Visiting Tom

by Michael Perry

  Only one other citizen is present to comment. He has the beefy hands and sausagey fingers of a lifelong farmer and is clutching a packet of snapshots.

  The meeting comes to order. The previous month’s meeting minutes are approved, and the bills audited. Then the public session opens and the recording secretary invites me to take the empty chair at the commissioner’s right hand.

  Without warning, I go completely cotton-mouthed. My heart begins triphammering to the point I fear my shirt is visibly vibrating. You’d think I was being dragged before the International Court of Justice. I can get up in front of a thousand people in a theater and let’er rip. I have clambered atop a piece of plywood on a pool table in a health food store to read my not-so-hot poetry with nary a knock in the knees. But there are two unfamiliar elements in play here. The first is the element of confrontation, and I have no stomach for it, even in this the most civilized of circumstances. I am basically present to tell the highway commissioner that I don’t agree with his decision and want him to not only reconsider it but reverse it.

  The second element is the level of formality. Sure, it’s an elbows-on-the-table session in a cramped cinder-block room with a quorum of men sharing gas station doughnuts, but I have this awareness—and this may sound silly, but I mean it—that I am participating in democracy. I am being allowed my say. I feel the spirit of Norman Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech hovering in the room, although unlike the subject of that painting, I don’t have to stand, and a good thing, too, as there is no bench back to grab, and I’d have to splint both legs with rebar to keep my knees from folding. If I am ever called to testify before Congress they will have to pour me from a water pitcher.

  I begin by making it clear that I understand why the change is being proposed. That I recognize it as a common reconfiguration designed to prevent accidents by forcing traffic from secondary roads to enter at the apex of a curve, which among other things discourages high-speed merging or lane crossings and improves visibility.

  At this point, the farmer with the snapshots breaks in. “You live off Starkey Road?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, you’ll never make it up that hill without havin’ a run at it!”

  “Yah, that’s my poi—”

  “That’s what the school bus always had to do, and the milk truck. They’d go past and turn around down there by Fitzger’s, then come at it that way.”

  I have never spoken to this man prior to this moment, but as the newcomer I am grateful to have him at my back, and surely the citation of historical precedent by a seasoned resident will help bolster my case.

  I have my prepared notes and stick pretty closely to them. I explain how the straight shot is essential if we are to make the hill under snowfall. I draw a little diagram illustrating how a vehicle forced to slow in order to navigate the proposed chicane will lose vital momentum. I explain how we learned this the hard way when we first moved to the farm and, trying to climb the hill without taking a run at it, had gone down backward with the van and the kids. I explain that I am especially concerned in light of the fact that my wife is home alone with the children so often. Not only does she face the prospect of sliding off the hill, but there is the additional hazard of unloading the kids along the shoulder, leaving the van as its own roadside hazard, and then hiking up through a snowstorm—the worst of times to be afoot along a roadway.

  Throughout this entire disquisition, my heart continues to fibrillate as though I were a high-strung gerbil keynoting a convention of raptors. I believe I am keeping my countenance fairly in order, but there is the dread prickle of emerging dewdrops across my balding melon-head, and now and then my voice is choked off by an involuntary gulp. Throughout, the highway commissioner regards me with a polite, bland gaze.

  When I was a child, I lived beside a dirt road. Of all the vivid memory clips I retain from those days, few match the turbulent beauty of Bob Bohl’s Plymouth Fury III streaking from between the pine trees and into the open on the road paralleling our meadow, the car a carbureted white rocket disgorging an oblong dust twister that hung to drift slowly over the corn. Bob was running two operations in those days, milking cows on his own farm southwest of us and also over on the Acey Fortner place to the northeast, so he ran that Fury hard. No going out by the road until Bob Bohl has gone by, Mom told us, but we’d get out there early and as close as we could for just that one moment when Beaver Creek Road became the Bonneville Salt Flats.

  Dust production was a big deal. My brother John and I pedaled our banana-seat bikes frantically in an attempt to raise just one visible puff, which we associated with grown-up vehicles and grown-up velocity. We’d aim for “sifty” patches where the sand was extra-fine and pump our pedals extra hard, looking back over our shoulders. We were thrilled when the thinnest wisp rose in our wake; we had broken the speed of dust. In that spirit, this summer I have enjoyed the fact that our county road has been temporarily left in gravel so it can settle before the paving. To celebrate I run a tad hot (even in the family van) on the way to Tom’s place, in an attempt to produce a classic Bob Bohl plume. How I smiled the day the girls and I ran a dozen eggs to Tom and Arlene and Amy spoke up from the passenger seat to say, “Go faster, Dad, make it fly higher!”

  One morning, instead of Bob Bohl shooting from the trees like a moon rocket gone sideways, a lumbering parade of bulldozers and Tournapulls crawled into view. They arrived early, because I remember seeing them first from an upstairs bedroom window and me still in my pajamas. You can bet we dressed fast, and for the next few weeks there was no end to the entertainment as the dark green earthmovers bellered and wallered up and down the road, black exhaust boiling at the sky. The Tournapulls were my favorite. There was something dinosauric in their articulation and the way they lumbered over the uneven terrain, the operator seated in a cab that jutted into the air ahead of the front axle and waggled about like the head of a monitor lizard scanning the bushes for food. When I recall how the operators jounced at their controls I assume it had to be a vertebral horror, but from our vantage point it was a carnival ride. When a dozer put its blade to the Tournapull’s rump it was like a bull boosting a hippo, and the two would snarl and rumble until the earth came mounding up and toppled over the sides of the catch box, at which point the Tournapull would snap shut its scraper jaw and roar off to the dump point. Once a Tournapull got stuck down by where the new culvert was going in. As the giant industrial tire spun down to the axle it flung sheets of soil like an angry rhino pawing dirt.

  The road crew used a corner of our hayfield as a staging area, and at night when all the workers had gone home, we would hustle down to where the equipment was parked, climb into the seats, and imagine we were reshaping the world. It seemed the work went on all summer, although it was likely a matter of days or weeks. In time the paver came, laying down blacktop flat as a sheet of oily brownies. First chance, we zoomed out there on our bikes. No dust, but we never felt faster.

  I still retain that little boy’s fascination with road crews and their equipment. (Naturally one fantasizes only in terms of safe and sunny days. Real road work is conducted in mud and dust and cold rain and boiling heat, and all too often within the kill zone of high-speed texting ninnies.) When I saw the road crews staging their equipment early this summer, I looked forward to observing them in their work. I looked forward to the dust and the evident progress. I looked forward to letting my daughters investigate the fresh culverts and even clamber on the equipment, although vandalism prevention and the culture of liability have impinged that experience. Funny, then, how my feelings changed when I saw what they intended for our intersection.

  When I finish speaking my piece, the commissioner calmly and clearly lays out the reasoning for, as he puts it, improving the intersection. There have been numerous complaints of vehicles coming down the hill and entering the county road at high speed, he says. This is curious as there are only two residences and a total of three driver’s licenses at the top of the hill, an
d apart from the occasional wanderer or teenager seeking refuge for beer and nookie, the term numerous strikes me as a tad robust and perhaps even preemptively positional. When I ask exactly how many complaints the commissioner has received, he becomes vague.

  As a follow-up, I ask, “If the goal is to slow traffic coming off the hill, how about changing the sign at the intersection from a yield to a stop?”

  “I don’t think that’s a yield sign,” replies the commissioner.

  “Yep, it’s a yield,” I say.

  “Yah,” pipes up the farmer with the snapshots. “They switched the stop sign to a yield sign down there years ago so the school bus didn’t have to stop if there was no traffic coming. They did it because the bus kept burning up brake pads.”

  Well, we can look into that, says the commissioner. Then he suggests that I contact the township and ask that we be put on a priority plowing list, so the plows would come to our hill first. I explain that the issue isn’t about the amount of snow, since the hill becomes too slippery to climb after only an inch of accumulation. In other words, long before the plows can be—or should be—reasonably dispatched. Furthermore—and this the commissioner doesn’t know—because I run in certain key social circles, I now and then have occasion to hang out with some of the plow operators, and hear regularly what sort of pressure they already face, and how many demands are put on them (in one recent case, by an angry preeminent citizen armed with an upraised shovel). I am also dying to expand upon the flummoxy notion of having to request increased services as a result of the road being improved, but nobody likes a nitpicking linguistics stickler, so for the moment I stow that sentiment somewhere down and to the left, just beyond the clutches of my spleen.

  The discussion continues a few more minutes, with commission members asking questions and exploring options. When it becomes clear that the commissioner and I are failing to adequately convey the issues at hand while seated around a conference table, he suggests that the intersection be included as part of next month’s annual road tour, so that the members can stand right there and see for themselves. This seems eminently fair. The day of the tour is yet to be determined, and because I want to be sure I’ll be home to attend in person, I give the commissioner my number and ask that he call me before setting the date. I’ll be happy to do that, he says.

  I gather up my papers, thank the committee as a whole, and like a student cut loose from his oral exams, tuck my head and beat feet for the door. Behind me the farmer has taken my place and is spreading his snapshots across the table while announcing that recent changes in the roadbed have left his driveway at an untenable angle.

  Two weeks after the highway commission meeting, the commissioner calls. After a pleasant hello, he informs me that he and the committee members will be visiting our intersection on an upcoming weekday. I check the calendar. Anneliese has appointments scheduled with the children on that date, and I will be performing with my band at a festival three hours downstate. It’s a paying job booked months ago.

  “That day won’t work for me,” I say.

  “Oh.”

  “You did say you were going to check the date with me first.”

  Nothing.

  “I’d really feel better if I could be there,” I say. I am thinking of all the difficulty I had trying to explain the situation to the board out of context.

  “I understand your concerns,” says the commissioner. “And I can do a good job of conveying them to the committee.”

  “No chance of rescheduling the stop for a day when I can be there?”

  “I’m afraid we can’t do that,” he says. “But I do understand your concerns and will make sure the committee members do as well.”

  I am setting up gear for a reading and concert in Madison, Wisconsin, when the commissioner phones with an update. My phone is muted, so I don’t get the message until after sound check. The commission has been out to look at the intersection, I hear him say, and we are happy with the proposed improvements.

  “If need be,” he says in conclusion, “we can revisit the issue in the spring.”

  Can’t lie. My jaw is clenched and my face is flushed. I snap the phone open and press callback. No answer. I leave a message requesting that the commissioner call me back at his earliest convenience. Then I head off to do the show.

  The first time I told Tom about the planned changes to our road, he looked at me like it was my idea.

  “Weeaahhll, that’s crazy,” he said. “You’ll never get up that hill come winter!”

  Since then, my evolving tête-à-tête with the highway commissioner has become a regular topic of conversation between the two of us. The initial discussion quickly devolves into anti-authoritarian commiseration. Basically, we sit at his kitchen table trading hassle-the-man stories. As you might expect, my stories are pretty weak tea compared to Tom’s. I can do a decent five minutes on our state-mandated septic tank fee (my beef being with neither the fee nor the attempts to protect Mother Earth and my neighbor’s drinking water, but rather with the verbiage of the accompanying letter, which casts the fee as a charitable means of protecting me from the “unnecessary economic burden” of fixing my septic tank should I fail to maintain it without the government’s guiding hand), I can chef up a nice little riff on the unintentional but nonetheless disturbing top-down disconnects of bureaucracy (We promise to collect only information necessary for each survey and census, says the government website. “So are you the writer guy?” says the pleasant census taker on the phone, followed by “I’m not supposed to ask you questions like that”), and if you really want to see me unhinged, inquire as to the environmentally and spiritually defeating wonders of recently mandated and profoundly misnomered “non-spill” fuel nozzles.

  Tom, on the other hand, has a hearty repertoire. Several years back, he and Arlene took in a stray dog. Girlie, they named her. Hearing a commotion one day, the couple ran outside and found the new meter reader holding a Mace can and claiming Girlie had bit her. Tom claims the meter reader couldn’t produce any sign of injury, but nonetheless, a sheriff’s deputy showed up later that day to check the dog’s rabies papers. They had expired two weeks previous. “Well, you’ll have to pen that dog up, Tom,” said the deputy.

  Tom showed the deputy his empty brooder house and asked if he could keep the dog there. The deputy said that would be fine.

  The following day a woman from the health department called and asked about the whereabouts of the dog. Tom told her the dog was penned up. You have to bring it down here so we can keep an eye on it, the woman said. That’s not what the deputy told me, said Tom, and hung up.

  The next day the woman called again and told Tom that if he didn’t bring the dog in she’d get a court order and come out to confiscate it.

  At this point in the story, Tom always plays both himself and the woman. When he portrays the woman, he pitches his voice high and waves his hands around his face in a fluster: “I says, ‘Lady, if you really want that dog, I’ll bring it to ya,’ And she says, ‘Oh, you will?’ And I says, ‘Yeah, but first I’m gonna get the twelve-gauge and blow its head off.’ And she says, ‘Ooooh, don’t do that! If you do that we’ll never know if it had rabies or not!’ And I told her, ‘Exactly.’

  “And she never called again.”

  Then there were the two unlucky fellows from the county zoning department who were driving the interstate when they spotted what appeared to be a trash dump on Tom’s property. In truth, Tom’s family had used the area as a dump for years. But what the zoning reps didn’t know was that when the government put the interstate in, for purposes of access it took a permanent one-acre easement on the property, including the dump.

  “So these two guys stop in,” says Tom when you get him going, which doesn’t take much. “They’d been drivin’ down on the interstate, and they could see the tin cans.”

  As with so many of the Hartwigs’ stories, this one is told in tandem, and right about now is when Arlene jumps in. “They came ov
er here and started givin’ me hell!” she says.

  Tom resumes. “So they’re sayin’, ‘You can’t do that, you’ll have to clean it up, blah, blah, blah.’”

  “I said, ‘That isn’t even our land!’” says Arlene.

  “‘No,’” says Tom. “‘It’s yours! Now who’s gonna clean it up?’”

  The men got in their car, and Tom says he never heard from them again. Look, and you can still see the tin cans.

  Of course in each of these stories one perceives the position of people just trying to do their job. Attempting to maintain some semblance of civil order in the face of behavior equivalent to that of an adolescent spitballing the substitute teacher. After all, I am the guy who once used Govis2nosy as my password when the state forced me to register my two-pig operation online with the Department of Agriculture, and Tom once filled out his entire U.S. Department of Agriculture Hog Census using a pencil held between his toes, just to make it tough to read. But why dampen the moment with apologetics? The joy—nay, the health—of sessions like these lies in the freewheeling release of grumbles and ire. No one gets hurt, and what better way to sprain your neck than by nodding in vigorous agreement with the genius across the table who understands the world is populated by stumblebums and ingrates, present company excepted.

  I have crawled into burning buildings, I have bare-handed the drawers of a child who has propulsively pooped the cradle, and once on the school bus I rose up and in a firm falsetto told Boog Swenster to stop picking on my little brother. In all other critical confrontations, however, I am by and large an equivocating wimp. Thus the moth-wing tickle flitting the underskirts of my liver as I flip open the cell phone that has been vibrating in my pocket and realize the county highway commissioner is returning my call. Truth be told, when the phone went off it never crossed my mind that it might be the commissioner. A couple of days had passed, I was splitting wood, and my head was utterly elsewhere. Now after killing the motor on the log splitter and putting the phone to my ear, I shift immediately from the sweaty happiness of physical labor to the skittish sweatiness of low-grade confrontation.