The Light Over the Ranges, Chapter Seven: Webb Has a Blast!

This chapter is a bit more realistic/grounded than the previous. Here we're focusing on Webb and learning about his background and the issues he has with the tension between blowing shit up and being a family man.

It starts out with a little frame narrative, of him preparing to blow up a railroad track with his Finnish pal, Veikko Rautavaara (it's also July fourth, which is thematically relevant). Is Veikko an ancestor (well, given the timing, not really "ancestor;" more likely grandfather or uncle) of the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara? Is that where Pynchon got the name? Is he an opera fan? AM I THOMAS PYNCHON?!? Dude: trippy. On that note, let me also point out that Webb has a horse named Zarzuela, which is also the name of a form of Spanish operetta. And there was a Saint-Saëns reference earlier. Hell if I know, but wouldn't it be a thing?

Finland was struggling for independence from Russia at the time, but to Veikko, there's no meaningful difference between the Tsarist regime and American capitalism. He came to America,

thinking he'd escaped something, only to find life out here just as mean and cold, same wealth without conscience, same poor people in misery, army and police free as wolves to commit cruelties on behalf of the bosses, bosses ready to do anything to protect what they had stolen. (83)

And, really, think about it: sure, there's a difference between the two: in America you can, theoretically, escape your poverty and improve yourself. But that "theoretically" is doing a shit-ton of work there: most people never will, and if you're doing hard, dangerous subsistence work to just scrape by, rhetoric about "freedom" has to seem awfully damned hollow. Well, I say "has to;" obviously this isn't actually the case, given how many people, unto the day, will rabidly support a system that's brutally screwing them over. But Webb and Veikko obviously have class-consciousness that many of us lack.

There's some debate about whether they should blow up the tracks immediately, or wait for a train to come. I think you can measure how how my sensibilities have changed since I first read this by the fact that back then, I was very ambivalent at best about this business of blowing up mine owners, whereas now, I'm all for it. There's a lot here that's eerily similar to the arguments we're seeing today about protests and violence and "looting" and the like. The only thing that gives them pause about waiting for a train is that the mine owners generally surround themselves with innocent workers for that very reason: "not that any owner ever cared rat shit about the lives of workers, of course, except to define them as Innocent Victims in whose name uniformed goons could then go out and hunt down the Monsters That Did the Deed" (85). See: Republicans spouting pious homilies about how tragic George Floyd's death was and then using any kind of assertive protest as an excuse to grind people into the dirt. And they are aided in doing this because "some of these explosions, the more deadly of them, in fact, were really set off to begin with not by Anarchists but by the owners themselves" (ibid). Contemporarier and contemporarier.

Anyway, we flash back to Webb's history, and his journey west (mirroring Merle's in the last chapter). This is not chronologically presented, or not entirely so: we start with the final Inciting Incident, when he miraculously survives unscathed a shootout in a billiard hall that's caused when balls start blowing up, freaking everyone out. Were explosive billiard balls a thing? Seems unwise. He is freaked out by this and meets the anarchist preacher Moss Gatlin (whom Lew Basnight also saw few chapters back), whose words he takes to heart:

Being born into this don't automatically make you innocent. But when you reach a point in your life when you understand who is fucking who--beg pardon, Lord--who's taking it and who's not, that's when you're obliged to choose how much you'll go along with. If you are not devoting every breath of every dah waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself? It must be negotiated with the day, from those absolute terms. (87)

Well, it's definitely worth thinking about: most of us--all of us--don't follow this to the letter, in the same way that most--all--Christians don't even try to follow Jesus' teachings perfectly. But...maybe we should. Webb comes closer than anyone I know. Maybe the likes of John Brown also.

Webb came west from Pennsylvania, meeting his future wife Mayva somewhere along the way. They ultimately have four children: Reef, Frank, Lake, and Kit, in that order. We will see A LOT of them later. Reef comes across most clearly in this first chapter; feeling a sort of blind, inarticulate rage at the injustice that how could he not see.

The mistake that Webb makes is being unable to balance his family life with his explosives work. Again and again, the novel equates human connections with radical politics. One way to resist an oppressive state is by--I hate to say this, it's such a cliche and so stripped of meaning by lukewarm liberal types, but it seems too appropriate not to say--being the change you want to see. Webb has trouble doing that, which ultimately causes resentment and splinters his family and leads to his own untimely end. It's kind of heartbreaking the way this is articulated:

If it took growing into a stranger to those kids and looking like some kind of screaming fool whenever he did show up at home, and then someday sooner or later losing them, their clean young gazes, their love and trust, the unquestioning way they spoke his name, all that there is to break a father's heart, well, children grow up, and that would have to be reckoned into the price, too, along with jail time, bullpens, beatings, lockouts, and the rest. The way it happens. Webb would have to set aside his feelings, not just the sentimental baby stuff but the terrible real ballooning of emptiness at the core of his body when he paused to consider all that losing them would mean. (95)

We will see this all play out soon enough.