotton, and weaved intricate fabrics on looms. They had been part of the Strategic Hamlets Program during the war. We were invited into a house, where corn was hung to dry from the roof thatching. A woman nursed a baby on a narrow bed amidst smoke from a fire. She had ten children. Gourds held water; a crossbow was propped next to a bicycle; a cat drank from a puddle in the floor.

The village was crowded; it was a celebration, and some had walked a day or more from other villages. Our guides were confused by their dialect and thought it was a wake but decided it was a man’s seventieth birthday. Another man chopped bloody meat for the party in a long tray in the dirt; a puppy ate from it and wagged its tail.

Two young men in army uniforms walked up behind us with assault rifles. Our guide asked where they were stationed. Kampuchea, they replied, and our guide cracked up because, he said, that was meant to be a big secret. He said they were FULRO fighters, who were not supposed to exist anymore. He laughed and covered his teeth with his hand.

We were in a café eating soup. A little girl and an even littler girl were begging from the doorway.

Hello, what is your name? the older one called.

She came in and started playing with Frenchy’s hat. He laughed as she put it on her head. She ran off through the crowd with it but came back, twice. He took her picture, and she squealed. He tried to get her to sing a song.

Give me money, she said.

"I’ll give you hell and call it money," he teased. He was going to give her money, but something changed his mind. She was at it until we had to leave.

When we walked away through the crowded square she followed at a run and kept jumping and trying to grab Frenchy’s hat. He kept walking. People were watching now. She was laughing and crying as she jumped up and down, grabbing for his hat, until she fell. She got up, winded, snatched the hat off his head and ran. As she passed, I took hold of it. We tugged grimly. A man finally yelled at her, and she ran away. It was a bad scene.

We were in a bank, waiting for a teller. A young Brit we’d seen elsewhere on the trip came to exchange money. He and I talked, then he disappeared. I thought he left the bank. There was a crash and the sound of glass hitting the floor, and when I spun, I saw he’d sat on a glass coffee table that shattered under his weight. He struggled out of the frame and shards, and his hand was sliced wide open across the palm, like a crimson wisdom line. He ran out the door, crying in pain. A few minutes later he staggered back, dripping blood as viscous as latex paint. He wanted a doctor but was denouncing Vietnamese medical care.

A squad of policemen arrived and led him out of the bank. Uh-oh, the local politburo, Frenchy said. They stood the Brit in the sun in front of the bank and shouted at him. It seemed he had to pay for the table before he could go anywhere. He refused to do what they wanted, and they got shrill, and he was screaming.

Frenchy lamented we couldn’t help him, but the butterfly bandages were in my pack in the room, and we had no sutures. He probably had tendon or nerve damage, Frenchy said.

We slunk out the back door with our money and left to go have frog legs at the restaurant named for a Catholic nunnery. A boy on a scooter shouted fuck you! as we walked in. The place was empty, and we sat on the water. Emperor Bảo Đại’s palace was up the hill, and across the lake the fire department was watering the fairway of the new golf course with their hoses.

We started laughing and couldn’t stop. Frenchy’s unit had flown in and out of the town during the war and used the school’s soccer pitch to land the Hueys. He saw a man gunned down in the market.

The restaurant still didn’t take plastic—no one did in Vietnam yet—and Frenchy whipped out his Visa, Mastercard, and an AT&T phone card.

Roll out the barrel, I think I’m going to like this place, he shouted to the confused waiter. His hair was crazy in the wind.

I seemed to think that by going to Vietnam I might die—maybe in an accident, maybe by jumping off a bridge. I don’t believe I’ve been seriously depressed, but I’d been through a divorce, had money problems, and felt the deadening of spirit from lost time. The malaria pills we took made some users anxious, depressed, or psychotic.

More to the point, up to 3.5 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans died in that war, on that landscape. When I was a kid, my mother told me I might die there too, if the war continued. Vietnam was my start in life, and my family’s end. The trip would turn out to be another beginning. Going to Vietnam—all credit to Frenchy—led me to write a book manuscript (never published), find my estranged father, quit my job, get a graduate degree, and change careers.

Is a desire for fulfillment also a wish for self-extinction? As a former diver, I have always believed that once you take that first step off the fantail, you’re no longer the person you were. The same could be said of all journeys, including those in books.

In lecture halls, the Beast is called complexity: forces, expanses, and events as insoluble as sugar crystals in the cold water of the mind. The Beast is the mystery of not-nothing, of many somethings instead of one. It lies between the urge to shape story and the hope for a little peace and quiet for a change.

Over time I have grown to appreciate certain kinds of danger to my beliefs. Sometimes I still walk out to see if the Beast is home.

SS America

2012–2018

Higher education in the United States is like the maritime transport industry. Each university and college has its usual cargo, its established route and trade, its chain of command, and its own risks and bets for profit.

I taught for twenty years at three universities, but for the sake of the analogy let’s say that for twelve of those years I served on the flagship vessel of a state university line. I did my job well and enjoyed the work, but it was the policy of the company that I should never be allowed to rise above junior grade, because I had started as contingent labor.

A friend told me of work on the Gulf of Mexico. It was on a smaller ship (analogy, remember), registered to a state that was bankrupt in more ways than one, but it offered the chance to do good work without many rules. A person might make something wonderful and unexpected in that environment, he said, and I could finally become a senior officer. He’d thought of applying himself, since he’d been a cadet on that ship when he was younger, but his wife, a medical professional, had seen the place and said, Hell, no.

That didn’t bother me. I had lived in all sorts of conditions and sometimes found opportunities in them others couldn’t see. Our family could make a good life almost anywhere.

I applied and was invited to fly down and tour the ship and meet the officers and crew. They were charming; the department head reminded me of my oldest friend. It was an unusual program, with only two officers assigned to teach a large number of cadets. Also, everyone who served on the ship had graduated from there, or were local, but that made it more like family, they said. The cadet program was so important, they explained, it was as if the ship existed just to support it. As one of only two program officers, I would help determine its course.

They did speak of a previous Golden Age, which divulged things had slipped, but I credited their awareness and believed it meant they intended to work for a Diamond Age. We also never actually left the dock on my visit, and the bow and stern were behind tarps, so it was hard to tell how big the vessel really was. Its bollards were rusty and the fish at dinner greasy, but the ship seemed utilitarian and authentic, which can be a kind of beauty.

There aren’t many berths offering exactly what you want to do in this life. The military paid well, and you retired young, but you had to survive to that point and were indentured getting there. Corporate pay was good, but for me the work lacked challenge. I did not have the skills to be a chaplain or engineman.

You could always make a raft and push off on your own, scribbling prose and throwing it into the sea in bottles, but no one was going to pay you for it or bob around with you, year after year, without validation. Many a writer has caught a last glimpse of the back of their beloved’s head as they swim for shore, where there are better meals and a health plan.

I got the job. I was forty-nine years old but felt half my age, and I intended to make the most of the long-awaited opportunity. I worked on behalf of the distant ship for months, without pay, before we even left. Then, at great expense, we moved my family down the Mississippi valley to chase my ambition—not just my two young sons and my wife, but also her mother, who was sick but wanted to be with us.

She died soon after we arrived, perhaps prematurely; my wife believes the local hospital accidently overdosed her the night before she was to come home for hospice care. My elder son immediately had a serious health problem that seemed environmental in origin. Local doctors misdiagnosed and hurt him, as they did my younger son when he fell off his bike and broke his arm.

The city was America’s twelfth-busiest port, with its own Coast Guard station and Homeland Security presence. Corporate visitors streamed in and out of petrochemical plants owned by multinationals in London, the Hague, and Caracas. Despite this, local society was organized tightly by race, church attendance, and family name. It was The Land of the Staring People.

Try Seafood Palace, another soccer parent told newcomers about one of the biggest and best-known restaurants, but be prepared to get stared at, ’cause they won’t know you.

My family learned how quickly foreign bodies were isolated. Midwesterners by accident and accent, we were asked several times if we were British. My children were treated as outsiders in their new school; one teacher made my son stand for half an hour on his crutches in the hot sun because he couldn’t find some class papers.

My biggest shock came when I discovered the ship was just an old packet boat stuck in the mud, and it hadn’t left port in years. Posters on the bulkheads said U.S. News & World Report named it ONE OF THE TOP SHIPS IN THE UNITED STATES and ONE OF THE BEST REGIONAL SHIPS IN THE SOUTH. Actually, it tied for 104th in Packet Boats, the South, two slots above where the rankings gave up and listed the rabble without differentiation. Few on the boat even knew of our program; the cadets said publicly there was no program.

The head of my department had bought a cheap captain’s uniform somewhere and was allowed to wear it around the ship. He was a gambling addict, $140,000 in debt, who worked side jobs at the casino or stayed in his cabin instead of coming to work. He alone decided how program money would be used and asked me early on to money-launder funds for his personal use. Like an autocrat, he changed his title periodically to stay in charge. He convened only one program-officer meeting in six years.

He started by saying I did more work before I arrived than anyone else had done in seven years, but soon his wife, another officer on the boat, was calling me an overachiever. When I asked questions on behalf of anxious cadets— when will they be paid, how much, when can they sign up for classes, what classes are being taught—he worked to isolate me.

My only peer in the program had a family emergency and was gone for more than two years. She called me at home to yell that it was unfair people were saying she did a bad job. She said she knew she was doing a lousy job, but she needed the money and would not take leave. This meant I could get no help. I worked many eighty-hour weeks and had the equivalent of three or four jobs. The program bent to the needs of her family, but she didn’t give a damn about mine. In guilt and anger she joined forces with the fake captain.

Friendly officers on big ships with excellent reputations put names to what I was seeing: asset stripping; treating students as a profit center; payroll theft. I talked to a leading journalist in the state, who told me the boat was the worst in the line, and the system had always been so corrupt nothing could be expected to improve. My wife shouted at me that I had ruined all their lives and sank into her chair, into bed. I asked my doctor about stress. He told me to drink more.

If I hesitated when a local asked me to testify how much we loved living in that place, they always looked scared—deeply, existentially frightened, as if they might cry or vomit—but not surprised. Then, the tight mouth, suspicious prying, and tense pauses.

For years, friends and family worried for me. Frenchy said he didn’t know anyone who worked as hard as I did. My old friend Crazy Larry said no one he knew had as crazy a life. Former bosses and other ships’ officers elsewhere told me to run. But how could I run, with a new mortgage, few resources, and a family of four?

In frustration, Frenchy told me to put the fake captain against the wall by his neck and tell him how things would be. Then he begged me to let him do it. He also said I should let him invite my colleague to a bar, where he would tell her to drink up, because he had some things to say and they were gonna hurt. He said he could see being supportive of her to a point.

"But she revels in it, he said, and puts it in everyone else. ‘Woe is me.’ Woe’s your ass."

Frenchy had his own financial and health problems to deal with, and by the end my woes had worn him and other friends out.

Well, I just don’t know, John-Boy, he finally said to me one day on the phone. His resignation was the worst, but a catalyst.

American Cloaca

2012–2018

What’d you expect? Crazy Larry asked on the phone. He’d been with me as long as Frenchy. "The first cliché of Louisiana is corruption."

"That’s right, I shouted. This is Louisiana!"

Long before Trump descended Trump Tower and made American democracy a rotten reality series, Bobby Jindal was a state-level proto-Trump, cynically playing to populist sympathies in hopes of reaching the Oval Office. Before the Republican primaries for the 2016 election, Rush Limbaugh called him the next Ronald Reagan, and the Washington Post called him a political meteor. Jindal called Trump an unserious carnival act but polled at about 1 percent.

Trying to prove himself a pro-business standout in a crowded Republican field, his administration provided more subsidies and incentives to corporations than any other state. He gave away more than $12 billion, which deepened rather than alleviated the state’s economic woes, as The Nation put it. ExxonMobil got 97 percent of its incentives from the state of Louisiana, even as the company made its citizens sick. Every episode of Duck Dynasty cost state taxpayers $330,000. Jindal also cut funding to higher education by 44 percent and raked over health care with defunding and privatization that didn’t work.

In 2017 Louisiana ranked dead last on health care and education, the . . . economy, the opportunity it offers people, its roads, bridges, internet and other infrastructure, its public safety and the integrity and health of state government, U.S. News said. The state jailed more of its citizens than any other state in the union and, by percentage of population, more than anywhere else on earth.

Water cuts through everything in coastal Louisiana, in gutters, culverts, ditches, swales, bayous, rivers, estuaries, channels, and lakes. Tropical downpours flood the streets, stall traffic, pour over doorsills into homes. Geysers spurt out of manhole covers. Cattle stand in mud on the edge of town, watching commuter jets depart in the rain.

Louisiana is said to be sinking faster than anywhere else on the planet, due to erosion, subsidence, and sea-level rise that cause the loss every year of a landmass the size of Manhattan. Without remediation, the fifty-year forecast is grim. In 2020 alone, Hurricanes Laura and Delta caused $22 billion worth of damage.

Left alone, the landscape might have resembled a carboniferous Eden, but that’s one of its problems. Louisiana oil came from vegetation that built up in those wet boundaries, and the petroleum industry now rims the coast, from New Orleans to Galveston, with one hundred chemical plants, seventeen refineries, and 50,000 miles of pipeline. The seashore of the Cajun Riviera, thirty miles south of where we lived, is muddy and polluted with fertilizers, arsenic, benzene, mercury, oil, pesticides, PCBS, and feedlot runoff from thirty-one states. An overload of nitrogen promotes bacteria that eats flesh and brains. Sea mammals wash up and rot in spectacular iridescent bloat. It’s zombie water, the wages of environmental sin.

Nature here has been consumed, used, dominated, destroyed, and seen as opportunity or hazard, but it’s not loved, except for what people mean when they say, I wouldn’t live anywhere else and sportsman’s paradise. The