I Whisper for Whiskey and a Bullet to Bite
Friday, December 7Ð
2 p.m.-
Vigor is returning to a fly on the windowsill. Dead for at least a month, it is beginning to wave spindly legs up at me from flat on its back. And I am astonished. Scientists could effortlessly account for stasis and suspended animation and how chemical ragouts all are involved, but I don't want to know that. I want to admire this buggy revival and remain childlike in my amazement.
Scrubbed the accumulated debris of insect wings and candle wax drippings and ladybug shell casings off the round cardtable top. All the water in the jugs is frozen, a customary circumstance from late October through late March. EZ, charging inside after the long ride over, is greeted by inch-thick ice at the bottom of her bowl. She's a good sport about not getting a drink and runs back outside to investigate small animal scurryings intensifying under the cabin.
A fire is built, the stove begins to chortle and mutter. Within fifteen minutes the inside temperature has warmed from 29 to 45 and the stove kettle has thawed enough to call EZ in and pour her a drink. She slobbers in it like a crazed desert derelict, then drizzles a trail of water and bounds back outside.
Snow in the yard is patchy, brown ground showing about fifty percent. Hunting season has come and gone for 2001; I'm always a bit nervous to arrive, expecting to find a shot-up cabin or vandal's remains, but all is intact and exactly as left in mid-October.
2:45-
EZ has been needing this trip easily as much as me. Little for her to do in the house day after day but sleep on the floor and secretly snooze on the bed while I'm away. She sat up in the back of the car and watched out the windows for most of the four hour drive, occasionally sinking from sight for a lull, then popping up at once to see what she'd missed. Then whining and singing and jitterbugging with glee as we turned onto the ten-mile cutoff and rumbled along washboarded gravel.
She's been mostly outdoors since we arrived, perking up when I stepped out in preparation of a walk down to the river. She watched me walk toward the car, but the moment I deviated from that track and made one step toward the west where the river runs, she exploded into action and streaked between my legs, careened around the curve onto the road on two legs and did not stop running until she was a fourth of the way down the road and had to stop to catch her breath. And, as an after-thought looked back (I was hiding behind a tree), to see if I was actually going to follow her lead.
God is constantly creating gorgeous fine aesthetics whether
or not anybody's around to see. Potholes in the road with canopies of ice,
sculpted and swirled into lacy designs. The water froze a thin crust at the
top then drained or evaporated, leaving a milky shell. Curving lines curled,
joined in arcs then zoomed wide apart, minute craze cracks, refrozen and brighter
than others, criss-crossing, spiraling parallel into fanciful contours that
no longer exist. Visible is the inspiration behind topographical map-making.
Sloping valleys and sharp ravines, wide river bottom plains and steep cliffs
all are there in frozen high relief.
At the river where the stream widens, and the rapids smooths out, ice has formed across the broad surface, although not all at once or during one chilly night. Wide arcs divide boundaries between lighter frosts and hurrier currents that required harder freezes to stop its flow. Remnants of snow remain along higher border ridges where ice was set early. Closer to the center of the stream the freeze plane is rougher, reflecting gray sky. Across the pool near the far shore a section of black ice froze quick, foam swirls locked in place across a smooth ice rink. Closer to the narrows, fuzzy open water flows, blurred by the breeze whisking past my cheeks.
Looking upriver: it's a scene I've seen hundreds of times, but suddenly something is different. But it's not. Yes it is.
The rippling rapids are there. Grayly doing what they've always done. Tag Alders tilt out over the stream as usual. The river course straightens as it's always straightened, just a bit off dead-center, from left to right before calming into the deeper swimming hole. But, the river can clearly be seen curving out of the scene, up to the right where in summer it's not visible. But it's obvious, the sharp curve is so near. It's never been so apparent, or so known, now with the foliage down.
I am set back with startle. Like discovering a mole on a thirty-year marriage. It's always been there, but preoccupation with other matters through the years and younger skin textures distracted its presence.
EZ has been investigating the riverbank upstream. Safely from a snowy shoreline, she's been allured by the opposite side. Nosing down to the thin ice edge, stopping a foot away, standing upright and high, inspecting the feasibility of crossing over.
3:15-
Damnit!
Pillows were left somewhere back home. But I don't know where. They'd been put in their oversized garbage bag but that's all I remember. The last time I forgot them, they were found at the end of the driveway when we returned home, having evidently fallen off the top of the car, where they soaked up some dew and waited patiently for us to return. (They were in the bedroom behind the door.) A trip to Pine City 40 miles away was scheduled for tomorrow (for taper candles and propane) so I'll go today.
The mart in Pine City is a small version of a vast corporate enterprise I passionately disfavor. To avoid defamation or possible uncivil liability I cannot mention the name. I earnestly avoid it in my own hometown, since more highly refined markets are there like K-mart and Shopko; rumor even has it a Target is on the way! There are times like this though when, with no alternative, I am pushed to the Wall. It's a real world with real shitty business etiquette -- survival of the fittest and all that clap. But look who gets my money. And they know it. I shop locally during trips to The Woods and know all about negative thrift, like squandering $4 in gas for $3 in savings. But Sandstone has no place to buy a pillow at any price unless I wanted to place an order at the Penney's catalog outlet and pick it up when I won't need it next week.
Besides, I get 39 mpg.
So into Sandstone and onto the Interstate I launch, heading south.
Directly across a service road from my intended destination is Pamida, a small-town discount chain. A moment of philanthropic disquiet flits through me as I approach, but the front tires wrest control and steer me away into the parking lot of its competitor and through a bedlam of shopping cart anarchy and consumer disorder. Passing by the entrance I briefly startle at an ill-tempered dinging outside of my car. Straining around quickly over my left shoulder I see a Santa bell-ringer raising and lowering a brass bell from what appears to be a motorized left arm. Sitting on a tall stool opposite the red cannibal's kettle, a boy about ten tap-taps a tom-tom between his knees. Two teenage girls wearing flip-flops and too-short T-shirts exposing bare midriffs walk past (it's December in Minnesota and nineteen degrees.) One wads up a plastic CD wrapper and arcs it into the kettle.
I park the car in a snit. EZ is sulking a bit. She and I had a dispute, and now she's staring out the back of the car toward Pamida--which is where she wanted to shop, and is refusing to come with. I scoff and lock her in.
Submerging through the automatic sliding glass, I am forced to halt at the balky door, after nearly colliding with it. A woman who looks like Grinch--grim green face with a sledge piled high like his too, bisects my course so I swerve to the north. A guy and a girl ahead of me stop abruptly. She squeals "Oh, Chad, win me that thing," then turns straight into me without first looking back, gives me an awful glare, then hops like a bunny to the vending machine game featuring a claw on a chain and heaps of colorful goo-gaws scattered across its bottom.
I change my mind about the whole matter and aim for the opposite exit, then request a self conference and go stand in a corner.
"Just settle down. It's not so bad. Stop being such a boor. Go!"
An older lady just inside the door is adjusting some carts, putting them in solicitous two-by-two lineups like a demolition derby start. She grimaces, says "welcome to Blank-Mart," then gives the lead cart a kick straight into my groin. I quickly crouch down and pretend for a moment to re-tie my shoes, then dab at my eyes. Standing back up and dragging a residual ache off of the floor, I request a hand basket, the kind that'll hold everything a shopper could want without having to push a wobble-wheeled self-willed cart. The lady is clearly weary of her day, and especially of cheap bastards like me who won't do the lavish right thing and take a big cart, especially at Christmas. She gestures toward the baskets with a famously expressive finger. I stick out my tongue.
Okay. I grip my basket by its two metal handles and turn to seek after candles. Striding through the checkout section and an accompanying chorus of loud electronic beeps, like sonar pings in a deep-diving submarine, I begin to get in the spirit and think this might become fun after all. A shopping cart shoots out of the lingerie aisle and thumps over my boots. I stop. A young mom with a toddler in her dray does not even look back; she's shouting to her co-shopper, "Becky seen him with her at Bomber's last Tuesday so don't be tellin' me no diff'ernt."
I'm rammed in the butt.
I turn around. A lady with an earring screwed into her lower lip lumbers past--pulling and pushing two carts--and mutters a moderately bad swear word straight into my eye. I perk up the pace and round the perfume department fast, headed for anywhere but there. Ah, the book aisle. Gorgeous color covers--almost exclusively publicizing Tiger Woods' glorious white teeth and big Buick smile, holding a golf club by its leathery grip. But I didn't come from The Woods to see Tiger Woods or look at his books. Hoping to avoid further commotion I head down the back of the paperback section. Oh!, a rack of Cliffs NotesÒ paperbacks catches my eye. Biology and Algebra and To Catch A Mockingbird and How to Write books plead for someone's attention. I flip through each one, but none make any sense, except a short passage about a black man named Boo hiding in the dark then being blamed for lurking in the dark.
Escaping out the back I surge through the personal hygiene department, past a "MERRY X-MAS" condom display where a young boy is covertly pocketing a packet of, "Santa's Fancy."
Dodging a mayhem of screaming children and renegade carts, I enter the Gracious Living section. Spying a small assortment of candles down aisle 16, I step in, and stop. A singular woman is there leaning over and presenting a backside blockade of astonishing substance. I stop and feign interest in stick-on google eyes among the display of plastic doll faces and miniature baby wigs and bare-naked doll bodies. (Although each has a rectangular black censor's box blocking every single plastic doll breast from view) Turning to the side of the aisle where the female is engrossed, I give attention to an assortment of dwarf Santa clothes and elf wax molds, imagining the festive potential for my home.
I hum, "White Christmas." Then whistle it more stridently.
The lady is reading instructions on an assortment of, "Elfin Tear Yarns."
I clear my throat, then offer her my reading glasses.
She sneers. I step back and tap-tap a toe, hoping to indicate that I want to pass by. She looks up at me, shudders, then squelches out a familiar loud sound from the underside of her, which for other people is accompanied by great blushing embarrassment.
She rises and bounces the bundle of yarn off my face. I retreat good-naturedly, crowded back by the smell of burning sulfur, and exit by the way I came.
"Do you have taper candles?," I ask a grandmotherly type, interrupted while rolling up a bolt of gingerbread fabric in the sewing department.
"They should be over here," she says, leading me to an aisle I'd already searched, but found only religious votives. She stoops and scatters merchandise along a bottom shelf, revealing two nearly empty boxes of purple six-inch candles.
"This is all we have, I guess. They've been dispersed throughout the store. Everything has been bought it is thought there are some over in Christmas Enchantment Maynard mopped up when he was down at the mouth plucking clucking chickens."
Or something like that. (Her dentures kept clacking.)
She beams. I thank her, re-brace myself for battle, and resume 'round the corner and trip over a box of Barbie a shopper must've not wanted afterall.
The Christmas department is a pandemonium of disrupted organization: heaps of Michael Bolton CD's and tarnished garland and coconut bark angels all in a jumble. A poinsettia plant lays on its side on the floor in a scatter of dirt. Low down I glimpse a candle shelf. Pillars and votives and jelly jars stinking of synthetic Santa scents. Pushed back into the depths is a box of white 12 inch tapers with my name on it: nine of them at 33¢ each. I grab it all, including the box, put it in my basket then head for bedding.
Pillows are marvels of "a lot for the money." I pick out two, "Firmly engineered for back sleepers," which I am, unless laying on my side. I have never had to choose between back-sleeper pillows or otherwise, nor have I ever been presented categorized degrees of rigidity. What will happen if during the night, having chosen a back sleeper pillow, I senselessly roll onto my side? Will the pillow be monitoring my behavior and perform some odious act? OR, are the pillow manufacturers simply, through attorney collusion, protecting themselves from personal injury misadventure by being able to say, "We told you so," when I show up in court?
I grab two pillows and begin stuffing one into my basket, then instantly realize my error by refusing to accept a full-sized cart. I am reminded of a trick can of peanuts, those with a springy snake inside that leaps out and provides good-natured mirth at office parties. One pillow gets jammed into my basket and I head slightly abashed for the shopping cart corral to pick one out. Then I get the idea that a Mart Cart--you know, one of those motorized rides with a gas pedal and steering, and probably even brakes, might be a fun deviation. Yeah but, I'm not genuinely in need ... how to portray to the attendant that I am?
Brilliance surges into my head. Nearing the front I lapse into a limp and clutch at my chest. Fishing for my wallet, I pull out my, "St. Jude Medical Patient Identification Card," which details my heart valve serial number (81023678), heart valve implant date (06-02-01), model number (33M-101) and the name of my implanting physician (Dr. Doctor). I begin unbuttoning my shirt to casually exhibit the scar, which, if suspicions arise, ought clinch the deal.
I round the final end-cap display performing my ghastly charade. Shoppers start staring through eyes of great pity, babies burst out crying and small children run away screaming. A pretty young associate shrieks and runs toward me. As she nears my impending death plight I at last fall forward into her arms and grow faint against her bosomy softness. I whisper for whiskey and a bullet to bite or, at least, a motorized Mart Cart to finish my shopping for Little Susie June who's mother was recently injured by a fast falling stock.
I suddenly become temporarily more serious when a manager rushes out of an office toting a duffel bag full of shock paddles, shouting that he'd dialed 911 and, "the medics will be here soon."
I explained that everything was fine and that I only needed a moment to catch my breath. I did so, then pushed my cheek out of the comforting warm nest and stood up, showed my medical ID and requested a motorized Mart Cart. The pretty young lady took my hand and lead me to the front where an elderly man had just settled into the last one, and was folding and stowing his walker. Young woman gave me a disastrous sad look. I said I'd be fine, and benevolently told her (as the scream of three sirens loudened toward the south) I could use a regular cart to regain my composure. She got me one. I placed the pillowy basket inside along with my other treasures and hastily set out for the sporting goods department in search of disposable gas canisters.
Through the endorphin-releasing snack food and cookie section I am visually seized by an elegant dark brown package (with rich buttery stains on the outside) portraying a picture of a large cook's scoop brimming with chocolate chips with a perfectly baked chocolate chip cookie balanced on top, oozing shiny melted chocolate. Large yellow numerals: "39% CHOCOLATE CHIPS!" I search for the word "more," then realize the percentage is referring to the entire contents of the package. I put one in my cart.
Along the way I am prompted to pick up a two-pack of Super Size Sharpie markers and a bag of healthful Cheddar Sunchips ("31% less flavor!"). I am interested for quite a spell by a dump bin of "Razor Ears," although I never did figure out if they were a new style of candy or a new (DVD-only) Disney video.
Sporting goods, in the rear of the store; crowded with men buying ice fishing gear and women buying ice fishing gear for them. I find a display and take two 2-packs of Ozark Trail propane canisters.
(During my customary stop at the Store before this trip I'd told Meg that I was going to Pine City for a few items and ... did she need anything? She asked what I needed there and I told her pillows--"you can borrow some from me," and candles--"I sell candles here," and propane canisters--"I have those for sale too. You don't need to go all that way! I explained that I wanted to make the trip just for fun and that, besides, I planned to leave pillows here from now on to avoid having to bring them each time. She is one of the most gracious persons I know. I am a son. But at the Mart I get two propanes for the price of her one.)
I return to the checkout and get to watch, from three shoppers back, a cashier's animated chatter with the shoppers checking out ahead of me. When it's my turn she wants to know my intentions with the pillows, explains how her nephew badly stained his fingernails black last week through adolescent mis-use of a Sharpie pen and marveled how clever it was of me to have brought the whole corrugated box to protect my tapers from breakage. Then she lowers her voice meaningfully and warns me about not dying from propane fumes. Each bag she packed was done with attentive care, even to the point of stuffing extra plastic bags around the candles for added non-breakage.
I'd left the hand basket inside the cart, filled it with my bagged purchases, then pushed it all ahead of me and out to the car. A middle aged woman pushes a cart up to an already stuffed Jeep Cherokee. There is no space behind the front seat, boxes and gift items and Christmas ornamentals are piled to the ceiling. She opens the door and shoves the new stuff in and across onto her husband in the driver's seat, then gets in and slams the door. This scene unfolds like an old black and white slapstick routine. His arms are trapped near the roof, hands flapping in vain. Muffled shouting from them both is echoing between tiny spaces within the car. The woman is straining to rearrange purchases into a workable scheme. A large cardboard box printed, "Fiber Optic Snowman," has wedged between the seats and three large plastic bags full of colorful Christmas objects--like giant balloons--are being shoved back and forth at the roof, with no where to go. The man, with a cigarette lit between his lips, is pushing parcels of Christmas wildly back onto her, who is no longer visible in the passenger seat. The man peers out his side window, backs out of park and fires the black car away.
EZ had forgotten her ill temper and was grinning at me through the rear hatch window. As I opened the rear passenger door she kissed me excitedly and declared gladly over my return. I unloaded the cart quite thoroughly, lifting the hand basket loaded with our new stuff, up and out and thieved it right onto the back seat. It'll make a nice Woods Kindling Collector.
Saturday--
8:25 a.m.-
22 degrees this morning. Half inch of snow during the night. Bare ground spots are white.
You know, it's really not so bad using an outdoor biffy in the winter. The back of the thighs are usually the same temperature as the freezing seat so there's little sensation of cold when pressing down onto it. Numb against numb. Unless it's windy and the partially open sides and the full open side at the front of the shelter permit bluster-blown snow and dead oak leaves to whip in and whisk along past body parts that actually were warm a few minutes earlier. The old Fiberglas screening still hangs in partial sheets across the front, dipping and swaying frayed holes and rips. Through it up close it transforms the snowy cold woods, if one squints just right, into a white sand beach somewhere in the rural regions of Fiji.
2:10 p.m.-
Luna was stuffing a vintage Santa suit full of wadded-up newspapers when I walked into the Store. Neither she nor Meg knew it was antique; anyway, it wouldn't have mattered. I worked into a bowl of Meg's homemade turkey soup and watched the filling of Santa's trousers. Gene Autry and Mitch Miller's Gang were singing Christmas carols from the tape player beside the coffee maker, beneath a colorfully illuminated decoration fabricated of disposable beer cups. Nobody else was there, though one visitor stopped in to buy snuff a few minutes ago and quipped "Looks like Santa's filling his pants! Hah-Hah."
Expired editions of the Minneapolis Star Tribune were crumpled and thrust into private places, then the overcoat was begun. I ate my soup and gave helpful hints. An ailing white car pulled up at the gas pump outside and an odd ageless female, with a violent frump of black hair erupting straight out of her scalp, emerged from the passenger side and began a slow shuffle toward the door. A silver ring pierced her nose. A medium length of dog chain drooped out of it and clipped into a large silver loop perforated through cartilage near the entrance of her left ear. She nudged-nudged the Store door open and climbed up inside to join us, standing with the door wide open as large volumes of December air rushed in and pooled at my feet. I looked over for a look, then pretended to discontinue my interest. Her companion, a skinny male about fifty years old, stepped in and shut the door. The female edged over and stood slightly to my right and slightly behind--I was noting her position with peripheral apprehension and hair-raised-on-the-back-of-my-head logic. An unreasonable period of time went by, so I quickly glanced over my shoulder to see if maybe she was waiting for me to maybe scoot ahead, so she could make passage toward the soft drink cooler.
No. There was adequate space. She had a vacuous look, staring into distance space toward the bug zapper glowing blue above the grill in the kitchen. So I stayed my ground, I mean, I'm a reasonable guy.
Her cohort was busy slamming a few bundles of newspaper delivery onto the table by the door then pausing to study grain patterns on the floor. The female behind me finally began a sideways tilt toward the cooler, then violently, but quite incidentally I'm sure, slammed into my chair, which caused the elbow holding my spoon to veer to the west and release turkey and noodles down onto my chest.
I arose and moved myself and my soup to the other side of the table where I could eat in safety and watch. Her boyfriend, or father, or ex-husband out on parole, or gran-daddy visiting from Arkansas, approached quite suddenly and jolted past on the left side where I sat at my table.
Luna and Meg, completely distracted by Santa construction and occupied by diplomatic constriction, afforded me no sympathetic glances, nor did either surreptitiously blow kisses to rekindle my diminishing good cheer. I arose, nonplused as possible, and gathered my utensils, assembled my pile of plastic crackers onto the ancillary plate, and headed for the faraway side of a table near the door where I was sure to be out of further trouble. Returning to watch, Luna, who is a delight of youthful good cheer, was finished ramming crushed newspaper up into Santa's belly and, chuckling, preparing to give him a head.
The "head" was a Styrofoam wig-form, manufactured for hosting wigs in theater dressing rooms or in hairpiece boutiques where wigs are found on display. Luna reached back to the top of the skull with two fingers and slowly pulled a four-inch long pin right out of its crown. A sudden cascade tumbled out of the soda cooler, pounding thumps and chaotic disorder pummeled onto the wood floor. I put my head down into my soup and pretended to be deaf.
"Ugh," sounded off to my left where chain-woman's left arm was submerged up to her armpit inside the soda rack. Meg scurried over, swooping low to intercept a 20 ounce bottle of Squirt dashing toward the furnace--roiling with foamy excitation inside, grabbed it up and took charge inside the cooler as the lady waddled away toward Santa. Meg pushed her bosom up against further revolt inside the cooler and chased two cans of Dr. Pepper with a right hand--which leapt free and pounded to the floor, rolled, and bumped the door. She peevishly hollered into the cooler, then again more tersely toward the ceiling, "aren't the ones in front good enough for ya?" But the visitors aren't hearing. Luna sticks a scruff of soiled cotton to Santa's right Styrofoam eyebrow with masking tape.
Meg restores order inside the cooler.
The woman person stands and observes Santa. Then turns to me and asks if it has a penis. Soup ejects from my nose. Cohort pays for the Squirt. They meander through the mercantile section of the Store, circling twice, gathering momentum, then exit the door, leaving it wide open against the jukebox at my back.
Meg slams the door.
"There's always gotta' be a first! Is she a retard, or something?" looking to Luna for guidance. "She acts like a damn retard!"
I assume Meg is acquainted with everybody who comes into the Store, unless it's snowmobile or hunting season when city strangers appear. This time she is completely bewildered and asking Luna, who is a young person and ought know about such things. Luna chuckles. I suggest that the pair might have been spaced out.
"Where you gonna' put Santa when you're done?"
"Outside."
Luna is working
on a pair of cutout eyes. "I looked through magazines until I found these.
They're from a UPS ad." With circles of tape she fixes them in place
and Santa turns furtive; flat paper pupils stare hard at the shotgun hanging
from chains above Herb's place at the table.
Elvis Presley sings,
"God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen."
Axel comes in, grabs
a Busch from the cooler, studies Santa's scruffy eyebrows and lack of feet
and delivers an opinion that they give him a gun and prop him up at the bar.
Or prop him up on the tractor out front with a beer in his hand.
8:20-
Damnable darkness. December is NOT May, with only slight alterations! Black blackness closing in from every window, galling me through invisible uncaulked gaps. The sky, so brilliant with crispy night sights like stars winking poetically through leafless lifeless tree limbs, go away! I don't want to be metaphysically stirred. I want brightness and warm air and you just will not do. Cold, pressing in at EZ and I from close at hand, just beyond that meager panel of plywood six feet away. Frigid air seeping, struggling to get in at us fleshly corporeal people who are honest and kind, to shut down our systems and install clownish dead X's in place of winter-depressed eyes. Although EZ would surely relish a run right now outdoors in the black-snapping eleven-degree hell, I have outgrown the youthful urge to expose myself to frostbiting pain. She's got her coat on and is ready to go, and needs no head covering or mittens, or scarf surrounding her neck. How the hell do dogs do that? I mean, get up from a snooze on the bed and stride right outside, whether it's ninety or nine, with only what they're wearing at the time.
It was just a few days ago that I was here with a beloved young daughter who swatted at deerflies and created such wonderful fusses, calling me, "Buster," and getting away with driving through roadside brush on a magnificent morning of dew. Back then it seemed all of the ease was there to stay and summer's melodious compassion of would live on forever. Then dead December came along, arriving insidiously with innocent minor warnings, through slight up-and-down temperature fluctuations of September and October and November. Then we're thrust savagely into December's permanent despair, skin-cracking blackness, and blind, "leave-me-here-to-die," despondency. The hat on the nail above the door has a deerfly patch on it with fragments of dead deerfly parts still clinging.
As I speak, the stove is chugging heroically to shove back the explicit
cold forcing in at us.
Earlier tonight we drove into town. In the dark, for something to do. Long after sundown, a quarter to six. We parked at the grocery store. I went inside for something to do, and bought a horribly date-expired package of Little Debbie Nutty Bars for $1.29. Never know when eating a stale nutty bar might come in handy and provide a few meager calories of heat and something to do.
That took three minutes; now what?
EZ's got it easy. She's got something to do matter what time of year. She can sleep. She was already dreaming in the back of our car when I returned, snoring heartlessly and twitching of running rabbits. She didn't even welcome me back. I ran the motor to warm myself up and honked the horn for something to do and tried to relive the good times of summer by watching the grocery store door. Grownups and little boys and small clumps of giggling girls, mostly naked in swim suits and T-shirts--or so it appeared to me, walked through the door. (It's an adolescent thing, I guess, to walk around outside and expose a lot of bare skin when it's below freezing. I remember a girl cousin showing up at Sunset Hill in Minneapolis one January day wearing short shorts and nylons--and a simile of jacket and a cigarette bobbing out of blue lips. She sledded and threw snowballs and got thoroughly snowy and never once showed a notice to the cold. That was forty years ago. Now she has gout.)
I have heard all the theories about natural rhythms of the seasons and how god made mankind to be slowed down like houseflies in winter. But what the hell is there to do? Other animals get to hibernate and sleep it all off. Insects play dead to avoid getting swatted. But I can't. Nor do I want to. And I'm tired of activities like killing time at a shopper's Christmas frenzy in a Mart far away where ignorance scrawls the word, "too," to draw attention to a silly clutch of sale items center-aisle when the senseless employee meant to write "to." Eloquence is especially tawdry when applied with an illiterate brush.
But no matter. Shoppers will overlook it for the sake of saving 3 percent at the expense of a small boy with rickets bringing home fifty cents for the week somewhere in Indochina. Whose face has been removed from the equation by subhuman trade agreements.
9:16-
EZ, who had been trying to settle cozily on the frigid plywood floor beside the table a couple of minutes ago, is now on the bed, motionlessly surrounded by quilts pressing into her head. Mendelsohn is playing energetically, as directed by Eugene Ormandy over Minnesota Public Radio out of Duluth. The stove has warmed the cabin to 78 degrees and, although for the moment we're okay, we're probably suffering more than we realize. Maybe later we'll even take a stroll in the brightly lit moon-drenched woods and stare up at the stars.
Tomorrow I would like us to make a final trek to the North Pool for the season. I expect by the time we come again for New Years Eve the woods will be too full of snow for foot travel. I'd like to cut firewood and eliminate a few popple trees. I'd like to flag wood piles out back and indicate with the new Sharpie pen when they were split, so we remember when they can be burned. I'd like to find a place to sit in the woods for a couple of hours and do nothing but let the silence seep in and the muse get set free, but I'm not equipped warmly enough for that. What I am going to do is drive to Minneapolis to see the big sights and become greatly appalled. Moth to flame.
9:50-
The lady on the radio just reported in an, "of-course-you-all-know-that-already," voice that the viola is the butt of jokes everywhere. She tells me there are, "seventeen pages" of viola jokes on the internet. It is a, "reviled instrument." I guess everybody knows that, as much as everybody knows that Jesse Ventura, with his feather boa, is the butt of every thinking person's ridicule.
I didn't know that.
Sunday--
Drove past the Boy Scout camp of my youth today, working into traffic-gridlocked Anoka then out the north side and onto County 47. The road twists and dips up and down over hills and past new housing neighborhoods where corn fields ripened thirty-five years ago. Traffic "swuffed" past in the oncoming lane. Sport utility vehicles were drafting behind me like Nascar drivers in second through twelfth place, although, as an act of courtesy, I was already exceeding the speed limit by five and careening through curves a lot faster than good sense liked. The outskirts of Anoka should've dwindled, replaced by aged farmhouses and clusters of corn cribs and machine sheds and granaries and picturesque weathered barns.
A good number of the southbound cars had Christmas trees roped to their roofs. Happy faces showed through windshields on this sunny Sunday afternoon two weeks before Christmas. Landscaped lawns along the sides are completely free of snow, only remnants of plowed up piles remain from a fifteen inch snowfall two weeks earlier. It seems everybody is out of the house and inside their car and hurrying to go somewhere far away from where they are right now.
Though the roadway is new and smooth and easy to drive, there are no shoulders for introspective motorists like me who would like to pull over and let the boxcars attached to my bumper go ahead and play through.
Before I am prepared to accept it a large wooden sign approaches just ahead on the right with the words, "Rum River Boy Scout Camp." How can this be? We're still in the city, and the camp was far out in the country, and to enter we pulled into an old farmer's driveway and stopped to visit the man who'd benefited much of his property to a North Minneapolis Boy Scout Troop. The farmhouse was gone, and so were the huge pine trees that surrounded the front. The camp driveway was squeezed in between new houses and fenced-in back yards. Everything is not the same.
No time to react or lay on the brakes. I calmly swish by with my circus train in tow.
I mull this over, ponder and wonder what it is that makes a curmudgeon so. Those people (usually with uncut whiskers and grim scattered teeth), usually grown into an older condition, have become embittered by the world, or at least pissed-off about a great deal of how life is these days and not like it was when the model was set at age twelve.
Say for instance cell phones. A curmudgeon scoffs at cell phones. Especially cell phones in use by speeding drivers who happen to be driving a monstrous Cadillac truck fixed with a heavy chrome cattle-catcher attached to the front bumper, all within 60 mph inches of the curmudgeon's own rear bumper. Most curmudgeons I know get disgusted at being pushed along against his own will. Stop lights are haughty examples of what I mean. It seems every modern motorist, stopped by a red light while out on the highway, will, when the signal turns green, bury the gas pedal as fully as possible and not let it go until a speed at least 15 mph above the posted speed limit is reached or, 80 in the case of a 65 mph limit. The posted speed limit is actually a minimum motorists, although traveling at the minimum will subject a driver to a whole lot of facial gestures and hand signal communications and present himself an Amish buggy road hazard, by going so slow. These days too-slow drivers are arrested for holding up traffic.
I reminisced.
Flames fell, silently glanced off a deep invisible obstruction, vanished. I shuddered, awestruck and horrified. Danny grinned, marveling again at concealed danger and fearsome infinity. He had found the old well during an earlier search and wanted to show it off.
The chasm showed itself as a small dark insignificance, flattened dead grass intertwined over the top; an obscuring, but not securing, veil. We pushed the grasses aside. The maw appeared, nervous and wide, about fifteen inches across. Stones and dirt crumbled into the blackness, but made no sound of a bottom being reached. Or splashed. A clutch of dead grasses was set fire with a lighter (good Scouts, being prepared, always carry cigarette lighters) and dropped in. It descended, illuminating only itself, and briefly a stick or branch lodged crosswise in the shaft, then continued downward out of sight. Cool air wafted out, mixed with odors of rot and fetid distress, enhancing the rumor that a five-year old girl, missing for three years, might have fallen in. A picturesque brick silo stood fifteen feet away but nothing else was around where the farmstead had been.
This sidetrip took place during a ten-mile hike in the spring of 1964. We, along with about twenty-five other Boy Scouts from north Minneapolis had been encouraged by peer humiliation and parental insistence, to get out of the house and earn our Hiking Merit Badge, "damnit," which required five ten-mile hikes and one twenty-miler. We were dropped off by carloads on the county road north of Anoka, about 9 a.m. under a cloudy gray canopy, more or less ten miles south of the camp along the Rum River. We were told to walk all the way there if we ever wanted to see our bag lunches again.
Some of the boys were obedient and trustworthy good Scouts. They established for themselves a cheerful swift pace and quickly advanced out of our sight. The rest of us bitched and complained, tripped and shoved one another into dirty snowbanks while discussing libidinous topics (we were all aged thirteen through fifteen) like the marvelous enlargement of Judy and Peggy's bustlines--both coming along nicely--and recounted girl conquests we never had had. The temperature was in the 30's. The late March snow was melty and wet, and gone from the woods and fields, lingering only in plowridges. Snowballs were thrown, faces and jackets and shoes got grimly wet. One or two of the boys had forgotten themselves and wore street shoes--loafers and dress shoes with wingtips, which grew wretched and ruined.
Sagging with low spirits two hours into the hike, plodding miserable and dank along the tiresome blacktop, we heard a motor, growing quickly loud, approaching from the south. Being on the prowl for something fresh to do, Alvin pounded up a big snowball and roused the rest of us to too.
"Let's throw 'em at that car coming at us down the road!"
Four or five overtly bashful boys immediately ran into the woods; one excitable fellow splashed vomit onto the roadway and his Thom McCanns, then chased the others into hiding. But to the rest of us, who couldn't think of anything better to do, it sounded sensible. Alvin was a rambunctious fun Scout most of us looked up to because he was older, and I for one figured if he thought it all right then it probably was. We tamped one or two reasonably sized snowballs. Wayne (nicknamed, "Carp Lips," because of his strikingly equivalent profile) made up four, storing three in the crook of his left arm. We stood helter-skelter along the gravel shoulder as a white '56 Oldsmobile 88 rocketed around a curve in a sensational wide lean, goin' fast a quarter-mile back. Its grill-grin (cars in the fifties were famous for vivacious big grills, each model had its own trademark grin, leer, or broad chromium smirk) showed no teeth and was droopy slack on one side, dangling low to the pavement, like it'd just come from numbing dental work, or had recently suffered a stroke. And, it bobbed up and down on that side as though trying to hold in some drool.
Onward it wallowed. I expected the driver to suddenly slow, or at least take his foot of the gas to notice a meander of Boy Scouts lining each side of his pass.
It did momentarily, to study the scene or maybe slug back some wine, then gunned it hard and aimed straight down the line. We were all slyly hiding our plan, standing at Boy Scout attention, two fingers saluting at the sides of our heads. (Except Carp Lips who pretended his left arm was in a sling.)
Grill Grin was upon us at once. An empty Grain Belt beer bottle arced out of the driver's side window--barely missing Earl, and bounced into the ditch. We all reacted fast, reared back and released the snow in our fists, but the speed of the rushing white car was so great that most of them missed. One fortunate Good Scout, through luck or big city practice, "blammed" a big one off the rear door of the foe.
Elvis was inside too. We heard him singing Devil in Disguise.
Few adolescents have had much experience with leading a moving target, (especially one weighing two tons and streaking past fast, only ten feet away), or given much forethought to what's yonder if one's mark should be missed. In this instance what was yonder were Boy Scouts lining the side of the county road quite closely, and subjected to adrenaline-hurled missiles traveling mostly horizontal and thudding against foreheads and torsos, and enlivening one Scout to collapse on the shoulder and clutch at his crotch.
Tires screeched, then stopped screeching. The gas pedal was floored, the motor blasted fast, the Oldsmobile careened into a curve and was gone.
Boy Scouts bitched ... at each other, and about crappy dumb aim and cold stinging fingers. Emotions got hostile. Perry ran up to Carp Lips and shoved him into the ditch. Lindon, who'd "blammed" the big one and instantly become tedious through boasting, attracted a semi-circle of Scouts around his front as Chris crouched on hands and knees behind, so Doug in front could topple him back.
We halted mid-reproach as the unmufflered engine again roared above the trees, revving high and coming on fast. Priggish Scouts, who'd come out of hiding, fled over the snowbank and re-entered the woods. Other boys yelped spiritedly and dove off the road and began frenzied snowball construction ... stacking loose piles near their feet in the ditch. We were well spread out, about fifty yards along both sides of the road. The Rocket 88 engine blasted above the trees then increased in volume as the big car swung out of the curve and headed straight for us.
A few snowballs flew prematurely, exploding on the pavement, then a storm of white blur filled the air over the road. Arms pumped, grunts sounded, "thud-thump-plunk," snowballs burst into glass and fenders and added some white broken teeth to the grill.
Then it was over. The car swayed down the road and fishtailed out of sight.
Boy Scouts chattered and shouted excited swearwords, bitched about missed aims and snowballs gone bad, then listened toward the south, awaiting a rematch.
"He ain't comin' back. Let's go!"
Skeptical Scouts cautiously rejoined from the woods and we started trudging again.
The motor revved again, further away, to build up more speed, tires screeched through curves, though still out of sight.
Boy Scouts leapt into action building new supplies, the worrisome youths clambered back into the woods. Into the straights approached the thunderous hulk, lips dipping and swaying, a funhouse contraption. Good Scouts had learned how to lead their throws, to more efficiently meet their goal. All was tranquil for a few moments as woman and car raced toward us at 60.
All hell broke loose. Snowballs streaked out from all angles, blamming into sheet metal and pasting against glass. The driver, a smoker, had committed a serious oversight and neglected to roll up her side window, open two inches from the top. A snowball smashed into the lip of the window, exploded onto the driver's left temple and showered the inside of the windshield with sparkly wet drops. The brakes were applied strenuously, tires stopped turning, screeched, and started to smoke. The Oldsmobile began a slow pirouette down the center of the road. A pothole dipped a right tire down; with a "pow" it went flat as the front of the car dropped and came to a stop, followed by a raspy clanging as the grill tore free and spun onward down the pavement, halting, then twirling like a quarter spinning on a tabletop, before flattening silent.
We all stood for a moment or two, then made an unscheduled sprint as muffled bedlam was heard inside the snow-splattered car.
4
p.m.-
Open water is still flowing at the North Pool, a bluish gray sheet that appears motionless until I move closer and see silent stirrings shifting along the surface. Feathery blades of yellow underwater grasses sway near the surface. The water level has fallen by an inch since the ice first formed. Ice shelves have widened along the edges, cut-crystal designs with lace edges and undulant layers of varying thickness, and, if imaginative enough, one can even make out profiles of satyrs and other past presidents and even a few telephone numbers etched in the ice. Air pockets swirl frozen bright lines, circles and swoops and elegant unmoving motion. Closer to the bank are webworks of spidery fine ice weavings, veins chiseled by frost in the air. Toward the end of an ice peninsula a cluster of foamy bubbles has become trapped between the moving water and the ice shelf. Dancing, bobbling, expanding and contracting by the movement of water jostling past. It reminds me of a biology film illustrating highly excited cells dividing. Each bubble has a white margin and is in constant bumping and flexing motion against hard squishing neighbors. There are eleven cells in all, six big, five small ones, filling in the interstices.
Toward the middle
of the pool where the sun is still bright, the ice is a thin skin, nearly
an optical illusion to discern where it ends and flowing water begins. Further
out, in the center, a snow dome rises white and sun-washed bright.
Walking back along the trail the sun winks low between tree trunks,
soothing across the snow. An oak tree is still clinging to the summer's crop
of leaves, leathery dry and clacking one other on a burst of breeze. EZ tears
out of a distant soiree behind me and gallops past, straight into the sun,
pulling behind her a gangling distorted afterimage of a tail-swirling dog.