So, finally, the day reaches midnight, and after dealing with her all day I can't even think. Let alone try to write something. Circular arguing: this is not my home, my home is twenty miles over that way; this Is my home, I have a life; where are the animals? is this my cat?; Is the cat out, he doesn't know where he is... Mom, he knows this place, don't worry. (Mom starts blubbering, turning on her on command boo hoo hoo, boo hoo hoo, which she can just as easily shut off, as when the cat comes across her path, good kitty, what a good kitty.). We call the cat. While I was out for my walk, unexpectedly, he came in, and now as we come in the back door, the cat is placidly pacing gently through the kitchen to inspect the opening before us out to the backyard. All of our woes were in vain, this afternoon. It goes on.
Mom, I need some space. You put me through too much today already.
You hate me!
One minute this is your home, and the next your home is over there...
You're trying to destroy me. I thought we had a nice day, but it's ruined. Thanks.
Here's a glass of wine.
How kind of you, she says, snidely.
Where are the animals?
(Jesus, we just went through that.)
Over just up the road a short walk, the National Power Grid sub station. There are wetlands, sawgrass, green cattails, turtles here in the first sort of pond sunning themselves on rocks along the steep brief bank, jumping in with a single splash. Fiddle-head ferns. Red-winged blackbirds all about, calling. The arrival of a green heron. Blue herons. An osprey nesting. Frogs. Black water snakes, careful, they bite, the old man tells us, sunning themselves along the steel rails of the old Erie Lackawanna and New York Central line tracks here. Canada geese, now with fluffy yellow goslings. Ducks.
The geography as you see it, first the swamp, to the left, which itself feeds into a pipe that goes underneath Liberty Street near the high power lines that hum in misty rain over a buried creek, then the turtle pond on the right this side of the old Erie Lackawanna train track bed, then in, up over the tracks, a larger body of water to the right, and on the other side of the access road a marsh, a few cattails, but mainly sawgrass, where water fowl nursery their hatchlings out of harms way, red-winged blackbirds calling at the passerby from the phone poll wires on the old style wooden poles. The body of water here on the right extends, more or less, southward under the power lines, hugged by marshes.
A yellow canary has a wonderful little teacup of a nest in a high branch to go with its brightness. "Anna-Lee! Anna Lee!" the little bird sings, and another across the way answers, and then they both vanish. Chick a dee dee dee. The warning chit of the red winged, there are many here, they watch me from the telephone wires, before their two note strange you can't rend it in word form, cluck of whatever they have to say. A fricative? The geese are French Horn Bugle bagpipe trumpet... And they're all crying and singing and issuing warnings and talking with each other over the waters and the reeds here, and sawgrass is called sawgrass because all of the wheat kernel like whisps are on one side, as if wind-blown, and indeed many in the shape of a saw blade, here on a long Moses reed.
As you cross the railroad tracks a hundred yards in, you come upon a larger body of water in the wetland, and lately it has been rising, I've noticed. Walking up westward up the along the old overgrown railroad bed, there is the mouth of the large pipe that connects, allowing run-off into the first pond, on the same side of the little road, and then into the first swamp you see coming in, on the other side of the road. The lower bodies of water and marsh have been lower, shallow, dryer than normal.
For weeks now, I've watched the water on this part of the road getting higher, taking up the grass into it, as the days get warmer. More sawgrass and cattails on the other side of the road, and there too the water has been getting higher. And one sort of desperate evening, taking a walk overtaken by a gloom of thinking of all my stuff in my old apartment back in my old DC life, worrying about unemployment and any number of other things, toward dusk, with a light rain falling, I saw the beaver, and then a juvenile beaver, both of them chugging along, with smooth forward unstoppable steady snout and head out of water, going about their business.
It didn't take long to figure out what was going on, whose civil engineering project this was. The beaver had succeeded in plugging up the pipe conduit under the railroad bed, with sticks, mud, small branch sized trees, and the water kept rising. And as the water rose, so did the beaver's little dam job.
Rains came steadily in late April and early May. The waters came to the top of the pipe, and the pipe was now completely blocked. There must be a parable attendant upon beavers and their work, how a stick here and a stick there, along with mud, and then just let the rain fall, and all the waters will rise.
And then the other morning, I'm taking my walk--I took mom here and showed it to her, she used to walk up here too, all by herself, enjoying the nature in the wetlands by the power grid transformer station and all the birds--and I see that a crew has arrived, with a certain ominousness. A row of high clean pick-up trucks, all painted white with a company name, and below the name, "Northern" with a big N, and below it, "Clearing Inc." each with U.S. DOT numbers, and a few heavier trucks with flat bed trailers, and back by the station itself, an eighteen wheeler huge and massive, with two beds with pilings on them, long railroad ties held together in flats, and with a clawed mechanical arm located in between the two beds. So I see this gathering up ahead, and then I see as I climb up the little slope to the railroad bed, men with their colored safety vests and hardhats, gathered on the metal walkway over the pipe the beaver have plugged.
It's a clear Spring day, the grass is bright translucent Dorothy of Oz green, the trees have their hold on the sky, the access road is a faded blue rock tan the color of sandy Maine pebbles, pressed smooth and flat, the only little cracks at the edge, goose droppings like cat or small dog turds, all below the open sky. The waters on either side of the access road have an iron tinge, reflecting trees optically where months ago crows cawed and gathered under Prussian blue pristine cold vapor less sky. The scrub trees and the mangrove like bushes have grown here, and you have to walk in a ways to get to a clear viewing point of the larger body of water now near the power station.
I walk past the row of 8 or so pick-ups, one a lineman's truck with a small bucket lift to reach toward things, and in one of the sturdy pick-ups, there's a nice fellow with a healthy reddish beard, sitting in the cab. I guess you're catching up with the beaver, I say, something like that. Yeah, the water is flooding the power station. Ahh, I see. Yeah, the water's been rising alright.
I've been captivated by this little feat of nature, the power of the twig, by the main character, the beaver, who motors along the surface with his or her head up, chugging along, knowing what has to be done and doing it, here in this wetland characteristic of train tracks, like the ones you see as you head south away out of the tunnel from New York City. Gravel. Cat tails. Odd bodies of listless water. Chain-link fences. A rabbit. Little snakes that swim too, also with their tiny little heads up, motoring along with out waves, like Loch Ness, instantly disappearing.
Half hearted, sad, I mention, to the guy about how I saw the beaver had plugged things up.
They are all waiting on the bucket loader to come.
When's it coming?
Ah, we don't know.
Where you out of?
He slightly misunderstands my question, probably because he didn't hear it, and starts to answer.
No, you I mean, where are you coming in from? (The trucks all have Wisconsin tags.)
Oh, Syracuse. But I'm up in Sandy Creek.
Nice. A lot of water up there, too, I say. And there is, up on the big lake itself, flooding.
Yeah.
These men are, will be, kind to me. I think they get it.
I live with my mom, over there, and she's getting a little... (I point to my head.)
Men don't need language for this. They would get it, my chagrin, my standing here at the edge of a minor story obscure to all, without meaning, or significance, but that the beaver will do beaver things. And now the power station is encroached upon by the watery part of the world and creation.
No one of the men, in their reflective vests can be worried about me, as I walk slowly by, keeping my distance, slow, watching, just standing sometimes, (like poor old Dostoevsky looking over the Neva), a sort of ghost. I'll stay out of the way. The crew could probably sense something emotional in my gate, my posture. Recognize it as men stuff. You don't talk about it. You just be, living it out.
I stood far away from them and lifted my phone to take a picture of the scene. And the birds continued, and little white butterfly moths, and an orange breasted bird, incredibly orange in the dogwood branches high up, singing to the sunny life all around it, and the geese, all going about their business, but with an air of all feeling refreshed by the beaver-revitalized wetlands, a little more space, somehow a little more protected by the abundance of fresh waters fed down by the wooded hills in this area of land the public right of way took to build the high power lines that stretch far south, up gentle glacial deposit rises.
I pace up the access road to the station itself, large enough, chain-link fence, the whole thing on a raised flat bed of gravel, with concrete slabs, and then the equipment set upon it all. Yes, in the distance the shining water, encroaching upon the station. In the distance, yes, I see the head of a creature risen from the water, chugging along westward away, efficient, unemotional, going about beaver business. A man with hard hat and vest is walking along the perimeter after I get back to the road.
I wait around a while. Nothing is happening. They're waiting on the big equipment.
I walk back to the townhomes. I put together a dinner for us, but it needs to rest, simmer on the stove.
After dinner I go back and just then a heavy pick-up truck with a long bed carrying the big huge yellow bucket loader black John Deere arm goes past me.
The set up will take time. The truck in the back waiting with the ties comes slowly forward after the big backhoe with steel treads is quickly off-loaded by the driver, quickly. The man on the truck with the ties now sits up in his seat at the mechanical claw arm, and in jiffy he's picking them up one at time, five or so long ties each, bolted, held together by long metal rods within, sturdy, very sturdy, down they go, and the bucket loader picks them up with quick ease and moves its way westward down the railroad trucks to get into position, like ants making a bridge, putting down the bed in front of its treads, moving right along, and soon in place, after smaller trees, fall, broken, pushed out of the way. Getting down to business.
The business, it soon becomes evident, is going to take a while. It's not going to be a simple matter of the articulated arm and the self-opposed claw of the large bucket itself of the machine digging in and scooping out in easy loads. It's going to be complicated.
Almost an hour of efforts later, the idea amongst the men is to take a tree trunk as a pole held in the jaws of the bucket and push it into the material clogging the pipe. And then they find a larger tree to use, after a chain saw sings. And then an even longer one, pushing the thing up the large mouth of the corrugated pipe. I left somewhere around this point, still plenty light out. I felt sort of heartbroken. Earlier, when the backhoe first arrived, and moved quickly into place, the bucket went down, its mouth pulling up a small tree with mud on it, but after a few first moves down into the muck of the bank and the beaver stronghold, water poured from its maw is it rose, and not much was happening. I stood along the side of the road behind the line of scrub watching it all, looking into the sun behind the men working.
I come back after mom goes off to bed, dusk, orange pink the sky, poofy clouds. I hear the machine churning away, and the eight or more trucks are still all there, but now the water is flowing into the lower, the nearer body of water out from pipe underneath the railroad bed. It's starting to trickle through the lower corrugated pipe, about six feet or so across. Two men are in boots looking in from the other side fo the pipe from this direction, shining flashlights into its distant depths. Something is happening, from their talk I can gather.
And earlier as I watch, just before, the big beaver shows, and the men cry out, as the beaver circles head up like a machine. "You fucked up my water!" one says, empathizing, speaking for beaver. "Oh, he's pissed," another calls across the water in the twilight. The beaver, no mistaking, is on top of all this. Fearless. Chugging along, head above water, seeing it all in front of him, coming in close to the workmen and their machine, circling, going out, coming back in, steady, no change of pace. I forget if he slapped his tail.
Was it a den? Or just a dam?
I'm standing in the roadway nearer to the main road, Liberty Street, closer to the gates, and I'm watching the culvert body of water, where they beaver-proofed it a few years ago with a wire structure and metal fence stakes, where turtle sun themselves above the pond scum, birds nesting in the hollow, a green heron's return. Catbirds, Grackles.
Dusk is deepening into darkness. Light too low to see much. Hard to see underneath the small branches and plantlike here as they themselves come out of winter's dormancy. I turn to follow the pipe under the road, to see how the swamp here, the lowest body of water, closest to the road, now must be filling with all this water flow, and as I look down, a small beaver, juvenile, slender, less than a foot long, swims out and along a new channel. The little kid is coping, but I can't help following him along for a minute or so, and then he feels me watching, and takes a dive. The baby beaver can fit through the beaver wire, must have slipped past the men in boots along with the current, then through the caging.
A family tragedy, and I feel more or less heartbroken by it all.
The men have put up with my presence, but at nightfall, when a car pulls in, bright headlights toward us, I hear it's a pizza delivery, the men wanting a soda too, in addition, "put it on the card," "Did you tip him," and they are going to eat off the back of one of the cherry picker trucks, and I quietly slip away to the grassy hill on the other side of the swamp, over land recently dug for a little pipeline or so. I don't desire to have to interrupt their dining hour with some explaining word or comment.
When I go back later at night, the bucket loader is there still, on three or four pilings, railroad ties of four or five as platform to make a level surface here over the gravel and the metal platform over the big conduit corrugated pipe. Two beaver come to circle, back and forth, then flapping a tail and diving with the distinctive sound of these cool waters splashing unto themselves and their own muddy depths ringed in by cattail and reedy things and the small trees allowed to grow through human neglect of their bigger project's main point, the power, the power lines, the grid station, all the things that look like hot water heater tanks or round tanks like doorless refrigeration units for the electricity, and Flash Gordon Ray Gun like baffled things...
Two or three days later, as the beaver civil engineering wetlands project meets human industrial reality of the large right away of the higher of high power lines stretching far to the south, I've set up a phone consultation with the lawyer for the things of the elderly, Medicare, Medicaid, bank accounts, assisted living or nursing home, all the meager assets of my mother cruelly and nakedly divulged and listed before one. And it's almost like he says, Oh. This is all she has? No house? What he might ask, it turns out, for retainer fee to do it all, just about the same she has in her bank accounts, which leaves nothing left to pay the rent with.
More bad news on top of bad news on top of bad news. And all my own foolish fault, for not doing better for myself. I'm the only one here, dealing with her craziness all these years, her willful disaster of leaving the family and going out stubbornly on her own. Making it worse for me every time she says, bitingly, "what would I know, I'm just a stupid woman," a propos of nothing, nothing to warrant that reaction, except the repeated synapse illness residing in the hateful regions of her mind.
You're like the beaver, you do your thing. Nature tells you to increase the wetland, and that life will come, good health to all creatures and the earth itself.
You get displaced. You can't pay the rent, or own anything, and they tell you you have to move on.
Poor Jorge, he, on the spirit of his sister Elena's ghost, always told me the place was mine, as long as I wanted to live there, but we all knew that was unrealistic, even if with holy good intentions. He became ill and reclusive, and I should have known to help him, but we'd fought over the place where I was vulnerable, meaning he asked me, in his periods of anger, striking out at me all of a sudden, like when my mother came, to wrap it all up, to leave, after he'd kept me as his sort of younger brother child, and I let him go I guess because it wasn't healthy, but then nothing I've done has been healthy for thirty years now, and now it closes in, and he just let himself go, didn't even take the trash out anymore, nor the recycling, as he'd always done fastidiously, and maybe I held it against him that he'd done one of his bitchy attacks on me when Pope Francis had come to town, for this was the time when I was set up to go in for surgery for a seminal vascular cyst, and he wanted to take me in and by my friend and nurse, except my brother swept in and said he was going to take care of it all and he knew everyone at GW Hospital, including the CEO, which Jorge objected to, saying, "Then What's the Point?" Oh Jesus.
Kerouac, his family was undone too by the flood, or the tearing away of the thing that held them all. The Merrimack River of 1936, when Jack was 13 or so.
And mom's nest of books stuck every which way and all across her bed so she has to sleep at the edge about to fall off, no matter how I try to help her, as the mess grows and grows, the paperwork, the documents a complete disaster, her record keeping days far beyond her now, what do I do, what do I do to find all these documents the lawyer to help us find an old folks home for her wants...
The writing, hand done, clear on the wall, I'm lost.
Nights and evenings and afternoons later I walk back to check on things. On a hot day I walk in up to the big wetland pond, over the gravel by the railroad bed, and the big John Deere backhoe bucker loader stands there silently backed up just a bit from where it was digging into the beaver dam in the big conduit pipe under the railroad tracks. It stands silent, the cab is locked of course, and it reminds me of a scene in an early Bond Movie, Dr. No, I think, Connery, Ursula Andress, in the Caribbean, where the local guide, a man of African hide tells of a fiery dragon monster that stalks people here with great menace, and when Bond tries to sneak in to the compound of the evil mastermind, a large tank or truck with strange armor comes rolling forth and of course it is shooting from/with its great flamethrower arms and the windshield is scary and covered, a mechanical war machine evocative of the worst kind of foe or dragon. And there the thing stands. Silent. Dead. On the dead steel railroad tracks with weeds growing up into small trees and gravel to be impatient with if you are on foot, the grating sound of gravel stepped upon, the unevenness, where life should be led barefoot.
To walk out on the platform, of cold blue steel grate, hand rails, standing above the pipe so as to view the intake of water. For a few days two of the the platforms had been left to the side, so that you could come out over the first, but have to hang onto the side rails and footing to get over to see the intake area of the pipe where the dam of mud and sticks and green branches and all sorts had been put into position to stop the water flowing out of the great wetland pond. Roman cement.
There is a quiet song over the waters, even as frogs have come, bullfrogs, singing frogs, geese, the little Green Heron, ducks...
The beaver have returned, never left. If I come in the night, as I do, they are back it again, I'm fearful to say. I might get a tall slap. But under a bright moon, they are working again, a family, at least three. A juvenile chirps with a sweet call, even when I am there. One is right below me as I look down as I first walk out in the night before the moon is full.
But on and on and on it goes. As far as America, official economic power America, of course, I have reached the poor sad territory of Jack Kerouac when he wrote that book Big Sur where he'd finally come to pay, even more than he had been for so long, or always, for the all the fuel of sorts he'd taken in, the way of living he had kept, all that hard stuff, even as he too was as good a USA Buddhist as USA Buddhists can get. Practice. But how good, how true, his Buddhism, even as he knew his stuff.
Big Sur, yeah, sure. Where they go to fall. The cheating having caught up with them.
It's not a sight you want to see, to admit you see, to admit you are in. Why didn't you just be a good by and be nice clean school teacher in America...
The writing led to the drinking. The drinking justified the writing. Both justified the lack of looking for another job in the world he lives in. Everything feeds... on itself. The bachelor life. The readings one would naturally do the soothe such a life, Thomas Merton, etc... All those guys who have made a rich fantasy life of writing, but then somehow, unlike yourself, made it a success.
You truly mean no harm, wish, aim, strive to be good, but that all falls and fails too, eventually, because you in America don't have a job that pays, that has benefits, that gives you a nest-egg of any sort of retirement you might want. Yes, Social Security, but how far will that go? Nowhere.
So you are even in a worse spot than your old mom, but having to take care fo her, no time to work any sort of job, so what do you do?
Blah, blah blah.
Then you find yourself, what?, old, not so in good shape, despite the efforts, burned out, no prospects. Isn't that the way it goes.
But how do you get out of it? Working at the Walmart... at Lowe's? At a local restaurant with nothing for a wine list? Trade school? On-line teaching certification? Why did I deprive myself the life of a good solid local school teacher anyway? Would have been happily married, a good life. Instead of turning into a black hole, eating all of my own achievements and personality as it might show up in the form of being capable of being a productive citizen...
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