From the Top (4 page)

Although I have always remained relatively active and have never truly let myself go completely to flop, I have also spent a vast percentage of the last twenty-five years slumped in a chair at a keyboard or slumped behind the wheel of a car rolling to the next low-key whoop-de-doo. There have been certain doughy accumulations. Furthermore, one day not so long ago my brother the logger and I were comparing our accumulated clicks, twinges, and impingements and it struck me that apart from the fact that I have never been hit in the head with the butt end of a tree, he's no more physically frayed from his certifiably dangerous profession than I am from all my long-term butt parking.

Then the sitting studies started rolling in. Now, I'm a skeptic when it comes to popular medical news, since mostly what you get is the most superficial skimming of the most shocking scintillas, followed in five years by an utter reversal, and we all get nutritional whiplash as we trade out our low-fat margarine for
stone-ground nut butters. I figure you get your genetics, you do basic due diligence, and then maybe you can tweak the remaining ten percent of fate. But these sitting studies made it sound like I might as well work in a burning tobacco factory as sit on my hinder from dusk to dawn, and—and this was the worst part—those intermittent jogs I was taking weren't enough to undo the sedentary bulk of the rest of the day.

And so I began to take preventive measures. First I tried sitting on a big red yoga ball. It was fine I suppose, but one day I got to bouncing on it as a form of procrastination and wound up knocking the computer monitor off the desk and injuring it well beyond the terms of the warranty. Next I tried a standing desk, but this only led to me slouching and slumping and leaning on my elbows the same as before only now while standing on my two flat feet. It was a minimal improvement at best.

Then my wife suggested I get a treadmill desk. I chuckled condescendingly, as she is ten years younger than me and thus surely lacks my capacity for skepticism, and never mind if she is really into high-level black-belt yoga and can do things like ski to the back forty and back, whereas I … I … aaand so I got a treadmill desk.

Do you know how hard it is to type
treadmill desk
? Of all the trend-chasing, fad-following silliness I've gotten myself involved in over time, this ranks right up there with parachute pants and jelly bracelets at the roller rink. Nothing like walking all day and getting nowhere. It's bad enough when the guys down to the feed mill ask me what I've been up to lately and I say, “Crafting precious metaphors.” Now I have to say, “Crafting precious metaphors while walking 2.2 miles an hour—in place.”

But you know what? Two months in I've dropped about fifteen pounds. Certain hitches in my giddyup remain, but I feel more spry in general. My record is eleven miles in one day, although it's usually more in the four-to six-mile range. I'll leave you with two final bits of information: the words you just read were written
over the course of 3.85 miles, and whatever wisecracks you or the boys at the feed mill come up with, they're trumped in spades by the look in my wife's eyes when I come in the door after yet another nine-mile day at the office.

The other day I was teaching my brother John about cheaters. It's not that we were thinking about becoming private investigators lurking in the lobby of the no-tell motel, it's that his eyes are beginning to fail him. This tickles me pink, because he is a sawyer, a pilot, a singer of barbershop harmonies, owner and operator of his own bulldozer, and head-to-head a much better shot with his deer rifle. Whereas I am a really good typer. So I jump at any chance to be the one educating him.

There is nothing dire afoot with my brother's eyeballs, just the standard early-forties fade, the one that's even harder to take for guys like us who have had better than 20/20 vision all our lives. Then comes the day when—at least this is how it happened with me—you raise your hand to clip your fingernails and they are oddly fuzzy. At first you fear some sort of creeping fungus, but then you tip your head back a tad and they come into clear focus and somewhere inside your internal you says, “Uh-oh.”

A guy could go on, I suppose, about what a spiritual gully-washer this moment is, how those fuzzy fingernails represent the fraying of time and the very fading of life itself, but let's not get heavy; it's not like your liver dropped out on the sidewalk. Fact is, this is the sort of thing you can—pardon the pun—see coming. Plus, how many other mileage-based maladies can be cured for under three dollars, which is the upper-end price range for your low-end reading glasses, or, as we call them in our family: cheaters.

I gently informed my brother that his mortal depreciation will now be measured in increments of magnification. Based on my experience, I told him to start with the 1.25s but to keep a pair or two of 2.0s on hand for close-range detail work. Buy cheapo cheaters in bulk, I told him, and just sling 'em everywhere. I sow them to the six directions: my desk, the car, the bedside stand, the workbench down in the pole barn, the tackle box, the pockets of my hunting jackets and suitcases, beside the bathroom sink, and inside the little glove box on the tractor. Had I the funds and resources, I would hire a crop duster to scatter them over the farm in general.

A year ago our local rescue service was paged in the wee hours to help an elderly lady who was having cardiac symptoms. I was the first on scene. She was frightened and trembling as I took her vital signs. As I let the air out of the blood-pressure cuff and turned to read the dial, I suddenly realized that no matter how I squinted or tipped my head back, I couldn't see the number. It was the first time I realized my eyes could be a liability for someone else. After the woman was safely in the hands of paramedics and I returned home, the first thing I did was place two pair of reading glasses in my rescue kit. I have given my brother (we took our EMT training together twenty-five years ago) the same advice.

Mostly, though, I tell him about the good stuff. Like how the first time you peer over those lenses at some younger person, you feel suddenly wiser and summarily excused from all subsequent fashion trends. Or the joyful bonus of reaching up for your glasses to find not one but two pair on your head. And what an economical miracle it is, after squinting and scowling in a stubborn attempt to read the aspirin bottle, to pop on a pair of cheaters and find yourself glory-be hallelujah cured of your weak-eyed affliction. What a fabulous soul-shiner to rediscover words and letters that don't look as if they've been rolled in lint. Embrace the change, I told my brother, but only after donning your cheaters, so you don't accidentally hug the drill press.

The other day my brother called to happily inform me that a grinding wheel he was using had exploded, with some of the shrapnel lacerating his neck not very far from several life-critical circulation points. Actually, what he said was, “Yah, it got me right in the gozzle.” It turns out this was one of those cases where a quarter-inch or so either way made all the difference between a goofball phone conversation and a memorial service. But John wasn't shook up about it. In fact, we talked about that: about how when the universe decides to flick your ear instead of take your head off, the thing to do is to stop, direct your attention toward the powers that may be, nod your head and say, “So noted,” and then get back to 'er. Or as my brother-in-law Mark would say, “Walk it off.”

“Walk it off” is Mark's answer to pretty much everything. Hit your head on the truck hood? Walk it off. Burn your hand on a piece of welding? Walk it off. Wife ran off with the Schwan's man? Walk it off.

Where I come from there is a whole entertainment element to painful nonfatal mishaps. Once you determine that your buddy is still able to walk and talk after being hit in the head with a monkey wrench, nothing's funnier than seeing your buddy get hit in the head with a monkey wrench. Once while helping our neighbor Jerry unload silage wagons, I stood up directly beneath the silo chute and drove my cranium into the apparatus with a resounding thump. For half a second Jerry's eyes widened with
concern; then as he saw I was still able to stand, he collapsed into giggles. This was a very kind and gentle man, but he just couldn't keep a straight face whenever someone got whacked.

Once he did get his. One of his milk cows became deathly and irretrievably ill and was in such discomfort that he asked my brother to come over with his deer rifle and mercifully dispatch it, which my brother did. Then they had to drag the giant corpse out of the barn. So my brother hooked a cable between the cow and the tractor and started slowly pulling the animal out. Somehow one of the cow's legs got caught on a stanchion and drawn way back. When the leg finally cleared the stanchion, the cow's hoof whipped around and smacked Jerry right in the kneecap. As he writhed and hopped around on one leg, my brother said, “You alright?” Jerry kept writhing and my brother patted his rifle. “ 'Cause I got one more shell …”

We all know of friends and family who have been subject to injuries that are not funny at all and in fact have been tragic. So I think the deal here is, whenever we can get away with laughing at the pain, we do. But we also try to incorporate a lesson from the pain, if our thick heads will allow it. When my brother called to tell me about the grinder explosion, he was sitting in his pickup in the Farm & Fleet parking lot. Said he was about to go in and purchase one of those—as he called it—“full-frontal” face masks. “Always thought they were kinda silly,” he said, “but this has been a behavior-altering experience.”

I woke up early this morning and moved the chickens to fresh grass, then drove to town and found myself caught in a traffic jam, which is to say there were three cars between me and the stop sign. This put me in a reflective mood, which was handy, because the vehicle ahead of me was fitted with a plastic license plate holder declaring, THERE ARE NO LIMITS.

I immediately started tallying up all evidence to the contrary.

First, foremost, and most problematic, there is a limit to my ability to believe there are no limits. This arises out of certain morose Scandinavian tendencies, festering curmudgeonry, frank peevishness, and a disappointing attempt at the high hurdles in 1982. Also, I was short on sleep and only twelve hours previous had been reviewing our auto insurance, both factors inimical to accepting the concept of there being no limits, even if it says so right there on the back of your RAV4 in all capital letters.

The last thing I want to do first thing in the morning is impugn the makers of motivational license plate holders, but: there are limits. There are limits to how I'm going to get anywhere stuck behind you at this stop sign. There are limits to my ability to do quadratic equations or choose correctly between
who
and
whom.
There are limits to how much ranch dressing you can get out of the bottle even after you leave it propped upside down for a week.

Getting more personally specific, my ability to grow hair on the topmost portion of my head is irrefutably limited, as is my
ability to start a chainsaw on the first try without flooding it, to untangle fishing line without yanking on it, or to perform a grand jeté without a scissors lift and better health insurance. There is a scar above my left eyebrow that says my ability to levitate above concrete is fundamentally limited. Just up the road from here sits a banker with a calculator that proves my credit line is unequivocally limited.

My ability to impress my wife is limited, although within reasonable bounds, and she does give me do-overs.

There are limits to how much coffee you can drink before your eyelids quiver like hummingbird wings. There are limits to the number of cheese curds you can eat during a Packers game, although you'd be surprised. My patience is limited, especially with myself, especially when I do the same dumb things, over and over, again and again. In fact, in that context I could do with way more limits.

And under the category of modern heartbreak, there are limits to unlimited internet.

Just to prove I am open minded, I will entertain the idea that there are no limits to how long you can be put on hold while figuring out the limits to your unlimited internet, how far you can go without directions, or how deeply you can love a child.

The person who screwed the license plate holder to that car would say I've clearly and obstinately missed the point, and fair enough. What you have here is a person offering encouragement. Or, even better, exhortation. On any given Thursday morning we could all use a little exhortation. And maybe there was more to the message: THERE ARE NO LIMITS was printed across the top half of the plate holder, but the bottom half had snapped off, meaning I couldn't read the rest.

I found this limiting.

Back home on the farm someone else is doing the chicken chores, because I've been on the road, and somewhere along the line on some ribbon of concrete a green mile marker flipped by and I thought, well, there's a metaphor on a stick, and I began to wonder just how many of those I've flashed past, and then it struck me that the more germane question would be how many
more
I'll flash past. This line of thinking caused me to hold the wheel a tad tighter, but it was a good sunny day and I had Townes Van Zandt on the CD player, so I couldn't maintain that level of grim focus, although in the moment it did occur to me that Townes was one of the too, too many we sadly file under Gone Too Soon, and I drove with two hands a few miles more.

When it comes to symbolic rumination, the road with a capital “R” is one of your top five metaphor generators, and it's easy, even when you are sliding along at just under seventy miles per hour with heated seats or chilled air, to construe that you are an explorer on the journey of a lifetime, because you are. Never mind that the journey does not cease just because you're at a stoplight. Metaphors are no fun if you stretch them too thin. No, it's more fun to think of ourselves on the move because that creates the impression that we are getting somewhere.