Best Intentions

More snow this morning, slick roads, and I'm glad I stayed in town. Trashed the floors, bringing in the glass show on Friday, so I sweep and start cleaning them. So much road and sidewalk salt tracked inside on wet shoes, enough to make a janitor cry. Technically a day off, so I take a long walk down below the floodwall. A string of barges and their tug have stopped in the wide swing of river west of the confluence and part of the crew has come ashore in a zodiac. I catch their bow line at the revetment in the lee of the world's ugliest jetty. Revetment from the Old French revestir, to clothe again, from the Latin re + vestire, to clothe, meaning concrete or rocks or dead cars and old appliances used to stabilize a bank or shore. The crew has come ashore to pick up a part they needed for the tug's engine. A deck hand stays with the boat, while the others go for coffee and sweets at the Market Street Cafe. I talk with the kid for a while. It was his dream to be on the river, and now he is. The food is good, the pay is good, and he loves his job, even in this foul weather; better, he says, than farming tobacco. The tug is a monster, pushing five barges upstream, 8,000 horsepower, and needing every bit of it. In his two years on the water they've never gone aground, but they hit a snag once, a forty foot oak with root ball attached, that sent him to his knees. Four separate skeins of geese, flying over, honking, a parade in the sky, marching bands with just tubas. Struck me as funny, like they were late or something. Got the date wrong, late for an appointment. Navaho time, in which there is only now, and any projection is mere folly. Tomorrow at noon means some time in the future. Maybe the day after tomorrow, maybe never; I'm still processing what I learned, living on the Res. That gun-shot trailer saved my life, the way real time was compressed. Bullet holes will catch your attention, but they don't necessarily mean anything, random acts of violence might just be random acts. A neighbor with a short fuse, the paperboy making a point, no reason to go ballistic, except that maybe it disturbed your sleep, and that might be reason enough to get angry enough to say something. Sarcasm is often the weapon of choice.