A Post in Pictures: Something about a creek...

Sometimes you get to reclaim a little of your childhood thousands of miles from where you grew up.

In order to do so this past Sunday, Matthew had to drive our van down a dirt road that felt like a rollercoaster from the early 1900s with people regularly pitched off the wooden slats to their serious injury a few dozen feet below. (I stroked my van and apologized, and she sits in the driveway stewing still, caked with mud all over her rear end.)

Holly and Chip, our hiker friends - the cool ones - are very intrepid, but when we finally parked the van 11 miles and 35 minutes later off the road and peered over the edge of the parking allotment at our trail, Matthew and I felt a little squeamish. But if our kids and Holly's pug, Buster, were raring to go, then so were we!


Pic by Holly

The hike led down toward Sycamore Creek near the Verde River, and once we had navigated the sharp descent with our children, digesting the fact that it would surely be the devil's road on the way back up, we came quite quickly to the first swimming hole. There was a thin rope, looped at the end, dangling from a small branch over placid water.

"Hey, a rope swing!" someone said excitedly.

"We'll have to try it on the way out," said Chip.

Our hike had barely begun, so we ventured on until we came to another accessible part of the river, and the kids all dipped their hats in the water and tipped them back on their heads, letting the cool drip down their necks. Little white butterflies fluttered around us, and larger members of their family, more colorful, drew near. Brilliant blue dragonflies zipped past and played about the water. We found a huge watermelon vine trailing the ground; someone must have dropped their seeds, because watermelon is certainly not native. But the smell on that path through the woods was a native aroma. It was delicious, all exotic spice, probably from the creosote. I breathed deeply, wishing I could capture the fragrance to rub into some grilled meat next time we barbequed.

Both families left directions in the cars, so we were lucky to find our swimming hole at all. We were sure we had lost the creek after crossing it twice and losing all sound of running water. So Chip and my boy Berto decided to scout it out ahead while the rest of us turned back, dispirited. The guys came running and shouting for us to halt in our cowardly retreat. They'd found the place, and it was right below a beautiful red rock with caves and multiple crevices.

"I hope you aren't fooling us, Chip," I said as we followed them on the silent, dusty trail.

"It's right ahead."

And sure enough, we turned a corner, and there it was in its splendor, worth the heat and the sweat and the uncertainty.

Chip, our resident adventurer, decided that we needed to go out on a ledge to ideally enjoy our packed lunch. So we clambered up behind him, helping our six children along, the remaining adults crawling quickly over a narrow lip of the rock after them. There we settled on a red rock precipice for  our meal, the adults and older kids hung their legs above the water and created a human fence to prevent the little ones from falling. Matthew dropped a carrot in the pool below, and presently Berto cried, "Look, a lobster!" It was a crawdad. He had grabbed the veggie and was ambling along the rocks with his prize.

It was all shade at first in our precarious dining space, but presently the sun broke above us. It was time for a swim.

There's a country song called Something About a Truck from Kip Moore with this verse that goes:

Something about a creek around 2 am
After a few of those beers, you wanna dive right in
You don't need no clothes, just hang em on a limb!
Something about a creek around 2 am

I hear that verse when Matthew is playing his country music, and I say to him, "That man has never been in a creek at 2 am. At 2 pm it's cold! If you wanted to go skinny dippin in a creek at 2 am, I'd say, 'You first!' and push you right in." Still, he's the only one who could persuade me, but it would definitely take a couple craft beers. (I'm selective but a light weight.)

And how right I am. We started wading out in the water, and I felt like my body was going to seize up. Meanwhile Chip was trying to catch crawdads by letting them clamp down on his finger. Holly submerged quickly and wisely kept most of her body under. Then Chip swam all the way across the pool to explore a cave. Matthew didn't want to swim; his lean body has no fat to protect him against the chill. I was dying for a swim; it'd been so long. After a short breast stroke, however, my hollers of misery were echoing off the red rock. Matthew snapped a picture after my dip:

Chip heard me shrieking from the cave and asked what was wrong. "Nothing...she's just cold!" Holly called to him.

Something about a creek around 2 am, my foot...though maybe with a proper bathing suit or no clothes it's better. My plastered and dripping jean shorts and T-shirt weren't helping.

Eventually, I found my courage, and getting down in the cold, I stayed down. I had a good swim while Holly, a great and once competitive swimmer, volunteered to water taxi the kids on her back to the cave, and Matthew stood still and alone in a little shaded bay of his own and lured fish with bits of carrot...until they got wise to him.

As we swam bits of white fluff from the cottonwood trees drifted continually by on the breeze, dragonflies lined up on a floating twig, small fish approached our toes and birds skimmed the water with their beaks to catch lunch.

It was a beautiful spot, in hues of blue and green and red, and the jolting drive and hot hike were nothing to the adventure of a good swimming hole, but eventually it was time to face the road again.

On the hike out we passed groups of young people in bikinis and swimming trunks, the young men hauling coolers of beer between them, looking sure of a good time (something about a creek...).

Just as we were getting dry, we jumped back in to play on the rope swing at the first swimming hole. We got muddy and wet, and our toes sank into the sediment on the bottom, sending big clouds of dirt spreading across the water. But I have a soft spot for rope swings, and so does Chip, apparently. I reminisced about the thick barge rope over our creek in Tennessee, how we could sit in its large loop. He talked about childhood summers in Pennsylvania, canoe trips and expeditions to find the best rope swing each year.

Memories such as those and these must be made. You have to grab adventure by the horns, no matter how tiresome it is to pack lunches and water, lather four kids with sunscreen, and see the mess of a van you rode home on. My city kids, so thrilled to explore caves and watch crawdads and fling themselves into water from a rope swing, need a lot more time in the God-given country. And where better than Arizona?

(Seemingly Endless) Days of the Condor

My daughter Hillary is on vacation, visiting her sister Vinca in Virginia this week and asked me to write a guest post.  So, while she views the monuments in D.C. and tromps the fields of Gettysburg, I will sit at my desk and slave away, dredging up old memories, just for her.

When I was younger, I worked in powerline construction; you know, those giant steel and cable behemoths that crisscross the country delivering massive amounts of electricity.  In those days, we built EHV powerline mostly out on the great plains.  It was an attempt by the government to connect the entire country on a grid and eliminate the plague of blackouts that were then occurring in the NE United States.  (If you live in the NE and are old enough to remember those days, well, you're welcome.)

One of the most dangerous jobs in what was overall a very dangerous profession (the only professions with a higher mortality rate in those days were combat soldiers, astronauts, and race car drivers), was cutting in dead-ends.  A dead-end is a structure constructed at a point where the line has to make a turn so sharp that it won't facilitate continuous conductor cable.  The conductor must be cut at this juncture after it has been connected almost horizontally to the dead-end structure by strings of insulators (or bells, as we called them, because of how they look).  Great loops of aluminum conductor are then slung beneath to connect up with the phase running off at a new tangent beyond the structure.

We all hated and dreaded cutting in dead-ends.  It required the lineman to sit on the wire while maneuvering extremely heavy six-bolt stays onto the bundled conductor and attaching them by screwing them down hard onto the conductor with a torque wrench.  The six-bolts would be fastened to the structure in order to keep the line under strain so that it would maintain its proper sag.  Then the conductor would be cut between the six-bolts and the tower and the groundsmen would send up another extremely weighty hydraulic device called a press.  With this, the lineman would press a sleeve with a ring on the end onto the conductor by which the conductor could then be permanently attached to the structure.  

Sometimes the line would be lowered after it was cut (though kept under strain) and the pressing of the sleeve done on the ground, a much safer and easier method.  Just as often, however, usually because of the configuration of the right-of-way, the pressing had to be done in the air.   

All this while, the only thing holding millions of pounds of aluminum and steel in place was an operator's foot on the brake of an immense machine known as a puller.  Oh, yes, there was an emergency brake, too, but this was a huge cumbersome thing and seldom used.  Men in a hurry to build big things tend to cut the corners where they can.  Besides that, our company's puller was an out-dated, even ancient thing, which we all suspected had been first built thousands of years ago and used up and worn out by the Romans or maybe even the Hittites.

I personally knew four men that died on the job in those years and two of those deaths occurred while cutting in dead-ends.  Believe me, when tons of thick aluminum cable, held under tremendous strain, comes loose, it tends to ravel and twist as it recoils back up the line, seeking the drum from which it was unreeled.  Gathering up the unfortunate lineman's remains for a funeral is a sad and often messy task. 

Eventually, someone from OSHA came by and forced our company to come up with a better solution for cutting in dead-ends than simply hanging a lineman out there in perilous space where old man death could draw a good sharp bead on him.

The company's solution was to acquire another incredibly ancient Hittite machine - a high-lift truck capable of extending a bucket containing two men up to eighty feet in the air.  The massive truck had once been called an Eagle by the manufacturer - we knew this because those of us with better eyesight could just make out the smudges of painted letters that had long ago faded into the metal.

The Eagle was a loathsome beast, contrary, undependable, dilapidated, and scary.  Sometimes, as if on a whim, with two lineman stuck up there at the end of its fully extended boom, it would decide to re-adjust the pressure of its hydraulic fluid and drop its boom three or four or sometimes ten feet.  You know, just for the hell of it.

Needless to say, this peculiar habit of the ancient animal made us all more than a bit skittish.  (And caused us all to heap abuse upon the poor operator, who of course never had a clue as to why the machine acted like it did.)

We finally decided that it wasn't an "Eagle" at all, but something extinct or at least nearly extinct.  So, we renamed it the "Condor".

Those of us on the clipping crews, responsible for permanently attaching the conductor to the structures, came to fear and despise the thing and our skittishness eventually devolved into terror.  How we all hated to see a dead-end structure show up on the line!, especially if it might be our turn to take a ride in the Condor.  That ancient beast became the stuff of my nightmares, and by the haggard, weary look of my comrades most mornings, I knew that it haunted their sleep as well.  We even began to long for the old days, when we sat on the wire while we wrestled with six-bolts at dead-end structures.

One day, it fell to Wamsley and me to take our lives in our hands, ride up on the end of that worn-out, bouncing boom and cut in the dead-ends.  It actually wasn't too bad that day, for the way that the truck was situated, the upper arm of the structure was right to our left, within reach, and most of the lattice-work mass of the lower half of the structure was directly beneath, fifty feet or so below our position, cutting off our view of the ground even further below where the ancient beast might seek to deposit us in rude manner at any second. 

We had the six-bolts positioned on the wire and were working to secure them to the conductor when the Condor decided to have one of its moments.  

Abruptly, the bucket dropped.  I stared at Wamsley, wide-eyed, and he looked back at me in like manner.  He was a lean, wiry fellow, with a tendency to squint, which made his eyes appear small.  Usually, all one could see of Wamsley's eyes was only about half of his brown irises with little triangles of white to either side.  This day, however, I could see all of his irises, plus a fair amount of white all the way around both of them.  His eyes, I realized, were actually quite large when one got a really good view of 'em.

We expected the bucket to stop, as was its wont, but it kept going.  In a fraction of a second, I realized that this was it - the machine had utterly failed and wouldn't stop until it, and we, were buried upon impact deep in the earth.  Somehow, we had to get out.

Dead-end towers look rather like big X's, with the feet splayed out to hold the structure up and the arms, to which the conductor is attached, reaching up and out to either side.  The upper part of the structure was just then passing by the bucket on my side.  Instinctively, in a spasm of self-preservation, I leapt from the bucket, catching the lattice-work with my left hand.  At the last instant, I thought of Wamsley and reached for him as I took my leap.  His safety strap was hung over his shoulder and my fingers caught it, grasped it, and my hand formed a fist.

The bucket of the Condor continued to fall, finally grinding to a shuddering halt on the leg of the structure thirty or forty feet below.

There we were, seventy feet in the air; me hanging onto the steel lattice of the tower like grim death with my left hand, and Wamsley dangling at the end of his safety strap, suspended in space from my right.

He gazed up at me as he twisted slowly back and forth and his face grew sad.  "We're all gonna die, you know.  Sooner or later that damn thing will kill us all."

"I know," I replied through gritted teeth.  "But not today."

We decided after that episode that the Condor wasn't a condor at all.  I mean, there are still a few of those birds extant out in California - right?  No, our beast was something more ancient still, something truly lost in the deeply layered age-old dust of history.

It occurred to us that it was, in fact, a pterodactyl.  Truly extinct, a denizen of pre-history.  So we re-named it.  The Pterodactyl it was from that day forward.  And still, though a member of a species that hasn't been seen on earth in many multi-millennia, it persisted in terrorizing us endlessly.

One day, I'd had enough.  I went to the shop and found a can of black spray paint.  After work, and after dark, when the crews had gone home, I hung around til the show-up yard was deserted and then I painted its new name up along the side of the boom.  In great, bold letters. 

Pterodactyl.

Later, when I became part of management, I understood that companies that construct powerlines have clients - the various power providers in the various states, and an image of professionalism must be maintained.  Having your men deface company equipment, especially when that defacement can be construed as demeaning to the company, is really not a desirable thing.  But at the time I did it, I didn't know this, and truthfully, might not have cared.

The next day, the general foreman of our crews, a huge man named Marlatt, found me where I was clipping in a phase up on a structure and yelled up at me, ordering me to the ground immediately.  Now - dammit!

Once I was on earth, he proceeded to chew me up one side and down the other for defacing company equipment.  He threatened to fire me.  I believe he even threatened to kill me.  I took it all as stoically as I could.  Finally, he paused and asked me what I had to say for myself.

I struck as casual a pose as I could muster.  "How do you know I did it?"  I asked.

He went red (redder) in the face.  "Cuz you're the only one of these lost souls with enough education to know how to spell a word like that.  And it is spelled right - I checked."

My penance consisted of painting over my offense with white paint and even sprucing the old beast up a bit.  It didn't matter.  The guy from OSHA eventually came back around and ordered the thing off the job (our theory was that this particular inspector was actually thousands of years old and had first encountered our hapless machine in ancient Mesopotamia or perhaps the land of Uz).  So, the Condor went away, its days finally over.

I seldom have nightmares these days about those days of the Condor - in fact, the nightmares may have stopped completely. I haven't had one now in, oh, I don't know, ..... four or five days.

Have fun in Virginia, Hoodoo.

Gone Fishing

Saturday was free fishing day at all the urban lakes, so I persuaded my man to take our kids angling.

While her big brother, sister, Mama and Papa fished in turns,  Ella held a worm she named Batman in her hands. He stretched himself, compacted and wriggled and almost fell out of her hands. She asked me if I wanted to hold him, but I declined, petting his smooth body with one finger.

A fish jumped out of the water, and she cried, "I'm glad that fish didn't jump out and eat Batman!"

The fishing was tough. We didn't catch a thing except memories, though we got to the park early after picking up the bait.

Matthew asked Daniel and Ella if they wanted to hold the bait, and then he dropped them gently into their hands. Daniel dumped the squirming creatures immediately. Batman was one of the fattest worms Ella got to hold, and she held him and powdered him with moist earth until our patience with the catfish had worn out.

"Can I keep him?" she asked as we packed up.

"No," I said gently.

"We are not keeping a worm as a pet," said Papa less gently.

We released him in the flower pot at home against my better judgment. It didn't turn out so well for Batman and his friends in this blasted heat. They're fertilizer now. Ella doesn't know.

_

I bet my brother Nate wouldn't go fishing with me again. For the memories.

Once we were at a pond or lake just outside Clarksville, Tennessee, and Natie laid his pole out on the ground to straighten his line and adjust the bait on his hook. My parents had told me several times to be alert, but I came by and tripped over his line, sinking the hook into his finger. His shout of pain brought my dad running. Nate got the barb out quickly, but it didn't save me from a well deserved rebuke for my chronic clumsiness.

Years later we were at one of many lakes near our campsite at my grandfather's gold claim in Idaho. Nate was baiting my line and advising me on technique. Be patient. Reel in slowly. If you feel a bite, don't jerk the line; tug gently so you don't sink the hook too deeply.

But I over do everything, so when I felt a bite I jerked my pole as if the ground had suddenly pitched beneath me, calling for Natie to come as I reeled it in. The fish was a skinny, short thing flapping about. Nate dug for that hook valiantly, but I had snagged it good.

"Hillary, I told you not to jerk on the line!"

I babbled apologies, feeling terrible for the little fish. Finally he gave up, found a fist-sized rock.

"Turn around," he told me. "I'm going to have to put it out of its misery."

Poor Nate, such a sissy for a sister! I cried as I turned away. I heard the stone hitting the earth, and when I looked back at my brother, his face was grim but the line was cut. The tiny catch was thrown back in the lake, not the intended Catch and Release.

_

Fishing is a patience game and can be as frustrating as a round of golf. You like the idea of it until you're 15 over. What you need is experience and a good arm. My son Berto beamed and looked toward us every time he cast on Saturday, and the line whipped through the air far out into the lake. My husband and I beamed back and gave him thumbs up, but though his bobber found the water where the fish had been jumping, he got no bites. He needs more fishing.

I wish he could train at the elbow of his great-uncles on my dad's side. They are all excellent fishermen and hunters. They are always going on grand outdoor adventures, bringing home photos of themselves smiling and holding up their prizes or kneeling by them, clutching antlers in both hands. They post them on Facebook and make their friends jealous.

Me? I stink. The most pleasure I have ever had fishing was in a stream up by Horseshoe Bend, Idaho. I found a sweet spot on a large stone in the middle of the slow current. There I sat alone with the summer breeze, in the water up to my knees and ample shade from the trees above me. I don't believe I was really trying, and I doubt there was anything but minnows nipping at my boots. The serenity of the setting, however, could have kept me there all day with nary a flirtation.

_

The draw of the bite and the hope for a "Big one" will get you out the door and on the road to nowhere before dawn. The more you go fishing, I'll wager, the more you think Next time! or Bigger yet. But what I love best about fishing is the conversation with nature and the bonding with family (Right, Natie?).

That's why I hope we get at least our oldest two fishing licenses this year. Oh, to have the chance to say often, as a fact of life, "Sorry, we can't. Goin fishing."

Dreams

Last night I had a dream that I was urgently called to a gathering of family, because someone I loved was very ill, near death or already passed. I drove up to this white wedding or revival-style tent on the campus of a school or some sort of public building. It was springtime, and I could smell the grass. As I traversed the lawn, my grandmamma, who passed away 2 1/2 years ago, walked by me in a navy blue suit.

I stopped dead in my tracks. "Grandmama," I called in astonishment. She turned and smiled at me. She was incredibly beautiful. Her hair was glossy and short. The beautiful structure of her face shone beneath her smooth skin. But the smile and the love it contained were enough, and all that I was granted. I had forgotten how well she looked as a middle-aged woman; she was forever young as she walked away.

I stepped into the airy tent. People were sitting on benches and foldout chairs. Inside were a few of my relatives and many people that I did not recognize. Seeing my confusion, they began to jog my memory, standing, shaking my hand, and uttering names from the past, from my family's life in Tennessee. I began to sense that the person who was ill was someone I loved very deeply.

********************


A couple evenings ago I watched a show that gave me nightmares, a movie about a gentleman who worked cleaning up crime scenes. I also watched a tiny part of The Mentalist which has gotten decidedly creepy delving into the Red John plot line. The nightmares were inevitable.

In the most vivid and subtle one, two doctors, a man and a woman, ran their practice from a rundown, rambling, perfectly unsanitary old house. The house was full of crawl spaces and secret passageways and long narrow stairs up or down into deep dark rooms with locks on the doors. The kitchen was the only decent place; you felt momentarily safe there even as you gazed into the dark labyrinth of evil possibilities off to the right. The male doctor was a villain, and he seemed to own those evil places as he went back and forth between them. The female doctor was weary, brainwashed, or jaded beyond reason. She handled the paperwork.

There was a terrible but short scene in this dream, but I won't describe it. I don't believe in giving others nightmares.

I needed rescuing, but the dream was my fault, and I was stuck in it. I didn't even try to wake myself up this time. It wasn't scary enough, but I needed some good thing to prevent it getting worse.

That good thing came in the sudden appearance of my parish priest at the long, rustic table in the dining room on the left. He was writing letters. I don't think he said one word to me or even gave me an examining look. He didn't speak with the doctors. He just seemed to own the table and the immediate space around it. And I was comforted. Even when a crowd of folks rang the doorbell and marched by the flimsy screen with outlandish, oversized utensils - massive sporks, serving forks and wicked-looking brass spoons - held high in their hands like picket signs. I just closed the screen on them and said, "no, thank you," repeatedly to whatever they were selling or thinking about doing.

************************

I was back in Tennessee, but it wasn't pleasant. Sometimes when I dream about Tennessee, it's so friendly and lovely. It's exactly as it was, and it brings me joy. But sometimes I dream that people have built Starbucks or condominiums by the creek or in the woods on those 98 acres where I grew up, and I weep inconsolably.

In this dream, the little square house was gone, but the rooms as they had been were mapped out with stones. And there were lamps and other pathetic pieces of furniture strewn about to make a semblance of living space. People who lived there acted like it was no big deal to have no walls and no roof. That didn't make me sad; it just bewildered me and made me restless.

What saddened me was that the plants in the yard were all shriveled to the ground. Gone were the blackberry bushes and the peach tree at the back fence. Gone the honeysuckle hedge by the field gate. Gone the lush hibiscus at the corner of the porch. The dogwood and huge walnut tree in the front were chopped down. I kept roving with my eyes, looking for some hint of life left on the ground where they had been, wondering, If I pour water in the soil, will they come back? Surely if I water their stumps and lifeless tangle, they'll grow again?

*************************


A week ago my man was hanging out with some sweet, young dame with blond hair named Sue or Stephanie. Maybe her name was Stephanie Sue, and she went by Sue.

Anyhow, he danced an Irish jig in a public fountain in front of a bunch of people we knew just to impress her. He got soaked, and she smiled and giggled at him. And I was right there.

I demanded to know whether he liked her more than me, and he said yes like it was nothing. and obvious.

So I demanded to know why, and he answered, "You know telepathy, right?"

"Telepathy?" I repeated. "What does telepathy have to do with it?"

"Well, we can have a conversation without even talking."

I made a loud incredulous noise to show my disgust, though I was mad with jealousy and desperate. How can one fight telepathy?

She was a schoolteacher, and she invited him to Father's Day Tin in her classroom. It's like Mother's Day Tea, only the dads drink coffee out of tin cups. He went, the infatuated basturkey.  And I followed him and Sue around, wondering what I was going to do about it all.

_

I woke up from this dream at approximately 2:36 am, mad as a rattlesnake. But I was going to forgive him if he spontaneously rolled over and wrapped his arms around me. He didn't. He lay on his side of the bed, jerking in sleep like he was having a perpetual charley horse. I wondered if he was dreaming about dancing that Irish jig for Sue. I felt like clobbering him. It took me an hour to go back to sleep.

_

In the morning I told him about my dream as soon as I thought his eyelids were fluttering. I angrily asked him what he'd been dreaming about, twitching in the middle of the night. He replied that he dreamed all his teeth were falling out. I said vehemently, "It serves you right!"



Writer's note: Not all my dreams are this vivid, lucky for you. It has been a productive week. Apparently, I've had a lot on my mind. Don't worry too much about the last one. My husband assures me that the dream was not his fault; he had nothing to do with it.

But I'm watchin' out for a gal named Sue. Any woman who could convince my man to do an Irish jig in a public fountain is no good.