Natural Phenomena

A road-cut or hillside where the sandstone layers are exposed, wet-weather springs emerge as frozen waterfalls. Very beautiful on the north-facing slopes. Hundreds of these ice sculptures that linger for days or weeks, some of them larger than a house. They recur, in the same places, a simple fact of drainage, some times in similar form. I'm always surprised, when I walk across one of last year's corn fields to get to one, how massive they can be. When melted, the ice is sweet water, and there are a couple of places, near the road, where I harvest stalactites for drinking water. This time of year, I carry an ice-pick in a holster and keep a couple of five-gallon buckets in the back of the Jeep. Ice weighs a little less than water; water being one of the few things that expands in both states from a liquid, hotter and colder: you got your vapor and you got your solid. Did you read about that guy that found the two-pound gold nugget in Australia? Which led to a consideration of concentration, why and how that happens. It's still raining, a year's supply of water, but I only collect 20 gallons because that will last me a month and I can't project further than that. I wash socks and underwear as the occasion arises. I keep a three-gallon stainless steel pot of water on the stove at all times, a test against need, I can wash my hair and take a sponge bath with a gallon of water. I'm set for months. Speaking of concentration, there's a site, Oklo, in what is now Gabon, where 1.7 billion years ago, at 16 different locations, uranium was so concentrated, it started, spontaneous nuclear reactions. Today was a concentration of sound. The most chaotic day yet. A decision was made. The theater has twelve rows of eight seats and an aisle down the middle. We needed to install a railing and there wasn't room, so we took out all the seats and will move them all to the left, eliminating one seat in each row, and put the railing on the right-hand wall. This involved removing a step at each of the twelve landings, cast in place concrete, and that involved Cody and Alfred using a jack-hammer for six hours. The steps freed from the landings fairly easily, but had to be broken into five or six pieces each for removal. Concrete has a specific gravity of 2.4, 150 lbs a cubic foot, and each step was a little over two cubic feet. Rubble now. It was very loud in the museum. Despite the fact that it's supposed to snow tonight, I had to get home, my brain had turned to jelly. I might be late for work tomorrow, but I needed to recover my sanity. And it was the correct call. On the way home, on the classical music station, I caught most of Beethoven's last quartet, which I love, it makes me sigh, sometimes weep; and then I was in the forest and the dripping trees were beautiful. I stopped to pull a family of raccoons off the road, so lovely in their winter pelts, thought, briefly, about skinning out the mother, but I didn't want the dead youngsters to see. Achieved my parking spot, at the bottom of the hill, retrieved my walking stick (an aluminum mop handle) from behind the tree where I stash it, sauntered up the hill, stopping often and looking at things. I didn't carry anything in, which I kick myself about, but I didn't want to stop at Kroger, I just wanted to get home. I knew there was plenty of food, whiskey, tobacco, and a new New Yorker in the mailbox. What more do you need? I've lived in a cave on the side of the road with less than that.

Tom

Phone is out again. I hate these glitches. I got home, ate, wrote, and was ready to call it a day. I spent an entire evening going through the footnotes of "The Swerve", which led to a dozen other books. I'm reading by candlelight at that point, the power had gone out, and I was thinking what more could they throw at me. Snow, of course. When I get up to pee, two in the morning, there's a new inch. The wind had died down, and the quiet was a blanket after a day of jack hammering and smashing with various sledges. I love the way snow muffles sound. Most of the year harmonics are what I hear, but an inch of snow (a foot is better) and the soundscape is considerably altered. I went out to the woodshed, for an armload of splits, oak and sour-wood, and I was looking at the tracks in the snow. The woodshed is a happening place. Nine different sets of tracks. And mine, sliding out to pee, two in the morning. Gotta be a blues song in that. Josh, the older son in the bathroom crew, said to me today that they had made a hell of a mess in the museum and I agreed they had. Today, I mostly consociate trash into peach baskets. Not that it's wasted, just that I have to haul the trash. A major side-bar there, I was looking for footing when the scree slipped beneath my feet.