RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,122
(clearing roads and cleaning ramps)
Without all these normal failings
hype and commerce and overblown
balderdash - when you come right
down to it - I don't think America
would have turned out the sort of
miserable nation it is now. There's
a sweeping disease, and I don't mean
this Covid crap, that over time has
swept through and ruined everything.
If you had, ever, an uncle in the
advertising business, an aunt in
finance or retail selling and service,
a family member as a scientist who
worked on, not pure science, but
developing product, your lineage too
is suspect. And I want reparations
for a ruined land and life and place,
for you have done this to.
-
Just after the Civil War most things
began turning over. For those, of
course, who were here then. For the
others, of my ilk, whose waves of
people came later on,in all those
arrivals of packed ships and boats
and steerage, this raw land was just
as much their destruction too, but as
a different breeding ground of misery.
The high-mindedness was gone and
instead was presented as ragamuffin
misery, hovels, tenement rows and
ethnic enclaves. The outer edges of
settlement still had not stretched or
organized that far afield; there was still
a frontier limit of sorts from the Ohio
and Alleghenies, on out. Uncharted
lands for settlement still lay to the
north and west and southwest, paths
and map roads, riverways and mountain
passes. Lots of things still held promise.
A man had a meaning, and a man packed
a punch, with a hearty appetite for 'Real.'
When men weren't slaughtering and
killing each other there was sometimes
room for things to get done. The form
of towns and villages had not yet been
set into place as commerce hubs of hype
and bureaucracy and misparlance, as
we now know them.
-
When I lived in Columbia Crossroads,
as a for instance, reflecting the 1970's,
it was a far-off enough hinterlands that
the sort of set-up I mentioned was, yes,
in place, but, compared to now, few
and little cared. The few men who
worked for the town itself carried
shovels and had an old truck. o
one would even think of freeloading
off a local tax dollar for the impending
comfort and expansion of living as
if they'd actually done something
worthwhile with their work time. A
rutted road, a burned-out home or
barn, a fallen tree or most anything
of those natures got taken care of -
precisely, efficiently, and quietly, w
with none of the endless paperwork,
review, permit processes and endless,
quarrelsome and didactic push/pull
of any of today's entrenched town
bureaucracies. You certainly saw
none of that little clipboard-men
brigade of people checking thing
off and inspecting every pipe and
draw-down ditch. A person could
get a shovel to the side of the head,
back then, for such intrusion. It was
a fine and different world. (Using the
actual definition of fine; not as money
penalty). It was about quality, but when
'Quality' had a different nature; now
people gleefully live in a quagmire,
and call it home.
-
I mostly stumbled into nothing out there,
learning quickly as I went along. If one
thinks of life as a dream, my entering
Pennsylvania consisted of the part where
the nightmare aspect of what's presented
gets slowly settled and turns back into
the dream that you can wake from, rested
and more without fear than if it was a
simple nightmare break-out. I had an
ante-room, so to speak, where things
could clarify while I figured or
perceived a next step.
-
What did I enjoy about that? Lots of
things, and notable stuff too. First off
I'd never really had a relationship with
the physical world before - hammers
and nails, shingles, cutting, oils, lubricants,
measuring and fitting. The same went,
of course, with farms and farming and
livestock - all those scheduled and
habitual things that such husbandry
calls for. The times of day were all
different, how and when people ate,
and the importance of it; personal energy,
a more intrepid and strenuous view of
life itself. Animal kingdom? Yes, but
no; more like just 'real' humankind.
All of that took getting used to, and
then, just as much, was the learning
curve of subsistence - money, outlays,
paying bills, buying things to store up,
fighting real Winter - in fact sometimes
just figuring how to be moving about,
clearing roads and cleaning ramps.
-
I always found it simper to be civil,
even to an uncivil man. There were
any number of those, and I just stayed
back, to watch what others did and how.
The local situation was pretty separated;
there were the poor, the really poor, those
who had working farms, those who had
working farms and some community
involvement, and - at the top - those
whose family, life, and privilege gave
them the run of the place; local community
leaders, the ones with graveyards and
schools bearing their family names, from
years back. At the bottom, I guess, even
below the far-country renters, were the
trailer folk - not trailer parks, I mean
the isolated, weirdly set, distant dirt-road,
trailers, out along streams and rivulets,
marshes and strange fields. Assistance
got to them by snowmobile or whatever
other conveyance worked - for snows
and blizzards and rains and the rest. As
a school-bus driver roundabout those
parts for some time, I got to know. Kids
went to school, sometimes and maybe.
Nothing got enforced; the rules were
spared the rulings and edicts held no
sway.
-
To compare any of this to the way the
rest of the normal, urbanized, world was
going - with its large stores and bubbling
desires and wants, manufactured promises
and images of faux-grandeur, was to be
comparing the local Ben Franklin store
to some megalith horror like Macy's or
Penny's or Sears and Roebuck. Funny
thing is, they're mostly all gone now too.
No comments:
Post a Comment