“I really would like to see something done,” says a commission member at the far end of the table. “Even though it’s not ideal as far as the highway engineers’ manual.”
The commissioner is looking a little strained.
“Well, I had agreed to look at it in the spring, and I plan to do that.”
When I leave the meeting, I head directly to the aforementioned coffee shop, jonesing for a cup and a quiet place to write. I don’t deal well with reality and am happiest within my own head. Events that pull me from the keyboard are always a reminder that while people like me float through life ruminating and guessticating and pining and trying to shape the narrative, folks like the committee members around that table get out of bed at 5 a.m. to attend meetings on the behalf of the rest of us to discuss everything from bridge graffiti to guardrail-replacement policies, and to make decisions that rarely achieve notice unless somebody’s not happy. Theirs is the plain, boring work of functional government, stratospheres removed from all the Technicolor barking of politics. My five-minute session was allowed to stretch well beyond fifteen minutes, and as I stood to leave, one of the more jocular committee members offered me a doughnut. I wouldn’t be in there with my seven-page report if I didn’t believe the commissioner had made a mistake, but I also wonder about the people around that table—the commissioner included—and if they see me as a needlessly obsessive yahoo throwing sand in the gears of the day.
In the middle of May I receive an e-mail from Amy’s father, Dan. Grammy Pat is back in the hospital. Shortly thereafter he e-mails again to say she has returned home under the care of hospice. A week later the phone rings in the evening and it is Dan with the news that Grammy has died. Amy is preparing for bed, and in light of her longtime tendency toward anxiousness at sundown, Anneliese and I opt to tell her the following afternoon in the full light of day. Thanks to Dan’s regular communication, Amy has known this day was imminent, and when we sit with her in the living room filled with sunlight, she takes the news in stride. We buy plane tickets, leave Jane in the care of my parents, and fly to Colorado.
Everyone converges on Grammy’s house and, truth be told, in between the necessary preparations we have a nice time, kids running every which way, adults cooking together in the kitchen and visiting. As the stories circulate, it is a chance for me to come to know Grammy quite literally by the numbers: Born in 1933 and married at the age of twenty-four, she taught school in Denver for three years before her first child arrived in 1960. In 1963 the young family moved to a farm and by 1970 the children numbered five. Then one night Grammy and her husband went out for a rare dinner with friends and on the way home their car was struck by a drunk driver. Grammy was badly injured and her husband—the man Amy would have known as Grandpa—was killed. Grammy Pat never remarried, and instead threw herself into running a farm and raising five children, all of whom wound up well educated and successful. After the children were launched, Grammy did not slow down. This is not conjecture, because Grammy left lists, and we’ve been reading over them today: Over 270 musicals and other stage performances attended; 19,387 recipes attempted and only one classified as “a total failure”; 1,800 books read and neatly totted up in a journal, the final entry inscribed only weeks before her death. Somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-five foreign countries visited, from Cancún to Croatia. And for those fatherless children, ninety-three birthday breakfasts served in bed. The family has put together photographs to be displayed on an easel in the foyer of the church, and what you see is a woman of nearly six feet who carried herself always with dignity, whether scrubbing vegetables for the county fair or giving her children in marriage one by one until the photographs became crowded with new smiling generations, including our Amy.
At the church, Dan and Marie and Anneliese and I arrange to sit together in the pews. Outside the church Amy has been running and playing in the sun with her cousins, and we are in the midst of the service before she finally crumples with tears and turns from the side of her fathers to the arms of her mother, a testament to the power of the feminine line. When finally she unburies her face from Anneliese’s breast and turns her eyes to mine, I am crying and begin to avert my face. Then I think, No. She must feel the strength of women and see the tears of men. Later, when we are together going through photo albums, including those documenting our visit in January, there is much laughter, and as I consider our situation and what it might have been as opposed to what it has become, it occurs to me that to all our other bonds our blended little bunch may now add grief.
Any reaction I might have to the appearance of apartments in a hayfield is tempered by the sight of a plumber’s truck parked at one of the units under construction. That plumber has more than once come to our house on short notice and saved my incompetent bacon with quality work. He is a local fellow and a former classmate of Anneliese. More to the point, as a fellow self-employed person I can imagine it was welcome news the day he got the bid for the apartment job. Somewhere along the line we’re all looking for some balance that will allow us to honor the past without strangling the future.
I have a desire to contain history that regularly drifts into the inane. Five years ago my father called and told me he was going to tear his silos down. I leapt into action, contacting barn restorers to see what the market might be for the remnants and recruiting my buddy Mills to assist in the salvage. These weren’t your standard concrete-stave silos. They were wooden, and marvelously constructed from laminated strips of lumber nailed together with thousands of meticulously placed nails and even more thousands of hammer blows. When I heard the silos were going down, the first memory to mind was of shoveling silage early mornings before deer hunting and seeing the fuzzy buttons of frost on each nail head. Dad used the silos only a couple of years. Mostly they stood empty, and we used to scare ourselves by climbing up inside them and then looking down from atop the pigeon poop– and bat guano–laden platform that joined them. The sense of vertigo was heightened by the fact that each had a five-foot-deep concrete-lined pit dug in at the base. The roof above the platform was very low, and if we crawled around up there during the day we’d hear the gritch-gritch of disturbed bats, which made us duck even lower.
Shortly after Dad called I drove to the farm and clambered up the cobwebbed ladders (hearing the bats squeak, I placed my hands on the rungs with care) and took digital photographs of everything I could: the handmade swinging silage doors, the patterned nails, the wobbly railing supposedly securing the platform, the concrete pits viewed from far above. By the time I shot the photos I knew the silos were coming down and the pixels would have to do for history. I had contacted a number of barn restoration and vintage lumber folks, but my initial rush of research eventually tailed off against the perennial headwinds of finances and time. Dad was reroofing the barn, and because the silos were attached, they had their own roof, which was beginning to sag. Dad had done the numbers on rebuilding the roof and how much the extra square footage would inflate the shingle budget, and with the year’s planting to be done and the roofers coming, opted instead to have my brother John stop by with his track-hoe. In a short hour or two he peeled the silos away from the barn, buried them in a significant hole, tamped everything down, and now there’s just some grass there. Upon reflection (sadly, I often require extensive periods of reflection to recognize something I should have seen in the instant) I realized the greatest kindness here was that phone call from my father. A man of great practicality, he nonetheless knew of my soft spot, and spared me the shock of showing up one day to simply see the things gone. My brothers often do the same, calling me when they find some odd historical object and telling me I can pick it up behind the fuel tank or out in the shop. When my brother Jed was logging up north and discovered a vintage sign clasped deep within the wood of a white oak, he took the time to cut it out and haul it in from the woods, and now there it sits in my garage atop the plastic tub of old boots, waiting for some future auctioneer to dispose of it.
/> Now and then this time of year—when the first green grass is up and the trees are leafing out—my buddy Mills will take a load of logs over to Tom’s place and we’ll have a sawing day. We’re over there now, and Mills has brought a batch of his fellow firefighters along. It has been entertaining to watch Tom surrounded by a posse of helpers from three to six decades younger than he, all of them (including me) struggling to keep up. It isn’t the pace—Tom doesn’t work quickly—but rather that we young ones lack the fluidity of memorized movement. Whether rolling a log from the rack to the carriage or dropping a dog ear on the saw log after flipping it, all of us amateur helpers invest reams of wasted motion. Even standing still, some of the guys look out of place, holding a cant hook like it’s their first guitar.
I take my turn beside Tom on the log carriage. The pitchy buzz of the blade and the scent of the torn bark and sawdust evoke my childhood, when we logged all winter and in the spring the sawmill came. We were always excited to see what the rig would look like this time (in those days they were nearly all some homemade variation on a theme), and what sort of character the sawyer might be. I remember most clearly Pat, whom we knew as a hearty, humorous giant bowing his head before grace at our lunchtime table but who—as we would learn later—was in the evenings a tavern brawler known to carry women about the bar on his shoulders. He hauled and powered his sawmill with a giant Case tractor featuring a set of repurposed front tires originally mounted on a commercial airliner. Another sawyer was a pastor whose saw was powered by a roaring 357 Chevy engine. The pastor took delight in sawing at full speed no matter the help or the heat, and took visible pleasure in overwhelming the stacker at the end of the saw, a cheapish trick that even in the eyes of a young child diluted the effect of the gospel tracts he passed around when we stopped for lemonade.
Here at Tom’s I have more experience than the rest of the crew, but it is far distant, and the distance shows. At one point I am working the carriage beside Tom, struggling to drop the sharp iron hook (the previously mentioned “dog ear”) that pins the log in place. This is a fairly simple process: You flip a lever that loosens a threaded stud, thus allowing the dog to drop by gravity down a rail and bite into the wood. Then you snug up the stud again and off the log goes to meet the blade. Tom does this in a single, smooth motion. I, on the other hand, am yanking and struggling and generally getting everything wedged sideways. At one point I look up, and there is Tom, hand resting on the handle he’ll throw to engage the saw as soon as I get done fiddling around. He is wearing a poker face, but in his stance you can read an indulgent patience of the sort you might adopt if charged with watching over a dim child attempting to jam square pegs into round holes.
It’s fun to work there, though, with the countryside greening up and the air sunlit but cool, and everyone in the spirit of big kids on a school field trip. We’re all wearing heavy gloves and hearing protection and safety glasses while Tom is a full-blown OSHA DON’T poster as he stands midway between the devouring blade and the whirling truck wheels that spin against each other, rubber to rubber, acting as gonzo clutch pads transferring power from one rattling shaft connected to a roaring Farmall to another attached to the saw itself. The exhaust blows, the blade howls, and the sawdust flies, and there is Tom, barehanded and placid at the center of it, wearing nary an earplug and squinting against the flying wood chips.
He is in his element with an audience, especially once the wood is sawn. After the slabs are pitched and the lumber stacked, he stands surrounded by everyone, his blue Stockman Farm Supply cap at a rapper’s angle, telling the story of the fellow who showed up with a beautiful set of logs on his trailer.
“I asked him, ‘Where’d you get them logs?’” says Tom. “An’ he says, ‘I cut’em from my yard.’ And I says, ‘Well, I won’t touch’em.’”
All sawyers and loggers are extremely loath to cut up a “yard tree,” since they are often secretly studded with nails and lag screws and other saw-blade-busting surprises, usually the remnants of young adventurers building tree houses, or some long-ago farmer hanging a clothesline for Ma.
The man was insistent. As a matter of fact, the more Tom resisted, the more the man insisted, until it became evident that he felt Tom was impugning his logs.
“So I told him, ‘A’right, I’ll do it. But you see that saw blade there? If I hit somethin’ and have to replace any of the teeth, I charge you a buck a tooth.’
“And his jaw was set right out there, and he says, ‘That’s fine.’”
The first slab peeled away without incident. Then, on the second pass, there came a shuddering iron clank. The saw powered through, and when the board fell to the rollers, Tom shut the mill down and assessed the damage: seventeen teeth destroyed.
“So I point to that one board, and I tell him, ‘See that? That’s a seventeen-dollar board. You want any more?’ ‘Oh, no, no!’ he says.”
He basks in the laughter that follows.
The best story of the day, however, is the one he tells on Mills. Mills is a world-class scavenger, always on the lookout for a good deal. Way back when he was barely out of his teens, he and a buddy spotted some downed pine trees in a farmer’s woods. Mills had some woodworking projects in mind and was thrilled when the farmer said they could cut up the trees and take the logs for free. Mills says he should have been suspicious when all the bark fell away from the trees while he and his buddy handled them, and that he should have been even more suspicious of the fact that he and his buddy—youthful strength notwithstanding—were able to easily lift the solid eight-foot bolts and throw them into the truck bed. Instead, not knowing anything about lumber, he drove off for Fall Creek, where he heard some guy had a sawmill.
“Oh, he was proud of those logs when he backed up to the rack,” Tom says, as Mills shakes his head. But before he even got all the way over to the truck, Tom was shaking his head. “I had my pipe goin’ and I told him, ‘Those logs don’t look no good,’” says Tom. “I says, ‘They’re punky.’” Mills admits now that he had never heard the term before and wondered what type of connection Tom was trying to make with Punky Brewster.
Mills also admits that he didn’t want to believe this guy, and Tom must have sensed it, because he went ahead and rolled one of the logs onto the carriage. After sawing a couple of boards, he shut the mill down and showed Mills and his friend the worm tracks and the punk that crumbled to touch. Won’t even make good firewood, Tom told the boys. Still, Mills had read an article about woodworkers who made distressed furniture and he was convinced this wood would be perfect for just such a project, and he prevailed on Tom to continue sawing. Tom didn’t say anything after that. He sawed all but two logs, both of which crumbled in the process of being rolled off the rack. When it was all over Mills had about enough for maybe half a picnic table and a smallish picture frame.
Mills has told me this story before, and he says the sweet thing is that after Tom finished, he didn’t have a bad thing to say. In fact, Mills has always told me that he’s pretty sure Tom charged him about half of what he should have for all that trouble and worthless wood.
Well, today we get proof, because Tom records all of his sawing sessions in a dog-eared spiral-bound notepad. And after fishing it out of his shirt pocket and tallying up today’s board feet, he flips backward through the pages until he comes to a scribbled entry labeled with Mills’s given name and dated 1987. The entry in the notebook shows that Tom charged him a grand total of twelve dollars, proving kindness is available in various denominations. We all gather around to look at the documentation. Mills rolls his eyes and laughs. “Oh, I really thought I was rollin’ up with some prime lumber there.”
“Weeaahhll, we straightened him out,” said Tom, addressing the crowd in general, “ . . . but he got quite a lot of firewood in the process!”
When the two gigantic box elder trees just yards from our house died, I had the good sense to call on a professional tree trimmer to take them down. Although I have a chain saw, and alt
hough the state of our house is such that we dream of redecorating it with a bulldozer, dropping a sixty-foot tree through the upstairs window seems a drastic starting point. When the trees were safely down, I took over, sawing them up for firewood. I began at the top, trimming the branches, then blocking up the larger limbs and eventually the trunk. When I got to within about fifteen feet of the butt end of the tree, I paused with my saw in the air. Yard tree, I was thinking. Don’t do it. I held the chain saw an inch above the trunk, while visions of my father and my brother and a parade of old-time sawyers—and of course Tom—slowly shook their heads. I eyed the distance to the stump again and figured I was still above the trouble zone.
The saw didn’t kill immediately, thus allowing the chain to make enough revolutions that nearly all of the teeth were stripped. When I pulled the blade from the cut, there—about an inch beneath the surface—was a fat chunk of steel, now brightly scarred by my disintegrated saw chain. I could see only the thinnest aspect of the object, but what I could see made clear that this was no bolt or nail—it was something of heft, like thick strap iron or a section of railroad track. I didn’t carve it out, so I’ll never know what it was, although I did entertain a vision of some unknown kid—now in his dotage, or long gone—shinning up the tree to stow a treasure some long-ago summer afternoon, or perhaps a hired hand setting some miscellaneous chunk of steel in the crook of the limb for just a moment while stopping to attend some task that distracted him forever. It is bitter in any event to run your saw chain into a chunk of steel; it is triply so when you have paused just prior to consult the memory of your elders.
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