Truck (6 page)

 

This basement of mine will never be one of those wood-paneled air-hockey-and-Ping-Pong-table romper room basements. The ceiling is low and dungeony. The joists are flossed with cobwebs. Much of the year the floor is damp, although it dries up nicely in winter and is dry today. The house was built in the 1930s. Old-timers tell me contractors upped the ratio of sand to cement in those days to save money. I don't know about that. Could be, because the concrete in the walls is cappuccino brown. Despite this, the house is solid and square. Down here beneath the frost line, I feel cocooned and safe. Enjoying, as poet Bruce Taylor wrote in his
Pity the World
gardening poems, “…some privileged ignorance of/the hungrier facts of life.” I am grateful for my safe little spot, but freshly reminded of the Rwandan horrors, I am humbled by the fact that my gratitude alleviates no one's misery.

Last year, I bought Nancy Bubel's
The New Seed-Starters Handbook
. Trying to better myself, as usual. I read the preface earnestly. I felt a swelling sense of purpose. But then I began to skim, and then skip ahead, and naturally, I became overwhelmed. The old cookbook overload kicking in. It was frustrating, but it also made me appreciate the commitment of years and time required to become a true gardener. In the introduction, Nancy Bubel says she began gardening in 1957, when she killed a batch of radishes in a window box. It was nice of her to include that. I am learning not to overstudy, but rather to be satisfied above all by the process. Learn what I learn, on the fly. I try to choose
wisely, plant things on the basis of the growing cycle and need for a head start, but pretty quickly I am throwing in favorites just because I miss them. Here in March I hunger for the stem crack of cilantro plucked in the morning sun and the thrill of discovering a deep green zucchini squash lying boa-belly fat in the grass, and so I unseal their respective envelopes and tap out a palmful of each. I do this fully recognizing that cilantro planted directly in the ground will catch and pass the wan, leggy stuff I'll sprout in these trays, and that starting your zucchini early is like starting your dandelions early. The hunger here is not so much for the food as it is for the sight of the sprout. And so I spend a few quiet hours in the subterranean sanctity of my ratty basement, tamping hard seeds into cushiony cubes of humus, putting in motion the predictable miracle of germination. A miracle available even to a klutz like me.

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) will 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.