"Nyah-nyah. Look What I Got!"
Sunday, June 16Ð
8:10 p.m.-
"Nothing's attacking me yet."
Caleb noted this a few seconds after getting out of the car in the clearing. We'd just arrived and he had gladdened with optimism that the mosquitoes and deerflies might have taken this summer off.
No. Within two minutes he soaked himself wet with Deep Woods Off and, holding the can upside down, sprayed a long blast of repellent into empty air to demonstrate how much more effective was his brand of bug juice than mine which, when held upside down, blew only air.
His first mission was to build the fire outside. He went for the pre-prepared kindling inside the cabin then had a prudent doubt, stuck his head out and asked (as though last year's rules might have expired), "can I use the kindling in here or is that just for winter?" then went foraging through underbrush and ferns, discovering pentitudes of fuel by tripping on it.
I unloaded the car and had a good laugh at the rear hatch. Road dust builds thick and orange on the back of the car while driving around here. It's a talcum-fine powder and a fun diversion to play, when preparing to slam the hatch down, to say, louder and louder as the gate lowers, "ah, ah, AH, CHEW!" as a fine spray of dust explodes out like a wet sneeze.
What is it about hand-sawing a log that compels us to help hurry the job by turning it to a fresh spot when the old cut gets boring and slow and seems not to progress? It's what Caleb did and I do and anybody who uses a dull handsaw to cut up a four-inch thick log does to at least show us some hope that an impression is being made. His patience was tried by a Swede saw that bound and stalled and wouldn't stay straight in the cut, and the short stubby end of the log kept see-sawing up and down and swiveling on its sidewalk block.
I cut the shaggy grass. He collected wood and tended the fire. Later
we are going to slow-roast a batch of ten brats over the coals to replace
twelve brats that needed discarding last night due to distracted blackening
at home by me. It was a smart move on my part, or was up until the whole deal
went bad. I'd picked up two packages of un-cooked brats, planning to pre-charbroil
them and bring them along for easy re-heating over the pre-fired fire at The
Woods. The charcoal was pre-grayed in the grill and spread out to a perfect
layer of glow. The sausages were laid out and both grill vents opened to a
just-right airflow and the cover was lowered into place. I looked out the
window after a couple of minutes, "mm-mm," thick flavorful smoke
exiting the top vent. Perfect. I looked again several minutes later. Still
smoking. "These'll be great brats," I said to myself and EZ who
bleared up from her nap. After about five minutes, or maybe a tad more, I
figured the time right to go out and see if maybe they were ready for turning.
Smoke was pouring out of the vent and around the shuddering lip of the lid,
jumping like a saucepan lid does when water's boiling hard inside. Flame fingers
were clawing to get out, bouncing the lid up from the base, then retreating
inward as it slammed down. The neighbors had come outside and were lined up
in lawn chairs watching the show. The man had a tripod set up with a video
camera aimed at my incineration. The neighbor lady across the street shouted
she'd "put in the call," and I heard sirens screaming in the night.
Anyway, the brats were cindered into tiny slag fingers and thrown into the woods back of the house where during the night I heard choking from one or two animals. That's why tonight I am being extra vigilant to cook these new brats slower than the last batch.
9:12-
Caleb brought along a Father's Day gift and is excited for me to open it, in fact asked as we drove out his driveway if I wanted to open it right then. I declined, since I was driving. Now, five hours later, he walks over and holds up in one hand a card and in the other a colorfully-wrapped parcel. Both say "Dad." So I go get a beer, sit down and open the card and read the cover words aloud. Nice, above ordinary, about how Dads know Dad stuff like the right times for a wink or goofy joke, but still written by somebody else who doesn't know me. The inside looks better, with a hand-written paragraph covering the left side. I make a smart remark about not reading his personal inside words aloud because I might cry. But it's more about wanting time alone inside myself to consider without performance what wasn't intended for dramatization. I read them silently. I thank him aloud and move on to open the gift package which has a blueberry bush all ready for planting and a pair of leather work gloves, perfect for working with firewood. He'd had a place for the bush in mind and it turned out to be exactly where I first thought it should be planted too. Both items were perfectly suited to me and I expressed true gratitude for his thoughtfulness. But all the while what has really moved me, where humans crave to be touched, is circulating way down deep. His words were genuine and contemplative. They were straight no-nonsense and meant what they said. It was clear he intended to express honor and respect, all done without embellishing adjectives which sometimes are unemotionally listless. I don't know why I didn't say all that when I felt it.
10:10-
The brats have been pre-warming for fifteen minutes, high on the grate, cool scattered coals below. The Tiki lights are lit, sooty smoke rising straight off of statuesque flames. Another perk from work is a solid brass fireplace tool set brought over last year and set up by the inside stove. A silly space waster that I shouldn't have accepted, except that it was going to be thrown out in the trash because the box it was new in didn't get brought back by the customer who didn't want the tools after all. Ah, but maybe all is not in vain.
The brats need frequent turning, but the heat is hotter than my fingers prefer, especially by the time I turn the third or fourth in a row. I need tongs. Maybe the brass fireplace log grippers will do, the sort twenty-four inches long that one holds in both hands and, from far back, maneuvers burning chunks of wood from the safety of a living room recliner. Inside I go to bring them into the action, to justify their existence here. They are hinged halfway along their length, like scissors are, with wide and long pincer ends for gripping the subject. At the other end are two loopy loops for handles. A user grips one in each hand and immediately feels divine, like a divinator seeking after water. Their weight adds to that impression because they dip toward the ground without my even trying to point out water, dragged by gravity pulling all of ten pounds.
I circle the grate, "click-clicking" my tool, surveying an approach. Then steer the polished tongs toward a sausage dripping its sauce nearest the flames and clamp down on it. Lift, set it down same side up. Unlike one-handed tongs, which permit wrist-turning action, these log rolling pliers require me to criss-cross my arms 180 degrees without tactile feedback from the brat. I try another. Lift and twist it above the firegrate, rotating my arms and chewing inside my cheek for precision. The meat sets down exactly where it'd been and looks up at me with a quizzical expression. The third and fourth attempts almost went better but one particular fiesty sausage took up my invitation and rolled toward the fire.
So I resumed manual manipulation.
11:10-
The cardtable and two chairs are brought out and set up beside the fire. So are three candles and one of the two oil lamps. The older oil lamp, the one with wintry pastoral scenes of specious cut glass is gone. Although it was phony cut glass it was The Woods' phony cut glass and needed to be here, not wherever it is now, in some stranger's shack lending cheezy cheap ambiance to a looter's bare walls. The north door was left unlocked after the last trip so some bastard must've taken advantage of the oversight and made off with our lamp. But why didn't he (burglars out here are rarely she) take the lawnmower, one or both Colemans, the leftover roll of hardware cloth, or the nearly full faded bottle of Pine Sol in easy view.
So, we've been robbed again, for such a measly trite object--Oh, just a minute, let me think, maybe that was the lamp I refilled and cleaned and put up in Red's Shed for Chuck's use in May.
"Caleb. Go up to the sleeper and see if it's there." He went and it was.
Yahtzee is our choice of duel. Dice are rattled in the cup and dumped
eagerly out. Moths dive at the candles and become injured and scoot through
our playing field, white ones and gray ones and one or two with blue stripes.
A huge threatening presence flits big and "whumping" past my ear.
I startle and flap a hand perturbedly, before I knew it was a cecropia moth.
It set down on the game box to give us a quick look, then winged out of sight.
Large straights and small, full houses and fun-house threes, bonus points go ungained, so do Yahtzees, which are five dice showing the same spots. And occasional brat-arranging breaks.
Along the way in the night the topic of "voluptuous" and "nice female asses" arose, then were combined into one sentiment, such as "voluptuous ass" and what attributes make one butt voluptuous, thus arousing lust, and another repulsive, eliciting disgust. I'd mentioned an algebra tutor's backside as "magnificent," then honed the effigy more finely by inserting "voluptuous" as a refiner and explained that my video taping of her working quadratic equations on the blackboard had been done with dual intent. Caleb wanted a more defined idea of what "voluptuous" meant, and all-in-all the discussion zeroed more and more affectionately on female derrieres and their shapes, and the dubious razor-fine lines between sexy and gross.
He disclosed that his girlfriend Trixie's ass was excellent. And he'd like to bring her over to the house soon to exhibit it to me. Then he began to understand that he'd be giving outright consent to his old man to ogle his girl's behind and that maybe he didn't want that, but still proud of his cohort's shapely rear and wanting to flourish its magnificence at me. "Nyah-nyah, look what I got."
We notice the base nature of our conjectures, both slightly appalled for saying in private what we think privately every day, but are constricted by common decency to never actually put out into polite society, where everybody pretends such subjects are domains of men of low breeding and prurient disgrace.
Three games are completed with low scores for both. Brats are gobbled, s'mores are melted, and we turn in for the night at 1:15.
Monday--
8:20 a.m.-
We awake when EZ crawls up the mattress.
"What time is it? Ten-thirty?"
"No. Guess."
"Noon?"
Sun bright and high, filling the woods with sight so different than when it's dark and invisible like last night. EZ sits by the door, metronoming slightly side-to-side as swayed by her tail. She wants to get out. I open the door and she jumps down into a pool of fern shadow.
9:24-
Caleb is running EZ back to the cabin where she'll have to stay. I am backing the car up from where I'd stopped abruptly with the thought that she might be the genesis of the horrible smell filling the car with stink. I stopped, released the hatchback, and went around back and lifted the hatch and made the same mistake I did with Susie in May by burying my nostrils in her fur.
"Oh God! Get out!"
Putrid crust along her neck. So she stays away from us while we go to town for doughnuts and ice and beer.
9:48-
A Miller Beer banner, one of many hanging along an outside wall of the liquor store advertising beer prices to passing motorists, has printed on a lower corner: "Live Responsibly."
Miller has gone too far. They used to tell me to, "Drink Responsibly," or flatly declared, "Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk." Now they're breaking free of the alcoholic class and broadening an appeal to civilian responsibility in all phases of life such as not swearing too much or lighting farts too close to mealtime or caring too much about temporal dross.
But it's too vague. What is "living responsibly?"
Miller has a brand called High Life. Is high life key to a responsible life? Or irresponsible low life, if I were to drink too much four times out of three? They also manufacture High Life Light and peddle the same hurrah in the lower right corner. Maybe a light high life is closer to godliness than heavy high life, or blatant high life, or at least less degrading for certain religious factions whose lightness, while using Light High Life, would elevate us closer to heaven, being lighter thus brighter and better equipped to receive dim answers than a regular man.
10:02-
We are sitting in the car eating doughnuts and sugary fried things. A shirtless five-year old boy in sneakers and shorts, with a diaper showing above his waistband, is marching to and fro with an empty bag of microwave popcorn. A girl, a year or two his junior with mid-eastern complexion and a dot on her forehead, is circling aimlessly with a sweater on her head. An obese young woman wearing low-cut black is talking on a pay phone, "to grandma."
10:25-
Not wanting to head back so soon we drive down into Robinson Park and park. A municipal worker is short-tempered with a government string trimmer that won't work. He throws it into the truck and drives away. Caleb wants to see the bridge described from last August, so we drive along the lane and stop at the display with the photos. He enjoys history, a lot, but I noticed it wasn't on his list of possible career choices when later he named pilot, lawyer, proctologist.
We explore the narrow trail and find the bridge legs in the trees. He submerges among the girders and trees and rocks and steel, then we climb up the trail to the bridge. Holding the cable railing he walks to the center of the trestle. I become alarmed to imagine a train approach out of the blue, as they do, around the curve on two wheels and regretless, moving through at high speed. The message to live responsibly is still resonating down deep, so I move back onto land where I can leap for the bushes if needed. Caleb looks down, spits, drops a few rocks and imagines (he tells later) actually stepping off into bare air to under-responsibly commit suicide, as he's read one man's account about doing just that. He lived to tell and didn't die, that's what I'm told.
2:22 p.m.-
Caleb is wearing a new left-over Deerfly patch from last year. We are headed through the woods north, wanting to see what the field I visited in April looks like today. And he is disappointed, through frequent checks, to see that the fly trap has only one customer stuck to it.
Woodticks are plentiful. I mean abundant, everywhere, profuse. Walking through a grassy patch we pick off a number who've ignored heavy applications of DEET. EZ has put on twice our distance and probably might have triple our count, which so far is six and eight. But I've seen none on her, so maybe not. The pasture appears through a tunnel of leaves. Along up ahead I see daisies and hawkweed and illuminated green grasses waving at us to hurry.
Inside the field Caleb picks a daisy and determines, behind my back, "she loves me."
A fluorescent yellow spider tip-toes over a stalk of purple clover. Caleb's hat has three deerflies flat on their backs, kicking the air.
Poison Ivy! It's here. Dad's assurance through all the years, beginning from the first, was wrong. I've never seen it here and became complacent, forgetting to look. Because Dad's are right and know what's up and us little boys need never consider verifying his word. But there it is. Green and jagged leaves growing in three parts. It's around the base of the deer stand. And I don't think I've touched any of it. I stand back.
3:15-
Nearing the North Pool Caleb stops to pick four more ticks off his bare legs and socks, reapplying another fresh upside down coating of OFF. A few minutes earlier passing through a dense woods away from the field I briefly felt what Chelsea had gone through last year when losing her mind over deerflies, swirling her hysteria at the sleeve-ends of a whipping sweatshirt. I am more mature then she was at that time and am trying my best to live responsibly, not wanting to endanger Caleb's relative equilibrium by acting somehow deranged.
EZ's vitality was restored by a long drink in the water. Strangely again as two years ago in the fall, the usually opaque brown water is clear, showing the rocky bottom bright in the strong sunlight. Rocky flat ledges laid open under low level water and minnows making shadows against the silt six inches below.
Along the final stretch of trail before coming out at the bridge site. EZ trudges second behind Caleb, who is slashing half-heartedly at ferns with an associate staff and carrying six deerflies stuck to his hat. The outing has grown tiresome through flies and ticks and scratchy blackberry brambles scoring red tracks on our legs. We try sitting for a few minutes on the bench, hopeful that, with stopping our motion through tall ferns and grasses, the deerflies will go away. I was wrong.
4:10-
The boat landing and dock is all ours. That's a good thing because I did not bring swim trunks and must strip down to briefs, which, being treadbare and white, will permit sight of a non-voluptuous ass. The water is tolerable, though not like last July. EZ swims slowly and hauls herself up the ramp and stands without shaking, dripping and weary. We bathe and shampoo then empty the tiny shampoo bottle over EZ and lather her fur, concentrating on her neck where she stunk the worst.
Back at the cabin refreshed and re-sprayed with DEET, EZ came over
and sat for a pet. She stared up with a tick on her eyebrow. I picked it off,
along with another one burrowing into her lip. Then stroked her head and found
three more under the fur of her head. Five or six on each ear and five or
six on each underside of the same ears. She laid down and showed me her belly,
pointing down there with the crook of a paw where she desired me to search
out and pick off more mobs of chewing ticks. Caleb came over and crouched
down on the other side and we harvested her skin. For a half hour, then a
short while later, another twenty minutes. A fair estimate of the number is
around one hundred. In warm sheltered places around her neck there were congregations
of ticks crowding down deep where their getting was good. Since then (that
was two days ago) I've spent sessions of time with her plucking more ticks.
In fact a few minutes ago, on this cool rainy Wednesday at home in Wisconsin,
she arose from a nap and came over for attention. Another six ticks have been
broken in two and deposited dead in the wastebasket by my desk. I have tried
products like Top Spot!" without success. They are chemical agents, and
applied to the skin of her upper back, and are supposed to kill ticks as they
feed. But one strict rule states that a newly doused dog is supposed to stay
out of water for three days after application. I don't like the idea of harsh
chemicals against her skin. Even tick collars are of minimal effectiveness
and reputed to cause irritations and rashes.
6:45-
The day has been classic cloudless summer with temperatures in the low seventies. We drove to the new bridge seeking something--anything--to do. Caleb brought the Frisbee along so we lost ourselves playing catch along the road and in sweet-smelling ditches blooming bright with ripe knee-high clover. Worked up good sweats, soaked up rays of the lowering sun. EZ trolled through grasses and picked up new friends.
From high on the bridge looking down in the shallows we saw two twenty-inch suckers barely covered in four-inch deep water, then propelling forward suddenly, raising swells on the surface.
We drove to the sluiceway. It's been reworked ineptly with new culverts and new concrete, but only halfway and grossly half-assed. And off on the side: a big patch of poison ivy.
The video camera went for a tear, plummeting to the gravel road, bouncing once or twice, releasing its battery and casting off the wireless microphone receiver and rolling to a stop by the weeds. A minute or two later I sensed its trauma and looked in vain for it beside me in the car. Then looked into Caleb's eyes pleading for him to say I really hadn't forgotten it atop the car when we departed the sluiceway. He didn't. But turned us around and retraced the half-mile where we saw it laying disgraced on its side.
"Gosh darn it," is not what I said.
I picked up the battery and other loosened parts and the main piece of machinery. Replaced the battery and re-submerged the receiver back into its Velcro, dusted it off and turned it on, "Ding," and viewed Caleb through the viewfinder. He looked good to see that way and, despite new scratches, so far it works as good, though uglier, as new.
7:40-
The haunted farmhouse
is being dishonored by others. Someone chose the front yard to discard their
burned-out gas grill. A mound of jettisoned storm windows has been dumped
further back. The kitchen is emptier than two years ago, probably by a big
city retro-antiques dealer; the table and chairs have been taken away. Bedrooms
are littered with trash thrown around, and from outside a microwave oven has
been shove
d
through one bedroom window, tipped on its side. Upholstered furniture is knifed
open. A small twist of dog shit lays on the buckled hardwood floor. When we
weren't looking EZ brought it outside and half ate it before getting caught.