From the Top (15 page)

Before we went out I sharpened my chain. I placed the saw on the luggage rack of the four-wheeler, which is just the right height for running the file through the teeth. The four-wheeler
was parked down by the pole barn, and I had the door open and the shop radio tuned to a station that plays songs ranging from Sinatra to Jimmy Buffet to Peabo Bryson. When Mills pulled in the yard I told him I couldn't imagine a better life, just standing there in the good weather sharpening a saw chain on the luggage rack of a four-wheeler while easy music floats out the pole barn door.

When the saws were gassed and oiled, we loaded up our gear and headed down-valley.

My neighbor down that way has been farming for longer than I've been living. The old rules say, when you're standing facing a line fence, the right-hand half is your responsibility. These days things tend to get more legalistic, but when I've got an old-school neighbor I'm happy to operate in the old-school manner. Last year I spent a full day trimming back our half of the fence. There was one tree too big to handle on my own, so the neighbor in question drove over with his big farm tractor and we did the job together. It was the first time we'd ever really met. After the tree was cut up and dragged clear and the brush was stacked, we had a nice five-minute visit, and what you had there was your basic rural Welcome Wagon moment.

The neighbor hadn't called about the downed willow yet, and that's part of the reason I got down here as soon as I could with Mills. There's something to be said for filling a request before it's made. It's a way to let him know I'm paying attention and trying to be a good neighbor. I don't know if I'm being altruistic or prideful in that respect, but anyways, here we are.

It didn't take us long to limb and block the thing up, although by the time we got everything dragged and stacked we were both sweating heavily. Then we took our saws and ran the rest of the fenceline, trimming things here and there, pulling a few limbs off the barbwire.

Before we packed up our gear, we took a moment to just stand there and look at the empty space where the willow tree had been. The post-project lookover is a classic male ceremony. No job is really finished until you bask in it a little. You'll see the same
thing with a guy who has just finished shoveling the driveway or stacking firewood. Backed up three steps, hands on hips, gazing upon What He Hath Wrought.

And then we went on to the rest of the day. I slept well that night, in part from all the chainsawing and wood-lugging. But the rest also came easy because I know the next time my neighbor and I meet on the road, I can nod at him and he can nod at me because of the fact—rather than in spite of the fact—that a good fence stands between us.

Lately the price of feeder pigs is way up. I did not get this information from the market report, I did not check it on the web, I got the news the way a guy oughta get that kind of news: through two pickup truck windows.

I got my first pigs from my neighbor Mike: two of them for forty dollars apiece, and feeders run roughly forty pounds. So, about a buck a pound. Last week I was running to the feed mill, and when I went past Mike's place he was about to leave the yard in his pickup truck so I figured I'd check to see if he had any feeders for sale this year. I pulled into his driveway, and we lined up our doors and lowered our windows and we convened a meeting. I think it'd be neat if you could track all the business conducted through pickup truck windows over the years. 'Course, if you wanted to get the true average you'd probably have to figure in all the time
wasted
through pickup truck windows over the years, but let's not get statistical.

Mike's driveway worked fine, but your classic pickup window chat takes place over a center line. I love the ceremonial process of it: how you recognize the oncoming vehicle and you slow down and then you just ease up to each other until those windows align. Then you kill the engines and shoot the breeze while the flies buzz. You talk about where you're headed, you talk about where you're coming from, you talk about how the corn is looking, and you keep one eye out for traffic. If a car approaches and you're at a point in the story where you can wrap it up, you
crank the starter, roll off, and toss a “See y'later!” out the window. But if you're in the middle of the good part of a story, you know, like what the guy at the feed mill said about the milk inspector's ex-wife's new boyfriend, the one with the glass eye and the International Harvester tattoo (I mean here to refer to the boyfriend, not the ex-wife or the milk inspector), what you do then is you pull ahead just enough to let them weave their way through and then you back up, realign, and pick up where you left off.

Usually you just chitchat and talk smart, what you call a “smoke & joke.” But sometimes you get real nuggets. It was through pickup truck windows at the intersection of Carlson Corners that I received the happy news of my brother Jed's engagement.

Unfortunately not everybody gets it anymore, and I have a perpetually renewing resolution not to hold daily funerals for the past so I'm not going to saw on this for too long, but I knew things had changed a while back when I was still living in my hometown of New Auburn. There were only 485 people in residence and Main Street is wide enough you could run five wide NASCAR-style with room left over for Willie Johnson to ride his lawn mower to the tavern. I was out cutting grass one day and my buddy Snake drove by. He stopped, so I walked out there in the middle of Main Street and leaned into his window. We talked for a pretty good stretch. Every now and then someone would drive through and they'd just swing around us, no big deal. Then this woman pulls right up on Snake's bumper and she lays on the horn. I looked at her and then slowly rolled my eyes around the space surrounding us as if to say,
You know, Ma'am, you just have at 'er. Roll right around us.
Then I went back to visiting with Snake. The woman honked again. Snake and I just kept visiting.

Finally the woman gave the steering wheel a violent twist, stomped the accelerator, and whipped out around us. As she zoomed past, she flew us the bird.

We gave her the gaze.

Our point being, Ma'am, this is how we hold neighborly visits around here in lieu of a garden fence. And when you stop to visit through a pickup truck window, you are luxuriating in the tapering moments of a quieter time. And furthermore, honking crabs the soul.

So Mike and I, we had a nice visit in his driveway. Unfortunately, he doesn't have any feeder pigs for me this year. As a matter of fact, he's looking for some himself and he tells me that the cheapest ones he's found are sixty dollars apiece, which is a bit of a shock after they've held steady at forty for so many years now.

That was bad news. But if you're gonna get bad farmin' news, you might as well get it from a neighbor who's in the same boat. Or in the same pickup truck, as it were. And talking to you through a rolled-down window.

We drove off and went about our business. I stopped by the feed mill and bought chicken feed. While the feed mill man was tallying up the bill, I leaned against the feed mill counter and we commiserated about the price of pigs. In the absence of a pickup truck window, the feed mill counter is a fine substitute.

It's been a year since Donnie died. He was a neighbor I didn't know real well or for a real long time, but knew well enough to know his name and know his truck and wave when I saw him plowing his sweet corn patch with his beloved Johnny-Popper.

A couple years back the township trimmed the trees along our road, and Donnie and his brother Denny (Denny lives right down the hill from me) got the crew to drag the trees to a spot out there behind Denny's shop. They'd peck away at the pile now and then, but with fall coming on and quite a few sticks to go, they said if I'd come down there and give them a hand I could take some of that firewood. Donnie was already in the fight of his life by then—cancer—but when I showed up with my pickup and trailer there he was, leaning on the back of the buzz saw, ready to go.

The buzz saw was homemade and painted John Deere green and yellow, because those brothers are John Deere through and through. Always have been. I'm more an International Harvester guy, but when there is wood to be made you join the team, and besides, with that blade spinning right there a guy isn't going to quibble over colors.

We worked steadily but carefully; when you grow up where and when I did the very term
buzz saw
brings to mind old-timers short three fingers, and those were the happy accidents. The wood bolts were stacked fairly neatly, but there was still a quite a little tugging and lugging to be done, as if we were undoing a
pile of giant jackstraws. I lugged the long chunks, Denny tossed the sawn chunks, and Donnie worked the saw bed back and forth. We kept an eye on him but he looked good the whole time, and when it was done I had two heaping loads, the truck and trailer springs sagging.

I didn't see Donnie a lot after that—waved at him a time or two and inquired as to his condition whenever I talked to Denny—but I knew he was struggling, up and down. When I saw the obituary I couldn't say I was surprised.

The funeral was held in a small town nearby, and I wasn't sure exactly which church was hosting the service, but the town was of a size that all I had to do was peek down two or three streets until I saw where all the cars were, and that was the place. When the church part was over they bore his casket to the cemetery on a hay wagon drawn by one of his antique John Deere tractors. You could hear it coming from clear the other side of the railway tracks, the pop-pop-pop, slow and steady.

It turned cold the day of the funeral, cold enough that despite the green grass, when I got back home I stoked a fire in the wood-stove. When we were buzz-sawing wood that day, we cut some of those chunks a little long before we got 'er dialed in, and so as I was trying to wedge a section of split maple into the firebox on the diagonal—the only way it would fit—I recognized it as a piece Donnie helped us cut that day, one of the many that kept us warm all winter long, and as the kindling took and the smoke curled up and out into the chill air I figured there are a lot of ways to honor a man.

I left the farm the other night and drove into town to the local technical college to begin my biannual first responder refresher. Every two years we have to revisit and retest on all the ways there are to keep people ticking when they've stopped tocking. The refresher is twenty-eight hours of classroom time and usually takes place over a month or so, and I always run into trouble stringing one together because I'm on the road a bunch, not that that makes me special, because there are truckers and soldiers in the department who face the very same scheduling issues. I realize I just said being a soldier causes “scheduling issues” and will think on that some more later. Jeepers.

Anyways, as we say around here when we aren't saying Any-
hoo,
the local emergency services instructors have kindly helped me work out a schedule that fits in between all the road days, and I'm spending a lot of time looking at PowerPoints about how to administer epinephrine and oral glucose and practicing splinting pretend broken arms and treating fake shock and binding up imaginary hemorrhages, and—because this is the modern age—rehearsing what to do in the event someone drops a weapon of mass destruction in the back yard.

You might think all this difficult-to-schedule death and destruction playacting would be a breathless downer, but actually, once I get in the classroom I really enjoy it. I'm closing in on my own quarter-century of being a volunteer EMT, first responder,
and firefighter, and it's been a consistent part of my life longer than anything else in my life besides breathing. It's a privilege to serve alongside my neighbors wherever I may be. I love that we converge on scene with all of our different backgrounds and beliefs and abilities and suddenly start speaking in the same language: the language of rescue. The language of help.

I also cherish how the fire and rescue world exists in its own little space outside the things I do to make a living. All the writing and performing and running hither and yon, and yet when I step in that classroom and see the legless, armless BigHead mannequin lying there on the table with his hair that looks like bad chocolate frosting and his teeth that click if you put too much pressure on them while inserting an airway, well, then I know that it's time to practice inserting airways, in particular a CombiTube, and I know that if I meet another emergency medical provider somewhere even far from home and we don't know a thing about each other, if I say, “Inflate the blue tube first,” he or she will smile and say, “And don't forget to auscultate for bilateral lung sounds and gastric insufflation,” and we'll know exactly what we're talking about just as reliably as two poets talking villanelles or musicians talking minor fifths.

It just seems healthy to pursue some interest outside your main interests. In my case, being a volunteer rescue member has always been my way of reminding myself that I am mortal and ought to act that way. That trouble can come to any of us, in sixty-'leven different ways and at any time. Again, it sounds like a downer, but it doesn't feel like a downer. It feels solid to know that. Like the big surprise is pre-sprung, so it won't hit quite so hard when it comes. Or at least I'll recognize it for what it is and say, “Oh, it's the big surprise. Okay, then.”

There's karma involved, too. Not the kind of karma where I believe if I make enough emergency calls I'll build up some cosmic bank account of get-out-of-jail-free cards, but rather the karma that when the day comes when I need help—or, even more importantly
and specific to my heart and situation, my family needs help, and it's one of those many days when I'm far from home—well, then, when help arrives it'll have a friendly face.