“If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”
— Walt Whitman
There is this unfinished stone patio behind our house. It’s nothing much. There used to be dirt there/ mud when it rained. Now it’s all mountain rocks, hefty ones, that I collected a few years ago. I’d drive me and Arle in my Honda. Up into the forests we’d go, out onto the ridges and we would just roll slow, churning up the silky dust from the dry road, slowly trolling for monster rocks laying right along the old road.
When we’d spot a possible rock, I’d slip the car in park and just leave the car right there in the road as I went to check it out. If it had flat sides and was thick enough (but not too much), I’d begin to try to picture how we could grab it. Then we would act out my visions, her over there grabbing that jagged point and me over here lifting this fat gut and before long we would be heaving a part of the mountain into the back of our ride.
We’d be taking the nature.
Stealing the wild, I guess.
Sometimes on the way back home, I could sense that the car’s front was lifted towards the sky from the crushing weight in the back. It filled me with strange pride/ sent me beaming towards places I had never really been before. There are all sorts of echoey rooms for a person to stumble into unexpectedly in this life. But I still recall, with great detail, this odd, good feeling I got when I was hauling ancient stones down from the hills so I could make a little patio for my people.
At times, I felt certain that the car’s undercarriage was going to rip apart from the stress of the load. It never did, of course. I went slow and navigated the exercise kind of like I would have done if I was managing a horse and carriage instead of a motor vehicle. You get tender when you detect your traveling bones are in jeopardy. You can push a thing to the brink, and I did, but when all is said and done, a dead mule or a dead ox or whatever, just laying there stiller than a cloudless sky, it’s an earth-shattering moment. People on the trail, people trying to stay alive and all, they pushed too hard and the beast just imploded.
Then what?
Then you have a problem you did not want to have.
The idea of me pushing the stupid Honda to some brink of destruction was thrilling, I suppose. Even when we are all supposed to use common sense and not overdo things, even when I know better, I think maybe sometimes I try to test the limits of a natural thing to see if I can pull it off. To find out what I’m made of/ what we are made of.
Luck be a lady tonight.
More than once, as Arle would be taking a swig from her bottle of water, sitting there in the passenger seat with the forest dirt and cobwebs on her fore arm unnoticed/ I would notice the freckles of her skin and a fresh mosquito bite with the red streaks coming off it where she scratched at it haphazardly, without even thinking about it, and I would hold the steering wheel loose but firm in my one hand while I hung my other hand out the driver’s side window/ into the slow flow of summer air on the mountain road/ and things would occur to me like this free notion of us right here, right now, doing something no one would ever really know about/ like hauling rocks off the high ground so we could lay them out in our backyard so the kids could walk into the house without traipsing mud into the kitchen across all the days to come.
Never did it cross our minds, I would think in that fleeting moment, that these rocks might possibly be sprawled out there for longer than we even live in the home/ own the ground/ walk the Earth. But there it was, this random notion hitting me square in the head, that we were up to something together that would be recorded in the annals of human history in the simplest vaguest way.
Someone put those goddamn rocks there, someone might say someday.
I wonder who the hell it was.
Chances are, no one would ever find out. Digging back through deeds and all would offer little to no clue. Sadly, there’s next to nothing in the common documents about the little minutia that people do with there lives. Money is the only thing that matters. The documents list prices paid and maybe moneys owed. They make specific note of where one person’s land ends and another one begins. They might even refer at times to specific landmarks to help illustrate the property lines once upon a time. The said farmstead terminates at the willow tree by the NE corner of Long Lane and Rhubarb Road.
But other than that kind of thing, legal documents are all bullshit. They’re dry and soulless like the damn money itself. Which wouldn’t matter so much if small towns still had thriving newspapers like they once did. But they don’t much anymore. That’s another source of historical detection, of wonderful storytelling gone. Hell, I never even lived in an era where it was all that thriving, to be honest. But recent developments with old newspapers from the 19th century being archived digitally have filled me in on what I missed. Because those precious, arrogant, opinionated, ultra-biased publications that once offered up daily (or weekly) scoops of national and world news to folks who had no other way of ever getting it also used to present the local gossip in ways that seem both magical and hilarious to me now.
Walter Weaver used an old horn from his deceased ram, Abe Lincoln, to slap a rattlesnake back into the woods by the creek last Saturday morning. Reports are that he has good aim.
Mrs. Rebecca Miller of Frog Town is laid up with the winter flu. She has been ill for three days this past Thursday. She wants it noted that this is why she has not been delivering her milk biscuits to her customers.
Three sheep escaped Inman Stoltfus’ clover field one evening recently. The sheep showed great determination by wandering up Penn Street and entering directly into Tim’s Tavern where they were welcomed by surprised patrons enjoying their ale.
The tone of such recordings fills me with joy. And the very fact that such isolated moments in the vast history of humanity were even bothered to be noted, it means so much more to me than it probably ought to.
I think about this sort of thing a lot. In merely walking down the road, driving past a dusty lane, moving from the Post Office door to the corner and then to my idling car, what all am I walking by?
Whose ghosts am I slipping through?
What events, what soldiers, what sadness or pain or laughter took place right here/ right here! (I point at the sidewalk)/ once so long ago/ before I was born/ before my mom or dad or their parents or grandparents were even born?
Watching Arle sip her water on a hot summer day, me guiding the car back to the place we call home now, I see the dirt streak on her arm and maybe the crimson line coming off her dumb bug bite, and I am transported by this possibility that something so unimportant in the grand scheme of human history might somehow, against all odds, live on to be considered by some future generation of people we will never know.
Mrs. Arle Bielanko joined her husband, Serge, this past Tuesday afternoon, on a venture up onto the Bald Eagle Mountain in search of sizable stones. The couple, who sometimes wave hello when spotted about town, and sometimes don’t, are planning to create a stone promenade in the privacy of their backyard on Penn Street. Reports are that their mules, Malcolm and Angus, were quite worn out by the labor.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
