Idiot Earrings Inside and Out
Friday, April 12Ð
5:30 p.m.-
"The Eagle's pissed off!" The color printout clipped to the Store's cash register depicts Osama Bin Laden gripped inside the beak of a too-large and insolently chauvinistic American Eagle.
Meg: "We had fist-fights on the trails and one stupid snowmobiler even rammed a pickup truck over to Banning Junction. On purpose! The season started late, mid-February, when we got 17 inches of snow on a Sunday night. Snowmobilers showed up Monday and were here all week. Then they went home and brought their families back! Then we had another 16 inches of snow a week later."
She palms each side of her head and shakes it, trying to shut out the noise.
"It was nuts. We had four good weekends this winter. Snowmobilers are usually real good. They buy gas and food and ice and beer. Good tippers! But this year they were like starving jackasses, and when they put on helmets all their brains leaked out."
Drove the four hours under mostly clear skies. The temperature was 61 degrees when we got here and the only snow remaining is plowed up remains and shady depressions. The ground in back of the cabin reflects pools, meltwater and rainwater standing everywhere in hollows. Seems a lifetime since EZ and I were last here. We have been given a second fire number beside the road, a new blue metal sign flagged to a five-foot post. I don't know why we now have two. Maybe local fire chiefs are on hard times and competing for business.
A friendly spider dropped to eye level on silvery thread and waved "hello" as I opened the door. Everything is exactly in place, including the moth flapping against the same window as in October. Does it warm up and awake on sunny afternoons to bruise itself for a few sunlit hours against glass that shows it where to go, but won't let it go? I captured it in a bowl and flew her free in the clearing. A mouse is dead in a trap. Another is dead at the bottom of the deep kitchen wastebasket. Both maple transplants inside their circular fences are bulging buds at the tips of their stalks. Sluggish flies zoom past my head, like they don't know what to do with themselves either.
At a little after 3:00 I walked (EZ ran) to the river to see if the bench is still in place. NO HUNTING OR TRESPASSING signs put up on the neighbor's land last fall have faded to gray and are mostly illegible, though it's not hard to know what they mean to say. Billboards that size, nailed onto trees around here at just about the furthest extent of a man's reach, rarely say "EAT GOGGLEBEE'S ICE CREAM."
Yes. The sitting bench is high and dry and ready for sitting as god intended his man to sit, up off the saturated ground. So I obeyed. The river is running high with meltwater and two inches of rain, and the bank still clings to a fringe of lacy white snow. Upstream a few feet out a flooded tag alder branch rises shivering; a belly dancer wriggling in the flow. I watched the fast water and listened to the rapids. Every minute or two the level raised, boiling up eddies and whirlpools, strengthening the volume. A slow pulse. A twelve-foot long and twelve-inch thick ice shelf surged silently through, released from somewhere upstream. Then another. A few minutes later a cluster of craggy dead branches floated past doing a slow showy pirouette. The North Pool shedding afterbirth. Spring cleaning, scouring the walls and clearing its closets. EZ liked it when I suggested we go to up there to see.
The low spots in the trail still have icy shelves. Walking along, some broke and went "squish" underfoot.
North Pool is clear of ice but the banks facing away from the sun are still snowed-in. A lone goose idling along the far shore noticed our arrival and ducked in and out of flooded underbrush, moving upstream, watching at us over her back.
(As I write just now beside the firepit, a small plane is circling overhead. Perhaps fire season has started and the boys are inspecting my smoke. Or Axel is back on with the DNR and riding shotgun and seen a car down here and is monitoring a possible trespass. I have built the fire on top of a layer of ice; it's melting under the heat. Embers are doused as they drop into small puddles of water, hissing into quiet. An empty Busch beer can just "boinked" off my car.)
6:55-
A trip to the Store to refill water jugs. Herb is fiddling with a fixture on the gas pump hose, mumbling darkly, prodding an impressive screwdriver and dripping blood from a knuckle. I fill the jugs in the kitchen sink. Herb gets in his truck and starts the motor. The phone jangles. Meg runs to the door and yells through the screen at Herb to come back inside and tell me all about his encounter. She scoots back and answers the phone on the fifth ring. Herb stares back at the Store, deliberating. Then shuts off his motor, gets out and comes inside.
"Tell him about it," says Meg.
Herb pulls out a chair and sits. I pull up a chair too, face him and sit.
"I saw a fawn on the road east by stewsgait--"
"I thought it was by his place," Meg points at me.
"I stopped and went over and it fell down and didn't get up. I put my hand under it and it ran into the fence and wouldn't get up. So I come and got Leon but when we got back it was gone."
"What fence? Meg demands to know.
"I tol' you. Stewsgait."
"Where?"
You know. That fence Stu put up to keep ATV's out. By his gate."
"That's out on the road!"
"I tol' you that."
"No you didn't."
"Did too."
"Did not. That's out on the road. I though you meant his road."
"No. It was on the road. By Stu's gate."
I nod, then remember my need to shop for candy. Meg goes back to the kitchen. Herb goes outside. I load up water jugs. Meg carries two outside too.
"Oh, he's going to show you my Mother's Day present."
I look toward the house. Herb is approaching, half-hiding a large dark gadget behind his butt. He holds it up. A pistol. A very long black pistol. With a black scope.
"I don't know. Maybe you won't appreciate this, though."
He hands it over.
I expect some sort of joky contraption, maybe a potato gun or fanciful fly shooter. It's heavy, and shiny and black and I am instantly concerned with responsibility about where to point it. So I hold it up and sight on the mailbox, steady it, viewing through the scope. A tiny red electronic dot bobs dead center, showing me, leading the way.
"Ooo, a laser sight. The real deal!"
"This is what it shoots." Herb hands me a bullet about the size of a vending machine Tootsie Roll. The tip is concave. Though I know little about ammunition, I suspect it is what law enforcement officials call a "hollow point," designed to exert maximum stopping power by flattening and widening as it tears apart spleens and hearts once inside its prey.
"Forty-four magnum," Herb grins. Then I realize that Meg, grinning attentively behind Herb, will never use it. Herb points out the new ash hand-grip he constructed, explaining that the original was way too small to hold effectively for a good shot. "You know?"
Show-and-tell is over. I get out the camera for some shots of Herb's bedspring Christmas tree: a dull spray-painted silver festoon of metal parts inverted classically into evergreen V. It all sits on top of an old Radio Flyer sled. The base is a thicket of Goldberg-esque chains and motors and switchboxes. Higher up are pulleys and gears and zigzagged bedsprings. Bedsprings gnarled and bedsprings twisted. Three-inch red-painted bedspring springs dangle like idiot earrings inside and out. Bedsprings interwoven with strings of miniature colored Christmas lights. Bedsprings spray-painted silver, and bedsprings welded.
"Herb! He wants you in the picture."
I don't. Neither does he, and drives away.
Meg stands inside the Store door and yells out the facts.
"He made that in 1967. That's my old sled at the bottom. That fan underneath (a 1940's six-inch desk fan) is for cooling, because Herb used a fan motor which ran the fan and it has to be cool."
"Isn't it cold enough in December for winter's air to naturally cool the motor?" I ask.
"Maybe ... I don't know. But Herb knows."
I will go down tomorrow and set up an appointment to photograph the tree in rotating luminescence.
We'll see.
8:25-
Dusk was shambling off-stage and the night crew was readying the new set. EZ sensed my movement toward the river and showed me where we wanted to go. But lost me quickly in the murk. Scents of cool clay drifted up out of the road -- it's nice to smell again after a six-month pinched-up cinch indoors. It's nice to hear again too. A nighthawk (always invisible in the night sky) circled and screeched important news from the south as I walked west. A bright star was there. Jupiter maybe, because that's the first star I thought of and it's what was always told to me as a kid when grownups told me to wish on the star. A few more appeared, furtively, as though they'd been there all along.
The river was still there too, expanding and breathing and roistering wildly. EZ sniffed at this and that, then sat and thought about things with water caressing her toes. I did too, but not with the toes. Then became intrigued by the water's surging where it flowed through a shallow spot. Flood contractions had quickened to every fifteen or thirty seconds since afternoon. I thought about doing research or quizzing a hydrologist, or contacting FEMA to learn about flood water traditions.
On second thought, like December's awakening fly on the sill inside the cabin sun, I don't want to have curiosities disillusioned by facts. I like to imagine for myself what probably is happening when rushing waters rise and ebb in a small river, attracting my attention in the wild nearly-dark night. Besides, when I have my own answers, I don't like being contradicted if an Expert's Truth mis-matches mine.
More stars had appeared by the time I got back to the cabin. (EZ was a bit late because of chasing a trespassing buck.) The more I looked the more there were. Wallflowers just waiting to be noticed, fresh-scrubbed and with nice perfume on and I'd been too busy peeing or watching my step in the dark to see.
9:38-
A small mooth has loodged between twoo keys. At first it was just expplooring or having a rest, but when I sppelled "Exppert" a bit too ppassioonately my ppinky finger caught ppart oof a wing and squashed his ability too flee.
I have extracted his smudgy remains with the dental pick and everything is okay again for most of us around here.
9:50-
I have finally surfaced to anxiety surrounding my head and perturbing my ears. Organ music on public radio, as presented by Michael Baron.
"The greatest sounds you'll ever hear," he says, as an audience cheers from the bleachers.
I have been waiting for a weather forecast to say if tomorrow will be rainy or sunny. I am excited for sun or rain, either will do, but I've endured enough big throbbing organs.
My God! Public radio's pornography.
9:58-
EZ, on the bed, just hooted a grand squeal, as she does from time to time while dreaming. I glanced over. Her eyes were drawing open, dragging the bottoms of her lids up, still showing blood-red, which always says she's not yet fully awake. I have never seen embarrassment from her. Until now.
10:02-
Another suicide bombing in Jerusalem. Officials on our side have re-euphemized them "homicide bombings," as passed-on through Spokesperson Bush. But whatever the term, I am unfit to describe the pallor I feel at what actually happens when a young lady pushes a button somewhere up under her skirt and explodes bits of her blood and rib joints and kidney veins into strangers' body parts equally.
"Horrific" was a good word prior to September 11 '01, before it was used too much and stopped meaning what it meant September 10.
What does it feel like to push a button and watch through one's whizzing eyeball as shocked faces and horror sail past the pupil?
So I'm going to go lay down next to EZ and be pretty sure that the press of her hip against mine is a safe thing to feel and that I know her well enough so don't need to worry.
Saturday, April 13--
The Phoebes arrived this morning, without luggage, and started right in shouting, "Phoebe," again and again from bare branches and waving "good morning" with their tails. I dozed during periods of quiet, then awakened to loud bickering over nest-building issues like correct spit consistencies to hold it all up high. I did not get mad at their tumult but enjoyed their arrival from the south. They'll soon become soundless for a few weeks in May, swooping on silent wings day and night with bugs in their beaks for the new babies.
8:45 a.m.-
The CLOSED sign was still up in the window, so I drove downtown to kill time and park in the Super Valu parking lot to wait until nine, when Jeffrey's CLOSED sign should be reversed and I can walk inside and walk back outside with yeasty fresh doughnuts. There are bald tires on the front of an old Suburban. On the backside of a downtown two-story building, "Jesus," flows in continuous cursive by several strings of red Christmas lights wound around heavy supporting wire. I wait for five minutes or seven, then drive through the Hinckley fire museum parking lot. "Closed for the season." It will re-open in early May when children under six will be admitted free.
I pull into Jeffrey's lot at 9:01. Another car pulls in too. But the sign has not been flipped to show "OPEN" as it should. Something is ominous. It might have something to do with a tall white rack obscured through a soiled picture window where tables and chairs should be low down and not visible. I get out of the car and look inside. The place is empty except for a piece of cookie showcase trim and discarded scraps of wood on the floor.
I wonder what happened.
Driving back I stop at Sandstone's grocery store bakery and get two careless cold-hearted doughnuts. They just weren't the same.
The Community Worship Center billboard says: JESUS BUILT US A BRIDGE WITH 2 BROADS AND 3 NAILS. I am impressed. I didn't know those plastic slide-in letters also came in bold.
10:55-
Yesterday the plow-ridge across the driveway required a Mazurka two-step and do-si-do to get over. Today I ease over it with a single schottische one-step.
Sitting at the firepit. The temperature has already warmed to 60 from the overnight low of 30, and air is flipping dead leaves. The dead mouse I emptied from the kitchen wastebasket is laying in a semi-fetal position under the cooking grate. Rusty bronze fur. Fully intact mouse, as good as I've seen on display at craft shows, forepaws curved to its chest. Missing is the spark of life, which reminds me that something bigger than all the right parts is afoot when it comes to life.
It had fallen into the deep slippery plastic kitchen wastebasket. I imagine falling into a fifty-foot deep round pit lined with Teflon, the impossibility of escape (assuming the fall itself did not do me in). Being a reasoning human, the realization would quickly occur that doom was upon me, slowly starving to death, and grim resignation to it. Or, out of the blue a rope or a large helium balloon (or shreds of paper towel if I was a mouse) should be dropped over the side, and effortlessly my death would move away into the future. But nobody dropped a paper towel rope for that mouse. I wasn't here. How many times has paper towel got me out of certain doom I never knew about?
11:10-
I am concerned about EZ. I just offered her a stick, but she wouldn't take it. So I gently fingered open her jaws and stuck it inside. She seemed relieved about having it. I gave her a pet and a few hearty scratches on her rump and she grinned slightly, as one does with a stick in the mouth. Then she went over to the grass and laid down to chew. But immediately yipped and put it down.
Yesterday while building the fire I found a perfect one and picked it up, although she didn't yet know it was for her. It became her excitement years ago to watch me pick up sticks because we both knew that, along the way, I'd hold one out to her and say, "okay," in a sociable fun voice and she'd run over and grab it then hurry to a sunny spot and reduce it to kindling. She does her part.
A moment after grabbing yesterday's stick she issued a yelp and slunk away as though I'd tricked her with a glowing hot ember. I cooed into her eyes and assured her it was both our regret if I'd somehow hurt her.
I offered a new stick but she cowered unhappily. So I left it alone and brooded. All she remembers is that a fun little play we enjoy together finally, inevitably, resulted in hurt. She doesn't have the capability of reason to know that I'd not cause her a pain or betrayal, surely not with intention. Nor does she know that I feel bad myself. What actually happened? Did I step on her paw? Did she bite her tongue, or lip? Though that seems unlikely, as on other occasions when playing our game she dashes headlong at me, grabs sticks away and runs away laughing.
7:15
p.m.-
A steady drizzle through the open panel. At the Store an hour ago, while photographing Herb's motorized Christmas tree, raindrops began falling, as a secret at first.
Meg tossed out a three-way plug for the extension cord and I plugged in the wires. Something buzzed in the base and the works began turning. One revolution per minute. First a few strings of white lights lit, then they switched off and a multi-colored batch glowed. The star at the top, though not illuminated directly, but wrapped with its own lights, blinked on. The bicycle chain at the bottom squealed through a spray-painted sprocket. The new motor hummed and the cooling fan, still inside its wire cage, blew.
It's a marvel of clever engineering. Especially how each separate string of lights gets triggered by the base's rotation. Meg came outside and suggested better photographic angles, which included her sign in the background. A string of lights, dangling too low, snagged on the sled and threatened to upset the balance.
7:49 -
I am fighting imbalances.
The air moving through the screening is blowing the flames of the candles
and making them drip, hastening their end. Besides, the flickering light makes
my work tedious. I refuse to shut the panel and close the outside out. So
I look around for a barrier to erect between the breeze and my flames and
come up with a 24-inch square piece of half-inch foam. It doesn't want to
stand, but with a bottle of lemon sour on one side and a tall pillar candle
on the other, I manage to secure a shaky truce.
I sit back down to chill outside air pressing in at my knees and do my best to ignore it.
Late morning we went on a wander. Pleasing hot sun, only a flannel shirt on top and the hogboots on bottom. North from the cabin through mostly snow-free ground, past the giant hollow popple tree that gave out a scary loud, "crack," when Chelsea and I stood under it in the rain exactly three years ago. It's prone now. A butterfly zoomed and banked tight circles around my head, all brown with yellow tatting along its wing edges. Then we passed out onto the firebreak boundary, which inexplicably still has a foot of snow on it.
Damnit! I would like to be able to buy a pair of hogboots that, with use, could last twenty years. Hard, intended, no bullshit wear. And, after twenty years I'd need to replace them because they're tired, thin, worn out through lots of hard use. And not need replacing because they're made out of shitty plastic that cracks and lets water run in after two or three uses, otherwise hanging upside down and motionless inside a cabin. I hate that. Manufacturers know how to make products that last. But they don't make them, no profit in that. They produce goods to appear normal, and to average consumers inexperienced in buying pairs of hogboots, hogboots are hogboots. They are not intended for use, but replacing every three years or one, regardless of wear. The price factor--the more you pay the better they are--is rarely a good guide. Expensive brand names sell only vanity and have little to do with long-lasting quality--or hogs--and everything to do with feel-good distinction. Besides, the hardware had only one bottom shelf devoted to hogboots. And only one box devoted to my size. All the same brand, and glued together in China.
I, confidently striding through deep snow and icy puddles did not expect to go suddenly cold in the left toe due to icewater pouring in through covert cracked plastic. I did not know there were cracks in the plastic and I surely did not think of inspecting for cracked plastic when I put them on a half-hour earlier. Why would I? They've only been used four or five times, and the first time didn't count because I got soaked all the way up to my elbows from rescuing a dog who thought all racy water was fun. Inspecting my right boot to see why my toes are wet I see breaks on the instep and crazes all over the left side and, OOPS, a layered seam split from Chinese deficiency.
Shopping for new hogboots I'll first interview a hog farmer from the midwest and take his advice. And eschew Hilfiger's desultory propaganda.
East and north, then down through a hollow at the edge of a hay meadow, with a narrow fast-running stream of clear meltwater. Lively and secret, it's there only during this season. I love the place. Through deep drifted snow and out onto the wide sun-bright field. Through short grassy stubble and very soft ground (which makes expressive vacuum-ous sounds as my boots lift out), and up to a rise where a derrick-shaped deerstand rises fifteen feet high. I've only ever seen it from the trees at the side of the meadow. It's sturdily constructed of stout aluminum channel with horizontal supports of 2x10 planks. One of the boards is split, a tapered spear of it aims toward the ground. I see tell-tale gouges where a bear had sharpened its claws. It's exactly the same evidence that a corner of Red's Shed still shows from a bear clawing many years ago. I climbed up the ladder and peeked into the waist-high enclosure. An orange vinyl secretary's chair on a base of five wheels squats under the lid. Tidy.
I retract to the ground and stand savoring the wide view of open space all washed by bright sun and gracious soft air. Red-winged blackbirds are back, and calling. Two eagles are circling above the treeline in the east, the bigger of the two tormented by a yapping grackle. EZ has been completely occupied running through the woods to the river; vital errands after endless months with nothing to do but stay alone inside for long hours, and once in a while ride in the back of the car for a grocery run. Today she's free to rush where she likes, learning about stuff through brush and tall dead grasses. And picking up Woodticks, I discovered later, laying in bed.
My God, the thrill of finally being outside! Light breezes flowing into me with aromas released from a thousand thawed sources deep. Freedom from inhospitable cold and stale forced-air heat.
I found the porcupine remains on the way back. Flour-white rib bones and a scrap of skull warming in the sun.
3:15 p.m.
Another hike, toward the sound of loud rapids in the south. I heard it late April last year and am curious about the lay of the land and what could be producing such clamor down there, when the river is so continuously flat. The sky has closed over gray, suggesting rain.
The rapids is a marvel of action where the river narrows between a passage of two stream banks. Water is trying to crowd through all at once, throwing waves, spitting and fighting, leaping high over itself.
We walk back through
Herb's park. Pussy willows are out! White fluff buds bursting with tangible
life sign. Two eight-foot-high round underground gasoline storage tanks are
above ground, side by side where Herb put them years ago, salvaged from somewhere.
The ends are cut out and laying like ramps. Inside and discarded, one holds
three rusty roto-tillers, a lawn mower, a gas space heater, an exercycle,
and a tipped-over greeting card rack.
8:23-
I surrendered to the cooling night air and went outside to close the panel. The first peeper of spring is futilely announcing his intentions.
Sunday, April 14--
7:40 a.m.-
A heavy drizzle
started around 6:00. Am up and looking out the north door, watching meltwater
pools ruffled by rain in the woods. EZ is watching me from the passenger side
of the bed, but noncommittally, in case this arising of mine turns out to
be short-lived and I come to my senses.
9:10-
It was. I climbed
back inside the covers and we listened to Will Shortz play his quiz with an
NPR Sunday Morning listener before turning back out for the day.
Home we must go.
Down to the river. A last look around. The white snow fringe is gone from
the bank but the water is still roiling at the same level as yesterday.
