Chapbook

[sasha]

Like a lot of kids in his generation, my dad grew up tinkering under car hoods, and even got my mother to let him buy a 1931 Model A he kept in the garage to dismantle & reassemble on rainy weekends - I can only recall a few occasions when he actually took the thing out for a spin. The industry's increasing reliance on electronics and emission controls frustrated him, for the very reasons that the iPhone frustrates me - it challenged his mastery of the technology. I spent nearly a decade writing software professionally, and still write a lot of my own - but every time I try to give the phone another shot, it gives me the finger. Move over, Dad. I hear ya now.

I suspect that the same will happen to today's iPhone samurai. So let them have their laugh at us. Their kids will do it to them.

[saw]

My dad was a car guy as well
not tinkering so much or restoring
but making sure the car we had would run
brake jobs in driveway. new exhaust across
the street, where a culvert for rain water
created a ditch that would have to do
for a mechanics pit....

one day i came home from school
and there was a metal tripod standing on the lawn
and dad was lowering a new engine with chains
into the chasis with a friend from Bethlehem Steel
Charlie Sain was his name...and theyd help each other
on the bigger jobs.....he never ever went to a repair shop
he grew up on a farm where you have to know how to do... Everything

[sasha]

Roamin' the 'hood

The past few weeks have been busier than usual. Apart from those chores that require weekly tending, there's been a flurry of longer-term commitments whose cycles have come into phase, cluttering the calendar with appointments: a dental scrubbing; check-ins with cardiology, ophthalmology, and my regular physician; an annual review with my financial planner. And, of course, the one-off: a few sessions at the bank to assist my daughter buying a house; a late-summer cookout at my brother's; automotive woes of varying severity; and out of the blue, my debit card was hacked, so until a new one arrives, I have to relearn how to live day to day on cash alone.

In the meantime, summer has begun its inevitable transition into autumn. The lethal heat waves of July never quite made it all the way up here into the woods, and some mornings in late August were chilly enough to warrant burning a little fuel oil to take the edge off. The rising sun has drifted noticeably southward, peeking from behind trees it never does when the days are long and lazy. While noting its progress one recent morning, I realized that there was no place I had to be that day, but that an inspection tour of the local dirt roads was long overdue. So after washing the breakfast dishes, I dressed, laced my boots, hoisted the camera and headed out the door for a walk. I stand in the doorway for a moment assessing the chill, briefly wondering if I should have worn a shirt over my sleeveless fleece - but I so often end up shedding layers once my engine revs up to temperature that I just shut the door behind me and set off down the driveway.

Such a morning! The clank of acorns bouncing off the car... morning sunlight slanting through the trees and glittering off that puddle that persists for days after rain. The same squirrels scampering away at my approach, but only far enough to stay out of reach; and what few insects remain are phoning it in - but for the lingering chill, I could have gotten away with shorts.

Out of the driveway, then right, down the hill. Robert's mailbox soon comes into view, and I wonder what's going on at his place. It's lain empty since April, when he & Sandra split up & went their separate ways. He'd said he was moving back upstate, where he'd come from originally. The FOR SALE sign is gone now, but his name is still on the mailbox; and though I've never seen anyone about, I've occasionally heard hammering and the whine of a Skil-saw coming from the house. I wonder if he's had trouble selling the place and has temporarily moved back, or if he's arranged for someone to make repairs he'd never gotten around to. I don't know. I suppose, in time, I will.

Silva's place lies just opposite. It looks abandoned - dead cars in the yard, knee-high weeds, household rubbish about... sometimes the driveway is plowed in the winter, sometimes not. It's been that way ever since Pete drove into the garage 40 years ago, shut himself & the car inside, and sat in the driver's seat with a fifth of Black Velvet, letting the engine run until they'd both run out of gas. I've never seen, much less met, its subsequent occupants. Maybe he still haunts the place. And yet the mail keeps getting delivered, and removed from the box. Life still seems to cling there, at least in some attenuated form.

Now I'm descending the steepest part of the hill. I can feel it in my pace, fighting the pull of gravity to keep myself upright without breaking into a trot. I instinctively take shorter steps to lessen the vertical drop with each one, and pay more attention to my feet than my surroundings - after all, I'm not a spritely 50 any more. I pass Nancy's place - one of her goats is watching me from atop its paddock in the pen. I bid it good-morning, but it says nothing in return. The slope is relenting a bit, and my pace increases accordingly. Now I'm at the spot where trickles from Brigham Hill come together into a rivulet flowing under the road. I stop to look down where it exits. One of these days, I think, I'd like to follow it downstream to see where it enters Scott Brook. One of these days.

I'm at the bottom now, where the road ends at a T-junction with another. I turn right and continue toward the state line, maybe a half-mile further on. I pass by Skip & Laurie's place - a gentleman's farm, neat as a pin, the grounds mowed. Field implements are lined up against the side of the barn, but they aren't for show - he uses them to work the land. Always had a bit of a thing for her - a beautiful girl, a nurse or nurses' aide, something along those lines. And now, well into her sixties, she's still beautiful. I'm grateful for the clear boundaries defined by her marriage - they save me from making a tongue-tied, self-deluded fool of myself. I run into her occasionally on the trails - we share our discoveries with one another, suggest side trips to check out, describe interesting things to be on the lookout for. The attraction's there, but not as a musk - only the barest whiff, no more than a pleasant background bouquet demanding nothing from me beyond enjoying her radiance, her vivacity, and our shared love of nature. Her dog Stella seems to like me, too.

I continue on, still downhill, but gradually now, as the road descends from the lowland hills to the marshy intervale where Scott Brook becomes Priest Brook before emptying into the Millers River. A stand of red pines crowds against the right-side of the road - they're nearly dead now, victims of some kind of pathogen - a beetle, I think - or maybe a fungus, I'm not quite sure. It's become endemic - the city of Keene has recently cleared a multi-acre stand of them to prevent the infestation from spreading. I think the Massachusetts DCR ought to consider a similar tactic around Birch Hill. Just sayin'.

Right by the old gravel pit, where a new house trailer sits beside that long-empty tract house, an orange diamond sign lashed to a pole warns of "Roadwork Ahead", and I can hear the distant growls and grunts of construction machinery. I know this section of the road sits low, and is prone to springtime flooding, especially after a hard winter - but I was sure the town had already dealt with it back in May. But when I finally come within sight of the state line, I see a front-end loader maneuvering well beyond it, and a mini-grader with a belly blade parked off to one side. So it appears to be the adjoining town of Royalston tending to business.

And sure enough, starting right at the granite post marking where New Hampshire ends and Massachusetts begins, the dusty dry gravel road surface is overlain with a fresh layer of damp, dark brown soil. It's soft enough to leave tracks, and the closer I get to the machinery, it's thick enough to require a little effort to trudge through.

The road gang appears to consist of but two town employees, one of whom is lounging in the seat of the grader, awaiting his turn while the loader prepares the road surface for him. The loader has just dropped a bucketful of fresh earth onto the road, and is now backing up, dragging the bottom of the bucket across it, like a cake decorator spreading frosting with the back of a spoon. I want to get by quickly, but without disrupting their work rhythm. I'm not quite sure where to stand, so I step off the road opposite the grader, where I apparently catch the driver's eye.

He gestures in my direction and says something I cannot hear over the loader's engine, so I cup one of my ears and shake my head. He slides his side window open further and repeats it. "What sort of lens is that?" he asks, gesturing towards my camera.

The question surprises me, and catches me a bit off-guard. It strikes me as the sort of question only a photography buff would lead off with, so I assume he already knows a little about the subject. "55 to 250 millimeter," I say. "More of a framing tool than a telescope." Then, hedging my bet, I add, "Anything longer gets a little unwieldy for hand-held, and you need a tripod."

"You see that tree there?" he says, pointing to the one beside where he was parked. "The one with the 'Private Property' sign?"

I'm still groping for my conversational footing, and this sudden left turn does nothing to help me find it. For just a second I wonder if this is a prelude to rebuke, an accusation of trespassing. So I just say my lines. "Yeah," with an audible question mark.

"They's three chipmunks in there," he says. "A whole family of 'em. Been watching them all morning."

"I didn't know chipmunks were tree-climbers," I say, for want of anything better.

"No, not chipmunks," he says. "I meant squirrels. Reds. Red squirrels. Three babies and their parents." He gestures again towards the tree. "Lookin' right at 'em. And they been watching me, too."

The loader clanks and groans as it lifts the bucket and edges forward to begin another smoothing pass, and clanks again as it drops it back down. "Used to have a lot of reds up by my place when we first moved in," I reflect. "But now they're all grays." He seems to regard this as a non-sequitur - which I suppose it was - and says nothing, so I lamely tack on what I hoped would be a contextual observation. "Still get scolded a lot by reds when I'm wandering around out in the woods, though. They just don't seem to like living alongside us."

"Look, look, there they are! Can you see 'em?" he suddenly interjects. He's lost interest in my camera, my observation on the changing ecology of rural neighborhoods, and points towards the tree bearing the ominous warning about trespassing. I look, but only see the sign above the grader's cowling. "No," I admit. "I think maybe..."

"Maybe if you stood over here, then," he says, still excited by the creatures' reappearance. "Go around back, there should be room for you over here."

Aware that "should" and "is" are totally different concepts, I nonetheless make my way around the machine's enormous rear tires and pick my way through the brush as far as the cab, so we could still talk. "There," he says. "They were right there. They ducked back down, though."

I squint towards the crotch between trunks where a family of arboreal rodents now allegedly dwelt in the shadows, but see nothing moving. The conclusion from one of my recent medical audits was that the time for cataract surgery is now hard upon me, and my inability to discern anything resembling a living creature confirms it. "Sorry," I say. "My eyesight isn't quite as..."

"See 'em?" he interrupts. "Two - no wait, three. Three of 'em, looking right at me!"

I start to wonder if he was seeing faces in clouds, or if he was just gulling me, when I catch a flash of motion as the unmistakable silhouette of a small squirrel dashing up the shaded side of the tree from the crotch. "Ah - yeah, I saw one run up the trunk."

"That was the mom. Or maybe the dad. The babies are still down there, lookin' up."

I hoist the camera and peer through the viewfinder, thinking maybe I could pull it in. I zoom in and try the autofocus, but it's apt to dither at maximum zoom, and I can no longer see clearly enough to do it manually; so I've learned to trust it while zoomed out, then zoom in after switching to manual to disable it. But it takes a few seconds, and the elusive baby squirrels have apparently ducked back down by the time I'm ready to shoot. I take the picture anyway, primarily to give the appearance of trying, and to grant me permission to make my escape.

"Didja get 'em?" he asks.

"I think so," I lie in appeasement. "Won't know for sure until I upload it."

"Well, I hope it comes out ok," he says.

"Me too," I say, and give the metal frame of the cab a slap. "Guess I'll be on my way now. Get outta yours for a while. Thanks for showing me this!."

"Hey, not a problem," he says. " You have a good day."

"You too," I say, and pick my way back around to the road, where the loader has backed up far enough for the grader to pull out and do its thing. I walk past, give each a parting wave, and continue my southward trudge to see whatever else there might be to see.

It wasn't until I'd crossed the bridge and heard the cough of the grader's engine starting that I felt far enough out of earshot to start laughing.

alleged squirrel nest

[saw]

thanx for the charming down-home review of people and critters....splendid

[sasha]

Thanks for the thumbs-up! I had some trouble with it - I'd written it as a number of separate vignettes that had to be stitched together, & did such a sloppy job editing the final assembly that I took it down to clean it up. Could still use a few tweaks, but I want to move on.