Call of the epic

SOMEWHERE outside Tucson, a 56-year-old photographer rattles down the interstate in a Volkswagen van -- his fifth VW van, because he’s been out here for 28 years now, on and off, looking for transcendence in the desert dirt.

“By definition, my project has no end,” says Richard Misrach. “I will end before it can.”

Meanwhile in downtown Sacramento, 46-year-old William T. Vollmann confronts a keyboard in the quiet of his own converted Mexican restaurant. And in South Dakota, a 79-year-old widow named Ruth Ziolkowski wakes daily in a pine cabin to direct the artful demolition of a mountaintop.

These three characters may never meet, but they are creative kin in a strange and scattered sort of family: They are frontier epic-makers. Their habits suit this age of short attention and rapid transmission about as well as quill pens suit a digital office. But they are compelled to their work -- maybe by tragedy, maybe by duty, maybe by plain fascination with the fractured North American landscape.

Misrach has been studying and shooting the desert, from night skies to bombing ranges, for close to 30 years. Vollmann has spent a good part of 20 years researching and writing a seven-novel series on cultural collisions between natives and new arrivals to North America, from the Vikings on. Ziolkowski, who doesn’t even call herself an artist, has worked more than 50 years to make tangible her late husband’s dream of a Crazy Horse sculpture to rival Mt. Rushmore.

“What would you want me to do that would be more important than this?” she says.

As the careers of serial author J.K. Rowling and serial filmmaker George Lucas make clear, audiences worldwide will spend millions to keep up with some epic projects, if those projects have just the right populist pitch. But most epic-makers get less attention. They mostly row against the flow of money, against pop culture, against mortality, sometimes against logic itself.

“I think they’re probably biologically different,” speculates John S. Dacey, professor of developmental psychology at Boston College and coauthor of “Understanding Creativity: The Interplay of Biological, Psychological and Social Factors.” “And I think sometime early in their careers, perhaps even in their childhood, somebody praised them for sticking with something.”

In many respects, these creators are working in the tradition of narrative poets such as Homer and Virgil, whose heroic tales were the first epics, and later talents such as Richard Wagner, who labored from 1848 to 1874 on his four-part, 14-hour 19th century opera cycle, “Ring of the Nibelung,” and James Joyce, who worked from 1922 to 1939 on the nearly impenetrable “Finnegans Wake.”

But those were all European projects. Misrach, Vollmann and Ziolkowski are exploring the very soil and stones of the North American frontier, and they’re not alone.

In the Arizona desert 70 miles north of Phoenix, Italian-born architect and urban theorist Paolo Soleri, a former follower of Frank Lloyd Wright, has spent the last 35 years chasing his vision of a high-density desert town of 5,000. Soleri’s Arcosanti was envisioned as a haven full of ecological features and organically influenced shapes, free of inefficient sprawl. But nobody with big money ever enlisted. He’s 86 now, the population of Arcosanti is less than 100, and a spokeswoman estimates the project is 5% complete. As it has for decades, the enterprise inches forward on the strength of volunteer labor and revenues from tourists who buy wind chimes in the gift shop.

Outside Flagstaff, 62-year-old James Turrell has raised and spent more than $10 million reshaping a crater, aiming for an array of earth-and-sky light effects, since the late 1970s.

In the outback of central Nevada, 62-year-old artist Michael Heizer has been sculpting earth by the ton for even longer -- since 1970 or 1972, depending on who’s counting -- aiming to complete a vast work called “City.” His project has substantial backing from the Dia Foundation, and he draws further income by raising cows and farming hay. But in the last year, that project’s future has been clouded by a U.S. Department of Energy proposal to build a rail line that would pass within a few miles of “City” to deliver nuclear waste to a storage facility planned for Yucca Mountain.

“I think there’s an epic temperament,” says historian Kevin Starr, whose still-growing series of California histories was born as he browsed Harvard’s Widener Library as a grad student in 1967. “You are called to this work because it helps stabilize, organize and direct your entire life.”

With Homer and Virgil more than 2,000 years behind us, “epic” has come to mean any sort of art, writing or music. There’s no consensus on exactly what makes one -- let alone what makes one worth the trouble

“Vast scale in some people’s minds is easily confused with artistic value,” says Esa-Pekka Salonen, the conductor and composer who has spent more than a decade as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“Every creative artist wants to ultimately create something that has lasting power,” Salonen says. And the American West, he adds, “has become a sort of a haven and land of possibility to artists who would not fit anywhere else.”

Dean Keith Simonton, a UC Davis psychology professor who specializes in the creative mind, likes to break epic artists into two archetypes: the veterans such as James Joyce, who gradually build up to a career-capping project, and the visionaries such as Simon Rodia, the late builder of Watts Towers, who “have only one thing to say.” The latter characters, Simonton adds, are “often eccentric, even frequently a bit mad, and have a low probability of success.”

But the closer one looks at the lives of creators such as Misrach, Vollmann and Ziolkowski, the easier it is to find bits of both archetypes. That, and a staggering stubbornness in the face of loss.

Conflicts of cultures

WILLIAM T. Vollmann wears thick glasses on a boyish face and writes books with implausible speed.

He finished one monstrous project just two years ago -- a seven-book meditation on the ethics of violence called “Rising Up, Rising Down.” And he won a National Book Award last month for “Europe Central,” a collection of stories set on the Continent during World War II. But for close to 20 years, since shortly after his first novel came out, he’s been marching toward another flag in the distance.

That flag is “Seven Dreams,” a series of novels on conflict between European and indigenous cultures in North America. Four volumes have been published, beginning with “The Ice-Shirt” in 1990.

They’re thick books, mingling deep research with invention and occasional drawings by the author, who calls himself “William the Blind.” In the course of researching his books and the well-paying magazine pieces he cranks out in between, he’s slept with hookers, camped above the Arctic circle, shot heroin and smoked crack. In 1994, on an assignment in Bosnia-Herzegovina, he survived a land mine explosion that killed two companions in the same vehicle.

“I never set out to write something monumental,” Vollmann says. “But if it ends up being long, that doesn’t scare me. And I’m not going to cut it down for anybody. Why should I let anyone else tell me what to do? The stakes are low. I can rewrite to make somebody else happy and get paid nothing or I can write it my way and get paid nothing.”

Born in Santa Monica and educated at Cornell and Deep Springs College in California’s eastern outback, Vollmann doesn’t drive. He usually pedals a bicycle from his Sacramento home to a former Mexican restaurant downtown that he bought two years ago. He has spoken in the past about his wife and daughter, but these days he waves off questions about that side of his life.

In any event, it’s his earlier personal history that many readers see as most crucial to his work. When he was 9, Vollmann’s parents left him in charge of his 6-year-old sister at a pond in New Hampshire. While his attention wandered, she strayed into deep water and drowned.

Neither Vollmann nor his admirers see much mystery in his furious productivity, his thrill-seeking, his preoccupation with moral questions or his recurring efforts to rescue vulnerable women. Near the beginning of “The Ice-Shirt,” Vollmann’s narrator calls history “nothing more than a long list of regrettable actions.”

The idea for “Seven Dreams,” Vollmann says, came from reading Ovid and hoping to build a literary structure such as “The Metamorphoses,” then seeing a Native American streetwalker on her knees -- “at that time I was heavily involved with street prostitutes” -- and thinking about her ancestors.

That was in his mid-20s. Soon he’d planned a single book of seven “dreams,” each representing another historical encounter in the transformation of the continent. But the first dream, which became “The Ice-Shirt,” filled 400 pages, and Vollmann realized each dream was going to need its own book.

Closing in on 50 now, with a stroke, a broken hip and carpal tunnel syndrome in his recent history, Vollmann has three “Dreams” volumes to go. His most recent installment, “Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith,” came out in 2000. The next -- once he finishes with a nonfiction project on the Imperial Valley -- will be about the travails of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce in the Pacific Northwest in the 1870s. To study up, he’s planning a camping trip or two to learn “the way things smell, the way the grass feels at night, all that kind of stuff.”

“You do your best work for as long as you can, and then you die,” he says. “Unless you plan your death ... it’s probably going to be a surprise, and you’re going to leave something unfinished.... It’s not like I’ll be any better off if I die after I finish ‘Seven Dreams’ and something else is unfinished.”

To match Rushmore

KORCZAK Ziolkowski didn’t see death quite the same way.

Ziolkowski (pronounced jewl-KUFF-ski), a Boston-born Polish American artist and accomplished sculptor, was nearly 40 when he started the job of his life in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

It was 1948. Ziolkowski, a self-taught artist who’d won notice at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York for a portrayal of the composer Paderewski, had been invited by Lakota leaders to undertake a sculpture of the Sioux chief Crazy Horse, on horseback.

The raw material: 600-foot-high Thunderhead Mountain. The challenge: to match Mt. Rushmore, just 17 miles to the northeast, where Ziolkowski had worked as an assistant to sculptor Gutzon Borglum.

Two years into the work, Ziolkowski married Ruth Ross, a volunteer on a previous project and 19 years his junior. As she remembers, he made no secret of his priorities:

“He said, ‘If this project stops because I die, my whole life will have been wasted.’ ”

On went the work and the marriage. Up on the mountain, Crazy Horse’s features slowly emerged form the granite, his face larger than all four Rushmore presidential faces together. But the work moved more slowly than Rushmore (which was done in 14 years) because Ziolkowski kept ownership and turned away offers of federal funding.

Down in the Ziolkowskis’ handmade pine-log home, 10 children turned up.

By the time the gray-bearded Ziolkowski died in 1982, at age 74, he’d moved 7 million tons of stone, endured multiple spinal operations and designed his own tomb. The unfinished sculpture had evolved into a self-sustaining enterprise, part artistic inspiration, part tourist attraction. So it goes today. But now at the Crazy Horse Memorial, the great leader’s face, completed in 1998, stares out above tons upon tons of still-raw mountain.

Below, there’s a museum, conference center, restaurant, theater and gift shop, and there’s Ruth Ziolkowski, with 55 years of life invested in Crazy Horse and an honorary doctorate from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. On June 26, she’ll be 80.

“It was his lifetime and it’s my lifetime,” she says, remembering her husband. “You get up every day knowing that you’ve got this job to do. And that job. And half a dozen others. And when you go to bed at night, you know you still have more.”

She serves as chief executive of an organization with 70 year-round employees and as many as 182 in the peak of summer tourist season. Among them are seven of her kids.

“Anyone who has a mission, a passion for what they do, is lucky,” she says.

The work follows the models Ziolkowski left behind. The most pressing business lately is the horse’s head. It’s 219 feet high, and a 13-person drilling, blasting and bulldozing crew is roughing out the shape. His widow refuses to guess when it will all be done.

“The important thing,” she says, “is that we keep on working. We work every day except Sunday. Korczak would have worked Sundays.”

‘My God, I’ve just begun’

WHEN Richard Misrach’s cellphone rings, the photographer is on Interstate 10, just outside Tucson and headed for El Paso, the AC cranked to keep his film cool. In theory, his destination is Louisiana, but once this photographer is out among the sand and creosote, plans tend to change.

“It’s always about the light,” he says. That, and “the collision between the natural world and the civilized world.”

Misrach, who studied psychology as an undergrad at UC Berkeley, started making photographs in the desert in 1975. But it wasn’t until the 1980s -- after a traumatic lab fire that destroyed years of his work -- that his ambitions took a clear shape.

“I realized, ‘My God, I’ve just begun,’ ” he recalls.

If he arranged his desert images in thematic groups, Misrach decided, he could reach beyond the common “photo essay” format and do something more like verses in a song or poem, the way Dante arranged his “Divine Comedy” in the 14th century.

“There are so many aspects of the desert to explore,” he says. “Each new one changes the meaning of the others.”

In 1987, he published four groups of desert photos, from shuttle landings to fires, under the title “Desert Cantos.” But that proved to be only another beginning.

There are 28 Cantos now, and images from the project can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Musee National d’Art Moderne in Paris. Misrach is a big name in fine-art photography now, his large prints fetching $30,000 and more, and he’s launched several other ambitious projects on subjects from the Golden Gate Bridge to cancer along the Mississippi River. But the desert has stayed with him. And though he lives in Berkeley, he keeps heading back.

Most trips, Misrach stays two or three weeks. In the old days, he’d sleep in his van. Lately, he and his wife, Myriam, prefer motels, especially Motel 6s, where bathrooms have no windows and the darkness allows him to handle sensitive film easily.

Not everybody understands this. Misrach confesses that “my best friend, who has no interest in art, he keeps going, ‘Canto schmanto.’ He’s sick of them.”

One Canto features close-ups of tumbleweeds; they look like what Jackson Pollock would have produced if limited to beige and brown paint. Another batch looks at a patch of Nevada outback where for decades the military practiced bombing. Another batch focuses on the night sky. Yet another, which Misrach acknowledges “has not sold well,” unflinchingly examines desiccated dead animals in pits. (“They look like Auschwitz for animals. But they’re an elegy of sorts.”)

In “Chronologies,” a just-released coffee-table book of Misrach images, outsiders can glimpse the photographer’s evolution. The book ignores all the thematic arranging of work that the photographer has done over the last 30 years and instead sets out 125 of his most striking images, oldest to newest. As the pages pass, you see the desert creeping across the image-maker’s consciousness and doubt fading, just as it long ago faded for Ziolkowski, Vollmann and all their epic-making brethren.

“You have to believe in a big way,” says Misrach. “Believe that it’s worthy of giving your life to.”