Truck (18 page)

Out back, where the big maples cast shade across the yard for most of mid-afternoon, not much is happening, although I have noticed the slow pace suits many of the herbs and all the lettuce, which grows at a pace you can keep up with instead of bolting. And the peas have done well, having reached the top of the trellis, where they have turned and have begun fountaining back to the earth. But the cucumbers back here are lousy, all spindly and tentative. Only two of my basil plants are big enough to harvest, and they look a little pale, but I snap off the best leaves, enough to make a batch of bruschetta for lunch. I make my way around my meager little plot, gathering cilantro, parsley, and a few green onions. Then it's to the sink, wash and chop, the leaves looking greener against the wood of the cutting board. In addition to the ingredients I have picked, I dice several cloves of garlic. Everything goes in a ceramic bowl, then I drizzle in virgin olive oil, red wine, and fresh-squeezed lime or lemon juice. I mix it well, and cover to sit out at room temperature until lunchtime. I add fresh ground pepper and grated parmesan late. When it's time to eat, I boil water and make a batch of angel hair, strain it, and then stir in the bruschetta. I don't know if this is proper or not, eating it warm, but it seems to me it gives everything a fuller flavor.

I eat in my favorite spot, the big green chair in the living room beside the bookcase with a view through the screen to Main Street. I can't imagine a finer moment than to be here in this old chair with this fresh alive food in my lap, all the greenness and the garlic and the sounds of the day easing through the screen on the back of a breeze. The bruschetta recipe comes from an e-mail printed and pinned to my recipe board. It's from the poet Bruce Taylor, an above-average hedonist who once stood by an open window in a bar on a spring afternoon and said, “Sometimes the best thing to do with a beautiful day like this is to spend some if it sitting in here looking out.” There is something about listening to a day through a screen that infuses the moment, as if the steel mesh slows the day down, lets us bathe in it a bit more. A screen seems to filter the harshness from the outside noises and they reach your ear softened. It will be best if the sound is coming to you over a varnished wooden floor
decorated with a strip of sunlight; the flat surface, however artificially imposed, is reassuring in the face of entropy and has the added advantage of being made from trees and blessed by light. It is exquisite to sit here in this perfect moment, eating food that I—a black-thumb gardener—have coaxed from seed to fork. I am humbled that in the face of all chaos, I should have this plain, priceless moment.

And then the nap. Set the bowl on the floor, tip the head back, take the glorious option of not fighting the heaviness in each eyelid. Maybe you shift your shoulders a little to get just right, and then there you are, sleeping sitting up in the middle of the afternoon of a perfect day. If you ride the wave right, catch it on the downslope, snag that catnap where you dip into unconsciousness and then rise smoothly back to wakefulness after only a few minutes, yet having shut down long enough to de-fragment the mind, O, then that is a glorious thing not to be replicated with any long snore. You come awake with freshness and clarity and the strip of sunlight has shifted, and you are living punctum in the present,
saudade
before it is sad.

T
O THE BEST
of my knowledge, my brother John arrived at the age of thirty-five having never been on a date. Then one morning last year the phone rang and it was my mother.

“We think your brother has a girlfriend.”

Pause.

“How did
that
happen?”

My brother lives in a tiny log cabin surrounded by jackpines. His only vehicle is a dump truck. Honestly. If you need some rocks hauled, he will haul them with his dump truck. If you need a few yards of black dirt, he will deliver them in his dump truck. If you invite him to dinner, he will arrive in the dump truck. So when I heard he had met a woman, I was flabbergasted. It was like waking up one morning and finding a fifth face on Mount Rushmore.

“How?” I asked again.

“Well, as it turns out,” said my mother, “she drives her own dump truck.”

 

Come August, you feel it all slipping away. The garden weeds are seeding out. The tomatoes ripen faster than you can figure what to do with them. You force boxes of surplus zucchini on complete strangers. You realize the leeks simply are not going to turn the corner and will remain the diameter of Tinkertoy sticks. A handful of the hottest days of the year are
yet to come, but some afternoons the sunlight is dilute and fails to heat the air, which in turn hits your nostrils with a remindful zing. This week I was on the front porch steps lacing up my running shoes in preparation for yet another four-mile slog when the giant maple across the street produced an eruption of blackbirds flying outward and apart. On some invisible cue the birds pitched, cohered, and streamed directly overhead with an ominous feathery hiss. It sounded like the air was colder up there. These were redwings, and they chuckled in a way that reminded me of frogs in spring. Twin sounds, bookending summer.

 

When I say my brother John lives in a tiny log cabin, I do not intend “tiny” as a euphemism. If you walk through the front door and stop, immediately to your left you will find a small wooden table, which he made himself. If you then progress from the table along the walls in a clockwise manner, you will encounter a stove, a sink, a refrigerator, a wood stove, a washer, a dryer, a hot water heater, a chest of drawers, a bathtub, and then you're back where you came in. A long-armed man with a pair of pasta tongs could stand in the center of the room and pretty much run'em all. A hinged ladder beside the tub leads to a mattress stuffed in a cubby hole wedged between the beams and purlins. Some might call it a loft.

John and my brother Jed cut the logs and built the cabin themselves, constructing it in the yard beside the machine shop on Jed's farm. It was a project for Sunday afternoons. The original plan was to get it built and sell it to a tourist. Then John bought a patch of land on the far side of the big swamp off the back of Jed's farm and decided to keep the cabin for himself. Problem was, his homestead was two miles west of Jed's shop as the crow flies, with several hundred acres of impassable tamarack swamp in between. The journey by county road ran a good three miles. Small as the cabin is, it would hang well over the centerline. There are rules about these things. To transport it legally they would have to rent a truck, hang signs, and navigate a government permitting process culminating in the writing of checks. On the other hand, John says if you get caught hauling something like this behind a tractor, you can get off
the hook by claiming you are just a dumb farmer. Jed fetched the Massey Ferguson.

Then they raided the iron rack for some goodly lengths of channel iron. These they cut up and welded back together in a T-shape of a width allowing them to hitch two hay wagons in parallel formation behind Jed's Massey. Employing a conglomeration of jacks, they raised the cabin in slow sequence, inserting blocks until the wagons could be slipped beneath. Once both wagons were positioned, they gently lowered the cabin. The wagon beds creaked but held. Then they went home to their beds. Very early the next morning, Jed took the whole contrivance on a practice lap in the field behind the barn, just to make sure she would track and turn. Then John pulled in behind and chained the front end of his pickup to the wagon frames. Hay wagons are brakeless, and were Jed to hit the tractor brakes, the tandem wagon hitches would likely jackknife and dump the whole works in his back pocket. It would be up to John and his truck brakes to hold the cabin back. He would do this mainly by intuition, since the view from his windshield was blocked by a wall of logs.

There are mobile homes, and then there are mobile homes. What you had here was a double-wide float in a hillbilly parade. You could have shingled the Department of Motor Vehicles with the citations required to summarize the moving violations committed the moment the first wagon wheel touched blacktop. When my brothers retell the story nowadays, they grin and admit they were nervous. John says the second they pulled safely off the road and onto his land, he said, “Hey—let's not do that again!” But they made it. Due to some wedging, they had to dismantle the wagons to get them out from under the cabin, but eventually they got the thing planted level. John had a home.

The cabin was wired with electricity and plumbed for water. But the bathroom was located out back, in a separate building. Specifically, a small wooden hut with a crescent moon cutout in the door. There are times, John says—particularly on January mornings—when it is difficult to muster the courage required to throw off the blankets and make the trot.

In addition to his dump truck, my brother owns a skid-steer, a track hoe, and an equipment trailer to haul them. He's one of those guys, if you need to put in a driveway or dig a basement, you give him a call. Eventually he'll show up with his equipment and his dog, Leroy, and do the job. I say eventually because he stays plenty busy, and if you call more than twice in one week you reveal yourself as a city-bred newcomer and should repair to your collapsible canvas chair and reflect on the fact that you moved up here to relax. You may wish to emulate Leroy, who will mask his enthusiasm for extended excavation by snoozing in the cab.

As I have come to understand it, John and Barbara—the woman with the dump truck—had been seeing each other for years. When I say “seeing each other” I don't mean clandestinely dating, I mean casting and averting gazes and pondering possibly maybe making moves. Eventually (that is to say, “about five years down the road”) Barbara quite correctly deduced she would have to make the first move. One day after delivering a load of gravel to a site John was working, she climbed down from her truck cab and approached him. He was pushing dirt with his skid-steer, and she had to wait for him to kill the engine and tug his earplugs free. Then Barbara said, “If I asked you to go to dinner with me, would you consider it?”

Later, Barbara said John wrinkled his nose and appeared stricken with gastric reflux.

“Ahmm…maybe.”

Yes.
Maybe
. Jiminy. When Barbara climbed back in her truck she figured she had blown it. The next day she left for a ten-day vacation, thinking she could never deliver gravel to this man again. Within a month, he ordered another load. She dumped the gravel, and as she was pulling out he flagged her down.

“You ever folk dance?”

“Erm.”

“Next Tuesday, I'm going folk dancing. You wanna go?”

“Well…sure.”

She said she drove straight home and got on the Internet. “I had to see what these folk dancers wore.”

 

For the most part my brothers and I do each other the favor of recusing ourselves from each other's personal lives. In the face of tragedy, or when specifically invited, we are there foursquare. But by and large, we limit our demonstrations of affection to flashing goofball salutes or peace signs when we meet rounding a curve on Old Highway 53. We got the peace sign thing from Dad. In his farmer overalls and Lil' Abner work boots he is the least tye-died of men, but for as long as I can remember he has greeted friends and strangers alike with the peace sign. Rather than flipping it up lightly beside one ear, he pushes it toward you in a thick-fingered vee that resembles a sprung bundle of sausages. The complete absence of panache suggests that he really means it. Either that, or he's channeling Winston Churchill.

If we meet on the road and time allows, we'll stop for a centerline chat. Add this to the list of rural traditions on the wane. What a delicious refutation of hustle to align your driver's side windows, kill the engines, and shoot the breeze while the flies buzz. You talk about where you're headed, where you're coming from, how the corn's looking, or the price of hogs. You keep one eye out for traffic. If a car approaches and you can wrap it up, it's crank the starter, roll off, and toss a
see-ya-later!
over one shoulder. If you're in the middle of a good part, you pull ahead enough to let the traffic pass, then back up, realign, and pick up where you left off. Usually it's just chitchat and catch-up, but sometimes you get nuggets. It was through pickup windows at the intersection of Carlson Corners that I received the happy news of Jed's engagement to his second wife.

The land rush is on in these parts, and not all the new folks are pursuing a ruralist vibe. They roar up here and forget to quit hurrying. This past summer I was mowing the lawn when my buddy Snake passed by. I flagged him down, killed the mower, and wandered out to talk. Snake and I were pals from kindergarten to graduation. These days we see each other maybe once year. I leaned against his door there in the middle of Main Street, and we visited for a good while. Every now and then a car would swing around us, but you can run four or five abreast down Main Street, so it was no big thing. Then this woman pulled up on Snake's
bumper and honked. I looked at her, looked at the space around us, and then leaned back in the window. She honked again. We just talked and ignored her. Shortly she gave the steering wheel a violent twist, stomped the accelerator, and whipped out around us. As she zoomed past, she gave us the finger. We gave her the gaze. The implication being, Ma'am, this is how you gossip in the absence of a garden fence. We are luxuriating in the tapering moments of a quieter time, and furthermore, honking crabs the soul.

 

During the early days of his relationship with Barbara, John and I chatted on the road several times. He'd either clamber down from his truck to my level, or I'd jump up on his running board and hang by the grab bar. As hopeful as I was for their happiness, I never asked him how it was going. I knew they were seeing each other regularly, and I met her a couple of times at family functions. She was pleasant, smart, and attractive. When she wasn't hauling gravel, she ran her own tax accounting firm. And she had a beautiful truck. A big red Mack. Finer than any piece of trash John has ever run. But as to the state of the relationship, I didn't inquire.

Several months into the deal, I had to borrow a tool from John. I drove out to where he lives and walked up the trail through the jackpines to his cabin. He was setting up forms to pour footings for a small addition. “Whad'ya doin'?” I asked.

“Ahh…puttin' in a bathroom.”

Oh-ho!
I thought.

But I didn't ask.

 

It's funny to think of him folk dancing, because my brother has a reserved stiffness to his comportment. (Then again, much of folk dancing is quite nicely prescribed, and furthermore, he was lured into this particular vein of decadence by my mother, a churchly woman whose epithet of choice is
fiddlesticks!
) Sometimes when he laughs, he squints up his eyes and tucks his chin toward his collar in a manner that makes it look as if he is embarrassed for getting so carried away, and if you can just bear
with him for a second here, he will straighten up and get it together. He and I come from a long line of Scandinavian stoics. In most social settings we are, if not shy, determinedly reticent. Our guiding precept is, “I don't want to talk about my feelings,
and you can't make me.
” My tears have loosened a bit with age, and I can be grumpy, and scowly, and—as my mother used to say—
a little snippy,
but in general I am pathologically self-contained. Writing-wise, I share things on the page that would mortify me if they came up in casual conversation, but these seizures of self-disclosure are triggered by the imminence of tongue-loosening deadlines and vertiginous health insurance premiums and should therefore not be confused with me at the post office, where I tend to study my boots and mumble.

Would that it ended there. In the world of the certifiable stoic, the repression of emotion is just the more obvious half of the battle. The rest of your time is consumed with masking even the appearance of the existence of desire. Anyone can hold back a tear or dodge a hug—it takes a real hardcore Norwegian bachelor to pretend you don't want a cookie. If I were commissioned to design the official crest for the descendants of emotionally muzzled Vikings everywhere, I would begin by looking up the Latin phrase for “No thanks, I'm fine.”

This outgrowth of the neurosis turns the simplest trip to the grocery store into a pulsating gauntlet of dread. Shopping for staples seems benign enough, but when you present your basket at that counter, you are revealing something deeply personal about yourself. You are approaching a stranger and saying—
in public
—“this is what I desire.” And not only that, but, “this is what I desire
to put inside me
.” If you are buying a battery cable or a snow shovel at Farm & Fleet, there is no shame. These are exogenous needs. Gotta start the car, gotta clear the sidewalk. But with food, there are distressing elements of psychosexuality in play—
Appetites! Hungering! Orality! Gimme Twinkies!
—coupled with the implication that if you ingest you must surely excrete, and this is not a place the stoic wants to, um,
go
.

Furthermore, one risks public exposure by checkout clerks who take it upon themselves to deliver unsolicited color commentary on the contents of your cart. I recently skulked through the IGA to snag a box of
broasted chicken when I should have been cooking at home, and at the register the lady said, “MMMM, that smells good!” and right she was, but I immediately felt as if I was standing there in my underwear. The same thing happened when I tried to unobtrusively purchase a transparent plastic clamshell of chicken tenders during a late-night road trip. “Oooo,” said the young lady running the register, “I like those reheated.”