Truck (27 page)

You will notice rhythms. Often the squirrels come in waves, then abate. Wild turkeys come streaming through afoot, spot you, and go clattering into flight, breaking branches and then leaving everything suddenly silent, although you may hear a gobble from where they have landed. I once watched a partridge feeding for half an hour until he was directly beneath me, at which point, because I do love fresh partridge, I tried to hit him with my thermos but missed wide right, and when the sound of his wings faded I immediately missed his company.

 

I stay in the stand all day and don't see another deer. I admit I snoozed a time or two, so there may have been a jailbreak. But now I'm watching the day draw down. Twilight in November comes early, pressing at you from early afternoon onward. The cold becomes foreboding, obvious as it is that it will only get worse as the so-far-ineffective sun fades away
altogether. Whenever I read paeans to nature—my own included—I am grateful for these late November days, which mercilessly reduce you to the proper size. This is not the lover's sunset of summer with its manic colors and promise of a tantalizing night. The deer hunting sun sinks as if it will never rise again. The light, already anemic, simply drains away. Even if the sky colors up a brassy pink, it remains metallic and you view it through bony, naked branches. There are times right at the edge of darkness when a crow will drift by silently and swerve to disappear into the inky silhouette of a tall pine and you are certain your life is ended. By the time you are out of the woods it is fully night, and back in the underbrush the fat on the gutpile has gone solid.

It is a relief, then, to roll up to Jed's shop and step through the door into the woodstove warmth, everyone gathered after having made their way back out of the trees. We skin and quarter the deer, hanging them one by one from a steel beam and ratcheting the skin away with an old boat winch, cutting the body into five pieces to be hung from hooks. We catch up while we work, everyone relating the story of their day. Later in the week we will begin carving the deer into the roasts, the chops, the parts for sausage, but tonight we just skin and quarter and then go home to our houses where the lights seem bright and everything unnaturally square.

 

We hunt most of the week, sometimes apart, sometimes together. The stories and the venison accumulate. Yesterday I wandered out behind Jed's barn with my rifle and a couple of wrenches to get those wipers off the L-180 and looked up to see a gigantic buck standing against a thin strip of woods two forties away. I dropped the wrench and went for the rifle, but he spun and jumped into the trees. Jed was nearby, so I told him what I had seen and then I stood at one end of the strip while he walked through it end to end, but the buck did not emerge and was probably half a township distant. I returned to the truck. After the wipers, I began removing a chromed strip from the lower lip of the front of the hood. The equivalent strip on my truck was cracked. This one is in perfect shape. It is affixed with four bolts. The nuts on the first three
spin right off. The fourth won't budge. I work delicately for a while, then get the bright idea of rotating the strip, rather than the bolt. It is made of cast aluminum and snaps in two immediately.

This is what we call a “
Sunnava!
” moment.

“Walk it off,” I can hear Mark say.

 

By the time deer season is over, we have walked miles and miles a day, and sat quietly for hours and hours. We are blessed with this swampy farm of ours, middling for agricultural purposes but perfect for family deer hunting. You can carry me out here blindfolded and give me five steps in any direction and I can tell you where I am, unless you stick me deep in the tamaracks, which are impossible even after thirty years. Life has gotten a little far-flung, but this place and this week have remained the pintle to my wandering.

Anneliese and Amy come up to help with the cutting and packaging of the venison, and it does my heart good to think this could be part of our future. The cutting and storing of the venison, but also maybe a pig, or a beefer. And I fantasize sometimes about looking up from the firewood stack to see Anneliese emerging from a root cellar. It could be looming middle age, but there seem to be more and more of us who feel this way. I remember back in the 1970s during the great Back to the Land rush, seeing the communal farmers make six trips a day past our farm with their little mower and baler, and I remember my father saying, “I wonder how long that will last…” and in general it didn't, but today's crop seems by and large more realistic. Anneliese and I have our chicken dreams, but we aren't headed pell-mell off the grid. We have talked to a man named Buffalo about the feasibility of integrating solar and wind power, and so far what I like most about Buffalo beyond his freaked-out Amish beard is that he does not speak of windmills in spiritual terms and he knows what it is to make payroll. We are not under the illusion that we will be farmers of the sort that raised us. In the main, we hope to cultivate a modest crop of self-reliance. Do some things the old way and some things the new. I for one would like to expand beyond freezing to canning. We aren't out to destroy capitalism, just to make it tougher
to get our dollar. Take the money saved on car payments and buy an airplane ticket to Panama or bologna for a road trip to North Dakota, or lay off the hydrocarbons and start saving for a recumbent tandem bicycle. Regarding the latter, if we truly wind up together in some legal or other extended fashion, Anneliese has made the recumbent tandem a priority and I have acquiesced, although I have made it clear it will take time because the geek factor there is just astounding.

 

Once on a bitter cold day when I was still in my teens and not yet past
bagging
things, I dropped my deer hunting hat in the sheep pasture and had to go out after dark to retrieve it. I had killed a doe earlier that day and when I located my cap I switched the flashlight off and tipped my head back to the sky, which was clear of clouds and profuse with stars. Looking at the infinitude and standing in the silent cold that felt as if it was bound to deepen forever, I was swept by the idea of the gutpile somewhere out there freezing in the brush and I had this vague idea that by killing the deer I had cheated the universe of some sort of energy. I walked quickly back toward the house and as always was pleased to see the warm yellow squares of the windows through the pines. But ever since that time I have tried to end at least one day of deer hunting by standing quietly beneath the sky. It is best, of course, when there are stars. You stand there on a frozen patch of the earth twisting away from the sun, and you think of the blood in the snow or on the oak leaves, and in your ears you hear the terminal murmur of your pulse, and you feel very small and uncertain, as you should. In the cold bed of the heavens the stars are saying,
we can wait
.

 

On a substantially lighter note, Anneliese recently sold the Honda and bought a van for one thousand dollars. It was owned by our friends Mark and Karen. Mark and Karen live simply and travel often. Mark has converted his 1983 Ford Escort to run on cooking grease. Karen was the person who hounded Anneliese to go to the Fall Creek library for a reading by a writer Anneliese had never read.

The van is of the variety they call mini, although I have forbidden
the use of this term in my presence, decreeing instead that when I am at the wheel it shall be called the
fambulance
. The engine was recently overhauled and runs like a champ, but the windshield wipers are wired to a standard seventy-nine-cent on/off in-wall light switch, which means you have to get your timing down if you want them to lie flat. You have the option, however, of stopping them at the fullest extent of their outward arc, leaving them parallel to the direction of travel, thus improving handling and aerodynamics.

T
HERE IS A MAN
in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who owns a bar where he will sell you no light beer. It says so in neon right there over the cash register:
NO LIGHT BEER
. He is uninterested in your opinion on the subject. He has also declared a moratorium on people writing about his bar, and the last time I was in there he told me, “Perry, you're a good kid, but you have to get past Baudelaire.”

I didn't have the heart to tell him I'm not even past the Bee Gees.

There is no sign over the entrance of The Joynt, because as a veteran of one corner table once said, this has become the sort of place that doesn't need one. There is an antique barber's chair just inside the door, but you shouldn't just jump right into it, because for years and years Harry sat there, and as the polished granite headstone behind the bar says,
HARRY WAS RIGHT.
Jack Kerouac once took a leak in the alley out back, and the walls are tiled from ceiling to wainscoting with poster-sized black-and-white framed posters of the jazz and folk artists who have played the narrow tavern (twenty feet wide and three times as deep) in their time—John Lee Hooker, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Koko Taylor, Dave Van Ronk, Stéphane Grappelli, Odetta, Son Seals, Tom Paxton, on and on—but those heydays were over long before I walked into the place for the first time sometime around 1992 and I have no claim on them.

I was led to the The Joynt by a small group of people I met at a local poetry reading. I had just begun attending readings at the invitation of
my friend Frank—at that time I knew him only as the editor of a local magazine—and afterward everyone headed for The Joynt. In particular, a corner table just inside the door over which hung portraits of Gary Snyder, Donald Hall, Miller Williams, and John Ciardi. Seamus Heaney once drank whiskey after whiskey at this table, but he didn't read in the bar, so his photo is not hung. There are rules.

For the next five years, I made it to The Joynt one or two Thursday nights a month, as on Thursday night the corner table was occupied by readers and writers. Often they were faculty and students from the local university English department, but you were just as likely to find a carpenter, a single mom, or a local newspaper reporter, and once I listened to a line worker from the plastics factory debate the merits of
Jane Eyre
. The sessions were not without pretension. At times there was enough inflated rhetoric coming off that corner table to resurrect the
Hindenburg
. And we are not talking perpetual lyceum. You had your facile aspersions, injurious gossip, and talk of the Packers. But I would sit there with my Coke (and later, when the corruption had set in, my O'Doul's) and just listen, and the talk would get bluffer and drunker and more ribald, and the air smokier, but there was so much to soak up, so much about books and writers and ideas, that I would return month after month, my rule becoming, the second time Taylor the voluble poet stubs his cigarette on your kneecap, it's time to go home.

There is a temptation with a place like The Joynt to keep recapturing that Thursday night, and when you see the new frat boy whooping and slamming shots in the barber's chair, you want to grab him by the scruff of the neck and say, Son, you are not a drinker, you are a swallower, and furthermore, get out of Harry's chair, turn your cap around, and go sit next to that quiet fellow down there, because he has been here since 10
A.M.
for the last ten years and two divorces, and
that,
my young friend, is
drinking,
and good luck catching up. But you don't, because that would be creeping codgerism, and there is grace in letting go, and maybe just maybe Harry's spirit will lead the boy to read a book someday. So after a while I stopped showing up for the Thursday sessions. The Joynt is timeless, it is you who are getting old, and so you ease off and away, knowing you can always come back as long as you show up with
reasonable expectations and understand you may have to sit someplace other than the corner. Now I go in there maybe two, three times a year, usually when one or the other of the old crew is coming through town, and it's good to throw peanut shells on the floor, play “Mustang Sally” one more time, and yell old stories over the jukebox. It is good to know there remains a smoky, well-worn place where Nolte the barkeep is capable of making dismissive reference to seventeenth-century French poets while refusing to traffic in panderous beer. And it's just fine to know it's not our place the way it used to be.

 

This year of mine has unraveled in just over a hundred ways, each of them representing a day spent away from home. This schedule is the result of modest accumulation of lucky breaks and the kindness of others, and any attempt to express sufficient gratitude is like chucking quarters into a platitudinous quote generator, housed in the heart though it may be. I say this to establish context for any grumping to come. At every stop and every turn, I have been received with smiles, funny questions, free food, good directions, a hand to help lift another box of books, and a place to lay my balding head. Every time I go to leave, Anneliese and I think of Steve and Sukey, bound to celebrate their sixth anniversary in separate countries, on their second and third tours of duty, respectively, children left at home, no end in sight. It is a time of war, we are told, and although stateside we and our credit cards remain apparently unimpinged, it is damn well a time of war for those two. Sometimes I walk two blocks to the post office and back and upon returning realize I didn't worry about a thing. So when I prattle on here, understand that I have removed my cap.

A year ago I had hit a point of relative clarity. All the usual cranial scrambled eggs remained, but as far as the number of toothbrushes in the bathroom, I was good. I was content as a single man, had rather firmly decided I would limit the scope of my romantic endeavors and most likely never marry, and now here it is December, and held to my desk there beneath the weight of a live 30–06 round is a newspaper clipping with a headline that reads, “Successful Couples Compromise.”

I've been going back and forth on marriage, trying to work it out in my head. I'm negotiating two central stumbling blocks: as a wobbly agnostic I have no desire to ask the blessing of some other person's brittle God any more than I feel the need to seek sanction from my own ill-defined list of contenders; nor, as much as I love the Badger State, do I feel any responsibility to declare my love before the state of Wisconsin, although I have downloaded the relevant state statutes and filed them in a manila folder to which I will shortly add the “Successful Couples” clipping. I am not antimarriage, as my life is full of examples of married couples—my parents chief among them—who emanate a depth of calm with each other that is evident of what love can be when it stops acting silly, and indeed I am seeking their counsel whenever possible. I have stayed up late talking to my big friend Billy, who makes his living carving tombstones, and in his fifty years has made the journey from biker bar bouncer to contemplative student of Buddha, and somewhere in between found a wife he treats with affection and dignity. Sometimes I see the old man up the street going for his mail and I remember the day I sat with him and his wife in the Jamboree Days beer tent and he eagerly pulled out his wallet to show me a portrait of them when they met back around World War II—in the photo he is wearing a military uniform—and then I looked at them shoulder to shoulder, both coming in somewhere around a short five feet and grinning with their beers and I wondered what it was to tote that photo around for fifty-plus years and still be so proud to show it with your girl right there beside you. My marriage reservations are not about cynicism or fear. I'm just looking for reasons. There is this anarchist philosopher I have never met but correspond with now and then. When I heard he had gotten married, I sent him an e-mail and asked him why. I guess I believe in it, he wrote back. He said he saw it as a public celebration of a private resolution. He said he meant it when he said
forever
. He said he wanted to make a pledge like that even if in some sense it was ridiculous or impossible.

“Plus,” he wrote, “we're both pretty severe advocates of monogamy, you know?”

Anarchists can be such squares.

 

Today I reviewed my gardening notes, which is a hoot. This year, as with all the other years before, I plotted everything out on graph paper, each little raised bed and patch, not necessarily to scale but done in nice straight lines. The first thing you notice is how many rows of how many plants I have crammed in each bed. Any third-year gardener could have taken one look at the layout and warned me off. There are these earnest little starred notes along the border: “
Thin turnips to 6–8 inches; Parsnips 4 inches.
”

Well sure.

There are dates beside each row, noting the day the seeds or sprouts went in, and you can see on some days I went on a binge, planting row after row after row: dill, basil, cilantro, parsley, shallots, lettuce, kale, more basil, cucumbers, parsnips, peas. Another day, and it was just beets and some carrots. There is no equivalent set of dates to note the eventual resolution of each row, although there are some undated comments that provide certain sad clues:

“
Thyme—dead-ish.
”

“
Leeks (carryover transplants),
” followed by an addition in different ink: “
didn't do well, I think leeks go to seed on yr. 2.
”

“
Lemon thyme?
”

“
Shallots.
” Three years running now, and I have yet to harvest one.

“
Pickling cuke.
” A particularly poignant entry. I made two batches of refrigerator pickles. The first batch sprouted moss. The second batch turned fizzy. I have a Post-it note here from that first batch. It says, “
Mold on the @#! pickles.
”

But then there is this entry, faint and barely legible up along one edge of the ill-fated parsnips bed: “
Evening robin rain song
.”

Of course I am already thinking about the seed catalog.

 

My brother John's garden turned out just fine. In particular, his carrots and parsnips did so well he found his root cellar overfull, and I recently came home to find he had left a box of them inside the porch. They were shockingly large. My first impulse was to wave them past a Geiger coun
ter as they had clearly been irrigated with water condensed from the cooling towers at Three Mile Island. I kept turning the parsnips around and around, looking for the label that said Louisville Slugger. Instead of a thank-you note I went to my crisper where the last of my wizened produce lay and, selecting a deeply withered parsnip and a carrot the size of a crayon, tied them in a red satin ribbon and put them on a bed of cotton balls in an empty stationery box, which I then sealed, addressed, and placed in the mail. Within the box I included the following note, printed in frilly Nimbus script:

 

Thank You

For your recent gift of homegrown parsnips and carrots.

 

We were most grateful.

 

Having said that…

 

We understand the temptation to simply load up on pig dung and grow the biggest dang vegetables you can. Good for you.

 

We here at Deliciously Sensitive Farms, however, specialize in custom-grown, esthetically pleasing vegetable miniatures. Following in the path of those green-thumbed entrepreneurs who(m?) sell baby greens to accountants in Manhattan for $57 a pound, we grow amazingly small versions of stuff, year after year, with depressing consistency. Enclosed in this custom-packed case please find a selection of our tastefully sized and undercultivated produce.

 

Send no money now.

 

But do please consider the following memberships in our exclusive, earth-centered, utterly Mother-Friendly community-based sharing circles:

(dues payable in cash or wildly irresponsible credit card)

 

Stunted Pumpkin of the Month Club

Friends of Wilt

Lentils-R-Us

Sprout-O-Rama

And the

Federation of Anemic Beets

 

I recently stood on a frozen lake inside 3.85 million acres of state-sponsored wilderness with a musher who had been working behind sled dogs for over thirty years but also once spent time in pursuit of a divinity degree, and he said the trouble with America today is not that we're dumb, it's that we're dumb and proud of it. It wasn't that the people I listened to in The Joynt knew it all, or that they had seen it all (although they could account for a pretty wide swath in toto), but that they had remained engaged. It wasn't that they were blue collared or woolly-headed, it was that whether they earned their buck from behind a lectern or on a scaffold, they hadn't allowed their brains to kick into neutral. They hadn't become satisfied. Nobody gave, as they say, two shits if your higher education took place in the ivory tower or atop a pair of drywall stilts, or, for that matter, at the bottom of a glass. This was not on the whole a churchly crew, but they had a fundamental understanding of sin, the greatest of which was to play dumb.

To be sure, there were times you needed tall, tall boots, and every once in a while, if things got too bloated, or someone overreached, Taylor would rare back in his chair and—his one hand triple-tasking a whiskey glass, a cigarette, and a pointer finger simultaneously—would direct our attention across the barroom to the opposite wall and say, “Hey. Hey. Hey.” until everyone was looking at the photo-enlarged R. Crumb comic book cover just up the wall from the jukebox and beside the bulletin board with the postcards, bumper stickers, and headline ephemera. On the cover, Mr. Natural—in his robe and wingtips—is riding up the sidewalk on a kick scooter. Flakey Foont and Big Baby are peeping over a
wooden fence, and Flakey Foont says, “Mr. Natural! What does it all MEAN??”