Round and Round Forever

I can honestly say that yesterday was the first time this winter got under my skin. I’m in the midst of smoking our latest batch of hams and bacons, a task that necessitates a nearly-uncountable quantity of trips to the smoke pit, maintaining the smoldering, almost-out fire essential to the task. I bet I walked that walk two dozen times yesterday, slipping and sliding and tripping on the boot-packed path, whipped by a relentless wind that drove a graupel-y snow against my sweet, tender cheeks. Yesterday was the warmest it’s been in weeks, and between the smoking and feeding the cows a round bale, which turned into its own particular clusterf**k, thanks to deep snow and spinning tractor tires, I was the coldest I’ve been all winter.

By 5-ish, still damp and chilled to my sorry bones, I was well and cracked. I don’t get in bad moods very often; I’m almost always able to maintain the perspective that a bad mood isn’t so much a mood, as a reaction. The circumstances that give rise to that mood are merely the way things are, and it is my choice how to respond. (By-the-by, I’m fully aware there are plenty of folks who, for reasons beyond my capacity to fully understand, are not so readily able to “choose” their mood. I’m speaking only for myself, here, which you probably knew, but still).

Anyhow. Around 7, I sat down to read to the boys. We read every evening, and by “we” I pretty much mean Penny and the fellas. But I sneak in a few chapters here and there, and I particularly sneak in a few chapters when we’re reading a book like True North, which is as fine a piece of writing about experiencing the natural world as I’ve read since The Earth is Enough.

The copy of True North we have must be borrowed, and I’m guessing from Nate; there are various underlined or highlighted passages throughout, though the book is so damn good it’s hard to find standout passages. Really, it’s the sort of book that could make a lesser writer throw up his hands in either supplication or defeat. Elliot Merrick tells his tale with the sort of effortless rhythm most of us so-called writers spend a lifetime straining our beat-deaf ears to hear.

Anyhow again. I was still in a foul mood, but sunk into our couch with a book in my hand and a boy on either side of me, I could feel the foulness slowing draining away, like an infection leaving the body. True North, as some of you likely know, is about Merrick’s decision to leave behind a cushy urban 1920′s existence and travel to Labrador and furthermore to follow a couple of trappers deep into the winter wilderness. It is also about his evolving awareness of what makes for a good life, where the magic and goodness of simply being alive is found, where the very marrow of his own humanity resides.

Since I still have my smoky ham n’ bacon fire to tend, I will lazily leave you with two passages to ponder. But really, you owe it to yourself to read the whole book.

Arch wanted me to tell him of life in the States, and asked me posers about all “outside.” What is the Russian Revolution? It turned out to be a good bit of a puzzle when I was done with it, and Arch summed it all up with a thoughtful “m-m” and went on to something simple, such as, how do people get so rich. And then we tangled ourselves all up in business and companies and interest and banks – not sand banks or clay banks, banks that people put money in. All very strange indeed, and I commenced to believe, myself, that I was telling some Alice-in-Wonderland fantasy. He had never tasted honey and asked me how big a bee was and if it could make a pound of honey in a morning. How fast can an airplane go and what does it look like, and have you ever been in a railroad train honest? What do people in the States do for meat if they can’t shoot partridges and the rabbits and deer are all killed up? He was much impressed that most people get two weeks’ vacation with pay each year.

“Who pays ‘em?”

“The people they work for.”

“Oh my, I can’t work for anybody else, but I can work like old fun for myself.”

He could not get used to the fact that people in cities walk right by each other and never speak. That amazes everyone in this country. Like John, he looks at me with awe when I say that I have walked by ten thousand people in one morning and not spoken to one of them.

And (this is one that Nate, or whomever had the book before, had highlighted):

Truly man must suffer. It is an old doctrine but few believe it. We must hit ourselves on the heads with a hammer because it feels so good when we stop. Yes, truly we must. We are so constructed. If we don’t, we get soft and bored; we are shoved off onto one tiny island of experience where we go round and round forever.

For me and thousands like me, it is necessary to learn that meals are not three inevitable formalities per day, clothes a bother and a house a real estate venture with a certain amount of frontage. It keeps one out of touch with the world to have too much food, too many clothes, too many ways of transportation, too much house.

What was a pair of socks to me in the old days but another possession, something to find room for in a drawer. How differently I look at them now. I’ve never really seen them before. How deliciously warm and soft they are. How many, many painstaking stitches they contain. I wonder who raised the sheep, who dipped them, who sheared them, who carded and spun the wool. They’ll keep my feet warn, actually keep them from freezing. Why, that’s what they’re for!