by Roman McClay
Lyndon had to see this part, it’s what made all the work, the 13 days in a row of drilling and climbing and hiking and tying climbing knots -the bowlines and figures-of-8- and the eating on the ropes and pissing down the rock and the sun that burned on his back and side of face, his Janus-face that only received the afternoon sun of autumn now, it was this part that made all that worth it, he thought.
This blast, to see the constructive destruction, the demiurge instinct of the blowing apart of that which needed to come down, he thought. Before their will to tear it down, it -this outcropping- was dribbling and dropping boulders that eventually crashed further down, like sequela of symptoms until the liths had dislodged a 4-ton rock just over the ski-slopes’ only entrance road and crushed a Volvo nearly flat. In fact, that is how they got the job, a family in a Volvo had been crushed by a 7,800 pound rock last April when the ice and snow had begun to thaw.
This rock was 1.75miles as the crow flies, from the shelf above the road, and this spot had been determined by the geologists and engineers to be the source of all their accumulating ills. The snow and ice would land on the spires, the effacement, and the top behind that fed the crevasse between each spire with tons of medium sized boulders and rocks; some as little as your head, he thought, some as large as the rest of a man and his shadow.
The rocks would be exhumed and dislodged but held in situ by the freezing water, and then as it melted in spring the rock would slip and fall from the absence of the buoying ice as it evaporated down into the fissures or up into the air.
One rock would slip and fall and hit another like a billiard ball, like atoms in a closed universe, and on and on all down the sluiceway, and crash into the side of the effacement that they had just blasted to prevent all this shit. And then rocks from 40 feet up would fall from that shock of the first species of rock that had landed upon it. Now a few more rocks would fall and three or four would begin to roll down to where they were positioned, then on and on through the trees and over sliprock. There was no dirt to slow them down, nothing yielding, just hard and smooth rock until they had picked up some speed. The slope down was at an 8 or 9% grade, it fell almost nine feet for each 100 it moved laterally.
Then these rocks would reach 40 miles per hour or more and crash into the rocks above the road like bombs; Molotov cocktails in whisky bottles made of grey and blue and mottled brown rock; pirate casks of ferric and granite blasts, and down and onto the road it all would go. Heavy and angry and without one care in the world, the road was now pock-marked and blocked by a shit-ton of stones.
It was quite a thing to see, and what they had just done had blown the most precarious face off the long and tall rock that housed all those high shelf bottles, all those 40 and 80 and 100-pound rocks that would fall and rush and run and crash.
The face finally, in the second he had to think, blew out and the rock was like grey and black dust at first then the large cleaves were seen, he gathered as much in his eyes as he could -like Frenchmen hurriedly gathering champagne grapes as the mortars fell in 1943- before he gave up and hid.
He spun and crouched as bits as fine as sand -with some actual sand too no doubt- hit his neck and scratched on his hardhat; he ducked and covered and put his fingers in his ears too. The larger chunks flew over them and landed on the rock and slipped and slid and careened away and then the rumble of the thing -the thing they had been sent to stop- began.
How often, Lyndon thought, did one have to create the very thing one wanted to avoid, to cut the skin with surgery to heal the skin of carcinoma; to tear down the engine of the truck to build it back correctly, to cut a hole in the ground so that something may fill it and grow? This was his 5th blast and he loved it more than he could explain. It was October now and he’d be in Turkey Creek Canyon by that snowy December and January of 2000.
The rocks flew passed and more and more fell, but most stayed in place after falling flat at the bottom of the effacement. The sound echoed off each drop -in elevation- of the canyon and each tree of the forest and he radioed down to the crew to look out for rocks, he said, in about one minute or so .
“Copy” Steven McLaughlin said into the radio that Ian and Lyndon ignored. They stayed hunkered down as more bits of flotsam & jetsam flew and bounced and landed and the crunching and vibrating of the massive blast -16 pounds of dynamite! he mused with joy- just 140 feet away.
They had drilled the manifold holes down at a 17-degree angle and this made the rocks cleave more than shatter; so the blast was contained better than a thief strapping sticks to a safe. Engineers had this all down to a science, just ask them , Lyndon thought and smiled a bit as more sand hit the top of his hat. It sounded like the scratching bones of an undead cat on his brain.
He shook it off and kept his mouth closed as the dust cloud moved around them like fog, or mustard gas, just above the trenches of the Somme .
They had wet rags now in their hands and placed them over their faces to avoid breathing in the dust. The ground still vibrated a bit as the sonic waves were transferred slowly through the dense ground rock and faster over the air; it was like a jet flying fast overhead while tanks followed it on the ground from behind .
He still had the detonator in his hand, squeezed tight. He relaxed his grip and set it in the cedar box and undid the frayed and burned up lines from the poles. He stared at that cedar wood and thought it looked nice and then his mind thought of earlier days.
He thought of last year in the canyon, all dark in shadow all day; just the blue ambient light of the sun’s hint at them, the sonne’s cabeceo as He traveled over and away along the winter arc of the sky.
The ad for the job had merely said, “ explosives, laborer” and it had grabbed him by the balls , he thought, it just as easily might have said, “you, now .” He thought of how funny details like that were to him, Yenter had kept the ad short to save money; not knowing that it had poetic flare. Its brevity added to its long-term allure , he thought. He thought it amusing that he liked what he could never be: brief .
He had begun working at eight and nine thousand feet, driving all day from Denver to Nederland and Big Thompson Canyon. But Turkey Creek Canyon was up a ridge and then down the backside of a valley. He thought of the blackest gorge, still in the mountains that the eagle flew in; he was above even when below.
It was a spot so hemmed in and low beneath the icy Pined and Birched and Aspened 3,000-meter crest that the arc of the elliptic never sanctioned one ray to touch their faces while they walked and hiked and labored down by the frozen stream that cut like a vein in the meat of the articulation of the joint of mountain and valley both.
In the penumbra of the permanently crepuscular light, he had carried -in bundled sacks on his back like a mule- sticks of dynamite, inert, beside blasting caps in chamois . It was then used like kindling; each stick cracked into half sticks and strung along deep -16 foot- drilled holed and rock faces like tree-lights with meters and meters of line and blasting caps; inert matter so full of potential snapped by bare hands whose skin absorbed the cold air and the nitroglycerin in the paste of the explosive. He loved to think of all that power contained.
That’s how he found out why nitroglycerin tablets were given as medicine to heart patients.
He had top-roped the job by climbing the long way around back of the mountain and tied bowline knots to thick tree trunks above; then repelled down to the seam to grab the drills and packs; then climb up to location via rope and ascenders. The geologists had selected specific spots and depths for drilling and blasting. It was all very precise on paper. Once in the field they just drilled as close to the map marks as they could.
He and his partner had hung from the tops of sheer cliff faces on heavy 10mm climbing rope -tied off on stainless steel safety-8s- 75 feet from the seam but hundreds of feet above the descending 1-to-1 slopes of copper brown Colorado scree and grey, ferrous, talus, while holding and operating and wrestling 80lb pneumatic hammer-drills that chronically pulled down upon a
nd ruined the grip of his hands.
His hands always would clinch and unfurl with the haptic-memory of such permanent daily weight; he always thought of Stalin’s quip about quantity having a quality all of its own.
With industrial diamond tipped bits he’d drill 1 and 7/8th inch diameter holes up to 16-feet into the hard formation; the rock dust was blown into your face and lungs as you burrowed into the face of the adamantine blue granite in order to pack explosives into the holes. These apertures in the earth were strangely satisfying to the eye, the artist’s eye, cylindrical and smooth vestibules; opening , he thought, into the hardest parts of the earth .
You breathe out such hot and moist air compared to the desiccated ambient high-desert cold that it appears as an expulsion of the same dust you’ve just inhaled; but that flotsam and jetsam has already settled into the lungs, it’s just hot vapor escaping; not the earth that is deep within you now.
They’d drill holes in crews of two, but he was mostly alone all day; both men drill in forced silence, monkish for days, until you have dozens and dozens of beautiful, lapidary holes perforating the rock; every once in a while you’ve abandoned a drill bit, six or eight or 10 feet in because you got it stuck with the back-fill of a collapsing hole. Rock cleaves sometimes along natural fault lines embedded in deep slab; it just cracks and slides in behind your bit and into the abyss you’ve created with your bore. Sometimes men do too. What had The Philosopher said? that man was a rope stretched between animal and uber-mensch, a rope stretched over an abyss, he mused.
Some days the diesel generator far below would run out of fuel and you’d lose air compression for half an hour until someone on the ground noticed. He’d hang from the ropes -100 to 120 feet up from the frozen stream and ravine- on the shear face and stare out over millions of verdant acres of Bureau of Land Management and National Forest land. A high-altitude eagle flew within a few meters of him once, and Lyndon had suspected the bird had smelled the femoral and tibular coyote bones he had picked up and stuck in his back-pack weeks earlier. The sinew and tendons frayed, mottled brown and rigid but still holding the joints to each section of lupine-canine leg together as good as twine. It was one of the few things he still had the day he went to prison; maybe one of two relics from that age when he had begun to make himself into a man that hunts and kills other men.
The eagle’s covetous flights near him were part of the rationale for keeping those artifacts all those years. He took his cues on Value & Worth -as the Bible told him to- from Nature and the birds of the air.
He hung in his harness fully trusting his equipment and just stared at that regal predator and his backdrop and thought of Death and the road to awe; he was told by Nico, a fellow worker, that to have an eagle fly that close to him was Good Medicine ; the eclat of the forest and her rulers.
He had thought of Shakespeare’s, Caius Marcius and his fealty to the eagle-class of men; Caius had felt the crows were soon to peck at him and his men now, and that his whole world had been rent and torn by the Roman Senate’s allocation to the weak and dishonorable public the right to criticize Rome’s strongest and most martial class of men. Democracy has not always been axiomatically lauded; The Bard saw what it did to Great men. At any rate, Italy banned that great play after WWII.
Look, he thought, at the way, even today, two millennia from that Roman Liberal rot, how our softest and most philosophically & physically flabby feel free to lampoon our best exemplars of sacrifice, honor and integrity . Our military and police are impugned and maligned without any shame by the same people who have neither the ability nor desire to spend one moment defending the country they squat inside and soil with the insouciance of spoiled and fat children, or, he thought with disgust, like the tiny prey animals that they are .
He watched the eagle with reverence and the bird-of-prey had watched Lyndon without favor or malice; merely sizing him up in his pragmatic and reflexive brain. But for the eagle the pragmatic is not tawdry like for man, for the eagle the pragmatic, the fitness of a thing, is tantamount to its truth. Unlike man, he surmised, the eagle need not lie to survive. Nothing gives it the right, it takes it.
Both creatures’ mindsets seemed apropos . “He took Rome as an osprey takes a fish, by sovereignty of nature,” he repeated as he heard Coriolanus whisper this into his ear at this -at their shared- elevation.
The cold never lifted off the valley floor, the ground; the crew would burn the lumber concrete forms in 55-gallon drums for warmth. Up on these cliff faces he could at least genuflect in the rays that first lit up the western solstice sky with early-dusk red-hues around 1500hrs. The low arc of the elliptic hits and then reflects the red-end of the spectrum off trillions of particles of the sky as the sun sets in it like the sea.
The other end of the spectrum is of course blue, the capri-blue of a high noon, the result of that high angle of light unwoven by Newton and lamented by Keats , he thought.
Finally, after finishing the last holes and packing sand on top of the final stick of dynamite and joining terminal cap to line, you begin what amounts to an hour of hiking out of the canyon pulling your airline behind you like a brace of pheasants; your 35kg drill over your shoulder like a side-by-side 12 gauge.
You’ve put the 25-foot sections of 2” diameter hose with the clanking Chicago ends coiled up like docile ball-pythons and hidden them in a crevasse; away from the impending blast.
The detonator is only the size of the writing pen, and he remembered hoping that his frozen hands could grip such a small and precise implement with the dexterity required.
He worried about everything when so much money and people’s lives were, and have been, in one’s hands for so long. He hid from his work-mates the lack of facility in those numb and dumb hands as they cramped and refused to move correctly like one would squirrel away a collection of saved -and cherished- love letter sent by an ugly girlfriend you wouldn’t ever admit to having at all. Your love for her was yours, not something to be shared with men who only value other women by the shallow metric of looks. Your hands too, were yours, and you believed in them, but you knew your work-mates wouldn’t just based on how damaged they looked, and how slowly they unfurled their grip; on how weak the grip actually was.
You knew they would worry about both you and themselves if evidence of this kind of softness and weakness was revealed. Shit, they knew you had secrets, but, he thought, you had better have the sense and pride to hide them if you are to be reliable out here.
Crouched behind type-2 barricades -or aft of your truck on some jobs- you jam the detonator’s footend to your leg and fat-thumb the head like you’re plunging a pen into action so you can write down your one shot at driving directions dictated over a crackling phone connection; directions to somewhere warm and safe and before you can release the tension of this old-style plunger the fire-wire erupts like sheet-lighting among the clouds as it sparks brachial roots all along -and retracing your path out of- the ravine toward the blasting caps at the speed of a coup de foudre .
Its beauty and speed shock you with the same ignition it charges all that buried dynamite and the rock sucks in its breath with the first concussive blast and then blows out all the detritus it held for millions of years in its stone lungs up and out onto the narrow 2-lane road that winds around and above. The stentorian voice of the rock-gods reaches your ears in a moan. You do not move.
Just these small atomized bits hit your grey and black back and hard hat and you dare not smile -in any of these jobs- to keep the grit and dust from your teeth; and just like that you’ve finally cleaved the fissured mountain of its splintered helmet-headed brow .
II. 2024 e.v.
Isaiah had looked at the data many times before; it was clear, it was something even a human doctor wouldn’t miss if you made him look at it. If you gave him the data, and prevented him from leaving the room, or looking away or focusing on anything else, even a doctor, as corrupt and stupid and brainwashed as they almost all are, even he would have
been able to see it, he thought.
The cortisol levels were chronically high, the neurons in the dmPFC were over-active and showing signs of decreased apoptosis; they had all refused to die. Apoptosis in the brain is as important for mental health as voluntary and prescribed cell-death in the corpus is for the body. Without it, the body gets cancers; and the brain becomes deformed. Often this deformation in measurable in reduced cognition, the patient, the subject, loses intelligence; general intelligence.
But, for the inmate this did not manifest in a decrease in G. Instead, it manifested in heightened pattern recognition, and type-one errors. He was smarter , and also more wrong, Isaiah thought, and only a stupid person would think these things incompatible.
Isaiah saw the neural correlates for it, and the plaque in the brain, and blood and heart. The man was riven inside, but on the outside he was a fortress. All the projectiles, the flung mortars of the Trebuchet , the cannonade enfilade , the heavy fusillade , all landed inside these walls.
Isaiah could -and did- reverse engineer it. He could -and did- trace it back to its source. And he found a timeline, a time-stamp metabolically that proved the inmate was almost right about his body and his life. He had known what was happening and almost in real time.
Isaiah had asked the inmate to recount the most painful memories of his life and the man had offered up many. But Isaiah was focusing on the metabolic traces to a few moments in time. Like rings in a tree, and their spacing, a man could discern a lot from looking at a hewn stump. The inmate’s brain showed wear and tear, in specific ways that corresponded to his genome and its proteins and the way they interpret stimuli. The dents in the anvil, small, shallow; the fissures inside, manifold, he thought.
A boy with certain alleles like the MAO-A/L -which codes for vengeance, not for unprovoked violence , Isaiah thought as he made notations on the cloud of the cited works; Caspi et al, 2002; like DRD2 & DRD4 or methylation of HTR1B which also appear in mice; Ressler et al, 2019; and HTR2A, again only coding for aggression when provoked, a boy like that has a chance to grow up with a normal brain metabolism, in fact they are guaranteed to develop normally .
