What Enables

I was walking west on the main ridge, to which I'm one of dozens of lateral offshoots and the next place is a trailer home down in a hollow. I don't know these people at all and they keep very large dogs, I don't know what they are, Siberian Bear Hounds maybe, but I had the wind and I'd wanted to look at their place for years. It's a marvel, I could tell, from driving by once in a while. Everything they've ever owned is in the yard. Dead vehicles, washing machines, every plastic kid's riding thing ever marketed, bright colors faded in the grass; dish washers, entire collapsed storage sheds, dead mowers. It's a field that extends several hundred feet in every direction from the trailer. It's unbelievable and comic, but it's difficult to get rid of things when you live deep in the country. Quite the opposite, you actually acquire things: a better sofa, a mattress, two chairs that are similar, and the old shit is relegated to the pile. I burn what I can, legs and frames, but there's all this other shit, dead toasters, waffle-irons, unfinished puzzles. I get Booby to come up with his back-hoe, once in a while, dig a hole and bury everything. The best trick, though, and there are a couple of examples of this within a few miles, is to just abandon the trailer and move in a new one a hundred yards away. Presto. It's difficult to get rid of an old trailer, you can sell all the scrap metal, burn the frame, and be left with a chassis that is often used as the frame for a small bridge, but they're a pain in the ass. Never live in a structure that can be broken into with a can-opener. They aren't even attached to the ground, they're designed to blow away in high winds. Stuff the working class in shipping containers and call it good enough. The weather reports are vague, but I do my morning routine, coffee, an egg on toast, then clean up a bit and head to town. The library first, where I get a bunch of fiction and a book on bronze, then the pub for a draft and a sample of the new soup, a pumpkin, roast apple, bacon thing that is pretty good. Kroger, where I back up my drinking water, back up my whiskey, buy ten cans of Mandarin Orange segments; and on the way out of town I stop at Bridge Street Liquors, buy extra tobacco and papers. I'm pretty well set. But I know I've forgotten something. Phone was out and I couldn't send last night, or this morning, or whenever it was, then I got side-tracked by the bob-cat, because it was the wrong time of day for her to be out. She seemed to be headed toward the graveyard. I begin to think there's an animal condominium over there somewhere; I know there's a rattlesnake den, the fox den, and I can imagine a great warren of tunnels in a primitive graveyard so long abandoned. There's a scene in "The Wind In The Willows" where Mole and Rat, and then some Hedgehogs, all crash at Badger's place. Mid-winter snowstorm; and the description of all the food at a late night supper and then at breakfast the next day is splendid, funny and mouth-watering. Reading some Marjorie Rawlings, and a book of her recipes. Then I read her letters to Maxwell Perkins. A couple of gunshots stir me outside. It's another gun week for bucks and I've posted a note for myself to stay out of the woods, I have an orange hat and vest that I wear to go to the woodshed. A nice pot of Great Northern beans and a pone of cornbread while I read about black bears. Sitting at the island, eating a simple meal, it's quiet, there's no media of any kind, once in a while I hear the wind. Occasionally I'll hear a helicopter or a small plane using the river as a route to Cincy, and now that the leaves are fallen, I hear trains in Kentucky. A log-truck, laboring over the gap; anything walking on a bed of leaves gets my attention. The senses are extended when you flush a grouse, or come home and there's a bear under your house. Listen, I have left-over beans, and cornbread I can toast, and nine cans of Mandarin Orange segments. I ate one can within minutes of getting home, a can of orange segments is in no way either a metaphor or an allegory, it's just a tin of fruit. As you might imagine, I chuckled all afternoon about that. It's a can of fucking fruit. The new rule is that if you're black and seventeen you can be shot sixteen times. I just want to bury my head in the sand.