musings

You Know Me

/ J. Thorp / 3 Comments

You never know who you’ll cross paths with later in life, or how they might touch you …

*****

“You know me,” he says, although in reality I don’t. Not that well, at any rate.

Sure, I knew him in high school—knew who he was; recognized his lanky form and hat-hair; heard the familiar jeering in the halls. Kids used to bleat his name like sheep and laugh. Don’t ask.

“You know me,” he says. That’s how he starts everything—like we go way back, or something. Like we’re tight. He arrives the same way each time—just about sundown, first sound, then sight and smell. This time I hear the rattle and pop of his lawn tractor coming up the road from the east. I’m working on my own mower as he pulls up; I step to the porch as he kills the engine. He looks the same as he did then, save a bit of gut and a scruff of beard, tall and a little off-center, somehow; hair mussed, teeth yellow with tobacco juice. He smells of chaw, exhaust fumes and manure. The latter has dried to the sleeve of his sweatshirt and the leg of his jeans. His shoes, however, are spotless and white—athletic shoes he must only wear after work. He squirts brown spittle from between his teeth, politely, into the grass before stepping onto the porch.

Maybe it’s the job again—he works for a dairy farm to the north, and doesn’t much like his boss. Maybe it’s his truck—transmission’s out, and the transfer case. $1,800 to get it going again, and he makes $6.50 an hour, before taxes. Maybe it’s the car—the old Thunderbird I sold him for a $20 down payment and a winter’s worth of snowblowing. He drove it all winter without a rear window or a heater.

Maybe it’s some combination—if he can keep the Thunderbird running, he can visit another farm this weekend, one that offers better pay. Maybe the owner would recognize him as a hard worker and loan him the money to fix his truck. Maybe he’ll get housing on the place this time, and maybe in a few years, insurance. Maybe he’ll clear $7 an hour.

Maybe he’s finally had it. “You know me, Jim—I don’t take shit off anybody,” he says.

He took shit from everybody. Sitting beneath a shade tree away from the rest of the freshman football team, he took off his helmet, opened a bag of fresh tomatoes and took out a shaker of salt. We sat with our Gatorade and sandwiches and candy bars and bananas and ridiculed him.

Some of the guys lived for giving him shit. I gave it to him less than most—but what’s that make me?

He asks if I’d noticed he’d been by earlier. I hadn’t. He points out the fresh-mowed grass along road in front of the house. Maybe I’d like him to do the whole yard? Maybe I’d like to borrow his mower until mine’s up and running. Maybe, if I’m interested in his snowblower, maybe I could loan him the $1,800, and he could give me the snowblower and make payments on the balance. Then he could fix his truck and visit that other farm up to Traverse City.

He tells me his plans for the weekend, the week, the future. He asks advice on how to approach the other farm owner when he calls him, and how to deal with his current boss. He tells me about his girlfriend—about being too tired “to pop” some nights, and about forgetting whether or not they did, others. It’s more information than I need—we were never really friends, were we?

The neighbor kid’s out of jail, but shouldn’t give me any trouble, he tells me —he’ll see to it himself. He tells me if I need a new mower, he’ll talk to a dealer he knows.

“We’ve known each other a long time, Jimmy—I’ve got no problem putting in a good word for you,” he says. “You know me.”

Better than most, I think, and say, “Thanks.”

*****

That was in Michigan. I don’t know how he’s doing—last I knew, he didn’t have a phone. But I think about him from time to time …

Tales of the Inexplicably Frightening

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

Seen on the way to work this morning: An unsmiling old man seated on his front porch in a white undershirt, next to a wigless female department-store mannequin with dark eye makeup and a jagged grey chip where her nose should’ve been, wearing nothing but a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt.

Initial reaction: Visceral dread, and no idea why.

Current thinking: Maybe I dozed at a stoplight and dreamed the whole thing …

Bottom line: Jack-o-lanterns be damned!

Wednesday Morning Stream of Consciousness …

/ J. Thorp / 2 Comments

I’m sitting stock-still in traffic – a column of bumpers and brakelights through the windshield; in the rearview, a long line of headlights stretching to the horizon. Life carries on in curves above our thick black lines. Flocks of migratory birds drop, swirl, and rise again beneath an orange sun and pale purple skies.

They ply the unseen winds, oblivious to the mesozoic rumblings of the sluggish herd below. Our concerns are not their concerns.

*****

A few weeks back, a friend and I spent a good hour (a great hour, actually) arguing about whether humanity can realistically expect to have a long-term impact on the planet, no matter what we do. I argued that the rapid spike in global temperatures we’re experiencing now appears to outpace every shift that’s come before, throughout geologic time – in short, that we appear to be having a dramatic effect right now, and if we can do anything to stop or slow this effect, we should.

He argued that even the best scientists can’t say for certain how much of global warming is directly attributable to humans (versus indirectly, e.g., the methane from cattle herds, changing the surface of the Earth to absorb more or less heat, etc., or versus “natural” cycles). Scientists admit that there’s a great deal of subtlety to the Earth’s climate that we just don’t understand – and my friend made the case that, given humanity’s relatively short tenure on this planet (and questionable longevity), our chances of accurately identifying and isolating the man-made problem, and then fixing it without screwing things up even worse, seem sketchy, at best.

I don’t think that any of this means we shouldn’t work to control consumption and burn less, emit less, pollute less. But he makes a good point: All too often, human history appears as a series of basic misunderstandings followed by tragic overreactions, as each supposed solution to a problem introduces several new (and even more poorly understood) problems.

In this respect, I am conservative: I believe that a headlong rush toward ill-defined “progress” is dangerous; that contemplation should precede every action, reflection should follow every action, and moderation should rule every action. My favorite quote in this vein comes from Jurassic Park, when Jeff Goldblum’s chaos theorist character says, “[Y]our scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

*****

Anyway – the connection to traffic and birds: I get the feeling sometimes that the Earth will, one morning, yawn, stretch, and slough us off like a little dead skin. And I suspect the birds won’t miss us.

The other day, another friend asked me why I like crows – which I do, of course, or she wouldn’t’ve asked. “Their call isn’t particularly pretty,” she said, “and they are scavengers.”

I replied that I like crows because they clean up after the rest of us, they’re survivors and crazy smart, and, as the poet Jane Kenyon says, “like midwives and undertakers” they “possess a weird authority.”

“You get the feeling they know something you don’t, will likely outlive you, and will note your passing but not mourn,” I said.

That exchange got me thinking about another poem, about crows I watched along a road, years ago – black-feathered, black-hearted back-stabbers …

conspiracy

opossum on the yellow line
no longer plays
a murder of crows
dark with purpose
flapping in loose succession
devour their brother

one stands watch

J. Thorp
14 Mar 01

We’re scavengers, too, I told her. We just dress it up better.

*****

In 1948, the naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote: “For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of steaks. The sportsman who shot the last [Passenger] pigeon thought only of his prowess. The sailor who clubbed the last auck thought of nothing at all. But we, who have lost our pigeons, mourn the loss. Had the funeral been ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us. In this fact, rather than in Mr. DuPont’s nylons or Mr. Vannevar Bush’s bombs, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts.”

I agree with the sentiment, but I’m not sure superiority is the right word today. Our ability to mourn the loss of the natural world has done little to curb our appetites. Perhaps the crow won’t cry at our funeral, not because it can’t cry, but because it’s not sad.

Eight Seconds on the Back of Old Labelmaker …

/ J. Thorp / 4 Comments

Recently I mentioned to a friend of mine that I’d just returned from a fishing trip to Colorado with my oldest boy, Bren, and another friend, Cowboy Bob.

“You have a friend called Cowboy Bob?” she said. “That’s so cool!”

It is cool, but he’s not actually called Cowboy Bob – leastwise, not by anyone but me and my kids, on occasion. In fact, I just learned a little more than a week ago that he wasn’t entirely enamored of that handle when I used it the first time (and considering we’ve known each other 13 years now, that’s saying something).

I also learned, during the course of this trip, that he wasn’t entirely taken with the notion of meeting me at all. I’d taken a summer job at the world-famous Wall Drug Store after my second year of college – I was assigned to the western boot department (with occasional stints in moccassins; two products about which I knew very little) and worked next-door to Bob’s wife, Cindy, in western wear. We got along pretty well, and apparently she told Bob there was this Yale student working in town that he should meet.

In as close as I can recall to Bob’s own words, here’s what went through his mind at the time: “Yeah, that’s exactly what I need to do: meet some snotty rich kid who thought it’d be a kick to spend a summer in South Dakota.”

But because he “ain’t got no weak nerve nor fear,” he came into town anyway, and spent an evening with us kids picking songs out of his guitar – mainly cowboy songs I enjoyed but didn’t know.* Then he broke into Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” – a song I knew, to my own surprise, nearly verse for verse. (I was surprised to hear a shipwreck song on the edge of the Badlands, but just yesterday, another friend described how the great wide open of Lake Superior made him homesick for the Plains, and now it all seems to fit.)

“Now that’s a song from my neck of the woods,” I said when he finished – and just like that, a friendship sprouted. That friendship led to my dad, my three-year-old son and I visiting Bob’s place during a branding back in 2001, and got me to thinking about A) how labels rarely do justice to people, and B) how quickly we make our marks on each other. And I wrote about it, in an essay called Brandings.

I’ll warn you: I tried to write very matter-of-factly about the actual branding, done more or less the “old fashioned” way, with horses, ropes and hot irons. I was surprised, even shocked, at times – but it was clear to me that these men were doing their work in the best way possible. I’ve seen bull calves castrated in a couple ways now, and I can’t see that a tight rubber band and slow withering (or even anesthesia and stitches from some pet vet) would’ve been any less stressful for range-raised critters.

And if your response is that they shouldn’t castrate them in the first place, I’ve got a couple questions about your “companion animals.” If everything checks out with them, I’ll gladly discuss the rest.

By the way, Bob came to terms with the nickname after thinking through who was saying it and how it was meant: equal parts respect and tongue-in-cheek affection. Sort of like the way he still sometimes uses variations of “smart-ass Ivy Leaguer” to describe me …

Here’s the essay. Let me know your thoughts.

—————

* The quoted bit, or something like it, is from Clint Eastwood’s The Unforgiven. Bob can’t remember the phrase, but never tires of getting me to say it. So there you go, my friend.