RUDIMENTS, pt. 77
Making Cars
Funny thing about that entire 'Big Pond'
episode and place - long after I was
gone from there, and well back into
further places and work of my own life,
it popped up on the news, in its own
right. I was pretty surprised. Even
moreso as it concerned motorcycles,
a biker gang I knew, and the State
Police of Pennsylvania too - seems
as (this is strictly news account stuff
and I make no claim for its veracity,
accuracy, or facts) if some fugitive
biker gang guy, having shot and
killed a cop in a shoot-out in his
pursuit, took off and hid out in the
'heavily-wooded' area of Big Pond
Pennsylvania. I don't remember the
rest but he was apprehended, with
some further slim gunfire of no
consequence. It was just weird for
me to see this place reappear in my
windscreen, so to speak, and blast in
from my past : I tried picturing little
old Big Pond with all this biker turmoil,
police presence, and the rest. I could
hardly conceive of those people who
lived even there looking from their
funny papers or farm news or whatever
to take note of some new activity. What
else was funny was the stupidity of the
news people - they seem completely
oblivious, when they talk, of what they're
actually saying. They acted as if this
was just some other any-place in rural
Pennsylvania where this meager, poor
biker jerk had high-tailed it to. Boy,
was that some short-sighted reporting.
I would have loved to fill then in some.
I went back through there some short
time ago, about a year and a half back
now, and it was mostly the same : the
hardtop road was partially closed and
detoured - reconstruction or new
paving or something - and right by
Lloyd Perry's old place, and up the
rise from old Edie's down below, there
was a guy sitting on the porch of his
little shack, in a big old chair (much
like the one that had been thrown at
me once) and he got all energetic and
happy gesturing me over to be sure to
tell me of the road closure, the detour,
and the fact that, at the end, it actually
just 'stopped' with no passage - meaning
that if I didn't heed the detour note, in
about five miles I'd be plumb out of
luck and have to turn back anyway.
All this really made the guy's day. If
I wasn't so uncomfortable right then,
and I know I should have, I'd have
asked this guy about 'Edie' down there
and 'Lloyd' over there - seeing if they
were still around, or alive or dead. But,
he was only about 35 anyway, so I figured
maybe he'd not know much, plus I was
an outsider just goofing around on their
roads, and that always causes suspicion
anyway. I'll go back again, next time
through. Last time I went back there,
also, I ventured past what used to be an
old, dormant, 1880's-1930's little fenced
cemetery atop the hill that crested where
my house was, about a half-mile off, by
foot, up the dirt road. It has long ago been
fenced and enclosed - one of those big,
black, wrought-iron cemetery fences from
a hundred years back. Old, nineteenth
century names - old that archaic and
antiquated bible-sounding name stuff.
Surprisingly, it's all been enlarged,
trimmed and opened up, and many
of the people I knew from my time
there are now buried proudly within -
new shiny stones, fancied up names
and engravings. I was shook up, at first,
seeing names of people I had lived amidst
- Willard Brown, Jenkins, Guthrie, Denton
Parmenter (he'd been in my house before me),
all sorts of local names. It was pretty scary.
I didn't look for Edie though, and couldn't
remember what her last name was anyway.
Back when that cemetery was old and closed,
I'd walk people there and they'd all end up
saying how scary it was. I was never scared
one bit. But seeing it now, modern and
opened back up and being used, and for
the names of dead people I once knew,
THAT was scary.
-
Funny thing about roads out there : there are
regular roads - names and numbers, paved,
and all. Those roads will get you everywhere
you need to go - towns, stores (eventually),
post offices, graveyards and all. That's like
one set of arteries and veins. But then, just
behind all that, everywhere else, like capillaries
and tiny offshoots, are these endless, open
miles of unpaved, hardpack roads - many of
the people live on these, and they go way out
and way back, for miles. Around huge trees,
turns in the road for swamps and lakes and
things. There are houses right up, snuggling
the roadway, with tippy mailboxes, little brick
and stones things for wells, jumbles of junk
and old cars here and there, acres and acres
of barns and pastureland and cows and all
the rest that goes with productive and steady
farming. There's also horses, horse paths (and
people ON horses, just slowly ambling about
and always ready with a wave and a nod). I
always go real slow along by them, not to
kick up dust and stuff for the horses and them
to have to breath. There are turnarounds and
pull-offs, places where you can just sit and be,
or rest. (Or disappear. Yes, I've written about
these pixie spots before, these wondrous
portals out, and I swear they exist. You can
enter, leave time, come back, whatever, and
no one even knows you're gone. It's truly a
dimensional time-trick). The really cool thing
is, also, that - for instance - let's say the
main, tarred road has a sign that reads,
'Snedekerville, 7 miles.' It'll get you there,
and right quick, in 7 miles. On these deep
and amazing hard-pack dirt roads, they too
will get you to 'Snedekerville'. You'd never
know it, unless you knew, from living there,
I guess, and no one would ever tell you; but
it would maybe take you 14 or 15 miles,
instead of that hard-paved 7 miles. I once
took a dirt-turn out from over the side of
Seneca Lake, over at Watkins Glen, and it
seemed like a day and half later (though it
wasn't) that the darned road, be damned,
if it didn't crest me up over the top of
some bluff, after long miles of pure nothing
and rural space, and then here and there,
progressively more, a house, and then
another, and then two, etc., right until I
was looking, from a height, smack dab
down onto the village of Ithaca, maybe
1 mile or so off. I was amazed.
-
It's been said that time twists and turns,
curling back over on itself and sometimes
taking shortcuts that are longer, and long
cuts that are shorter, and then it all ends
up the same - and in physics today the
consideration is that it all never existed
anyway. Or could exist but maybe never
did. Or did exist, but maybe couldn't.
It's all like that for me now - those roads,
the cemetery, memory, and Big Pond too.
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