Triptych

TRIPTYCH

ADVENT IN JULY

There’s been a lot going on lately. I feel a bit odd wheeling out an excuse like that to explain why I haven’t written an installment for over a week, but time has been taken up. My sister and her family took a trip out from Indiana for their first visit to Vermont. The day of their arrival I was heavy with anxiety. There was all the preparation and cleaning and it was raining and soggy and I was feeling personally responsible for the crummy weather. I knew this was all ridiculous, but I could not or would not shift my thinking. And I’d rigidly scheduled my day, a sure set up for every plan going haywire. And that’s what had happened. Instead of writing, Richard and I had to chase chickens and put those unlucky few that needed to be processed into pet carriers. Though I liked that the numbers of chickens were dwindling and the cacophonous crows of all the roosters would be diminished, it was still sad, as if we were taking part in our own “Tale of Two Cities” trip to the gallows. I was going to have Richard trek them up to St. Johnsbury where the processing was to take place while I stayed home and got back to writing, but I felt he needed some spiritual support, this being the first experience with thinning the flock and so I went. Along the way, we thanked the birds for the meat they would soon be providing us. Very Joseph Campbell of us I thought.

By the time we got home from that and lunch at the P & H truckstop, my day schedule was way off. (Vermont commercial break. If you are ever in these parts, you must go to the P & H Truck Stop – reason 27 I love Vermont. This place is sensational – great food, great variety, and excellent, fun waitresses. I understand it’s pretty famous in these parts, as well it should be. Come, come; go, go. Commercial over.) My rigidity was biting me hard in the ass. I could not let my plans go. I was hating the chores – the mowing, the cleaning, the not-writing. I needed something to break it up, to snap me out of it, to jolt me back into the land of the living. And that’s when the Bull Moose came running down the middle of our road. I heard him before I saw him, a heavy gallop. ‘A horse?’ I thought. ‘Who’s galloping a horse on the road at this time of day? At ANY time of day?’ And I peered out the window and there he was, the Bull Moose I’d been dying to see for years, a huge set of antlers. And he was being chased by the cute, kind Alaskan huskie pup from down the road. The moose didn’t seem to be having fun, though. He cut off up the side of our pond and cut into the woods with a brushy crunch, the husky in playful hot pursuit. I screamed out ‘Richard! Richard! Did you see that?!’ He was in the backyard and he had seen it and he was screaming for me to look. We caught sight of one another, realized we had both witnessed this incredible thing and we laughed hard and long. And all the rigidity and schedules and anxiety and weight of the day lifted off into space.

JUST MAKING A DEPOSIT

I’d taken a trip down to the bank the other day and entered into a conversation that I’d heard from a few sources over the past several weeks, namely the advantage of planting either strawberries or tomatoe plants in old tires. It’s as if it’s some new Vermont planting tradition.
“Oh her tomato plants are out of this world,” the woman in line was saying “I’ve never seen anything like them.”
‘What is the advantage of planting them in tires?’ I asked.
The woman didn’t know, but she hazarded a guess “Maybe it’s the black in the tire absorbing the heat from the sun and transferring that into the plant.”
‘Hmmm.’ I wasn’t convinced.
“All I know is I’ve never seen anything like them” she carried on.
‘So you fill the tire with dirt and plant the plant inside of it?’ I inquired.
“No. She just plants the tomato in the ground, in the flat earth, and then she places the tire around it as a border.
‘Hmmm.’ I really didn’t know what to say to that. But I was thinking – LOUDLY -Why would anyone want a bunch of tires around their plants?
“And who wants to taste petroleum products going into the roots of their strawberries and tomatoes?” my ecologically minded friend Emily asked with a grimace a couple days later when I told her about this encounter.
‘What is this Vermont thing with tires?’ I put out. ‘It’s everywhere and it’s strange.’
“No one wants to pay $4 a piece for them at the dump.” Our friend Chris, Emily’s boyfriend, chimed in.
Finally something made sense. Of course. It’d have to be frugality to inspire a Vermonter to do such a redneck thing like tire gardening. I guess it does beat burning them, but still … ugh.


30 YEARS AGO ON MY BICYCLE TRIP: JULY 1, 1979 – OPALUSA, LOUISIANA

The day had been humid and frustrating, filled with broken bicycle spokes, an occurrence which for days had been dampening my spirits. Every broken spoke meant unpacking my bike, taking off the wheel, deflating the tire, replacing the broken spoke with a new one and then spinning the wheel to see where it was untrue and trying to the best of your ability to crank the spokes with a special spoke tool (its name escapes me) until they were all well balanced and the wheel spun in a straight, unwobbly revolution. This felt as if it were next to impossible to accomplish – this perfectly balanced state. If you didn’t get it true, chances were - with all the weight of packs filled with equipment and necessities – that another spoke would break. And this was happening with increasing frequency. On top of the broken spokes, there was the heat and the thick Louisiana air and lousy directions. Oh, but I would curse with frustration at the countryside when I realized I had just gone 8 miles out of my way and would have to turn around.

Now there had been compensations. Louisiana, and Mississippi and Alabama before her, had been lush and green, almost Amazonian. I had had my first introduction to kudzu and its encroaching, tangled strangulation of everything around it. There had been ghostly remains of old plantations with only pillars left standing. There had been kind and helpful people, fun encounters. And there had been armadillos and snakes sunning themselves on the roads and long flat stretches of hot, hot weather.

Earlier in the day I had asked for a good place to camp that night and had been directed to the city park in downtown Opalusa, Louisiana. My antennae had gone up when I heard “city park”, but I ignored my misgivings. By the time I pedaled into the park around sunset, I was whipped and ready for rest. Opalusa was a small, quaint town and the city park was alive with well-attended Little League games, their cheers and applause comforting and homey. But as I rode by them I began thinking “they’re never going to let me camp in a place like this” – “they” being the Opalusa police. Still I biked to a secluded part of the park and began pitching my tent as unobtrusively as I could. While I was doing this, a kindly looking tall gentleman in a light cardigan sweater happened by. He reminded me of my great Uncle Ernest. He had been on his evening stroll and was curious about who I was and what I was doing. As I told him about my trip he seemed genuinely interested and impressed and he began asking about my experiences so far, which had been my favorite, what had been my ups and downs, and how I had ever gotten the notion to begin such an undertaking in the first place. It was a pleasant conversation and soon he had wished me well and walked on.

About 45 minutes or so later I was sitting cross-legged in front of my tent writing in my journal, a can of lima beans warming on my little gas stove. It was just turning dark. The Little League games had wound down and the sounds of the neighborhood crowds had been replaced by sporadic bursts of laughter and play in the distance and an underlying hum of summer insects. The frustrations of the day, all the cursing and negativity, the broken spokes, everything had been mended with the coming of evening and I was looking forward to crawling into my sleeping bag for some well deserved shut eye. And then the headlights started coming across the field. And they were coming right for me ‘Oh great,’ I thought with a groan, “It’s the cops and they’re going to make me pack up and leave.’ I just sat there defeated, squinting my eyes in the cars glare, thinking thoughts that sounded like my dad’s, thoughts like “It figures. I should’ve known. What more could I expect?” The car pulled up beside me and the driver’s door opened. It wasn’t the cops at all, it was the soft spoken gentlemen I’d just had the conversation with. Before I could say anything, he handed me a plastic plate with a roast beef sandwich, lettuce and tomatoe, chips and a slice of cake. And then he handed me a coke with a plastic glass full of ice. I was speechless, I don’t even think I got up I was so utterly stunned by his generosity. He said “I’d like to think somebody would do the same thing for my sons if they were in the same situation.” And then with a “Godspeed” he shut the door and drove off. It was the stellar day of my whole trip. Incredible.

Within a couple days, I’d had it with broken spokes, and I packed up my bike around Lake Charles, LA, and took a bus to Houston where my sister was living and that’s where I spent the 4th of July.