Must Do

The new show is coming from Kentucky, two hours away, they have to rent a truck and load, no way they can get here before 11. I get up early and start a fire, work up another rick of wood, eat grits and toast, have another coffee, then head out, in crampons and gaiters. 10 inches of snow on the driveway (13 inches at my house), tough going and this is the downhill leg. The truck is buried again, dig it out, Upper Twin was plowed yesterday and is covered with ice and drifting snow, but Mackletree isn't too bad in 4-wheel drive at 10 mph. 30 minutes to go 5 miles. Rt.125 is clear, as is 52, and I get to town fine. The roads in town are horrible, back into 4-wheel drive. Get to the museum at 11, James is happy to see me, The Show and all. They arrive after noon, 17 crates, on wheels, thank god, as they are heavy and awkward. 3 of them are too large, too heavy, but we manage, one we have to carry around through the frozen alley (3 inches of ice) and take in through the loading door. We all go to late lunch, they love the Pub, love the lunch, and they're off. We don't want to handle a bunch of frozen art, so we just pop the lids, so things can acclimate. We study the condition book because there are detailed instructions for packing and unpacking; complex foam inserts, with all kinds of numbers and arrows. James will photograph the unpacking tomorrow, so we have a guide at the other end. Always good to have a guide at the other end. D and I saw the Show, when we were picking up some Circus Show parts, and it's going to look very nice in the main gallery. LaVon, the artist, did a residency with some local high-school students weeks ago, and their pieces are finished and ready to install in a tiny upstairs gallery, to run with LaVon's show downstairs. Tidy. It's nice when the galleries reflect each other. Sometimes it sounds like I'm talking about something other than what I think I'm talking about. Language is a wonderful thing. Mouse infiltration due to the rotten weather (from a mouse's point of view) and they have invaded, from, I think, the storage shed. Four in two days, and I just heard another one. I've rigged the entire perimeter with prototypes of mouse traps that can be assembled from things found around the house. My favorite one, and its already scored two kills, is a small plank, a 1x4, one end of which rests on a cast iron brick (I had one hanging around the house, a regular brick would work) and the other on a pan of water. There's a shingle ramp that goes up to the plank. Where the plank rests on the edge of the pan, there's a shim balanced on the end, the fat end of the taper on the plank. On the thin end, out there over the water, is a smidge of peanut butter. I can see them, in my mind, as the shim over-tips, and they think, falling to their death, "that goddamn Bridwell and his fucking traps." Notice that I choose to contest only small mammals with very small brains. A decent tombstone: He Could Outsmart Mice. Sometimes. They or something actually got to a bag of rice I had hung from a beam in the kitchen, thinking it safe enough. But this kind of weather, turns us into thieves and cannibals, and when I got up this morning there was rice everywhere. I saved most of it, by rinsing off crap in rainwater and re-drying the rice, but what a pain in the ass. I have a little propane cylinder, and I'm working on a trap where there little fuckers would just be incinerated, but I can't see risking my house and library to kill a single mouse. On the other hand, if it was The Main Mouse, and we were going head to head, I might risk everything. I have before, on lesser bets. I could argue with my friend Harvey that I was alive and he wasn't. And he could argue back. In the Dead Of Winter, anything is possible.