Cold

It's cold. Everything is frozen. A dead Vireo, that didn't make it south, got trapped between the door and the screen. I tried to use a tennis racket to free it but the technique didn't work. Fuck a small bird, I have to survive, but I feel bad, that I couldn't be everything to everybody. I should have saved the bird. My feet were cold, I wasn't wearing enough clothes, the tennis racket was the wrong implement, a ladle would have been better, a scooper, rather than a swatter. So the bird dies, freezes solid, and I feel bad. Unexpected consequences. Odd that I can deal with almost anything in the field, amputations, bodies, clogged toilets, but this dead bird bothers me. First off, it has a yellow collar below a black band and it's the first color I've seen all day, and secondly it's so soft. My clubbed fingers hardly do it justice, but it's like the outside of my mother's breast when I was nursing. I remember the rain on the roof, stroking something softer than dawn. I don't know what the Army Corp thinks they've done, where Mackletree flows into Roosevelt Lake, but they're wrong. I know this drainage and they've made several mistakes, the first is thinking they can control what happens. Bless them and their backhoes but they don't stand a chance. What water will do, it will do, you can watch it or run, but you can't interfere. Not much, you can do some things, plant willows, limit access, post notices that you protect this place with a gun, but the creek will do what it will. Control is a relative issue. Protection is more concrete. What would you do? If I were you, I might put sugar in their gas tanks, slash their tires, but I'm a fiction, I really can't do anything, my hands are tied. An imagined janitor, at an imagined museum, in an imagined town in southern Ohio, I don't see where I have a lot of leverage, the fulcrum is either missing or masquerading as something else, a knoll, a glacial deposit, an expensive watch, from which I either time or watch whatever is going on. The acronymic agency disavowes your existence. You less than exist, you're not even a shadow. All the photos are doctored, nothing is what it seems, what you remember is a carefully constructed fiction. That Grateful Dead song in the background, sampled, a fake, really, if truth be known. The next week's weather looks brutal, I'd better lay in supplies. Carry in a full pack tonight and maybe make an extra run into town tomorrow, lay in food and drink for two weeks. Got two of B's chains sharpened for the saw. Cut up Big Bertha this weekend and the rest of my winter is set. I need to clear another path, will need to carry this wood out in two stages. I have a flat place cleared, with a couple of log stringers on the ground, to keep firewood out of the melt, where we dropped the last tree, and I think I'll use that as a staging area, carry splits up and rick them there. The tree is in a deep hollow, just maybe 200 feet from the staging area, but extremely vertical, 30 degrees at least. I love carrying wood, it's such an intimate connection with the natural world; I'd rather make getting the wood out of the hollow a separate task, something I had to do, like earning a living, so that I could enjoy actually bringing the wood home. There is a mind state you can go to, easily, when the chore is exactly repetitive. When I carry the wood out of the hollow, I'll have created stair-steps, as long as you start on the right foot, that allow decent stability climbing up the slope, but my mind will drift. I try and create a safe space for that to happen. I know I'm prone to fall, I make allowances, I fill my pockets with bookmarks and rocks. Everyone's solution is different. I trust I'll find a way. Did I mention that the motel room in Johnson City was the worst I've ever had? Nothing worked but the bed, I slept the sleep of the dead. There is nothing that tires you as much as family. Me, I should say, barely endured the pointless babbling. I often took my dinner alone. Let that be on your tombstone. "He Often Ate Alone." I know him, I speak with some abandon, he is my friend.