Anodyne

The day started clear, then clouded over, another frost warning, for tomorrow morning. I needed to be outside for a while. Found a few morels, and generally cleared my brain, back home; a light lunch, reading Joan Didion, After Henry, and I her love her straight spoken, detail driven prose. There are either four or six piles of books clogging my passageways and I spend some time culling, a box for the Goodwill, a box for the library. I intend to get things down to a single layer against the walls. That seems both fair and restrained. The fifth pile is mostly hard cover catalogs of art exhibits. I need to build a special shelf in the girls old bedroom for them. Their covers tend to be slick and they slide. The sixth pile is more of a problem because it's magazines and off-prints, and I have no filing system whatever. It's only awkward when I can't find something (50% of the time) because my usual sense of book size and color has failed me, but I can't imagine what to do with so much information. The ash you collect from a camp fire is not text. My crows are back and they are absolutely obnoxious until I take them hot mice on a cold afternoon. I was reading a Corvid piece the other day, and the researcher felt she was beginning to understand a little Crow. I understand a little, three different sounds: a simple greeting, a warning cry, and what I think of as the usual bickering. They bicker all the time. I stopped feeding humming birds because of the bickering. I have to move quickly away if a couple are bickering at the store, especially if there's a kid involved. It bothers me. That escalation from normal to sharp speech. I didn't know people could get abusive until I was fourteen or fifteen years old, I was always off in a corner reading comics, Classics Illustrated, the next Tom Swift, it never occurred to me to complain, or that people could be so nasty to each other. B called, he'd saved me some meat, and I imagine several meals of beef and morels on toast. I'd exhausted myself, what with the socializing, took a nap and woke again after dark, rain on the roof, phone ringing. An old friend wondering about some walnut lumber, I got a drink, rolled a smoke and we talked about the staircase he wanted to build for a house in Aspen. Cantilevered treads buried in adobe walls, so he needed stout pieces, 3x12's, and he could get them there, but they would be very dear; I could get them here for a fraction of the cost and he could come and get them. He's got a Ford 350, and we spend a few minutes calculating, he needs 13 sticks (so he has to get 14, margin of error) and that shouldn't weigh more than half a ton. $500 for gas and motels, and he makes an extra three grand on the project. Of course, something will go wrong, he'll blow an engine in Kansas and it'll cost three grand, and I advise him to buy the wood there, but he insists he would enjoy the adventure. Fine. It's not my adventure, indulging my fantasizes, anymore, is stopping at the Diary Bar for a milkshake. I'd rather hole up with Thoreau. I just passed the section where he actually lived on the pond, and he excised most of that stuff from the journal, literally: four pages missing, two pages missing, a paragraph missing; he must have used some sort of cut and paste method. I've never read a biography but I suppose I will now. Up most of the night, finishing the Didion, then reading a large section in the Dictionary of Americanisms, fell asleep when it started raining this morning, dreamed about a crowded elevator. There was a narrative element to it, like No Exit, but I didn't know what was going on. After I'd gotten up and got coffee, I called Froggy Taylor at his sawmill in Lynx and he said he could get the logs and that it would be about a thousand dollars. Five thousand less than John had been quoted in Denver. Even if I gave Froggy the go-ahead and the deal fell through, I'd turn a profit. The central problem in all of this is that the wood will be sawn green, and will shrink and want to warp during the drying process. It'll need to be banded and stored out of the weather, but with good air-flow. It would need to stay here, for six months, to get down to 20% moisture, then a couple of months out west, to get down to 10%, so if we cut the logs now, he could use them next spring. I suppose there are kilns available that could do this in a couple of weeks. Kiln dried hardwood is more difficult to work, it's hard and brittle, but massive treads, emerging from adobe walls don't need a lot of finishing. I'm not used to 'fast track', I tend to bring things inside and let them dry, it sometimes takes a while. Read another account of the battle between the USS Constitution and the HMS Guerriere. It's quite amazing how detailed descriptions of these battles are, all the officers keeping journals and the ship's log, letters home. 475 men on the Constitution and she's 147 feet long; tight quarters, but half the crew is on duty at any given time. She's a frigate, a "44" (she carries 44 cannon), a gun crew is 6, so 264 of the crew are gunners, though everyone does everything, especially in battle. I love being engaged by a subject. I just ordered a book on rigging, to try and get a handle on the miles of rope it took to sail a ship of the line. A 44, a frigate, was the smallest ship of the line, Nelson's ship at Trafalgar carried 100 cannons, crew of 1000. A modern American aircraft carrier has a crew of 3000, and I was thinking about feeding all those people. Just before dawn I hear a few bugs and I hope that means it might stop raining for a while, though the rain and much cooler temps could produce a good flush of morels. In the US Navy there are three distinct mess-halls, officers, chiefs, and enlisted, all with different cooks and assistants. Imagine feeding three meals a day to 3000 people. Imagine the logistics involved in setting out to sea.