In Rwanda, 800,000 died. Most of the killing was done with machetes, axes, and hoes. One by one. Face-to-face. Neighbor on neighbor. Here I am with my seed packets. You can bow to the six directions of the cosmos full-time until you blow your back out and never reconcile the capricious distance between dumb luck and utter horror. In the preface to The New Seed-Starters Handbook, the poet-farmer Wendell Berry says that growing your own food is a sacrament. A visible form of an invisible grace. It is certainly an act of faith. When you tuck that seed in the dirt, you are drawing on the past to bank on the future. In another of his gardening poems, Bruce Taylor writes that planting serves “to bring us to our knees/to bring us back to quiet…” No matter the speed and uncertainty of the approaching future, we love to put our hands in the dirt, “where there’s little/choice but to begin/with the intensive/care of the present…”
I take the trays upstairs, to a southern-facing window, and place them in the light.
Here lately I weep more easily. There is a sea change happening in my heart. Nothing too dramatic. I rarely blubber or sob, but I tend to well up on short notice and in odd—sometimes ridiculous—context. I get misty at the sight of an elderly woman smoothing an old man’s hair, or a suburban tot picking out Halloween pumpkins while clinging to the arthritic finger of her grandfather, a gnarled farmer. Looking for a laugh and lured by the casting of Rowan Atkinson as a bumbling priest, I borrowed a friend’s copy of Four Weddings and a Funeral and wound up so unexpectedly afflicted with sniffles over John Hannah’s recitation of W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” that I watched it twice more just to see if it had the same effect. It did. In another baffling moment, I recently became teary while reminiscing with a goose hunter in a cow pasture. And not so long ago I was in a snazzy hotel room far from home watching a scene from a television documentary in which a bail bondsman has taken time out from collaring thugs to visit his newborn grandchild. The hospital room was jammed with family, all of them—right down to the new mother—looking like they had jumped bail a time or two themselves. But there was something in their beaming faces and the burly man’s eyes as he hugged the infant to his neck that broke me down. Tears were slip-sliding down my cheeks even as my inner Norwegian said, Get it together, son, you are weeping over a documentary on the bail bond industry. I was so startled by my weakened state that I called room service and ordered a plate of raw Kobe beef slices to restore iron to my blood. The beef arrived garnished with shavings of ginger, which cleared my head, although the piney notes, as they always do—especially when I am alone away from home—reminded me of fresh sawdust in the sun, and I was tempted to resume weeping, this time for the dear departed sawmills of my youth.
The radio show about Rwanda sets a sadness in me that will recur for days, compounded by my awareness that such moping is at best impotent and at worst cosmically insulting to those who suffer whether you mope or not. Whether gardening safely in your basement or staring point-blank at the rotting corpses, you simply cannot relate. And yet it is the very voluminous evidence of the horrible things we willingly visit upon each other—what author Philip Gourevitch has described as uncircumscribable horrors—that invests a willing act of kindness, the tiniest touch or gentle word to a friend or stranger, with energy powerful enough to reverberate around the universe. And so when I see acts rooted in gentleness and purity, the tears rise.
In part I suppose this is all driven by chemical changes associated with advancing age, but I think also the loosening of tear ducts is tied to everything good ever squandered—the headlong accumulation of which instances you cannot help but note if you live attentively. I can tell you the tears are not bitter. They feel something like relief, and as such, I am lately forming an idea that they are triggered by glimpses into some fourth dimension—perhaps string theory is involved—when we sense how all time and experience is joined. If we live heartily enough to take on some scuffs and disappointment, we develop a yearning for the soulful moment. Perpetually poised at the vanishing point of a yawning infinitude, we come to see that our only lasting powers are love and hate. I tear up over the bounty hunter because as he holds that baby to his cheek, I believe he senses the inherent fragility of the moment, and how quickly it may shatter. The crack of a rifle in Memphis and a million dreams die. My friend the goose hunter may be understandably nervous about my glistening eyes, but the dampness on my lashes tells me I am alive.
I am happy to live in a place where I can chuck a washing machine out my back door and no one judges my behavior unusual. Having said that, I recognize the limits. Shortly after I moved to this village, I was upstairs writing one afternoon when a steady rhythm of thuds gradually intruded on my conscious. Moving to the back of the house, I peeked through the blinds and saw two teenagers, each armed with a sledgehammer, pounding the bejeebers out of a junk car in the adjacent yard. To compose the approximate image, visualize a pair of manic first-chair kettle drummers slamming madly through a speed-metal update of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” The bulk of their blows were directed against the hood, trunk, doors, and roof, so the clamor was largely metallic, but now and again they’d strike a headlight, and the tinkle of glass came through like a grace note. When they drove the head of the sledge through a window, the safety glass gave out a squeaky crunch and collapsed into sparkling honeycomb. The boys hammered until every flat surface had been thrashed to a rumple. Then they set aside their tools, and, as men are given to do, retreated three steps to gaze upon all they had wrought.
As long as there’s a shot your car might one day spin a wheel, the village board will generally give you dispensation to leave it parked in perpetuity. But when you pulverize your Pontiac to the point that it appears to have been tumble-dried in a rock crusher, you are sending a specific message, and that message is: this vehicle has been rendered irretrievably out of service. Someone complained, and the village board commanded that the vehicle be removed.
Occasionally this happens—someone will show up at a board meeting and ask that a patch of weeds be mowed or a car hauled off. There are ordinances, and I understand, to a point. Neatness keeps the property values up, and based on the number of scrawny cats emerging from the three-foot foxtail across the alley to dump a load in my cilantro, you could probably advance the argument on public health grounds. Still, I am leery of enforced neatness. We’re seeing more and more of it around these parts. Zoning, covenants, “smart growth,” and so on. We strive to preserve the countryside. Minimize the impact of big boxes and sprawl. But social engineering in the cause of perfection and the tax base has its casualties. You can’t build a simple shack without a series of visits by some bureaucrat waving a sheaf of permits and a clipboard. People move here from the city and put up their dream home on twenty acres and don’t want to gaze upon tin siding and caved-in Plymouths. I get it. But neither do I want someone checking my quack grass with a tape measure. To my eye (and I freely cop to a festering case of latent hickitude), that trailer house tucked against a row of Norway pines is far less objectionable than some tony monstrosity dwarfing the ol’ fishin’ hole. Gentrification is not always a matter of Starbucks. When my brother four miles north of town is informed that in certain circumstances all of his neatly stacked lumber must be a minimum of twelve inches off the ground, I can’t help thinking some people have too much time on their hands and our tax dollars would be better spent on the local kindergarten teacher. My brother, whom I’m sure appreciates that I “can’t help thinking,” tends in nearly all cases to adopt firmer courses of action, and is standing for election to the town board. We are not of one mind on all issues, but I solidly admire his willingness to take the abuse.
He and I are both complicit. Him with his bulldozer, with which he carves driveways for the new arrivals, me with my little ten-acre patch outside of town, which I sold in a trice when I needed the money and found out what it would bring. And if the time comes to put my house up for sale, I will be seeking the highest bidder, which (based on what I paid for the place) w
ill raise the property values accordingly, continuing to prove the point that no matter who’s shinnying up the trunk—land-hungry developers or preservationists intent on legislating the position of every pine needle—it’s the poor folks who get pushed from the tree. In the meantime I ponder the advantage of keeping one’s place in a state of rattiness capable of evincing sympathy from the assessor. He sees a rusty International and a marooned dryer, I see a pair of tax deductions. I shall reserve the money saved for a quick spruce-up when it’s time to sell to a buyer looking for a decent place with affordable taxes. Arrange a situation à la Chevy Chase in Funny Farm in which the neighbors pitch in by nailing their siding back on and disguising the pile of rusty carburetors and two-legged Weber grilles with a hand-stitched Amish quilt and a smattering of heirloom squash. Just long enough so you can close the sale with some nice young couple escaping the big city.
Time passed, and once again I was drawn from the keyboard by an apocalyptic clamor. First, an engine, revving to the point of warping the valve covers. Then the sound of spinning wheels, general acceleration, and the faint rattle of chain links. Finally, the whole buildup terminating in a horrifically conclusive ha-WHUMP! I rose from my desk and assumed my customary position at the upstairs window.
The family van had been brought around to the backyard, where a crowd had gathered around the annihilated Pontiac. The van was one of those customized jobs with flare fenders, tinted picture windows, and a silver luggage rack. It had long ago gone to rust and sag, but remained the pride of the family fleet. The van was backed into a position perpendicular to the driver’s side of the car. A logging chain was hooked into the frame of the car somewhere under the passenger side, drawn up and wrapped around the passenger side door, pulled across the rooftop, and then angled down to the rear bumper of the van where it was secured to the trailer hitch. I was trying to make sense of the arrangement when the van shot forward.
Ha-WHUMP!
The pummeled car lurched six feet sideways and the van stalled. The driver restarted the van, backed up, and roared forward again. Ha-WHUMP! The process repeated itself over and over. They yanked that car around the yard for ten minutes. And somewhere in there, it hit me: They are trying to flip the car. By passing the chain from the bottom of the car and over the top of the car and then using the van to jerk the slack, they theorized that enough lateral force would be generated to spin the car on its long axis and flip it wheels-up.
And on maybe the thirty-seventh try, the whole ridiculous project panned out. In a perfect convergence of bounce, torque, and frame-snagging topography, the ha-WHUMP! was followed by a beat of silence during which the car teetered on the driver’s side, then a much softer whump as, pushed past the tipping point by several alacritous bystanders, it flopped on its flattened roof. One wheel spun slowly. After a brief round of congratulatory whooping and fist-pumping, the boys moved in with tire irons and started removing lug nuts, and then I understood: they had hatched this great endeavor in order to salvage the four tires, which, despite all the violence, still held their air, if not their tread. For lack of a jack, it had been deemed simpler to flip the car. Five minutes later the tires were leaning against the garage and the automobile was being trailered to the salvage yard.
What you had here was a full-on testament to the blue-collar work ethic, Yankee ingenuity, the fundamental beauty of main force violence, and the potential upsides of beer and unemployment. I felt the urge to salute. Recently an outsider questioned my neighbor Trygve about the local propensity for cockeyed perseverance in the face of absurdity. “We up in New Auburn,” replied Trygve, “walk a more difficult path.”
We’ve hit a warm stretch. The fourth Sunday in March, and temperatures are headed for the mid-60s. Nearly all of the snow is gone, and when I open the kitchen window, the air that rolls through the screen is soft with the watery scent of melt. I step out the back door to feel the sun on my skin. For the first time in months, the earth gives a little under the sole of my shoe. I know this is not spring. It is the first of many false starts. But the smell of the warm air and the sound of the soil loosening—that barely audible trickle and drip—taps a pinprick of melancholy that blooms from my heart in a sweet, radiant bleed. The sensation is vestigial of adolescence, when the first whiff of emergent earth triggered fits of yearning and longing. Not lust, but rather the purest sort of want, a nostalgic intuition that somewhere a woman waited beside a stone fence beneath a wide sky, pining for me to stride from among the pine trees and take her in my strong arms and my true heart. There would be a popple tree thicket and a blanket, within and upon which we would recline with earnest intentions, and from somewhere in the bushes would come the sound of Neil Diamond singing “Coldwater Morning,” “And the Grass Won’t Pay No Mind,” and “Girl You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” in medley. That would be love, and that would be it. The scene would neither conclude nor progress, leaving me instead to hover timelessly in a stasis of poignant bliss, chastely cradling my anonymous desideratum.
I trace the Neil Diamond thing to my aunt Meg. I recall playing air guitar to her vinyl copy of Hot August Night during a family get-together when I was very young and girls were yet a nonfactor. When the hormones hit, I borrowed Neil’s albums from the tiny library in Chetek, Wisconsin, where I believe the record will also show I checked out every Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, and Max Brand Western in stock. Cowboy books and Neil Diamond: hello, solitary man. These twin influences shaped my concept of romantic comportment in ways that lingered into my mid-thirties. Meaning, I owe a smattering of perfectly classy women signed letters of apology. And yet I still pull out the Neil albums sometimes, if only to feel again what I once imagined love might be. “Shiloh, when I was young…”
The Best of Bread will also do the trick.
When the weather warms, the village stirs. Cars passing up and down Main Street run a little looser, their drivers uncurled from the deep-winter heat-conserving hunch and more prone to raise one hand from the wheel and wave. Last week the tires gave off a muffled crunch and squeak as they rolled over the snowpack. Today they roll on naked asphalt, grinding the residual sanding salt between the rubber and the road with a gritty crackle that echoes from the vinyl siding of the surrounding houses. I can hear children calling, radios playing, doors slamming. The ska-winch, ska-winch of trampoline springs. There is something lonely in the distant sounds, and now I am ruminating on the failures of affection and assessing the damage done, and my Neil Diamond reverie is derailing. The accumulated dings and cock-ups of love—once “breaking up” advances beyond merely switching school bus seats and results in real hurt—tend to leach the sweetness from melancholy. Two blocks over on Pine Street, the morning worship service at Bethel Lutheran is commencing. The tone of the bells is mellow in the warmth. My back-alley neighbor steps out the back door and snaps a leash on his ferocious dog. They set out down the alley, the dog lunging, the man leaning backward, a decorticate stutter-stepping water-skier. Still, he manages his aura of detached toughness. I can see words across the chest of his T-shirt. He gets closer, and I can read them: 100 PERCENT WHUP-ASS.
The resurrection of the International has officially commenced. My brother John used to work for the local implement dealer, and the dealer has allowed us to borrow his equipment truck. It has a tilt bed and a winch. John backs into my driveway, then, using controls mounted on the truck’s frame, runs the bed back and down until its beveled tail is wedged behind the rear tires of the International like a stunt ramp. Unspooling cable from the winch, he slings the hook around the frame. Then, with me in the International to steer, he rewinds the cable, pulling the pickup slowly backward up the ramp. I can’t help but grin like a kid. For the first time in years, I am sitting inside the International while it moves. When all four wheels are on the wooden deck, John retracts and lowers the bed. We secure it with chains and boomers and—after pausing for purposes of a good story to measure the depth of the depressions in the asphalt where the truck has stood for all t
hese years (officially: three inches, per the Stanley tape)—are on our way. Up in the cab of the implement truck, John’s dog Leroy rides shotgun, gazing loll-tongued and happily out the window from his elevated position in the passenger seat. I follow in my car.
It is something else to see that old truck up there, moving down the road high in the air and backward. Exposed in that manner, it looks surprisingly frail. The sky is pale blue and clear, the sun’s heat today just adequate to ease a small seep of melt from the one shrinking blob of snow remaining on the hood after all the recent warm weather. The trip to my brother-in-law’s shop is just over twenty miles, and John takes it easy, rarely running over forty. I settle in for the ride, turn on the radio, and punch up Moose Country. When you are rolling down the road behind your brother headed for a truck revival, you want to hear some chicken pickin’. Whoop-whoop-whoop, said the late Waylon Jennings, and, boogity-boogity.
Mark is waiting outside his shop when we arrive. John backs in, raises the bed, and decants the truck. I ride in the cab again, giving Mark a thumbs-up and steering as the unspooling cable lowers me to the ground. When the truck is on the level, Mark and I brace our butts against the rear bumper and push it the rest of the way across the concrete apron and into the shop. Then we troop into the house. My sister Kathleen has made a batch of spaghetti. After the crisp air it is good to come in to the pasta steam. Mark and Kathleen’s house is built into a hillside, and from the dining room table we can see for miles across the simply and perfectly named Blue Hills of northern Wisconsin. We talk about the truck, but we also talk about our cousin Sukey, a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Marines. She sends us e-mails from somewhere in Africa. We remember her as a blond tyke at Fourth of July picnics. Her husband, Steve—also a helicopter pilot in the Marines—is facing deployment to Afghanistan. Mark and Kathleen are adjusting to their newborn boy. I call him Sidrock, which is not his given name, but such are the prerogatives of uncles. While the grown-ups talk about loved ones at war, Sidrock is goobering in his infant seat.
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