It’s almost midnight as I start this. Two minutes ago I put a chunk of dry piñon plus a little piece of aspen in the ancient Ashley woodstove, and I just heard a WHOOMPHH from the next room. Now there’s a rumble! [getting up to check...]
Whew. Had to turn the draft almost completely off, though “off” is an abstraction.
You have to watch that piñon. There’s wood and there’s wood, and then there’s Nature’s napalm. Only certain portions of the tree might have that edge, so it can sneak up on you. With the round (unsplit) pieces, I can’t usually smell the extra resin, but sometimes it’s obvious from the weight. I seem to write about piñon a lot, for the little that I really know, but I don’t see how we could live without it. Even the normal piñon settles down to a powerful, slowly fading heat that lets you know you can finally relax for a couple of hours. That counts for something, under these conditions.
This winter, possibly the most consistently cold one I’ve experienced since moving here in ’99, is really holding us down. That’s what it is, holding us down. We’re very comfortable, you understand, inside 18-inch thick adobe walls with a hot stove going, but you have to feed it. This one has been blazing most of every day since before Thanksgiving. You also get to spend an extraordinary amount of time within 10 feet of your spouse, which we all hope is good. Usually it is, but when it isn’t — holding us down!
Today was my 27th wedding anniversary. How is this possible? I don’t deserve any of it, poor miserable excuse for a partner, too slow to notice and grow up, but there she is, smiling at me every day. She wrote on a card that I was her cowboy and her knight, and that almost made me lose it. I should lose it more, I think.
A while ago I got up out of a hot bath. After I dried off, I pulled on a pair of stinky sweatpants, battered moosehide slippers, a big fleece bathrobe, work gloves and a baseball cap, and walked out into the frozen night. I was heading next door to build up the fire in my wife’s studio so the cat wouldn’t freeze, something I do most nights when it’s under 20 degrees. (Another stove, more wood.)
Let me set the scene:
As soon as I step out outside, tiny invisible fingers pinch the inside of nostrils together. My breath is an explosion of vapor in the glare of the outdoor light. I’m carrying what we call “the stick,” actually a ski pole with the tip removed I found in a dumpster once. It’s handy for navigating what used to be the driveway, now turned into an undulating bobsled run of compressed snow and ice. I walk slowly up the little hill to the road, leaving the front door light behind. There’s only a piece of the moon low in the western sky, but the stars I can see are simply brilliant. I don’t need a flashlight and don’t have one. There isn’t any wind at all. Warmed from the bath, I’m not even cold yet, though the temperature is below zero. My slippers crunch and squeak with each step. The tip of the ski pole pushed down into the snow makes a sound like stepping on small mammals a short distance away. Of course a dog is barking somewhere. Squeak, bark, squeal, crunch, squeak, bark, squeal, crunch.
It’s beautiful in the dark, in a murky, purple-and-light gray sort of way. The only sounds are coming from me and the yelping mutt: when we both stop, the universe is one. I walk past the Dodge, parked up on the road because it isn’t a sled, through the gate in the neighbor’s fence, and down another path of mashed-down, frozen snow to the studio. The cat is fine, I build a fire, hang around to watch it for while, and then head back up the way I came. It’s still beautiful in the dark, but now I don’t feel quite so warm and walk a little faster. As I come up on the woodpile close to the house, I let my guard down too soon and almost fall flat on my ass, stick or no stick. This reminds me to pick up several small logs of piñon, which I do, and once I’m back inside, I put one on the coals inside the Ashley.
WHOOMPHH!
Which in the old days, would be where I’d say, “this is where I came in.”
(Buenas noches, y’all.)
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Beautiful. Thanks, this helped start my day with a smile.
Nice piece of writing – one of your best. Schiller used to take a deep breathe from a private bin of rotting apples for inspiration. Hart Crane loved the sonic and concussive impact of industrial machinery. A great WHOOMPH from a blazing sap-filled log apparently does the trick for Farr. The general proposition here is that an addled brain loosens the tongue marvelously!
“This is where I came in” – that’s one of those things we say all the time without exactly knowing where it came from. Johannes, you and I remember that people once went to movies at whatever time they felt like doing it. They didn’t have a clue when the movie was supposed to begin. They just went through the doors and sat down and started to take in the spectacle on the screen, not knowing whether they were at the beginning, the middle or near the end. Nobody thought this was strange, in those long ago days. Yet when I tell my children that that was how we used to go to movies, they are quite incredulous…. Anyhow, “that was where we came in” refers to the point where you get back to that place at the beginning, middle or end of a movie where you first “came in” and started watching it. Therefore you could now leave, although usually you didn’t, at least not right away. I still think this is a good way to see a movie. I think the weird disorienting nature of coming into it somewhere in medias res stimulates you to think and imagine and invent. You are puzzled and have to speculate. The scene you are watching is entirely mysterious. You start to puzzle it out, to put together the pieces from the beginning based on the pieces you are now seeing in the aftermath. Then you get to see the start-up with foreknowledge of what will eventually come, and you start to wonder exactly when this beginning will join up with the place you first entered the picture.
I haven’t watched a film in this way since high school. It’s probably not even possible anymore, in that they now clear everybody out of the theatre between showings. Such a shame. But the old chesnut, “that’s where I came in” still lingers in our minds and means god knows what to all the whippersnappers who have never “come in” anywhere but the beginning.