No Wheels

Synecdoche. Back on track, but it took some extra hours. B came over early and the Jeep wouldn't jump-start. I'd had a feeling it wouldn't, but B had brought over his battery charger, we put it on charge, and he left. I read for four hours. It started, and I ran to town (whiskey and tobacco), just a one stop trip because I'm concerned about the battery. It holds its charge so I know it was a battery problem, but I keep B's charger, and if it won't start in the next few days I'll be able to charge it, so that I can get to town for a new battery. Isolated lives require complex logistics. I probably need to own a battery charger, and if I did, I could have a couple of lights when the power is out. As the crow flies, B is less than a mile away. A bear's range is more than a mile (a square mile is 640 acres) and Shawnee State Forest is 64,000 acres. (This is a large number in the east, out west I knew people who leased 640,000 acres.) Clearly I had run the bear away with the yard work B's place is the only house between my house and thousands of acres of wilderness. So B's in bed and he hears scuffling on his back porch. Flips on the light, opens the door and the bear is right there. The bear leaves. My experience too, that the bear always leaves. I bought a couple of different hashes, to see which one I wanted in the winter larder and ran a blind taste test, a simple burrito with scrambled eggs and salsa. The Kroger brand, at $1.99 a can, was every bit good as the premium brands. I get three meals out of one of those cans. In the remaindered produce section, as always, there were Brussels Sprouts, which I love, roasted, or fried in butter. Thank god I got out, as Mackletree is going to be closed to traffic for a month. Who knows what they're doing. It means going the long way around to get to town, an extra 16 miles per trip. A gallon of gas. On the other hand, either way I drive, along the river or across the ridge, it's terrain I don't see that often. I haven't been down the creek in weeks, and the ridge route goes through sway-backs that expose every possible slope, so I'll see hundreds of plants that I don't normally encounter in my cloister. Retreat, anabasis, redoubt. Mountain Laurel, the last wild apples, chicory, mushroom hunting ground. Tonight, for instance, a fine wild mushroom stew: chicken stock, caramelized onion, a meaty Bolete. My older daughter calls, wanting me to come to Denver to see a play. I'd love to, but it would cost me a thousand dollars that I don't have, and I have a bowel disorder that wants to make me to stay close to home. The body fails, what can I say? My feet are not as good as they once were, my stamina is diminished; even my sense of balance is called into question. I'm contained within this, the natural world, in which there are bears and a fox and black squirrels, the smell of fresh cornbread, and that lingering sense that my time might better be spent crabbing.