American Arcadia: The Big Rock Candy Mountain

"The whole nation had been footloose too long, Heaven had been just over the next range for too many generations.
Why remain in one dull plot of earth when Heaven was reachable, was touchable, was just over there? . . . He had a
notion where home would turn out to be, for himself as for his father -- over the next range, on the Big Rock Candy
Mountain, that place of impossible loveliness that had pulled the whole nation westward, the place where the fat land
sweated up wealth and the heavens dropped lemonade."
-- Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943)

Et in America ego. There's a paradise somewhere in this land of ours, built on the dreams of tramps royal and singing
schoolchildren alike. In this American Arcadia our national pastimes of getting and spending take a hike, so you don't
have to. There, "the handouts grow on bushes, and you sleep out every night." It's the home of the Bluebird of
Happiness, it's the pie in the sky, it's where the streets are paved with gold. In our continuing illumination of the
American mythology, what better place to paint than no place at all? So come with me, we'll go and see the Big Rock
Candy Mountain.

"One evening as the sun went down

And the jungle fire was burning,
Down the track came a hobo hiking
And he said 'Boys, I'm not turning,
I'm headed for a land that's far away
Beside the crystal fountain,
So come with me, we'll go and see
The Big Rock Candy Mountain.'"
-- Harry "Haywire" McClintock, "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" (1928 recording)

The irksome thing about oral history is that nobody ever writes it down until it's too late. During the 1893-1897
Depression, there may have been a million people "on the bum" to one extent or another. In an era before Social
Security -- and before Social Security cards -- and when the railroads shipped millions of tons along millions of miles
of unguardable railway track -- a man, or an idea, could become completely anonymous. Even a whole mountain could
disappear, or, as it happened, appear without anyone realizing it. As a result, the actual origin of the Big Rock Candy
Mountain itself is probably unknowable. Like any good myth, it's how Never Always Was. We don't know, for sure, if
the hoboes actually called America's paradise the Big Rock Candy Mountain before its realization in song. To
paraphrase the Zen koan, is the Big Rock Candy Mountain a legend about a folk song, or a folk song about a legend?

As far as my (admittedly limited) folk musicological resources can stretch, I'm pretty sure that Harry "Haywire"
McClintock wrote the standard version of "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," the one adapted by Burl Ives into a
perennial children's favorite. (Remember, kids, they're "peppermint trees," not "cigarette trees.") But even I was able to
dig up at least four major versions of the song, and plenty of minor variants. McClintock was an orphan from
Tennessee who ran away to join the circus, and hit the rails at age 16 (during that 1890s depression), where he became
a kind of "court jester" or minstrel to the hobo gangs, singing and playing guitar. I can't say for sure, but my sense is
that it was then, desperate to keep the goodwill and interest of people who were, themselves, the original "desperate
men," that he revealed the story of the Big Rock Candy Mountain. McClintock went on to serve in the Spanish-
American War, gold-rush to the Klondike, work as a railroad brakeman himself, and eventually host a children's radio
program on San Francisco's KFRC. In 1928, as far from the 1893 Depression as he could get, he recorded his song --
ironically, when he tried to enforce copyright, the judge refused to allow it, saying it was "a folk song and in the public
domain." An interesting fate for a song about the abolition of private property.

"The bluebirds no longer sing by the lemonade springs: The Big Rock Candy Mountain Resort on the Sevier River near
Marysvale, Utah, is bankrupt. The sulphur- and chocolate-colored mountain, celebrated in a song written by Harry
McClintock and sung by Burl Ives, attracted visitors from around the world who during the 1950s drank its mineral-
rich spring water, rumored to have healing powers."

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 -- "Reality Intrudes on Big Rock Candy Mountain," Western Roundup (Oct. 17, 1994)

Another element briefly intrudes into the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Mountain itself. This brown-and-yellow
rounded pyramid rises out of the Utah desert roughly midway between Zion National Park and Mt. Nebo, Utah. Its
name comes from the plentiful deposits of yellow and pink rhyolite (volcanic granite) crystals around the area -- and
from the folk song. The name came after the first automobile roads went through the Sevier Valley, well after
McClintock wrote the song. However, it is interesting that the springs here were "rumored to have healing powers" --
would those be the "lemonade" (or, in a decidedly not-Burl-Ives version, "rock-and-rye") springs, or the "crystal
fountain"?

Crystals, fountains, paradises in the desert Waste Land -- is the Big Rock Candy Fountain the Grail Castle, where
"each knight ate whatever food he deemed best, and as much as he wanted" as it magically appeared on his plate?
How, precisely, does the Big Rock Candy Mountain, as an American paradise, tie in with the "Zion" the Mormons
found in Utah? Of course, ever since the Puritans settled in to build their "shining city on the hill" -- or even before,
when Columbus thought he had discovered the Garden of Eden in America -- our national dream has been the Garden
in the Wilderness, the perfect city. Chicago's motto, Urbs in Hortis, means "City in the Garden," and the Columbian
Exposition (commemorating the 400th anniversary of this voyage to Eden) featured the White City -- a model of
urban perfection that became the Emerald City of Oz, the great American Utopia of 1900.

"And all larks that are so couth

Fly right down into man's mouth
Smothered in stew, and thereupon
Piles of powdered cinnamon:
Every man may drink his fill
And needn't sweat to pay the bill."
-- The Land of Cockaigne (from a 12th century French ballad)

Of course, the story is even older than that. The German peasants had their own paradises, Schlaraffenland and
Lubberland, where bread and cheese grew on trees and beer foamed up from wells. The minnesingers told tales of the
Venusberg, the hollow mountain ruled by the Goddess of Pleasure where travelers roistered in endless debauches of
rich food and orgiastic sex. The story of Cockaigne, the "land of cake" where pigs walked about already roasted and
wine flowed in the streams, shows up in a symphony by Elgar, a painting by Breughel, and poetry in English and
French stretching back to the 1100s. Cockaigne's rivers of wine flow back to Hesiod's 7th-century B.C. Works and
Days, which tells of Saturn's kingdom somewhere to the West, where men "lived as if they were gods, their hearts free
from sorrow, and without hard work or pain," and "the fruitful earth yielded its abundant harvest to them of its own
accord, and they lived in ease and peace upon the lands with many good things." Another source, even older, is the
Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve could "eat of any fruit" and did no labor for it. Also in the Bible, we find Zion
to be "a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey;" Isaiah (roughly contemporary with Hesiod)
places the earthly paradise in "God's holy mountain."

But there's another side of the Mountain. Paradise is, after all, a place you go when you die. It's a land of the dead, an
Elysian Field with "a lake of stew and whiskey too." In "The Dying Hobo" and "The Wabash Cannonball" the hobo
singer hops the last freight to a land suspiciously like our own Big Rock Candy Mountain, where (for example) "the
handouts grow on bushes and everything is bright." In hoodoo tradition, ghosts like sweets, tobacco, and liquor -- that's
the Mountain, all right. And it might not even be Heaven, after all. The Venusberg is, after all, a hollow mountain
ruled by a demonic goddess. Isn't it kind of creepy that the "air is pure and bright" inside a mountain? McClintock, at
one point, said that the song was a parody of the "fairy tales" (brrr) or "ghost stories" (double brrr) that hoboes would
spin to lure young boys onto the road. There's a variant of the song, called "The Appleknocker's Lament" that casts the
Big Rock Candy Mountain as akin to the Paradise promised the Children's Crusaders, or the song sung by the Pied
Piper. Perhaps that good old mountain music isn't so good, after all.

"I'll show you the bees in the cigarette trees,

The big rock candy mountains,
The chocolate heights where they give away kites

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 And the sody-water fountains,
The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings,
The marbles made of crystal.
We'll join the band of Dangerous Dan
Who carries a sword and a pistol."
-- attr. to Wheaton "Skin" Brewer, "The Appleknocker's Lament" (1927)

Whether Heaven, or Hell, or both, the Big Rock Candy Mountain deserves a place -- or two -- in any game of
American fantasy, of American myth. For games of a high mythic level, it can actually exist; if you're playing the Paul
Bunyan Pantheon game I've mentioned earlier, it can be the Grail or the Valhalla for our American heroes. In an
America-centered In Nomine game is it a Dream battleground between Beleth and Blandine? One of Eli's projects,
hijacked by Nybbas over the KFRC airwaves through the insidious machinations of Burl Ives? A stronghold for
Haagenti, or a killing zone for Marc, or both? A "happily ever after" land for Christopher and the Angels of Children?
For even wider-eyed "juvenile fantasy" gaming, supernatural child PCs can emerge from the Big Rock Candy
Mountain to help kids in trouble across the Depression-era West.

Or, of course, you can really throw your players off, and sneak the Big Rock Candy Mountain into a "straight" game,
either as a one-off comedic note or as a cave opening out into High Weirdness. Our enigmatic ultraterrestrial Airship
emerges in 1897, around the same time as the song may have; was the Big Rock Candy Mountain an attempt at a Belle
Epoque Faerie hill? You could build the Big Rock Candy Mountain with a pretty simple nanotech spill; was there a
UFO crash in Utah in 1894? Does the Templar map encoded by John Dee reveal "God's Holy Mountain" as the source
of lemonade springs? Are hobo code marks Enochian sigils? Did Sir Walter Raleigh's occult tobaccos come from
America's hidden cigarette trees? What, exactly, is in the Warehouse 23 candy machines? It's fun to play where the
Nephites pray, where you find the Grail in an Oz lunch pail, where the American Dream comes with free ice cream --
it won't be tame if you set your game in the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

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