“If you could pick any place besides your usual, to have a beer, and sit in chairs & watch the moon rise, it would be this. The cabin’s yard has been left alone for a few. There’s a path to the deck, but the deck, is engulfed at every edge by raspberry canes. This was once a hippie palace. The old, rotting boards are still solid, enough to walk on. The interior, sort of timeless. Wood stove, a comfortable chair, floor to ceiling books. No insulation, or wiring, no plumbing. No mold due to a good roof and a cast iron sink draining into a sheet rock bucket. A shelf of fungus sits on display, next to a montage of faded photos with curling edges. Nothing remotely fancy or remodeled. We go back outside, and settle into plastic chairs, looking over fields of golden rod, a distant peak. “I’m a long way from where I used to call home,” she says. Or maybe i say it, but I listen intently about her year harvesting Osha, mushrooms & peaches in Colorado., “Illegally, I guess”, she adds. But her story is hardly a tale of deception or thievery. An herbalist, digging to fill her back pack with roots; a ranger out on patrol. “At least we don’t have those around here”, I say. Or maybe I don’t, because it would interrupt her detailed description of her life out west. I think of the spindle berries we found on a tree today, bent over like a vine, poisonous, but beautiful. So many things are a mess like this. We were planting cedars, into some good dirt, but also into holes arrested by a bedrock of gravel. There’s just no perfect place to do what you want to do. There’s no perfect tool to make it go much better than it’s already going. We ratcheted a second weed tree, with bungy cords, upright, & connected it to an ancient apple. The point was, to fill a hole. A sort of air hole, between the house and the road, where an excavator had trampled everything down. I often come in, at this point. To fix, to shift, to nurture, to reimagine. An astrologer called my mission here “Cosmic Cleanup Crew”. I didn’t bat an eyelash when she said it, nor was I offended. It made total sense. We sit sipping our brews, until the blue sky day starts to dim. “Want to keep going?” she says. I think I know what’s ahead. A very sketchy section of fourth class “road”, that is almost unsuitable for the 4x4 we’re driving. “Let’s do it”, I say. The night is young. She revs it up, and we lurch along a track, almost blind until she remembers there’s headlights. This is as bad as it could be, especially the fallen tree, just past where we almost didn’t make it thru some mud holes and boulders. I’m now a tree inspector, or an intuitive human micrometer, as I try to gauge our chances of success with this situation. I remind myself to get tee-shirts for the crew, saying “We have a situation”, because this is not a one-off. We positively cannot drive out of this quagmire, in reverse in the dark. “Okay,” I yell over the chugging motor. “Go for it!!”. I stand out of the way, holding a tree branch as far to the side as I can. Maybe scheming to be a few feet south of impending vehicular disaster, or possibly being invaluably helpful. I won’t boast about the part I played, besides egging her on. Cowardice takes many forms. But she makes it. We whoop and holler, and roar up the rest of way, until we get out of the woods, and ride alongside a flattish section of hayfield. “Look at that” I say, and point at the smallest, crescent moon on a perfect sky. It’s getting colder. Now the wind is playing a role, as we speed up and hit the gravel road, then the hard road. Cars in the country on a nighttime errand seem surreal passing by, more than we do anyway, with reality raw on our skin, and almost hurting. We do make it home. I say goodnight after a meal she cooks, and a shot of whiskey, for warmth. Nothing much to do out here. But somehow, we keep ourselves entertained.”
