“I did not see that coming,” I said, and slunk home.
Another time Jane and I were on the way home from the feed mill when I spied a FedEx truck parked out by my neighbor’s mailbox and the deliveryman jogging a package down the long driveway, which was impassable with unplowed snow. My neighbor is on the road even more than I, so I figured this was my chance to do him a good turn. When Jane asked why we were turning into Mr. Justin’s yard, I grandly explained that by gosh around these parts when we see the neighbor needs help we don’t wait for the call, we act. As the FedEx man pulled clear, I lowered the blade and blasted a path to the house, then turned around and blasted my way back out. As we approached the road I had that Boy Scout chest-swell sensation you get when you do a good deed, until I checked the mirror and realized I had missed the driveway by about six feet and was leaving in my wake a sod-clodded snowbank garnished with lawn peelings. On the way home I concluded the day’s moral instruction by reminding Jane that nothing is more déclassé than drawing attention to your own good deeds, so we’d just keep this one to ourselves.
Throughout the course of winter the hill-fails accumulate. Neighbors coming to pick up Amy, sliding down the hill backward with a car full of grade schoolers. A business meeting canceled. A neighbor bringing her children to visit forced to make a Y-turn in the middle of the hill . . .
I track it all in a chart.
It’s not the plowing. We’ve always been well served by the plow crews, but this winter the township has stepped up their activity noticeably, plowing early and often, and spreading sand so thickly it’s like Daytona Beach out there. We frequently meet up with the plows in the turnaround, and I’m always worried that they’ve been warned about the guy up here who’s been pitching a fit and demanding early plow-outs. I am especially paranoid because plowing is an often thankless job—they never get out soon enough to satisfy everyone, and the stories you are likeliest to hear are about how they creamed someone’s mailbox, or sideswiped the garbage cans, or lurked around the corner until someone cleared their driveway before roaring out of nowhere to blast it shut again. So desperate am I to remain in their good graces, I often overwave when I see them. At one point I simply cut to the chase and stop by the town shop to leave cookies and a thank-you note.
I handed the cookies to the town clerk, who, much to her credit, didn’t dive behind the counter when she saw me darkening the door. I had stopped peppering her with e-mails after she quite rightly pointed out that there really wasn’t anything she could do at this point and that I should rather maintain communications with the county commissioner. The clerk’s husband is a sheriff’s deputy on the graveyard shift and we sometimes wind up on scenes together. The other night, after we had helped load a patient and the ambulance siren was receding, I took him aside and apologized for my obsessiveness and said I hoped it was clear that my issue was with neither the town nor its plows, but rather with the commissioner’s redesign, and that I hoped he would tell his wife so. He said he would and was as soothing as a large man with a gun can be.
Then the other night I attended my monthly first-responder training and found myself paired up with a fellow first responder and firefighter who moonlights as a snowplow operator assigned to our area. During a break between CPR certifications, we were standing next to the fire truck when I got up the gumption to tell him I hoped the crews knew I wasn’t pushing for earlier plowing, and that in fact I was grateful for how much extra attention had been paid to the hill in the wake of the changes.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, gruffly. “We know what’s goin’ on there.”
This was an immense relief, and I thanked him for his understanding. Later that week, just to prove he didn’t play favorites, he blasted my recycling bins so deep into the woods that they won’t be available again until spring.
On another snowy afternoon, Anneliese calls Arlene and asks if we might come over with supper. Although Anneliese has known the Hartwigs since she was a child, we rarely ever drop in without first calling. You learn pretty quickly that the Hartwig farm—Tom’s shop and Arlene’s kitchen in particular—is a nexus of characters and conversation, and the couple won’t be shy about letting you down if no reservations are available. No, not tonight, Arlene will say, the Schmidts are visiting. Yah, not this morning, Tom will say, Frank Henderson’s comin’ over and I’m gonna turn a bushing for his combine. And more than once I’ve called to verify that the coast was clear only to arrive and discover that someone else had showed up in the interim. If you like Tom and Arlene Hartwig, you will have to share them.
Tonight, though, their social calendar is open, and so we are at the kitchen table again, this time seated around the remnants of a baked chicken and salad. Tom has been telling stories about Chester and Lester and the oxcart. On the kitchen wall just above his head, there is a photo of a younger Tom on the cart with the two oxen in harness. A little boy is sitting beside him. It is either his nephew or his grandson—he told me once and I can’t remember, but I don’t want to interrupt the story.
“ . . . and a team of oxen pulling a small cart runs at an average speed of two miles an hour. How I know that is from here down to that overpass is a mile, and when I used to take them down there and back, if nobody stopped to talk to you, which wasn’t very often, you’d be gone an hour.”
Looking at that photo then, I’m curious about what kind of granddad Tom might have been. His grandsons are long grown and live many states away, so I have little to go on. With Jane and Amy he is friendly (and of course the first to offer Jane the M&Ms) and he’ll show them things like his blowfly-powered doll, but he isn’t a “gather round for story time, children” sort of guy. Even now he has switched gears from his own story to one he read in Small Farmer’s Journal a while back about the woman who, along with her husband, two children, and their small scatter of cattle, joined a train of seventeen ox wagons in an emigration from Iowa to Oregon in 1847. “She kept a journal along the way,” says Tom, “and in the eleven months it took to make the trip, she buried her husband and both children. The cattle lived.”
He pauses, then says, “But, I mean . . . people don’t realize the hardships.”
Perfect, I think, that Tom’s stories are not told to the children, or for the children. There is that meddling-parent part of me that wants to prep Amy prior to our visits (at this point, it’s tough to get Jane to focus on the historical implications of anything other than the Milk-Bones and the M&Ms jar), tell her to be sure to pay close attention to all the wisdom and history, but I try not to harp on it. You can’t cram these things down their necks. My dad never told me, C’mon, we’re going to visit the Carlsons in their kitchen so you can learn something.
It’s enough, really, just to let him go. When Amy picks up Oscar Underfoot and begins to pet him, Tom launches into a story about the time the cat brought a live chipmunk in the house and how it got to ripping through the curtains, and from there he segues into the story about the skunk in the basement, the one that dug a hole under the wall and hibernated all winter, until a warm spell in March, when it woke up and strolled up the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the door. Unable to pass within fifty yards of any animal without getting a case of the awwws, Amy is now paying close attention as she cradles Oscar.
“Yah, and when I was a schoolboy, I captured a crow,” says Tom. Anneliese and I have heard this one a time or two, but the girls haven’t.
“We didn’t know whether it was a male or female, so we named it Ginger. We kept him in a cage that first summer, and every time I’d go by I’d say hello. And that crow would bow and he would say ‘Hello’ back, just as plain as day. ‘Hel-loow, Hel-loow.’ After that first summer we let it go and it would sit out here in the trees, sayin’ ‘Hel-loow, Hel-loow.’ Old Oscar Hibbard lived across the crick over here, and he didn’t know about that crow and they had a big oak tree growin’ by his barn, and one day after I told him about Ginger, he said, ‘By God I thought I was goin’ nuts! I’d
come outta the barn in the morning and there was a crow sittin’ in the tree and he’d say hello to me! I didn’t say anything to anybody, and then one day my wife says, “Do you see that big black bird that waits in the tree every morning and says hello?” ’
“The school was right over there, and that crow never missed a noon or a recess. The kids would be hollerin’ and yellin’ and he liked a lot of excitement. We had him around for five years. He’d always roost in the woodshed and the wild crows wouldn’t have anything to do with it I suppose because it smelled like Man. When he was hungry he’d come and land in the window and he’d peck the window. And you’d go out there with hamburger and as fast as you’d hand it to him he’d take it, and when he couldn’t swallow any more, he’d start pouchin’ it, like a pelican.
“But anyway, when he was comin’ or goin’ from the school one day, someone shot’im.”
“Oh!” says Amy.
Tom is sitting quietly, looking at his hands. Reflecting on the memory, I think. Turns out he’s just mulling a tangent.
“I’ve observed that starlings can mimic other birdsongs, and I think if you got a starling young, you could teach it to talk.”
Snowstorms big and little come and go, and time and time again we find ourselves out of our cars at the side of the road in the worst conditions, or leaving vehicles parked at the neighbor’s house at the base of the hill so they won’t be cluttering the shoulder. I have stopped calling the commissioner and instead just keep adding to my master list of incidents with an eye toward the review come spring.
Sometimes I fear I am turning into a ranting one-note loon, but recently I obtained backing from an unimpeachable source. The last time our farm was a fully operating dairy operation was in 1978, when the Starkey family sold out and moved to town. One of the Starkey boys (the “boy” is a grandfather) who grew up on the place still turkey hunts out here (every year he kindly thanks Anneliese and me with a restaurant gift certificate and is thus responsible for roughly 50 percent of our annual dates), and when he told us his mom was still alive and living in town near the post office, we resolved to visit, mainly to introduce ourselves and satisfy our curiosity about some of the history of the farm. After welcoming us into her living room, she told us she moved to the farm in 1950 after marrying her husband, who was raised there from a boy. Mrs. Starkey was happily animated during our conversation, and it was fun to fill in the blanks as she reminisced and described how things were back in the day, allowing us to reset the scene in our minds. Toward the end, I indulged myself:
“You ever have any trouble gettin’ up the road there?”
“Oh, ho, ho!” she said, in the jovial affirmative. “We used to go up to the corner and then fly up!”
Then she looked at me quizzically. “But you can’t do that anymore, because they got that . . . that . . .”
“Yah,” I said.
“Why did they ever do that? I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. I’m glad they didn’t do it while we lived there.”
The conversation moved on then, to who used to live where and how the Starkeys were related to the Galdens and when it was they stopped using the windmill and the old well, but I might have missed some of it because I was nursing up a little self-righteous fever over how we disregard the accumulated wisdom of the elders at our peril. First the farmer at the initial meeting, then Tom the first time he heard about it, and finally the woman who lived at the top of the hill for nearly thirty years—they all knew why the intersection needed to be straight, but then they had received no formal training in highway design and furthermore were not consulted.
Tread water in the seas of bitterness and you will eventually slip beneath the pinched and serrated waves, so thank goodness for a snow that fell like today’s: softly, steadily, and lightly, stopping just as darkness arrived, so that the final visible image was the countryside tucked beneath a comforter. The steadiness of the precipitation meant that the hill was unattainable for most of the day, but any peeve I might have felt is at this moment evaporating in the warm roar of the pickup truck defroster as my daughters and I set out to clear the driveway.
Among the unanticipated joys of parenthood, snowplow time is a top-tenner. Amy sits belted beside me; Jane is strapped in her safety seat next to the door on the passenger side. We make the first pass out the driveway as if embarking on a grand adventure, coddled pioneers pushing through the untracked whiteness toward civilization, the girls giggling giddily when the snow overflows the top of the plow and sweeps across the hood into the windshield, so Dad is temporarily driving blind. I let out with a theatrical “Noooo!” and tap the brakes so the snow reverses course. The audience claps and bounces, their smiles half-lit by the green glow of the dashboard lights. We jounce and scrape along, the snow rising off the canted blade to curl before the headlights like a perpetually surfable wave, falling to invisibility at the edge of darkness. When the long return run of the driveway is done, we switch to clearing the area before the garage, relishing the rambunctious back-and-forth bumper-car nature of bashing into snowbanks and reversing to make another pass.
It was during a snowplowing session that I first taught Amy to use the heel of her fist and tips of her fingers to make miniature footprints in window frost. It is during snowplowing sessions that I see her—teetering uneasily on the cusp of adolescence—happily back at being just a silly little girl. And it was on a night when all three of us were running in the plow truck that Jane spoke her first intentional word. It was her first winter, and she was on the verge of language. One evening I carried her with me to my office on an errand. The moon was bright, and I stopped to point it out. “Moon!” I said. She puzzled on it a bit, then said, “Mwooow.” We practiced some, then went on our way. The next day it snowed, and after supper the girls joined me to plow. We were bombing along and bouncing around when suddenly Jane began clapping her mittens and pointing excitedly. “Mwooow! Mwooow!” she said, and sure enough, right out her passenger window, there it was: the moon, rising over the ridge.
Nowadays she’s full of jabber, and between the three of us we are having a fine old verbose time when I clear the last swatch of snow. Wanting to prolong the moment, I turn the truck around and we make one last touch-up pass out the driveway and back, the blade rumbling over the asphalt, the warm air blowing, the world beyond our headlights irrelevant, nothing else mattering but this shoulder-to-shoulder moment.
February 26. I am working in my office when an e-mail pings in. It’s from a friend I haven’t seen since college. A few weeks back, he writes, he was in the area and wanted to visit. He didn’t have my phone number and it isn’t in the book, but someone told him where we lived. He had driven out this way, but after sliding off the Starkey Road hill several times, he gave up. I open my ongoing Starkey Road file and add him to the list. His makes the fourteenth known incident since October, and we haven’t made March. We can revisit it in the spring, the commissioner told me back there when I was splitting the firewood we’ve mostly burned through by now. Spring, schmring, I think. If not for the gift of extra credit, I would have pulled a struggling C in my college statistics course, but I believe we have accumulated what the experts would call a representative sample. I go online and check the county website, then place the next highway committee meeting on my calendar.
CHAPTER SIX
This is the most complicated thing I ever built, he says, hands on his hips as he stares at the sawmill. Took me two years. Two winters. We went out and looked at about twelve sawmills before we built this one. There’s over a hunnerd pounds’a welding rods in that thing.
The sawmill is mounted on a set of old truck wheels and balanced by seven screw jacks distributed fore and aft. From tongue to tail it is forty-five feet long. A gangly boom projects out at a right angle and terminates over a pile of sawdust that has been swept there by the paddles on a droopy chain. The shine of the blade is dulled by a thin dusting of rust. Milkweed plants and ragweed are growing up through the slab rolle
rs. The sun has been out just long enough to warm the surface of the slab pile, and you catch the scent of stale pitch.
Fella had some sawmill parts that had been lying in his iron pile for forty years and I gave him seventy-five dollars for those. That included the arbor and the wheels. All the rest I built. He lifts away a hinged piece of sheet metal to reveal the guts of the mill, and now he’s describing the minutiae, how he set up the clutching mechanism with sheets of Masonite and two truck tires that roll against each other, how he built the keyed hubs on his lathe, how the roller chain setup is intended to counter the negative effects of torque, how the push stick he uses to run the log carriage back and forth is hooked by means of an iron wheel to a setup that engages a Chevrolet transmission hooked to the rear end of a Ford Pinto, which in turn rotates a cable drum that pulls the log into the saw or runs it back when you throw the stick the other direction . . . You’re trying to follow but all you see is a maze of shafts and bolts and roller chains and grease-caked bearings and flanges. In Tom’s head, it’s all laid out real clear.
Where I used to figure a lot of stuff like this out is while I was milkin’. I would visualize these projects. And then a lotta times at night you’d be out in the shop there and you almost had the idea of what you wanted but it wasn’t quite there and finally you say the hell with it and go to bed, the next morning you’d get up, and you had it.
There was 250 pieces we cut and welded together on this frame. I used hollow tubes and trusses because I wanted a frame that was real rigid, but not heavy. ’Cause you take heavy items, when the sun shines on there it’s got a tendency to expand and then distort. He lets the sheet metal bang back into place. Yah, before I did this, I thought on it for six months. One mistake I made, I cut the grooves backward on that cable roller. Wound up havin’ to take the cable off the bottom instead of the top and consequently had to raise the roller so it would clear.
Visiting Tom Page 14
