Peter Behrens's Blog, page 165
May 29, 2021
Regarding Chainsaws
Regarding Chainsaws
[image error] [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error] The first chainsaw I owned was years ago,an old yellow McCulloch that wouldn't start.
Bo Bremmer give it to me that was my friend,
though I've had enemies couldn't of done
no worse. I took it to Ward's over to Morrisville,
and no doubt they tinkered it as best they could,
but it still wouldn't start. One time later
I took it down to the last bolt and gasket
and put it together again, hoping somehow
I'd do something accidental-like that would
make it go, and then I yanked on it
450 times, as I figured afterwards,
and give myself a bursitis in the elbow
that went five years even after
Doc Arrowsmith shot it full of cortisone
and near killed me when he hit a nerve
dead on. Old Stan wanted that saw, wanted it bad.
Figured I was a greenhorn that didn't know
nothing and he could fix it. Well, I was,
you could say, being only forty at the time,
but a fair hand at tinkering. "Stan," I said,
"you're a neighbor. I like you. I wouldn't
sell that thing to nobody, except maybe
Vice-President Nixon." But Stan persisted.
He always did. One time we was loafing and
gabbing in his front dooryard, and he spied
that saw in the back of my pickup. He run
quick inside, then come out and stuck a double
sawbuck in my shirt pocket, and he grabbed
that saw and lugged it off. Next day, when I
drove past, I seen he had it snugged down tight
with a tow-chain on the bed of his old Dodge
Powerwagon, and he was yanking on it
with both hands. Two or three days after,
I asked him, "How you getting along with that
McCulloch, Stan?" "Well," he says, "I tooken
it down to scrap, and I buried it in three
separate places yonder on the upper side
of the potato piece. You can't be too careful,"
he says, "when you're disposing of a hex."
The next saw I had was a godawful ancient
Homelite that I give Dry Dryden thirty bucks for,
temperamental as a ram too, but I liked it.
It used to remind me of Dry and how he'd
clap that saw a couple times with the flat
of his double-blade axe to make it go
and how he honed the chain with a worn-down
file stuck in an old baseball. I worked
that saw for years. I put up forty-five
run them days each summer and fall to keep
my stoves het through the winter. I couldn't now.
It'd kill me. Of course they got these here
modern Swedish saws now that can take
all the worry out of it. What's the good
of that? Takes all the fun out too, don't it?
Why, I reckon. I mind when Gilles Boivin snagged
an old sap spout buried in a chunk of maple
and it tore up his mouth so bad he couldn't play
"Tea for Two" on his cornet in the town band
no more, and then when Toby Fox was holding
a beech limb that Rob Bowen was bucking up
and the saw skidded crossways and nipped off
one of Toby's fingers. Ain't that more like it?
Makes you know you're living. But mostly they wan't
dangerous, and the only thing they broke was your
back. Old Stan, he was a buller and a jammer
in his time, no two ways about that, but he
never sawed himself. Stan had the sugar
all his life, and he wan't always too careful
about his diet and the injections. He lost
all the feeling in his legs from the knees down.
One time he started up his Powerwagon
out in the barn, and his foot slipped off the clutch,
and she jumped forwards right through the wall
and into the manure pit. He just set there,
swearing like you could of heard it in St.
Johnsbury, till his wife come out and said,
"Stan, what's got into you?" "Missus," he says
"ain't nothing got into me. Can't you see?
It's me that's got into this here pile of shit."
Not much later they took away one of his
legs, and six months after that they took
the other and left him setting in his old chair
with a tank of oxygen to sip at whenever
he felt himself sinking. I remember that chair.
Stan reupholstered it with an old bearskin
that must of come down from his great-great-
grandfather and had grit in it left over
from the Civil War and a bullet-hole as big
as a yawning cat. Stan latched the pieces together
with rawhide, cross fashion, but the stitches was
always breaking and coming undone. About then
I quit stopping by to see old Stan, and I
don't feel so good about that neither. But my mother
was having her strokes then. I figured
one person coming apart was as much
as a man can stand. Then Stan was taken away
to the nursing home, and then he died. I always
remember how he planted them pieces of spooked
McCulloch up above the potatoes. One time
I went up and dug, and I took the old
sprocket, all pitted and et away, and set it
on the windowsill right there next to the
butter mold. But I'm damned if I know why. -Hayden Carruth
from Toward the Distant Islands: New & Selected Poems (2006)
May 28, 2021
1972 Chevrolet Nova SS
Saw this car in South China, Maine. Very cool and clean. Caught another Nova in Freeport, Maine. Something about these Chevys is just about perfect. Here's one from the Back Bay, Boston. A Chevy II and a Nova caught in California a while back.
May 27, 2021
Chevrolet Loadmaster, Outstanding In Its Field.
from Alex Emond in Saskatchewan: "This truck has turned up on the edge of Ponteix since I was last here. Outstanding in its field. I took a few shots of it then sat in my truck and did a sketch. Comfortable set up as long as the dog stays in the back seat. I'm sure this truck still runs."AL caught another L'master in Kansas a while back..
May 26, 2021
RHD Land Rover Denver
May 25, 2021
Raglan Road Or Near Enough
Raglan Road or Near Enough
I always meant to write a song for youon Raglan Road. Then winter came, with its longjohns and bold cats and forty proof. I entertainedalmost unidentifiable feelings in the basement’sblackout. It would have been better if I had leftsome feelings unidentified, but that was nevermy style, or rather lack of it: everybody knowsI’ve got no game. Anyhow, if I did, what wouldwe ever laugh about? I don’t believe everyoneloves a winner, but I do believe we all crackup sooner or later for a dirty joke, a groaner —everyone loves a class clown, at least once,at least briefly, because everyone loves a punchlineor a punching bag; everyone’s punch-drunk, one time.On Raglan Road, your hair started to go grey,I want to say prematurely, except we weren’tso young. Mature is a polite word for it; but youmight say we skipped that part, headed straightto rotten. I skulked around those mold-drownedrooms in your rotten longjohns and felt a lovefor you so perfect it was indistinguishable frommourning. My love was so much more impeccablethan any human man, you may as well have died.One imagines how it felt, in the crosshairs.
I missed you, daily, in plain sight, on RaglanRoad with the lost leaves of January shudderingabove your head in its permanent cowl of smoke,and the unimpeachable soprano winter light siftingthrough the wind’s tin whistle, and the holes in yoursocks, and in your shoes, and in that thing I called oh myheart. The sky was a series of holes closely wovenas a sieve. I saw you straining through the winter’s poresinto piebald tomorrow, halfdead with the life of it,and your greys like the fuzz on stale bread or abutterfly’s wing, your woolen foureyed glareall bergamot and black ice and brandy exhale,and the smell of the numb, simmering earth and yourcoat coated in cedar dust undusted and your safflowerskin, and I could see myself, as if from a treebranchor a crow’s nest or a copcar peeling paston Raglan Road or near enough, at the edge of theframe whistling “Raglan Road” out of key, fading. -Eva H.D.Raglan road or Near Enough first appeared in Typishly. Reprinted here with author's permission.
E H.D. possibly referencing P. Kavanagh's Raglan Road.
May 24, 2021
1972 Ford F-100
May 23, 2021
Roadside Toolkit...
O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love
I like being with you all night with closed eyes.
What luck—here you are
coming
along the stars!
I did a road trip
all over my mind and heart
and
there you were
kneeling by the roadside
with your little toolkit
fixing something.
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was -Anne Carson
Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 10, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets and posted here by permission of the author
1974 MGB and The Smell of Smoke
from Reid Cunningham: "These used to be so common, so it was a nice surprise to find this one in Bedford, NH. The collector market has shot up during the pandemic, but these remain relatively cheap. I suspect many people who would have picked up an old MGB are driving a Miata instead. My dad had a 1980, the last year sold in the USA, while I was in college in the late 80's. It made his previous Fiat seem reliable. A couple times a month something broke, my favorite failure was when the exhaust manifold split. How do you manufacture a hunk of cast iron so poorly it fails? All that said, my dad loved his and I thought it was a fun car when he let me borrow it."AL: here's a 1968 MGB we caught in Portland, Maine. And Bruce Willard's MG poem. And an MGB-GT we found on a cold day in Holland. Then there's the "white sports car" referenced in this Peter Behrens short story, The Smell of Smoke, which was, in fact, a 1964 MGB.
May 22, 2021
Reorganized Reo
From Alex Emond: This truck was parked in a fenced , private lot so I just took this shot . Just east of Medicine Hat, Alberta. The wheels make me assume that there's more going on than I can see. Mighty fine .... here's some Saskatchewan landscape ... down in the Grasslands .
