Truck

by Michael Perry

  “Lemon thyme?”

  “Shallots.” Three years running now, and I have yet to harvest one.

  “Pickling cuke.” A particularly poignant entry. I made two batches of refrigerator pickles. The first batch sprouted moss. The second batch turned fizzy. I have a Post-it note here from that first batch. It says, “Mold on the @#! pickles.”

  But then there is this entry, faint and barely legible up along one edge of the ill-fated parsnips bed: “Evening robin rain song.”

  Of course I am already thinking about the seed catalog.

  My brother John’s garden turned out just fine. In particular, his carrots and parsnips did so well he found his root cellar overfull, and I recently came home to find he had left a box of them inside the porch. They were shockingly large. My first impulse was to wave them past a Geiger coun ter as they had clearly been irrigated with water condensed from the cooling towers at Three Mile Island. I kept turning the parsnips around and around, looking for the label that said Louisville Slugger. Instead of a thank-you note I went to my crisper where the last of my wizened produce lay and, selecting a deeply withered parsnip and a carrot the size of a crayon, tied them in a red satin ribbon and put them on a bed of cotton balls in an empty stationery box, which I then sealed, addressed, and placed in the mail. Within the box I included the following note, printed in frilly Nimbus script:

  Thank You

  For your recent gift of homegrown parsnips and carrots.

  We were most grateful.

  Having said that…

  We understand the temptation to simply load up on pig dung and grow the biggest dang vegetables you can. Good for you.

  We here at Deliciously Sensitive Farms, however, specialize in custom-grown, esthetically pleasing vegetable miniatures. Following in the path of those green-thumbed entrepreneurs who(m?) sell baby greens to accountants in Manhattan for $57 a pound, we grow amazingly small versions of stuff, year after year, with depressing consistency. Enclosed in this custom-packed case please find a selection of our tastefully sized and undercultivated produce.

  Send no money now.

  But do please consider the following memberships in our exclusive, earth-centered, utterly Mother-Friendly community-based sharing circles:

  (dues payable in cash or wildly irresponsible credit card)

  Stunted Pumpkin of the Month Club

  Friends of Wilt

  Lentils-R-Us

  Sprout-O-Rama

  And the

  Federation of Anemic Beets

  I recently stood on a frozen lake inside 3.85 million acres of state-sponsored wilderness with a musher who had been working behind sled dogs for over thirty years but also once spent time in pursuit of a divinity degree, and he said the trouble with America today is not that we’re dumb, it’s that we’re dumb and proud of it. It wasn’t that the people I listened to in The Joynt knew it all, or that they had seen it all (although they could account for a pretty wide swath in toto), but that they had remained engaged. It wasn’t that they were blue collared or woolly-headed, it was that whether they earned their buck from behind a lectern or on a scaffold, they hadn’t allowed their brains to kick into neutral. They hadn’t become satisfied. Nobody gave, as they say, two shits if your higher education took place in the ivory tower or atop a pair of drywall stilts, or, for that matter, at the bottom of a glass. This was not on the whole a churchly crew, but they had a fundamental understanding of sin, the greatest of which was to play dumb.

  To be sure, there were times you needed tall, tall boots, and every once in a while, if things got too bloated, or someone overreached, Taylor would rare back in his chair and—his one hand triple-tasking a whiskey glass, a cigarette, and a pointer finger simultaneously—would direct our attention across the barroom to the opposite wall and say, “Hey. Hey. Hey.” until everyone was looking at the photo-enlarged R. Crumb comic book cover just up the wall from the jukebox and beside the bulletin board with the postcards, bumper stickers, and headline ephemera. On the cover, Mr. Natural—in his robe and wingtips—is riding up the sidewalk on a kick scooter. Flakey Foont and Big Baby are peeping over a wooden fence, and Flakey Foont says, “Mr. Natural! What does it all MEAN??”

  And Mr. Natural, just cruising on that scooter, says, “Don’t mean sheeit…”

  We fight and fight to give it all order, have it all make sense, and in the process we tend to sell each other short or cultivate seething caricatures of each other as idiots. All over the country people are painting their neighbors one of two colors. From San Francisco to Manhattan I lost track of how many times some earnest person approached me in a nice quiet bookstore and asked why people in trailer houses were voting, as they say in polite company, “against their economic interests.” Having attended a number of caucuses down at the fire hall, I can only conclude the problem is traceable to fifty-seven things, among them a mother of three regularly preyed upon by her line boss and then forced to watch as leading feminists helped zip the pants of a naughty president. When pressed on the issue (and believe me I try to avoid this, as my political views are as delicately constructed as a sugar cube and equally as durable), I said maybe the Donkey’s best bet was to have Barbra Streisand send the check and then put a sock in it, whereupon they would respond with “Yes, but..,” which made it clear we should probably talk about cheese curds, an area in which my opinions are informed and durable. Conversely, every time one of my concrete-pouring pals tells me the country is headed to hell in a handbasket thanks to drug-addled media lesbians soft on crime, I am tempted to reply, in my best third-grade-recess voice, “I know you are, but what is Rush?” There are the standard targets, but I swear to you, the scariest thing I heard on my car radio all year aired on a station that had recently switched to a liberal talk format and was running promotional liners, one of which featured a female caller saying, “I used to listen to NPR, but now I listen to Air America in the morning, because they make me laugh.” I was pouring hot coffee in my lap at the time, and may have misheard.

  But you long for nuance. You long for discussion. You long for the right to muse aloud, then take back what you said and try again. I recently received a very angry note from a man who said he was so in censed by my caricature of a previously mentioned prominent radio talk show host in a book of mine that he had thrown it down immediately and would never read another word I had written, which I take to mean he never got around to the part seven pages later where in a late addendum I retracted the original statement. Bolt from my table, early Sir, and you miss the waffles. I am falling deeply in love with a particular woman because on a regular basis she allows me to say the wrong thing, back up, and try again. She has this reasonableness. I love that about her. I love that about anyone. Oh sure, at some point you have to make the call—agreeing to disagree is a privilege predicated on civilized stasis; no less an authority than Louis L’Amour once made the point that straddling the fence will give you a sore crotch; fool me once, all that—but it’s nice to hit a few fungoes before the big game without some hothead running in to clobber the guy with the bat.

  Dialogue has waxed and waned ever since Socrates took the hemlock, and you know you could always find some grump down at the end of the Athenian coffee bar who would tell you this chowderhead Socrates was no Anaxagoras. And whenever my ears purse at the sound of my own bemoaning, I make it a policy to recall that the halcyon days of yore included the Harding administration. It’s just that the two powers currently ascendant are noise and rampant fractionalization. Agents provocateurs aiming to tweak the squares (most of whom are otherwise occupied with paying their rent and fixing your furnace) or marchers on the square still draw cameras and microphones, but a sense of diminishing returns prevails. Give your local mechanic a headline and he can tell you how to spin it, left or right. Your hairdresser is a pundit. The plumber arrives with talking points. The yield curve on babble is approaching the perpendicular. Among the piquant conundrums due to face the nation is: How do you whip the folk
s into meaningful action when everyone is cocooning in like-minded corners of the Web, rather than synthesizing some sort of national unity through the late-lamented mainstream media, which, no matter how you tilt the screen, has had it? The corpse will be wrapped in unsold newsprint, and the viewing will take place online in downloadable form. As a guy who types for a living, I intend to diversify, perhaps into goats, perhaps survivalist chinchillas, but certainly into chickens. I am told there is no longer money to be made in llamas. Additionally, I am pricing solar panels, sawing off my shotgun, and trolling the Y2K sites of yesteryear.

  Adjusting on the fly, as one must these days, let me say whoops, four powers ascendant. I mean to include transnational corporations and well-armed theocracies, both of which find noise and fractionalization to be reliable sources of fuel and cover. Perhaps the clones of our toenail clippings will view grainy holographs composed of images from Gulf War III: Google Invades. I still sleep at night, because I need the rest.

  The culture wars are over and the deconstructionists have won. Which means they’ve lost. Which—if I grasp the concept—was inevitable. Whatever. The point is, what was once the tool of academic counter-culture is now everybody’s tool, from your neighbor to The Man. Hector someone to celebrate diversity rather than show tolerance for the noun that it is, and one day he’ll call you on the verb and demand you celebrate his. Force the pagans to pledge allegiance to God and they will spank you with a switch cut from your artificial Christmas tree, although the numbers are against them. The nation is daily and at an accelerated rate devouring its own tail. Derrida is dead and we’re all deconstructionists now. In further troubling news, Spam is lately available in a single-serving pouch. In the saddlebags of the four horsemen of the apocalypse are sandwiches made of this.

  And lest my friend the anarchist grow hopeful, I once responded to an emergency call at an underground music event at which a woman had been stung by a wasp and was going into anaphylactic shock. As we crested the rise in the ambulance, we spotted a barefooted man clad in dust, dreadlocks, and a T-shirt emblazoned with the classic circle-A. “Over here! Over here!” he hollered, urging us to hurry it up with our state-sponsored gear and our syringe full of evil corporate epinephrine. The woman had stopped breathing and when the bagging and adrenaline took effect halfway to the hospital and she roused, I had this teachable moment where I realized the trouble with anarchy is that it is allergic to bees.

  In my fondest dreams, I sort it all out, using as my chief organizing tool the booklet titled (take a breath), For Your Convenience in Recording Foods Frozen and Foods Taken Out of Your INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER FREEZER Irma Harding Presents “My Freezer DAY by DAY.” Irma is posted dead center on the cover, looking frank as ever. Gosh, you just know this woman would brook no sass. But once you ate all your peas…

  The booklet is divided into five categories: Meats, Vegetables, Fruits, Baked Goods, and Other Foods. Each category includes eight columns with the following headers: Food; Number and Size or Weight of Packages (Pints, Quarts, Pounds); Date Stored; Kind of Pack (how prepared); Location in Freezer; and, Removal Record. Instructions are included, and were apparently written by your mother: Keep this record faithfully…it is quickly, easily done…the minute or two it will take you to make a record of food frozen and stored, or of food removed from the freezer, will save you many, many minutes and much unnecessary effort later on.

  Really, nothing is left to chance. Consider the instructions for the column labeled Location: Directions of the compass provide a good way to indicate the portion of your freezer in which any food is stored. Use NE for northeast corner, SW for southwest corner and so on. If you wish to be even more specific, add U for the upper portion of the chest; L for lower portion.

  I am thinking now of the colorful circular plastic sticker that came with my water-filtering pitcher. Solemn as a Boy Scout I put it on my kitchen window over the sink, right where I would see it when I did dishes. Which I still do, and I can report that the first filter cartridge expired September 23, I assume in 1995, since I recall buying the pitcher the year I moved into the house. Later replacement packets included an in-pitcher attachment with an automatic dial that is supposed to track your filter status. I have had mixed results with this latter device, which is to say it is a raging success and the members of the design and engineering departments should get an obscene raise. In specific moments of ground-level clarity, I recognize the dumbing down of the nation for what it is: an act of charity committed specifically for knotheads like me.

  So easy, says the booklet, yet so important. Irma there on the cover, looking at you with that smile and hairdo somewhere between corporal schoolmarm and encouraging ladypal. And despite my eagerness to please, I just know it would never work out. I have the garden charts to prove it. I’d spend an entire afternoon in the basement, all contents pulled from the freezer and placed in coolers or wrapped in towels and divvied up in laundry baskets, and I’d separate everything out, working within the categories Irma provides, slowly refilling the freezer, noting that the venison roast was at coordinate NWL, the yogurt container of strawberries at SWU, and so on. A little music on the boom box. The day passing overhead. And at some point I would place the last package and now I am thinking what it would be like to go upstairs and sit in my green chair and visualize the freezer one floor down, everything so beautifully squared away.

  The following morning after breakfast I would sit at the cleared table with the perfect cup of coffee and consult the guide, tapping my Ticonderoga #2 against my lips as I scan the columns and plan supper. Fish, perhaps. I see I have four packages, half a pound each. Or venison chops. Yes, venison chops. One pound, vacuum-sealed, coordinates NEL. I go straight to them then, but when I tug them from NEL I trigger a landslide in NEU, and during my attempts to rejigger this mess I set off yet another slide in SEU, and by noon I am a wild-eyed frostbitten Sisyphus. Tears of rage in the melted raspberries. My Freezer DAY by DAY sodden on the floor, the columns a wretched tangle of cross-outs, Irma’s face obscured by a big plop of tomato sauce.

  I am told the necessary chips, scanners, and barcodes are already in production so that a dolt like me can monitor the coordinates of my frozen venison sausage from the comfort of my pickup truck. I think of the water filter improvements and never say never. But this misses the point. We keep convincing ourselves we can get a handle on it, despite all evidence to the contrary. In my modest collection of Irma Harding paraphernalia (including a wooden-handled plastic bag sealer that can apparently be used to castrate rodeo bulls) I have two of the day-by-day freezer booklets. Neither has a mark on it. Page after page of barren rectangles. It is better that way. All promise, no disappointment. I find it calming to sit in the green chair and study the unsullied pages, choose one rectangle and use it for a koan. To think of the possibilities. To extrapolate from the freezer to the world, imagine the Removal Record filled in neatly, so when you are tempted to go looking for something that is no longer there, you are spared the disappointment. Do this, and You’ll always know what is in your freezer, and where to lay your hand on it. We don’t ask for much.

  It’s good to get back to Mark’s shop. The furnace is going, all blowy and warm while we work and listen to the radio. Christmas is coming, and this will be our last session of the year. We visited at the kitchen table awhile before coming out. Sidrock crawled around on the linoleum between our legs and ate a Japanese beetle. Mark fished it out with his index finger, lined as always with the residue of his trade. By the time he’s toddling full-time, Sidrock will be saturated with a durable set of antibodies.

  Mark is attaching the nerf bars today, and they look factory direct: the end of each bar machined to a half sphere, a carefully laid strip of traction tape running the ridge where your foot goes, the frame braces perfectly aligned and angled. I asked him how he did it.

  “I just wrote a program in CNC.”

  “CNC?”

  “Computer Numerical Control. I used two-and-a
-half-inch round stock and made a full radius rounded end. Just wrote a program in CNC, then put it in the lathe.” He pulls a book off the shelf above the workbench and thumbs through it a minute, then places it on the metalworking bench open to Figure 14–8, which is labeled “Turning a Spherical End.”

  Pointing to the illustration, he says, “The end is proportional to the diameter.”

  Last night a bunch of the old Joynt crew got together at Taylor’s house, specifically his kitchen table. Anneliese came along, and it was good to see her welcomed by this bunch that has done so much for me. There was smoking, drinking, and braying, although markedly less than in the old days. The writer John Hildebrand came by late. He took me through In Cold Blood the first time I read it a few years back. I recently heard John speak to the fact that a lot of us come from a place where physical labor is the gold standard for judging people, an observation that has helped me readdress a number of my pet obsessions. His Mapping the Farm and A Northern Front are touchstones of mine, core sources of recalibration. I can also report he is deaf in one ear and, when drunk, develops the malevolent gaze of a quiet man sent to kill you.

  If you had gone around that table last night ticking off the Ten Commandments and asking for a show of hands to indicate transgression, you would have thought we were doing the wave. A gloss of the New Testament rules and you would have heard the rotator cuffs snapping. But if you had asked a simpler question—“Who among you is proud of this?”—I think you would have seen no hands, and this is what I love about that crew. Chipped and profane, they have taught me that there is a certain vocabulary you learn only through attrition and heartache. Mercy of the fallen, as the singer Dar Williams put it. The fork in the river where knowledge meets remorse, adds Greg Brown. And in spite of the pomo balderdash all too often generated in academe and held up at arm’s length by syndicated foghorners to warn the rest of us off the madness of book learnin’, this bunch taught me that calluses and straight-shootin’ alone do not a good man make. Here in the welder haze, I’m at a point in my life where I’m trying to figure out where to go and who to trust. Who to surround myself with for the long term or, more to the point, which of them might have me. In these red and blue days, we get gulled into false choices. On a fundamental level, give me a guy who can fabricate nerf bars from scratch, because all the Proust in the world will not clear your sewer line, mangled metaphors nothwithstanding. On the other hand, when some humanities professor knocks around his old lady, you never hear the faculty chair say, Well, yes, but he’s a hell of a worker. Or perhaps you do. I have missed some meetings.