Dynamite Discharges
Friday, March 14Ð
7:58 p.m.-
Ghost plane is flying over in the west. EZ is on the bed tonguing her paws, endlessly-endlessly. Endlessly. Just like she does customarily most nights back at home when called onto the bed, lick-lick-lick until I finally object and boss her to stop. She lays on the floor at the foot of the bed for an hour, sometimes, comfortably curled on the blanket I've affectionately laundered and folded just right for her lounging satisfaction and warm winter repose, where she senses no compunction to clean between her paw hairs and lick soil out from under her toes. But she's reliably thoughtful when called up beside me--onto the cheap K-mart pink Student Dormitory Blanket--to then attend to her hygiene in the same manner dogs scrub up a newborn puppy and afterbirth by disappearing the mess by swallowing. Three nights ago I was lost inside Yann Martel's Life Of Pi and did not realize that EZ--beside me on the socially acceptable linens--had been licking herself for a half-hour. Her body was safely on her blanket, but the business end of her tongue and toes was off onto my blankets and sheet, six inches from my right arm creating a hell of a dark wet mess. Ah, she's a good girl so responded punctually to my shocked request to "Stop" and "Move over, damnit!" Then I got up and got a towel to cover the wet patch on the bed and we laid facing away from each other.
Sunday night's Weather Channel preview of the upcoming week showed warm weather bulging northward and shoving away our siege of temperatures in the teens, radiating the north with agreeable highs in the fifties. Not susceptible to rejecting lies when they're in my favor I planned a trip to The Woods as the change in climate was scheduled to coincide with an extra long weekend off and spring break at school. This time the forecast held its integrity right through to today. The time/temperature credit union sign said "38" when I passed by it thirty miles outside of home town at 9:30. Another on the marquee of Komplete Flooring west of Spooner read "52."
I stopped in Winter in the lee of a convenience market to dump leftover tuna salad onto two pieces of bread, so I could eat. Safely away from the gas pumps and main entrance. As I dropped the top piece of bread down onto lunch my eye caught movement to the right. An owner, or manager-ish man, walked purposefully along the store front windows toward my car, which I put into gear and idled away. He stopped. I looked back. He turned, with peevish body language as though a bust had been thwarted, put sunglasses back on and disappeared back inside the market. Was I spotted on a security camera parked in a likely terrorist spot? And, failing to get out to shop, this man had alarmed, and was preparing to confront me with fear of terrorist intentions? We are three days away from George W's March 17 Iraq deadline to toss military technology and American self-willed importance to the rest of the world. Pregnant wombs will go silent. Children and Mommies and Daddies and dogs and cats named snickers and rats will die excessively so one man with a religiously zealous ego can atone for its insecurity.
Turning onto the Woods road was scary. It hasn't been plowed all winter--hasn't really needed plowing, until now, when the packed down tracks have started to relax three inches of compressed snow. The car swerved through okay. Then fishtailed and bogged down through the open spot beside Herb's park, then settled into a wheel-spinning slog up the slow incline to the cabin rise. No plow ridge to stop us, so with forward momentum helping, I pulled into the clearing. Three inches of snow still on the ground; soft and fine-grained, as though recent and not icy-coarse December leftovers. Sun brilliant and radiant. Let EZ out so she could shit a Dairy Queen dollop right smack in the path to the cabin.
Mouse in one trap. Whiskers wide, satin eyes staring, body shriveled and stiff. Water jugs still mostly frozen, but EZ drinks from a puddle forming in the yard. The battery clock I bought a year ago--powered by a single AA battery--still chugging along keeping the right time: 1:33. Through thirty-below-zero nights and windy dark days it has gone ahead and kept up its pace, left alone for three-and-a-half months to endure winter's solstice alone and not have party whistles blown in its presence, and it didn't even get to vacation during February's Presidents-day holiday. It's looking a bit drab so I've just placed it on the bed before EZ's nose and asked her to give it a spring cleaning.
9:22 p.m.-
Three-quarter moon brightening the yard. I stepped out. Completely silent, finally, after a day of low heavy groanings, like from distant diesel engines. A huge explosion somewhere in the southeast this afternoon had me pulling up a chair to the window in the door so I could easily view the mushroom cloud and end-of-the-world shock wave approach. Then turned on NPR to await the news of Minneapolis's destruction. I'm so far still alive, as we know aliveness to be.
So I went to the Store where Meg was in a bad mood in the kitchen frying burgers and Herb was disappearing out the door carrying a box, and four men were swearing at the table by the door. It was a matter of out-of-sync logistics. The men's ATVs were acting moody and so were the maps they were studying and the North Koreans needed teaching a lesson. Meg's fryer filter was clogged and the kitchen was dense with French fry smoke and the bacon for two Ultra Burgers was limp. And she swore. Then swore again, "He's gone!!?" about Herb who'd failed to communicate his intention to go out the door with two other fellows carrying cardboard cartons of "Goddamn" dynamite.
I got a glare as she hustled past, then a quick repentant, "oh-hi" as she delivered imperfect chow to the round table of depressed men. I filled my water jugs at the sink, enjoying the aroma of old-fashioned original Joy dish detergent cooling in the adjacent other sink. It's a sense of safety, that smell. Elicited from places deep down and inexplicable, a brief subtle sense that everything isn't as bad as it's said to be.
9:47-
A quantity of baked beans is heating on the stove and coyote screams have raised EZ's head and ears from the bed. They are in the north and the special recipe beans are bobbing in their contrapted double boiler.
I have obtained a pair of new hogboots. Though the manufacturer has more manly pursuits on its promotional plate by calling them "18 Grange," which is vague enough so a man, or woman, could wear them waiting tables at the Tipsy-Top Tavern, or remarking, "do you know what I mean," at a gay Baptist protest. They are fashioned of "100% waterproof ozone-resistant rubber," though I don't foresee ozone leaks as a menace. They are ankle-fitted "FOR COMFORT" and molded in authentic "OD GREEN," code for odious. And they work to repel all puddles from entering my podiatric space.
So, with new boots on, I went off to watch Leon burn grass along the road. He announced his intention on a brief "blam" into the Store where his mother, passing with fries to the round table, inquired "do you have the right permit?"
"Of course, he muttered indignantly."
I followed north to the edge of the pasture. Leon got out of his truck (a Ford I'd never seen before) and ignited a propane torch. He stuck it down into windy ditch grasses, jabbing and stabbing as the breeze fanned the flames. The fires blazed, danced and died. He lit new spots by a swamp. They also went out and he noted those particular locations as where he'll go "next time we have a napalm attack." EZ went over and jumped into the back of the car and laid down and watched from a safe distance, this man with a torch.
The Woods road deteriorated quickly throughout the afternoon. By the time we drove back it was slurry and more relaxed, smoking a cigarette, though appearing still sane.
The cabin yard was clearer of snow and the gully off the road crown offered us a hand to get through.
A nap late afternoon. Then a trip into town. The Community Church marquee says: "SIGN BROKEN - COME INSIDE ON SUNDAY FOR MESSAGE." A shameless tactic to get access to my soul or shove salvation into it. Paper toweling inside the grocery offers a diversity of value: $.69 for cheap boorish textures and $1.99 for decorator designs and civil softness.
Saturday, March 15--
Iced-over puddles already melting in hazy sun by 8:30 a.m. Spaded a couple of scoops of snow into a Walmart shopping bag, tied it shut and jammed it into the cooler. Loaded the Thermos with coffee and EZ into the car and we headed out the woods road, over crusty snow ruts in a continuous rushing sound as the tires broke through. I'd spoken to friend Phil a week earlier. This is his busy season at the sugar bush--from early January on--and I said I would be spending time at the cabin this weekend and that I'd maybe take a run down to see what was happening.
Not much. None of the trees I could see were tapped, hoses and spouts hanging limp. Jim, Phil's partner, standing beside his pickup watching to see who I was, saw, said "hi."
I was shocked. I'd imagined scurrying and boiling and chaos shouting orders. And electric motors pumping and rumbling blast flames boiling and the short season in high swing. And maybe a brass band tooting and kettle drums beating encouragement for everybody to keep up the pace.
"Phil's in Madison for something. He's not here. Good to see you. That tree there isn't running, but the one over there is goin' pretty good." He wandered over to a test tree with a bucket hanging from a spout behind the cook shanty. I let EZ out so she could be free from her coop in the car.
As far as infinity shows itself in a woods of big trees thin threads of dark blue and light blue and white tubing run between trees, droopy, straight with varying degrees of sag between. A gigantic web woven by toilet paper teenagers on a lark, but here a meaningful one with careful planning and technology tubing and clever logistics contrived from the start. The land is softly undulant except for a gradual ravine near the shanty. The eighty acres is divided into three zones and, like tributaries of a river, every tap of each tree drains toward low center where a tank collects sap and pumps it uphill to the cook house.
But not today. Jim says they'll surely be tapping early next week but he has a bit of doubt in his voice. "Hard to find people who want to work. Everybody who's not is getting unemployment. They're content with that and don't want to come out. You gonna' be around on Monday?"
Just so he knows I'm not a slacker like all them others I regretfully explain that my two jobs will prevent it. "Say 'hi' to Phil next time you see him."
A stop in Pine City for batteries and film at the mart I disfavor. Warm sun. Shoppers pushing carts through the parking lot piled high with early Christmas purchases. EZ panted through the hatch window at me when I returned, so I drove around the lot looking for a puddle to let her drink. To the back of the building where I found one at the juncture of two curbs. Let her out while I made a sandwich. EZ sniffed at the colorful petroleum skim on the puddle then trotted through it and peed beside an arrangement of blister pack trash. Then sniffed a dead rat and rolled her neck on it.
Flecks of Swiss cheese and Healthy Choice bread sprayed from my side window when I yelled "No," and she regained her stance and bolted toward the south. She always comes when I call, with body English reporting her mood. I slammed down the hatch, got back my sandwich from the roof of the car and settled back into the seat. Started the motor and put the gear into "go." A back door of the large corporate bazaar building sprang open and two teenagers wearing black bullet-proof Kevlar uniforms diverged ten feet apart, crouched, holding--at serious forty-five degree angles to the sky--assault rifles with deadly blaze-orange tips. Sunglasses and helmets, and black full-lace boots to the thigh. Then an older, more seasoned, man with full beard and shalalie green hat limped out of the darkness brandishing a crooked root cane shouting, "Yim peg nor'a gintaly!" pointing the cane right at me, who pitched the sandwich out the window into the rainbow puddle slick and gunned the motor and turned the tires north.
Ace hardware at noon was as empty as the street, except for wizened-arm young man and another clerk. The quiet was eerie and unexpected on a mid-day Saturday on such a wakeup warm day when I would have expected town bustling with residents released from their tombs, out correcting long months of deteriorated domestic infrastructure. I needed gas light mantles for the propane cabin lights. A couple of years ago I bought a permanent mantle at this store; no more replacing vulnerable ashen silk ones every time a kamikaze moth dove into it. I don't remember it being priced at $8.95, though, as a peg of "Pre-formed mantles" boxes were marked
I opened one and looked at the form. Looks right. Touched the curvy shape with a finger. Stiff. As a permanent mantle should be, resistant to a push by the finger. Hmm. OOPS, said my mind as a dimple appeared by a thumb where none was before, or intended to be.
I think these old-fashioned mantles will be fine.
Harvest Gold is a toilet seat color few socially adept shoppers want anymore. I brought one along still wrapped in shrink-wrapped plastic, except for a sullying scratch along the lid. A "Policy A" gift given to me at work last fall. I brought the potty chair down from the biffy so I could work in the sun and set into removing old screws. EZ wanted to be close and kept nudging my tools. So I invited her to sit on the park bench, which I'd relocated under the cabin roof by the wall in the fall.
Everything in life has an end. Some ends arrive slowly, unnoticeably, like the movement of a glacier. Some ends arrive long before anybody recognize their meaning, denying the truth of it, continuing to do what isn't so easy anymore. Some ends arrive explosively. We are sure of the blood and accept it as a sorrowful means to the end. Twenty-two caliber, though a disfiguring nuisance, does not regularly result in decades of fun dying. Forty-five caliber gunshots are not so easily ignored.
The "snip, snip, crack," ten minutes after arriving back from town and setting into work in the pleasant spring sun with my Harvest Gold seat was okay. The neighbors shooting guns an eighth of a mile down the road where Norma used to live was annoying, but tolerable. Even were the shouts of cheer after a series of rounds was expended. (It's a guy thing to shoot at something and watch holes appear for a few minutes, then put the rifle away and go somewhere else and get on with meaningful life.)
I finished the potty seat installation and imagined an increase in biffy comfort. Then, when the gunshots intensified in frequency I chose to take a walk north with EZ and see what there was to see in the bright spring day. Put on the new hogboots and headed along the esker toward the North Pool.
Sound does not subdue in a wild forest. EZ roamed. I replaced the stolen toilet seat back onto the old lawn chair I'd taken it from three years ago. The North Pool was still solidly frozen over as was all of the river. (Even by the end of the road swimming hole at the sitting bench, where shallow rapids always snickered and rushed, there's only a smooth white river of ice.) I'm surprised, then remember that this winter has been unusually cold, as measured by the trend over the last five years, and that recent weeks of subzero temperatures have frozen ice thick and deep and that much of the river's current has been stilled over recent weeks. There may not even be current still flowing underneath.
Meltwater is pooling over the ice. EZ trots through it, inches deep
in some places. I break from the shore, my two feet convinced I'll break through
and drown, though the river is only twelve inches deep in the summer when
there is no ice, and I'm wearing eighteen-inch boots. Up through the wide
pool, skirting the sides, I notice cracks in the ice, widening down, deep.
God!, the ice is thick as concrete. Gunshots continue, joined by more distant
"whoomping" explosions like dynamite discharges.
A bend in the river, slow, pleasing, tag alders skirting me further out on the ice, which angles down and deepens the water on top. Brown water unmoving except in curly-cues pushed by the breeze. A sound of hissing suddenly breaks free of other noise. A sound rising into consciousness although it'd been there, sullen and curious. EZ's not doing it. She's far upriver exploring her own curiosities. I scan the woods, the river bank, the ice at my feet. Nothing unusual but the sizzling sounds continue. Water moves across ice. Bubbles boil twenty feet away in a smooth surface of white. Other bubbles and more, glinting, sparkling, the ice is alive with blistering fissures and sun-cooking holes. The calm winter river is undergoing transformation. Nothing is as it was five minutes earlier though there is no imminent threat to life as I know it. The river is coming alive after months of static slumber and it's not all unmoving as it seemed at first.
We reached a deep depression. EZ had already waded through it with impressive ease. But I chose to forego it and took up on land where I was sure the wide open field should be near.
It was, visible through a half-acre of trees, yellow and bright and open and beckoning with airy new scenes.
The deerstand still stood in its place overlooking the field. Truck tracks and dead grass meandered. I sat on the stand and watched excited flies zoom past my head and smack foolishly against two-by four struts. EZ appeared panting out of the brush by the river and looked at me as if to ask, "if you're staying put for a while I'm going somewhere else in a hurry."
The poison ivy patch was dead, as though that's cause for me to ignore it in two months.
3:45 p.m.-
I want to go back to the cabin. But men and women are still exploding things too close to home.
We meander through meltwater pools reflecting sky in the meadow stubble. Back along a narrow rutted lane, through Herb's cattle killing field, along the north boundary break we enter the forty acres.
"BOOM." The neighbors began detonating dynamite. Or a carbide cannon. A fourth-of-July aerial bomb is the closest description to use here, the sort that flash, then a second later pound in one's chest and roll through neighborhoods echoing fine china into shards and ripping roofs off of row houses. It's impressive and fun when I know it's coming. It's not fun, though impressive, when I don't know it's coming.
They had exploded six or eight bombs by the time we got back to the cabin. (EZ was unfazed.) I had become edgy, waiting for the next "BOOM," wondering if a spell of silence signaled that the hullabaloo had finally come to an end. The other gunfire explosions continued; the big blasts were exclamation points. My God!, how long can this go on? What is the recreation from shooting and shooting? Twenty-two shells are cheap, but the rounds of the larger caliber shells are not. This surely must end soon--"BOOM" and everybody will go shopping in town or go inside the house for coffee or to watch Judge Judy.
I sat on the bench by the firepit. Analyzing. Nothing they are doing is illegal. It's disruptive to a neighbor and a few people detonating loud explosions would think of that and exercise some neighborly self-restraint. My paying a visit down there to request cessation would likely result in haughty words and an escalation of eruptions, maybe even a lit stick of dynamite up my butt. (Firearms fanatics by nature tend toward belligerence, owing to owning constitutional rights to disrupt other mankind through the bore of a gun.)
Two hours until
dark, when they might quit. Tomorrow's forecast calls for rain. That might
keep down the noise.
"BOOM."
I was packed up and on the road home within fifteen minutes.