May 30, 2006
May Day, 4/4
A pickup truck pulled into the drive way.
My father and i were on the porch. The conversation had rolled like a steam engine down the tracks. We talked of politics, war, and religion. We talked about the middle east, and culture and conventions. I talked of travel and how living abroad should be mandatory for American leaders, and my children alike. We talked about ignorance- our own and other's.
As we talked, my mind began to split like the cracks in a windshield, spreading out in all directions. I was a nested folder, and marble in a bag. and i wanted not to be. i wanted to leave, and i wanted to see, and wanted not to be ignorant. My father spoke of a book he read of a man from ohio who walked around the world. I thought of those i know and where there were. I pictured their states and their countries and their continents. I tried to picture the sun and whose faces it was falling on right then. I was a puzzle piece. I wanted to see the puzzle.
The truck door opened. It was dave. He was soaking wet and smiling.
"We tipped our boat in the river" he said.
He and his brother go out in the summer evenings on a particular stretch of the hocking river a few miles from there. The set trotlines on tree limbs to catch catfish, and return in the early morning to pull in their catch.
"It was a rookie mistake." he said to my father, laughing out loud. "The boat hit a log between the rocks south of rt. 93. We should have jumped right then. but we leaned over and the boat began to fill up. Everything we had started floating down the river."
We stood in the twilight and laughed at his adventure. Dave has lived in that corner of the state his whole life. As he talked he got more excited and remembered stories of frog hunting, fishing, and hunting of his rookie years. he told wild tales of traveling the narrows, a remote stretch the salt creek, west of South Bloomingville, gigging frogs in the middle of the night. He painted pictures of biker camps, hippies, and hillbillies along the water as he reminisced about his adventures in his piece of the puzzle.
He spoke of an intimate familiarity of the area that he has lived his whole life. And we laughed as he stood in the dark soaking wet. Some need to travel the earth to see the world. Others walk through the woods to find what they need. Suddenly i realized how little i know, how i am ignorant, about both the fertile crescent and the banks of the salt creek. And there standing in the headlights of Dave's pickup truck, i saw my present and particular puzzle piece in vivid detail, deep in the woods in ohio.
I have been to many states, most all of them have been of mind.
[*footnote: The next morning. ]