On Golden Pond

Morses, actually.

Furnace Brook

   Furnace Brook falls sharply down a narrow valley, between great boulders, through deep, cold woods, until it relaxes into the fields of old farms in the meadows outside Proctor.  The brook is named for an old iron furnace, the ruins of which are settling slowly under fallen trees and brush and creeping vegetation at the edge of the woods, across the road from the old Ironmasters Inn.

   In the fall of 1990, my older brother and I went fishing together every day for four days, three of them on Furnace Brook.  My brother said it was teeming with trout, some of them “lunkers.”  On the morning of the last day, before he drove me into Rutland to catch the bus to Boston, my brother caught a trophy brown trout – a beautiful fish of 18 inches, truly a prize for a stream like this these days.  A thrilling, completely pure and satisfying moment that we shared. 

   After three days of mild, frustrating rain, it had become a beautiful fall afternoon.  Golden leaves showered down around us in the stirring wind. 

   As we hiked up through the forest to the road, I thought about how timeless was the fishing that we do, in the old simple way, with worms from the earth, not fussing with our casting or our tackle, only searching for the trout that hide deep in the clear, cold water, hunkered down behind worn rocks, waiting for what food the surging water would bring tumbling into the pool.

It felt as though we could have been two brothers in 1890 or 1790 in this moment, in the woods along Furnace Brook.

Through frozen branches

   

   I want to tell you of a night in January when I was young, when it rained hard just before a quick, deep freeze.  The rain pushed south to Massachusetts.  A full moon rose, pouring its own cold light over the hills, sudden and absolute.  A stunning cold.  It left an even layer of crystal coating on the night.

   We rushed into our jackets and black rubber boots with metal buckles, grabbed our leather mittens from their hanging place behind the kitchen stove, and charged out to skate on the sequined counter-top that was now our front yard.

   I remember most the lilac by the driveway.  Twigs that were soaked in the black night rain, then flash-frozen.  An explosion of sparkling shafts, a bundle of frozen sparklers in the green street light. 

   Thinking at the time that I would remember it always, I slid under the lilac on my back to look up through the frozen branches at the moon.

Even mercy

   We have been watching the story unfold for the last few nights on the local news.  It is a story we have heard before, with minor variations.  It goes like this.     

   A young, dark, evil-looking man has killed his ex-girlfriend's mother in her driveway and taken the ex-girlfriend hostage.  Every night, just after the weather and before the sports, we are reminded that he is believed to be traveling about with this woman, and that he is, as they say, believed to be armed and dangerous.  No kidding.

   Tonight we hear that the police finally cornered him in an old apartment building, which they efficiently evacuated and placed under siege.  The killer soon released his ex-girlfriend (it is his true love for her, after all, that has started all this), and settled in for the obligatory night of phone calls from the police negotiator. 

   Now the clean-cut District Attorney is telling us how it ended.  At some point the police decided that the “situation” could not be brought to a peaceful resolution.  Just what led to that conclusion is not explained, although it was awfully cold out.  In any event, someone decided it was time to storm the apartment building.  Apparently that was enough to also convince the man barricaded inside that the situation could not be brought to a peaceful resolution, and so he shot himself in the head.  The District Attorney says, with a straight face, “Unfortunately the suspect shot himself before we were able to reach him.”

   I wonder what the District Attorney would say if he could look directly into the camera, like they sometimes do on clever television comedies, and tell the audience what he really was thinking.  I know what I would say. 

   We waited for a good long time for this guy to come out and give himself up to our usually fair and generally lenient system of criminal justice.  Having waited through most of the night, we should not be required to wait indefinitely, further endangering and inconveniencing the people we evicted from the neighborhood and all of these policemen who have spent the night crouching behind their patrol cars while their own women and children are worried sick.  So we went in to seize him but he shot himself first.  That’s the way it goes sometimes with these extremely troubled, extremely violent types. 

   And on the whole it is not such a bad result.  This way the ex-girlfriend (whose condition no one has asked about) does not have to live through all this again  at the trial for murder and kidnapping.  She can begin to try to put this behind her as best she can; and if we put half as many resources into helping the victims as we did housing and feeding the offenders, no doubt she might have a better time of it.  And, come to think of it, this also allows us to avoid the considerable expense of housing and feeding and psychoanalyzing this very troubled, very violent man. 

   Even more to the point is this simple question:  who would be better off if he had surrendered and lived?  Not the killer, who has expressed rather clearly his own preference in the matter.  Presumably not the ex-girlfriend, who, among other things, now is spared the agony of waiting for the parole board to release the killer from prison.  Who?

   In short, I did not wish for the killer’s suicide, but neither am I troubled by it. 

I am reminded of a line in an essay I read a few weeks ago – to the effect that remembering, like burying one’s dead, is an act of mercy.  That is one thing that burying the dead can be.  It also can just be about preventing the smell and disease.

    And so here you see it.  In the long list of qualities where I fall short – even mercy.

This brotherhood of man

   Raymond Carver is dead.  He was, is, perhaps my favorite writer.  He died too young.  It must have been the drinking.  He finally had stopped in his later years, but you can't just stop all the damage.

   He wrote one poem about John Gardner, another favorite of mine, who also died too young.  He slid his famous motorcycle under a truck.  Carver's poem captures him on the motorcycle, long white hair flying, racing along, distracted, toward his sudden end.

   A young man from my hometown died in just that way.  Sliding his motorcycle under a truck.  He was on his way to meet his classmates to ride the senior float in the Alumni Day parade.  They got the news but decided to go on and march without him, in his honor.  The girls riding the float cried all the way.

   Aaron Manor was his name and he was the best basketball player our high school ever had.  So when he died they made a trophy with his name on it at the top.  Each year the award goes to the most valuable player, for about a minute, before they take it away, add his name on a plate at the bottom, and put it back in the case outside the principal’s office.

   I went back home for my 25^th reunion and wandered into the high school for a look around with some of my friends.  I found the trophy in a different case down near the gym, tucked among the other trophies and team photos and basketballs that accumulate in such a place. 

   I found my name on the plate at the bottom, with a few new names coming after it.  Something they stopped doing twenty years ago.

   I remember the awards ceremony in the high school auditorium when Aaron Manor was recognized for scoring over a thousand points in his high school career.  I was probably in the eighth grade at the time, and found it thrilling.

   And then my own turn came – not to score a thousand points, I didn’t come close – but to be the star of our team for a year.  To be the last one in the line we formed at the base of the stairs below the locker room before we ran out to take the court.  Hopping up and down a bit to get loose and burn off a little of the excitement.  Waiting for the cheerleaders to start singing “When the Chiefs Come Marching In.”  And then the song would start and the crowd would cheer and the line would start to move.

   So now I’ve been back to see the trophy and the gym.  And in my house I have a bookshelf half-full of Carver and Gardner that I need to visit again, too.

All that goes on

   Left alone here for a few days, I handle it better than I used to.  I don't watch as much television.  I eat better.  I don't use the same glass all week, for everything, just rinsing it out.  Still, it's best they don't know all that goes on when they're not here.  

          

The rich still use summer

Armies used to use winter as a verb.  The rich, they still use summer.  

Of mice and women

   Only now, in May, it occurs to me that we went the winter without hearing any mice in the attic.  The women in my house are mighty pleased.  It was my wife who called the animal control guy last year.  He came with traps and poisons. And control the mice he did. 

   Control.  It sounds like merely the responsible thing to do. The mice thing had gotten “out of control,” the women said.  Now the mice are controlled. 

   They are all dead. 

   I like animals.  The mice were harmless.  We gave them a warm place to be in the winter, safe from cats and foxes.  They had a good thing going here, if only they had done their running around midday, when no one was home. 

   But mice will be mice and women will be women.  And control of the home will be restored.

What people don't say to young people

     My older daughter met a boy in college whom I think she will marry.  I thought that the first time I met him.  They had been "seeing each other" a while by then.  We'll see what happens.  They're still in school, and a lot will depend on who gets what job where.

     Anyway, if they do get married - or live together - I am resolved to share with them some actual wisdom, or what seems like it, about that part of your life where you are starting to build an actual home with someone.  

     Okay, so maybe it isn't wisdom.  Maybe it is just how you felt at the time, or at some of that time, which might be helpful to share.

     You wake up some days with feelings of anguish and despair and fatigue.  Relentless pressure.  You realize you have been clenching your teeth.

     You are overwhelmed by looking for a place to live.  You are not poor, but are frightened to death of spending all your money.  

     You waste your time at work, but still are bitter at someone else for having to work on Sunday morning.  The work you have to do feels like shoveling coal.  

     You say your apartment is like a pig-sty and you mean it.

     Your partner feels the way you do.  When that happens, even though you love them, you can end up barking at each other like stupid, lunging dogs.

     Take a deep breath.  Go for a brisk walk in the sunshine and the cold air.  Stop at the store and buy something to cook, so that you can nourish yourselves and do something creative, even if you will eat it much quicker than it took to do and then have to clean up after yourself.  

     Resolve to hug the person you are living this life with when they come home, even if you don't feel like getting up from the couch. 

     At least do that, and the rest will sort itself out. 

Tool set

   Some day, I think, I will get to writing actual essays.  I would like to do that -- make well-built and functional pieces, like good cabinets.  Projects that take some real time, varied skills, and patience.  All of which seem lacking theses days.  I find at my hands only hammers and chisels and saws, nothing finer.  

20th and Walnut

   For a year after college, my girlfriend lived in a small apartment in a new building at 20th and Walnut.  A bunch of boxes way up in the air.  Down below a man on the corner also lived in a box.  More on 20th than Walnut, usually, depending how the wind blew.

Postcard from L.A. - No. 2

A homeless man lies in the middle of the street on Cesar Chavez Avenue in downtown LA.  A doorman from one of the apartment buildings kneels over him.  Two police cars arrive.  The officers position their cars to block some but not all of the traffic, then get out and stroll slowly over.  More slowly than you might think right, with a man down in the middle of the road.  Two fire trucks arrive, including an enormous ladder truck, for no apparent reason – an impressive display of both firepower and bureaucracy.  The firemen get out and walk around, waiting for the paramedics, who finally arrive and start doing things.  I see this unfold on my morning run, doing my slow three miles, jogging in place at the lights.  It seems the right thing to keep running, rather than stopping to stare.  The road rises and I plod up the long hill, nearly to the top, before turning around.  By the time I get back to where the man was, all that’s left is one police car.  It makes a u-turn in the street and drives off.  It’s seven in the morning in LA.  The traffic flows easily on Cesar Chavez Avenue, as if nothing had happened at all.