A Key to Treehouse Living

by Elliot Reed

  REVELATION

  A moment when something becomes clear to you all at once. Revelations come without warning and at random, and sometimes they come at just the right time. You can spend days and days or even years thinking through a mystery and then have the solution come to you when you’re sitting on a porch listening to a baseball game on a little radio. You can be lost, your future unclear, without a single thing you can think of that you have to do or even that you should do, and then a revelation will hit you and your mind will instantly be made up. You can be standing at a bus stop when you notice, from the corner of your eye, something that causes a revelation. You see something you recognize but you don’t know why, and then all of a sudden you do. When I was waiting for the bus in the Podunk Town by the river, I noticed from the corner of my eye an old man walking with a cane along an overgrown footpath that led steeply down to the banks. Vines hung over the path. The sight of this old man walking alone toward the river, parting the vines—I’d seen it before (see MYSTICAL VISION). Then he looked at me. He looked for a moment longer than you’d look at a random stranger, as if he recognized me, and then I recognized HIM, and then came the revelation that I was here in this Podunk Town for a very specific reason and that reason was this old man, named Jim ‘River’ Swift, who hadn’t aged much in the years since my father had taken his photograph. I got up, walked away from the bus stop and down the path after him, back to that river which just a few days earlier had tried to drown me.

  RUM RUNNER

  An alcoholic drink named after famous booze-hustling pirates, a drink invented by people who lived on an island somewhere in the tropics—perhaps Dominica. Over time, the rum runner gained favor among people not living on that island, and the original recipe changed. Originally, the rum runner was meant to be drunk from cups made of coconuts. The recipe called for rum, fresh juices, and herbs. Over time, the rum runner made its way inland, changing as the recipe was passed from drinker to drinker, eventually penetrating to the heart of the largest continents. Ask an old guy who lives in a shack on the banks of a muddy river in Middle America to make a rum runner and what he’ll make will come in a blue plastic cup with a nibbled rim. In the cup he’ll put pale, cloudy ice, several long glugs of Seaman’s Best white rum, and a splash of Sunny Delight.

  RUMINATIONS OF THE ELDERLY

  If you happen upon a lonely old man living by himself in a houseboat on a river and you stop by to talk to him, let’s say you stop by on the pretext of asking for some advice about fishing in the area but then instead ask him if he remembers someone you think he met many years earlier, expect this elder to ruminate. If you’ve been to a nursing home, you’ve heard the elderly ruminating. If you have to use a cane to get from place to place and require frequent rests, you will find that your days become filled with less doing and more ruminating. When you meet an elder and ask him a question, he will begin to talk, and his answer to a simple question will end up being an answer to a lot of questions you didn’t ask. An old man with the need to ruminate will pop like a champagne bottle when you ask him a question and the stories will come out like the foam. It will be impossible to get the cork back in the bottle and anyway it would be rude to try because elders left by themselves most of the time can’t entertain themselves like they once did and need to take that lost liveliness and apply it to ruminating. Let the old man by the river talk and sit still, nod, and listen. Answer his questions, even if they’re ones with obvious answers, answer them in a way that keeps the old man ruminating. If you want a specific answer to a specific question, and you need to ask an elder in order to get your information, you must be prepared to listen for a long time. He will mention names of people as if you know who he’s talking about. He will make guesses about what kind of person you are from the way you look, and no matter how wrong he is you must not correct him. Let’s say he’s an old hermit who you’ve followed down a path to the shack by the river where he lives. You think you recognize the man from a photograph taken by your father, and you figure it’s worth a shot to ask this old man if he remembers anything. Your hopes should not be high, since elders who live in shacks on the banks of rivers often look alike, and there are a dozen big, muddy rivers like the one in the photograph, and anyway there’s almost zero chance that this elder would remember having his picture taken years ago by a passing photographer. But still, whether you like it or not, there’s something that fills you with hope. Upriver from the houseboat there’s a suspension bridge that looks like the one in the picture taken by Howard Tyce. Ask the elder if his name is Jim.

  SARDINES A LA KETCHUP

  A sardine is a tiny fish that tastes like salt. A and LA are French words that mean IN and THE. Ketchup speaks for itself. It’s unclear how this dish earned its French name, since it didn’t originate anywhere near the country of France. SARDINES A LA KETCHUP is a dish prized by old men who live alone on the banks of rivers. If you never have a chance to try SARDINES A LA KETCHUP, you’re not missing out. If you had to choose between it and Salisbury Steak, you’d be wise to go with the steak. If somebody offers you SARDINES A LA KETCHUP, and you’re very, very hungry, it would still be best to ask for just the sardines or just the ketchup.

  SAYNKER

  This is the word, among river folk, for anything that sinks to the bottom of a body of water when you throw it in and that’s heavy enough to drag fish hook, bait, and line down to the bottom of the river with it. A saynker’s got to be heavy if the river current is swift. If river folk say “Use it as a saynker,” they intend for you to tie it, whatever it is, car part, brick, or glass eye, to a fishing line and throw it in the water. While it may be hard to believe about the glass eye, it’s a fact that a man named Biggs, an acquaintance of Jim ‘River’ Swift and fellow fan of the rum runner, uses his lucky eye as a saynker when fishing for catfish, and it works. There’s a little hole through his glass eye so all he has to do is pop the eye out with his thumb, thread it on the line, and toss it overboard.

  SEEING UNDERWATER

  Seeing underwater depends on the water and on the eye that’s doing the seeing. If it hasn’t rained in a while and the water you want to see in hasn’t flowed through any place with banks too muddy and if your eyes aren’t too sensitive you can put your head under the water, open your eyes, and see things. Some of the little creeks that come trickling into big rivers are clear enough to see in. Sometimes these little creeks will be springs, and you’ll know this because they’re cold and crystal clear like a fish tank and you can keep your eyes open for a long time in the pure water. If it’s a pond you want to see in, say it’s a small pond dug out of what was once the forest floor and now is filled in with rain, ringed with cattails and patrolled by carp, don’t expect to see anything underwater. Even if you have a good pair of goggles and a flashlight, all you’ll be able to see is swirling clouds of brown and whatever comes within a foot of your face.

  SLEEPING ON THE FLOOR

  While generally this is something people try to avoid doing without the help of some kind of mattress, there are certain instances where furniture is present and there is no mattress, there is not even paper to make a paper mattress, and yet sleeping on the floor seems like the best option. Perhaps there are beetles with large mandibles crawling around on the couch, using the insides of the cushions as a place to lay eggs. And perhaps when you go to sit on the La-Z-Boy you find that the seat is oddly wet and funny smelling. If you decide to sleep on the floor, wrap yourself up in a sheet like you’d wrap a burrito or an egg roll, including, especially, your head. You’ll want to sleep with your head covered so nothing can get inside your mouth. Nothing is worse than waking up to the touch of the night rat’s long-nailed paw on your lip. If you can’t find a sheet to wrap yourself in, a tacky truck-stop wolf-and-Indian tapestry taken down from a wall will do the trick. If you see, on the wall beside the tapestry, in a plastic frame, the photograph by Howard Tyce, you might find it hard to sleep, even with the truck-stop tapestry protecting you.


  SKINNY-DIP

  The act of swimming in the nude. Skinny-dipping is the most natural way to swim. It’s the way we were meant to be in the water. A good dip in the nude, at dawn, in a broad, softly gurgling river, in the summer, is maybe the healthiest and most refreshing thing a person can do. I learned this from Jim, who said that skinny-dipping every day at dawn was the secret to immortality. This is because every time you do it you’re letting your soul experience what it felt when it was born—you came out in the nude, the womb had water in it like a river, and the light of the room into which you were born was like the sunrise. Coming out of the river and feeling the sun’s first rays bite through the chill of dawn air allows the mind to open, to do its best hard thinking, to solve problems that have been bothering it, and to recall things it had forgotten (see KERNELS OF THE PAST).

  SPEAKING CLEARLY

  People are hard to understand on many levels, but especially when they’re talking. You can get a lot of information from people just by watching them for a little while. It’s when they speak that the problems of communication come out.

  SKIPPING ROCKS

  Stones that are flat, smooth, somewhat roundish, and no larger than your hand can be whipped sidearm in such a way that they bounce across the surface of a body of water. Depending on the force of the throw, the angle of the release, the stance assumed by the person skipping, and the wind, a skipping rock can travel as far as fifty yards, touching the water up to seven or eight times before finally sinking or landing on the opposite bank. Skipping takes a lot of practice for most people. Most people will only get a rock to skip every once in a while, and even then they’ll only be able to get it to go two or three skips. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen throw down their rocks and stomp away from the riverbank. What most people need is a good teacher, a decent pond to start out on, and patience. Others seem to have been born with the ability to skip a rock. Some of those people go on to enter rock-skipping competitions and can get very serious about it. For some people, rock skipping is a form of therapy. Jim, for example, swore that he’d skipped at least seven rocks a day since he was five years old. In the morning following the night when I slept on the floor of his shack, after we’d taken a skinny dip, he and I skipped rocks across the river. “You’re a damn fine skipper,” he said, as a blueish stone I’d thrown took its last flutter of skips and sank halfway across. Then he said: “Your old man was good at it, too. We skipped rocks every time he came down here. Seemed about the first thing he’d do every time he showed up was go down to the beach, find some rocks, and skip them—not say nothing to nobody until he’d finished. That was always how it was. We never did know when he’d come and when he’d go, but if you saw that little car coming down the river road you could count on him to walk down here and start skipping,” and that was the first time I was introduced to the idea that a gift for rock skipping could be passed on from parent to child.

  At that moment, by the river with River Jim, you realize that by skipping things across a surface you’re defining not just the tension of that surface but also the weight of the thing that’s skipping. You realize your ability to define the story of what happened, and you feel the courage to tell a story in your own words—the proper way—so it can’t be rewritten. It’s about writing your life on the face of the world in such a way that you and the world, both, are made real.

  SANITY

  This is a term used to describe the ability of a person to behave normally. Behavior that you see as normal you call SANE behavior. Sanity is at best a very loose idea since you can do something in one situation and have it be seen as sane while you can do that same thing in another situation and have it be seen as a sign that you’ve lost your sanity. Throw a rock into a pond so that it skips, that’s a perfectly sane thing to do. If you were to try to skip, say, ancient mica artifacts, you might be seen as having lost your sanity. If you and all your family and friends got together and spent fifty years building a mound of earth in your backyard and you didn’t bury anybody underneath it and you didn’t put some kind of a fort on top of it, but instead you just went up to the top of the mound, put your hands on your hips, and said, at the top of your lungs, “It’s done,” you might be called insane. We’ve all done something that would make it look, if someone had seen us do it, like we were out of our mind, or insane. Probably the most famous example of a loss of sanity is suicide, but in some situations you might be acting logically because, as best as you can tell, the reasons to die generally outweigh the reasons to live. The reasons for living become questionable, and then eventually you quantify them as zero.

  STEALING WOMEN

  It’s not like stealing money, which is a concept everybody is familiar with. Stealing a woman means you got her to love you, when before, she had loved somebody else. This is understood as a form of mortal betrayal. No matter who you betrayed, it must not feel good to have people think you’re a stolen woman as opposed to just thinking of you as a woman who changed her mind. River Jim said he thought my dad came down to the river to get away after somebody stole his woman, and that a lot of people down by the river had had their woman stolen at one time or another, including him. He told me all about a woman named Janet, whom he used to love but who sold her soul to alcohol and then got stolen by a man who worked as the director of the chamber of commerce in Paducah. I asked if he’d found them porking, and he said that in fact he had. Then I told him that the particular stolen woman he’d referred to earlier was my mother, and that I’d never heard of her being owned by anybody, but now she was dead and so it didn’t matter—the earth owned her, or whatever—and a funny look came over Jim’s face and he apologized once or twice before going in to make another rum runner.

  When he came out, he had the drink in one hand and a cardboard shoebox in the other. He handed it to me, and the box was heavy.

  “I hadn’t stole this,” Jim said. “Just been holding it. I guess it’s yours.”

  I opened the box and found a camera inside.

  SWIMMING BIG RIVERS

  If you’re by a river and it’s hot out and you want to cool off and the water is moving slowly along, gurgling or rushing in the inviting way some rivers do, you might feel the need to get in that water. This can be a good or a bad idea. It’s a good idea to swim the big river if it’s a clear night and the full moon is out so you can see the water is moving calmly and without much debris. Swim out, lie on your back, float for a while, look at the sky, and then pick a safe spot to climb back ashore. It’s a good idea to swim the big river if you’re floating on a raft in the middle of the big river, it’s hot out and the reflection of the sun on the muddy water is blinding, and there’s a little rope attached to your raft that you can tie around your waist while you float along at the same, natural pace as the river and the raft. But it’s a bad idea to swim a big river if the water is full of huge logs that have been swept into the water by a flood somewhere upstream. It’s a bad idea to swim a big river if the water is so high that it has engulfed a living forest. It’s a bad idea to dive into the big river if it’s thunderstorming. Diving into a big river at night, when it’s thunderstorming and the river is filled with ancient trees that have been torn, roots and all, from the shore somewhere upstream, is what river folk call insane. If you’re hanging out near a river taking photographs of the people living on the river’s banks, and you’ve been there for a few days so the local people have gotten to know you and you them, and you know about the dangers of swimming big rivers, and you know about thunderstorms and you know about saynkers, and you know about floating and you know about rum runners, you have shown that you can do what it takes to live life as an adult. If this is you, and yet you jump into a flooding river at night when it’s thunderstorming out, and you’ve left your possessions boxed neatly in the trunk of your car, and people see you do this—they see you get in the river while rain is pouring and lightning flashing and they see you paddle out into a current so violent it’s got huge tree
s spinning circles in its eddies—and they don’t see you come back to shore, they know you have abandoned your sanity. You’ve abandoned your life.

  SHAMAN

  A person who can travel to the spirit world and come back from there with information. A shaman can also be a healer (see MEDICINE PEOPLE) and will have a good collection of powerful trinkets. A shaman only works if you believe in him. If you believe in him, the things he tells you about the spirit world might come to help you. While a true shaman can look like anybody, those painters who make the art that’s sold at truck stops have a very specific idea of what a shaman should look like. Take, for instance, the faded tapestry that Jim had hung on the inside wall of his shack. In the tapestry a shaman stands on a mountaintop at night. A big storm cloud with a face in it looms over him. A full moon is shining through the thunderhead. The shaman is a mostly nude, muscular Indian, who has deer antlers on his head. He’s holding a long staff with powerful stones in its gnarled tip. He wears a serious, concerned expression on his face, and his eyes look up at the thunderhead. He wears a fox-pelt loincloth, and his two pet wolves, one on either side of him, are howling. You’ll know you’re looking at a work of truck-stop shaman art if you’re seeing wolves howling in close proximity to people. The sad truth about shamans is that you can believe in a shaman one day and then not believe in him the next, and in that way you can make all his power disappear. If I’d seen a shaman poster on a wall in my parents’ bus or my uncle’s mansion, for example, I’d have been able to feel the shaman’s power—I’d have been able to control the thunder and lightning, change jelly beans into horses, float through deep space on the inside of a balloon, or make wolves and coyotes do my bidding. When El Hondero told me about Hanging Frog and the shamans who made the mica hands, I knew that all I had to do to get powers like theirs was to make my own version of the mica hand, to write my own history, and then I’d be able to have some power over the world. Then I found out about how my father took photographs, summoned them like a shaman from burned and washed paper (see ENLARGER), left me with my uncle, drove down the river, took some photos there, and then, for reasons that had to do with the stealing of women, lost his sanity and went for a swim in a thunderstorm. When you hear something like that last part, the spirit world becomes cheap and tacky, and a lie.