l i f e
low tech day
I woke Easter Sunday to the sound of church bells ringing down Tate St. I heard them in the shower as I watered the bansai. They were there faintly while I dressed. They were still playing when I cut the engine to the MG an hour later and coasted to a stop next to the belfry. The bells resonated off the side of the Whitherspoon gallery and I closed my eyes and listened for a few moments before pulling the starter button and turning right onto Lee St.
I was heading to Salisbury. That's where I was born. It's where you could say my "roots" are, but really I'm spread over the area surrounding High Rock Lake like a vine wrapped around an aging oak. I was raised on the lake. I've long grown accustomed to the slightly metal taste of well water. I spent summers as a kid cutting the grass around the variegated hastas my grandfather seemed to plant at random. And this particular Easter when I pulled down the drive nobody was home.
It was one of those rare occasions where I wandered around the house looking at everything before pulling a beer out of the shop fridge and getting a couple of screws I needed to fix the top on the MG.
I stretched out the top, replaced the missing screws and thought I'd better get the boat ready as my folks would be their soon.
Down at shore I skipped a couple of stones and gently kicked the new flat-bottom boat tied to the birch tree by the pier. It had been painted primer gray, thick marine paint, and I noticed it was leaking. I stepped into the back, over the last bench seat and immediately saw the problem. Rotten boat plug. I went to the boat house and took the plug out of my Glastron. Kneeling down over the leak I thought about my grandfather. His frail hands pushing the rotten plug into place without giving it a second thought. Never checking. A mistake he would never have made in his youth. A mistake he taught me always to avoid. And yet a mistake that, in his old age, he cannot shake.
I switched plugs and bailed out the four inches of water in the back of the boat. On my way back to the house I checked to make sure at least the knot around the tree was strong. It was.
Now, when I go to the lake I've been taught to do certain things. Mix gas for the boats. Set batteries to charge. And, among other things, check for dead trees. Yes, dead trees. My grandfather is obsessed with the idea that a tree is going to crush his house and so part of all things normally done when first arriving at the lake is checking for dead trees. Today I find one candidate. An old oak. It's lowest branches are to high to reach but look gone to me. Very brittle, no life. I grab a bamboo pole with a hook fashioned onto one end and pull one branch down. Little green buds are at the end of each twig. Good. Felling trees is not something I really enjoy.
Next I check the shoreline for dead fish and trash that mess up the bank. I move it all to a pile where later it is burned with the household garbage. Then the ash is spread around flower beds and boxes. Quite efficient really. Anyway, this time I notice down by the pile a stump where there used to be another sizable birch. I'd guess eight inches across. I knelt down and thought...what? It wasn't cut with a saw, but it looked rather like an axe. Wood chips were all around the base and I picked a few up. Then I noticed. Hmmm. I laughed to myself...so, my grandfather's got himself a beaver. You can tell a beaver from an axe by the even cut on the wood, no person can do that, I don't care how many trees they've cut down. It didn't take too long to find the nest, next door under their pier, out by the end. Beavers can cut down a tree like that and have it all drug out and gone in a night. Amazing really.
Of course I knew I'd have to talk my grandfather out of shooting it. He's always trying to get me to shoot something for him. When he was younger and I wasn't allowed to touch guns yet, he would blast holes in copperheads so large, barely two small pieces of flesh held them together where the shot went through. He always kept one 12 gauge loaded with rock-salt for the neighborhood dogs. It's surprising all the wildlife didn't leave his property for good, but he was, and still is, always complaining about something.
As he aged and I learned to shoot he would ask me to shoot for him. I always missed. I figured if he couldn't hit the woodpecker way up in the top of some far away tree himself, he couldn't very well bitch at me for botching the shot and giving the bird a chance to fly off. Which is exactly what I always did.
"God bless it all to hell when I was your age..."
But the bird was gone by then. Safe. I was, and still am, deadly accurate with a 410 gauge and a .22, but you can't carry guns around the lake anymore so I sometimes shoot old dishwashers and junk up by Bob Strange's house.
The only things I ever did shoot were snakes and that was out of fear. I would carry the 410 out when I went fishing and anything that resembled a snake got a shell shot its way. That's just how it was. So, I had to laugh to myself about the beaver. It would piss off my grandfather to no end, but there isn't much he can do about with his sight and a beavers intuition so I figure they'll just battle it out like some cartoon, and that image is what had me laughing.
I went back up to the shop for another beer and ran my hands along the green fly rod hanging with the others in the shop. I looked at the old wood lures on the wall and in the boxes. My grandfather always liked to spit tobacco juice on his lures before casting them out. He has a ritual for about everything, but I only doubted him once.
"Son, I'm telling you the God's honest truth. You spit on these here lures first an' you best be able to catch a fish lest you be lame, or weak in the arm."
"Poo Poo, I don't know about..."
Next thing I know I'm wiping tobacco juice off my face. I was ten.
"Boy, I tell you something I mean it. Don't ever doubt me." He spit again over the side of the boat.
I never did.
A few minutes on the swing and I was wondering where everybody was. A few more minutes and I went for a drive.
It's hard to explain the near perfect feeling of winding an open top car that you practically built yourself through the twisting lanes and various stretches of unknown country roads. I try to get lost. Just drive and drive and drive. I usually have my camera with me and I take shots here and there of old farmhouses and barns. Sometimes I'll pull an old nail from the building to see when it was built. Nails have a definite pattern to them. Thin, flat nails are the oldest. Then there's a flat with a slight twist. Those are pretty old too, not at all like new nails which are round and have grooves to help them hold the wood.
I pulled up next to farmhouse I'd never seen before. I had no idea where I was, but on top of the house were four lightening rods and a weather vane. All of them had hand blown glass globes on them. The house was abandoned, but I've been in enough trouble before to know somebody owns it. It was pretty well covered with ivy and shade from the enormous trees surrounding it, so I felt safe in exploring. Its foundation were four stones on which large railroad timbers had been laid and locked together, tongue and groove. It had a rusty tin roof and the only way up was out a second story window and then up the lightening rod that ran across the roof line, down the side of the house and into the ground. It was tacked onto the roof by copper brackets and thin flat nails. When I tugged the loosened. I knew my time on the roof would be short and very limited.
I went straight for the weather vane. It flaked in my hands as I twisted it free from the bracket. Copper won't rust. Iron, yeah sure, but the bracket was like the day it had been nailed in.
Stealing. I know. Bad. I can't justify it so I won't, but take it I did.
On the way down the nails began popping out in twos and I just made the first floor slant when the rod came free. I ducked as it swung over my head and that was it. In through the window, down the staircase and out the front door.
I focused. I opened the throttle. I brushed dirt and rotten wood through my hair. I felt good and it was just mid-afternoon...
goodnight 6.6.98