A Bridge

We lower to bridges, whatever the bridge must cross. Before the bridge is built, if we can find the photo we see ourselves half-submerged in a tropical river whose name is also lost in that watery sac known as memory. Our diesel truck has stalled, mid-crossing. We should have waited a little longer for the river to subside, rivers rising or falling before our eyes--where else would it happen--in response to rainfall conditions higher up. As it is, we spent hours there, eating papaya, sleeping, staying out of the sun if we can.

(Once, an Irishman, my predecessor as driver of the school truck, stalled in this same spot. Remembering a drunken afternoon with an Aussie, the main mechanic at the government station of Kupiano, Papua New Guinea, while he (the Aussie) overhauled the engine on one of the his trucks, the Irishman managed to dis-assemble the school truck engine enough to pull the injectors, dry them and the cylinders manually, put it all back together, and drive on to Moresby with a truckload of schoolkids. (Maybe I've got the diesel mechanics wrong here, but it was a remarkable performance by this Irishman, Watson, who normally wouldn't know how to hitch a lid to a teapot.))

I hear they've built a bridge there now. Maybe this one we'd have to rise to.

When you get right down to it

A track can be downright intimidating if you get close enough. Close enough to feel the heat bounce off the snow. And it does. And I did get close enough. Close enough to feel the after-touch of feathers. Smell the after-scent of willow. The after-here.

I saw a donkey in Kelowna

I don't think he used his legs much anymore.  Didn't need to.  His authority came from the bulk of his neck, the heft of his hee-haw, the thick-jawed resonance of his glance.  He ruled the paddock from his lean-to in the south-east corner below which a dozen sheep roamed, creating paths in the snow and not straying from those paths (thus acting like sheep, I'm tempted to say, except that their owner--the human owner, not the donkey--said every year their paths are in exactly the same place, meaning, he claimed, that the sheep selected the most logical path given the topography of the paddock, not just because one sheep walked dumbly along and the rest followed).

At feeding time I wondered, was the donkey oatey?  No, more like cornstalks was what they all ate, even the sheep (following the donkey).

I spoke to that donkey in Kelowna.  If it was after dark when I drove by, returning from kicking some brother-in-law butt on the shuffleboard table up at McCullough Station, the donkey would let me have it--a variety of rusty hollers for which the word "hee haw" doesn't come close.  ("He's an excellent watchdonkey," his owner had told me.)  By day the donkey couldn't have cared less if I spoke to him or not.  Get outta my face, he seemed to say.

Time out

Listen. Move your legs. Don't take a penalty.

Buy into the system.

Remember. Short shifts. Change on the fly.

Keep it simple.

Boot Heel: what Leaf fans say to Sharks

I didn't notice anything at first, but next I did. There was a cross in the left boot-heel made with big nails, to keep off the devil.

It's one of those moments when Huck Finn stops his fooling around with Tom Sawyer and gets serious: That's his Pap's boot-print, no doubt about it.  He's heard Huck has come into some money and has drifted back to town to beat it out of him if necessary.

Last night in class I asked, for the fun of it, what Halloween costume they'd choose, if it had to come from Huck Finn or Catcher in the Rye.  "Don't forget about the minor characters," I added, (having already planned my own costume: Ernie, the piano player Holden encounters on his Saturday night in New York).  "And be ready to tell us about your choice."

Half the class was missing because of the weather, and four of the remaining nine students picked Jim, the slave Huck travels down the river with. 

Noreen didn't pick anybody.  "I didn't understand the question," she said.

Between one boot and the next

"One small step for [a]
snowman

one giant
leaf

pressed beneath [a]
heel."

Blue

I went nuts shooting floats one day along the waterfront in Vigo.

Couple of gulps, I'd say.










Between one boat and the next.

Blue tip: my eye on it.