Description

Published by the legendary Tellus press, Carpool centers on a commuters’ car pool. Its proletarian view opens with an ode to the commuter god who “wheels you up the cloverleaf ramp into the workaday world.” The car poolers include a painter/veteran who is stuck in the wars of his past and an ex-hippie stain-glass artisan who works as a roofer to make ends meet. The book takes flight with a hitchhiker who turns out to be a raven, a gravedigger terrified by corpses, and a pre-dawn snow-plow driver on amphetamines hallucinating space travel to Kurt Vonnegut’s Trafalmador. The group is awed by the beautiful destruction of an ice-storm as they “skate through the wrecks.” More philosophical views are provided by a school teacher named Joy who finds herself musing on the allegorical world of the pinball machine strapped on the back of a pickup truck. We gain perspective on highway building through a Thoreau-reading road surveyor who watches the “prairie disappear” behind his surveying “gun.”