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copper like taffy
Sunday, August 7 2005
setting: Hogwaller Neighborhood, Charlottesville, Virginia
This morning I woke up at Jessica's house for the second morning in a row. She made me some coffee and we sat out on the stoop in the back beneath a crazy tangle of wild grapes growing up along the frontier with Jessika's yard. The mosquitos there were ruthless, but they were only attacking me. Jessica told me various stories about things like life in Nevada, an experience visiting the family of her psychedelic-taking Jehovas Witness boyfriend, and her "shopping problem," which has rendered her once-mighty credit cards useless. Being a graduate of UVA's law school, credit card companies took an informed gamble on her prospects and lost; currently she has got some sort of hum-drum non-lawyer job at a Charlottesville publishing house. I'm not really clear on what she does, but I do know she calls in sick a lot, sometimes just because she feels the need to clean her house, which is always immaculate and well-stocked with the tasteful fruits of her shopping problem.
Today I'd be driving to Staunton to visit my parents, but before I left I visited Jessika to help her set up her newly-purchased refurbished IBM Thinkpad. I gave her a wireless card so she can benefit from Charlottesville's many open access points, but since she also has DSL I installed a wireless router so she can give as well as she gets. I actually detected an open wireless network across Midland Street (surprising given the backwards nature of the neighborhood), but it was too weak for Jessika to use with the cheapo wireless card I'd given her.
Then, after a forty minute drive, I was back at my childhood household. Just like that. The big change there is that my brother's room has been completely rebuilt.
[REDACTED]
It now features hardwood floors, a built-in closet, new double-paned windows, and a fresh coat of paint.
Still, there were plenty of distressing reminders of what time does to things. When you're young, you haven't seen enough time pass to really know what sort of weapon time can be. But now I'm old enough to have forgotten things I learned as an adult. And walking around my childhood home, I can see the effects of the years on every day objects that you'd never suspect would be susceptible to the ravages of thirty years. Take, for example, simple copper electrical wire, the kind strung between poles to allow 120 volts to reach an outbuilding. Copper is a ductile metal, meaning it can stretch endlessly under the effects of some force. In the case of the wires going to the barn, the force is gravity, and over the years it has pulled those wires like taffy. They used to be seven or eight feet above the ground but now they're less than five feet above the ground and you have to stoop dramatically to get past them.
Erosion can follow a similar subtle path. I'm not talking about the overnight gulley-washer kind. I mean the kind where a quarter inch of soil is lost every year, an erosion so slow that the vegetation remains in place, seeming undisturbed. The only way you know that the erosion is occurring is that buried manmade objects gradually reveal themselves, corner by side by wall. Now, for example, the household septic tank is exposed along one of its sides to a depth of several inches, though once it was buried beneath a couple feet of rocky soil. That's what time can do. It's both awe-inspiring and alarming at the same time.
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The only positive triumph of time that I saw was accomplished by the Chinquapin Oak near the gate between the "goat pasture" and "the restoration field." At one time a gate made of iron pipes hung from this oak, but it gradually had to be abandoned because the oak was slowly engulfing the hinges. For years the remnants of that gate hung on that oak, being swallowed by the trunk's ever-increasing girth. Now finally the process is complete, or nearly so. There's a hole in the tree at the top of the old pipe gate where you can look in and still see a little bit of pipe, not yet fully cut off from the light of day. I've been looking forward to the final absorption of that gate for twenty years.
Time hasn't been kind to the household cat known as The Kitten. She's a scruffy shadow of herself, spending her days out in the yard to avoid the possibility of fleas, though there don't seem to be any left in the house. She recognized me immediately and resumed our mutual friendship, one that dates back to the early 90s. But then she went to scratch herself and was locked for twenty seconds or so in what seemed like an epileptic seizure. Still, as old ages go, The Kitten doesn't have it as bad as some. My mother had cooked up a bunch of shrimp for dinner and The Kitten was given as many as she wanted.
Most of these things I've described, with the exception of the refurbishing of my brother's room, have been cumulative and gradual, with my infrequent visits acting like stop action photography of an extremely slow process. But there have been a few revolutions along the way, things that popped up like mushrooms: my mother's horse barn, the beaver dam, and Jesus only knows how many paintings and prints my mother has created in her abundant free time.
I had to go down and look at the beaver dam again to see what further effects the beavers have had on floodplain ecology. They'd felled more trees, some as many as forty years old (I counted the rings). Their preference for White and Green Ash are having a strong Darwinian effect on the floodplain forest, with Walnut being the primary beneficiary. The height of the dam has been increased somewhat over what it had been when I saw it in September. Now about a third of the current of Folly Mills Creek jumps the bank and flows down a sidestream along the other edge of the floodplain. Where this sidestream rejoins Folly Mills Creek there is now a waterfall, a miniature Niagra, that has already chewed its way back through the marl and sediments some six feet upstream.
(You can see an ærial photo of this area here.)
My brother Don today. He's 40 years old.
Don took this picture of me and my mother in the living room of my childhood home.
The beaver pond on Folly Mills, look NE towards Pileated Peak.
Green Ash trees felled by beavers.
Miniature Niagra where the beaver-created sidestream rejoins Folly Mills Creek.
A morning glory flower.
The Kitten on the front porch of my childhood home.
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