7:52 a.m. - 2023-04-17
little cabin
Too depressed to sleep in my own room last night, so I drove across Route 16 to the other ranch, to stay in the “little cabin”. A house I built 28 years ago. There was no infrastructure on the property back then save for a lone light-bulb hanging from an oak tree by the spring. This was where I'd park my temporary home, a 1976 Buick Electra Limited. One of the last land-yachts Detroit produced before the gas crisis would open our eyes to the reality of finite-fuel dependence. It boasted gold velour upholstery and six (!) ashtrays, each w/its own cigarette lighter. I cooked my meals on a propane camp stove, and I'd watch the perch and minnows clean my tin chow plate in the clear water every evening after yet-another can of beans or stew.
The work was strenuous, and I slept hard in the back of the Buick every night. But this still left me hours of of silent twilight and starry evenings to myself; hours spent “alone” in a now-lost sense of the word. There was a pay-phone at the gas station 3 ½ miles away if I needed to call my mom or my college girlfriend, and I would go into town twice a week to buy supplies (and to indulge my two luxuries--a diner breakfast and an indoor bowel movement). My other free moments were spent lost in thought, I suppose. Learning guitar, writing letters; imagining a much different future...one where I wasn't living half-a-mile away from where I was camped, with nothing more to show for the years than a graying beard and a handful of stories. (I do have indoor plumbing now so, you know...baby steps.)
I got the sheathing up on the cabin as winter set in, and moved into the loft/attic bedroom. Insulating the ceiling, boarding up the rough opening that would eventually frame a window, and hanging a door. Power had been run out to the place and I had a space heater. I also had an old army-issue cot to keep my sleeping bag off the floor and a puppy. The latter had been found covered in fleas and burrs in a church parking lot and “gifted” to me by family friends who felt I was living entirely too alone. So training him became part of my evening routine. Six months later, with the cabin complete, I would drop him (sans a leg he lost in a heartbreaking job-site accident) off at my parents house en route to New York City.
I was still depressed when I got to the little cabin last night. For this was also where, years after its completion, I would stay with Pidge when we came out from LA to visit. And where, five years ago, a woman I'd met in Mexico would stay as well. She was a screenwriter, quick-witted and like-minded and despite my best efforts to fuck things up, I could have made it work w/her. But politics and pandemics and circumstance intervened, and that long-shot chance involved me moving to Portugal, a decision I lacked both the funds and self-confidence to make.
I owed last night's blue mood to neither of those fondly remembered visits though, rather to one that will never happen.
Not that it would've happened in this cabin anyway; this would-be guest wouldn't have been able to sleep under the same roof as the wall of trophy-mounts surrounding the fireplace: Aoudad, Axis, Black Buck, Caribou...and I'm only three letters into the alphabet. Handsome beasts whose sole crime was being majestic on the same planet as a fragile gang of apes who'd discovered gunpowder. I too sense the sadness in those glass eyes and dusty antlers, and have never hunted for sport...
Anyway, I sat for hours on the porch, staring out into the dark. A few days prior, in my tiny room across the highway, I'd lain down for a nap when my bookcase collapsed, violently, and for no apparent reason. This, it turns out, was foreshadowing--for my recent, delusional, happiness was about to collapse just as abruptly.
It's still there, the mounded wreckage of that bookshelf; a monument to Ikea entropy and my taste in heavy literature. Across the room is another pile, some random shit stacked in an aborted attempt at spring cleaning. Begun in anticipation of a guest, perhaps. Interspersed between them are the envelopes and boxes...each addressed in the same wonderful lady-script and covered in hearts. So many, many hearts. Should I line them up by postage date and see if those sharpie-hearts changed somehow, months ago, when her own heart did? To prove what? (hypothesis redacted) This was the dark hallway down which my mind was headed when nature interrupted w/the fireworks.
The heat-lightning had been flickering on the horizon for hours, but now the sound of thunder promised something more... I wish you could have been there, dear reader. I'd have fetched you a quilt as the front moved in and the temperature dropped, and we could have sat on that bench together and watched an April norther unleashed on the Hill Country. The sky was frenetic, kinetic, and glorious; with jagged arcs of violet and blue snaking between clouds, set against a strobing backdrop that silhouetted the hills in an unpredictable slideshow of relief. The wind, already stiff, found another gear and began to howl through the valley in earnest. This proved to be more than one deck chair could bear, and he toppled off the porch in surrender. A big limb snapped like a gunshot somewhere up on the ridge as the first fat raindrops hit the thirsty dirt.
I made my way up the too-steep stairs to the loft/attic bedroom. To lay awake with my memories, next to the ghost of a three-legged dog. Listening as the storm hammered the tin roof inches above me. “Now it rains” I thought bitterly, “now it rains”.
