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a grave for the undead
Friday, July 19 2024
location: the couch in the Shaque, rural Augusta County, VA
This morning after I awoke, I started drinking that big bottle of cold press coffee and getting the bike rack attached correctly to the back of the Subaru Forester over in front of the Creekside trailer. Once I had the bikes loaded on it nicely, I went back across the road and down to the floodplain to poop in the same manner as I described yesterday. Then I wandered around marveling at the changes that have taken place since I last paid much attention. All the white ash trees have been killed off by the emerald ash borer, and a few of their skeletons remain. In their absence, black walnuts have proliferated, forming something of a near-monoculture in the lowlands. There is still a large healthy sycamore in one corner of the floodplain, and it has also spread its progeny, most of which seemed to have started growing in the protection of a metal riding ring that is now no longer there. Now that there are no domestic animals grazing any of this land, the plants are coming in thick, making it impossible to get all that close to the swamp or walk past it. (When there were horses grazing it, they kept open a series of trails.) As I looked at the landscape, with my knowledge of all the changes that have come and gone (horses, beavers, ash borers, ice storms, floods, even droves of escaped pigs), I thought about the difference between how the floodplain lived inside my brain and how it came to be in reality. It had its own present it had to find from its past, something that would've been impossible to predict. But here it was in the present, insisting on doing things as it now found them. Even the creek had changed, curving more in some places and less in others (though it hadn't moved much from the where it was when I'd first seen it back in 1975).
I wanted to salvage any firewood tools I could from behind the abandoned house, so I poked around in the remains of the old woodshed, a plywood building that had completely evaporated, leaving its contents in a small heap. When my father went into decline in the Aughts, he gradually stopped worrying about heating the house with firewood. So the wood stopped being gathered and processed. It might've been delivered for a time after that, but eventually even using delivered firewood became too much of a chore. The topmost strata in the pile of wood that had once been contained in a shed was a package of firewood wrapped in heat-shrunken clear plastic, the kind you buy for $5 at a gas station. My father would've sneered at that as late as his 70s, but the fight was out of him when that was purchased (or donated). I wanted to find the old splitting maul, and evenually I did, starting with its handle. It was a ghostly remnant, completely rotten and wanting to crumble in my hand when I reach down to grab it. But I followed it to its business end and found the steel splitting head that had once been on that handle, and it was still just about as good as the day it was forged. I grabbed it with the idea of perhaps making it into a serviceable maul.
Back at Creekside, I told Don to let me see his drone again. I tried again to pair his phone to his drone, but his phone couldn't see an SSID it was serving. But my phone was, and I was able to connect my phone to it and take it for a brief flight where it showed us live video from its camera, a demonstration that, with the right phone, Don could take his drone for point-of-view (POV) flights. But something made that impossible on his particular phone, and I suspected it had something to do with the malware he had, in his overly-literal naïveté, allowed unscrupulous advertisers to install on it.
By this point in the visit, I felt like I'd done everything I'd come down to Virginia to do. I'd helped Don with his drone, said goodbye to our dying mother, and salvaged some nice bicycles that had been in storage for thirty five years. So I told Don I'd heading back today, something that didn't seem to surprise him much. I went back to the Shaque to get my laptop and other things and while I was there, Don showed up saying that our mother's power-of-attorney Joy Tarder wanted to talk to me. So I took the phone. Joy's most pressing issue was, somewhat surprisingly, about what to do with Hoagie's body once she was dead. Don, who has no sense of the relative magnitude of money, had been complaining earlier this year about the expense of a cremation, which is about $1000 (that's what Joy had told him). But then later he'd told me that it would somehow be possible to bury her body on the property for an expense of only $400. This was the idea Joy was floating. She said that all we needed was a hole four feet in depth and an approved shroud. But then she said we should start digging the hole now, while Hoagie was still alive. What? That seemed a little premature. But then Joy explained how quickly everything had to happen once Hoagie died, since she wasn't going to be embalmed. Her corpse might be refrigerated, but once it warmed back up, the clock was ticking fast. So we should find a hole and start digging now. I'm a deeply practical person, and will choose practicality over propriety every time, so I asked where the hole might be. She explained that it had to be out of the "easement" (the 27 acres protected by an agreement with the Nature Conservancy) but that a good place might be in the field behind the honey house, since that was apparently outside the easement in the small amount of land where someday a new house will stand on the ground currently occupied by the now-abandoned house where I grew up. She also said the land across the road ("Pileated Peak") would be protected, though perhaps not in the way me or my late father would've preferred. She said it might be "logged" to get rid of dead trees but that it wouldn't be "clear cut." (There's a huge swath of horrible options between removing dead trees and clearcutting, but I decided not to think too much about it.) Joy also said she needed my full name, birthdate, and social security number so that I could get my share of the inheritance, which was Hoagie's individual retirement accounts, though, she said, one of those had to be liquidated to fund Hoagie's stay at The Retreat. (I'd assumed I'd been cut out of the will, so this was a pleasant surprise.) I told Joy that I'd find a place to dig the hole and get Don started on digging it. A hole four feet deep, five and a half feet long and two feet wide takes awhile to dig, especially in rocky clay such as is found behind the honey house. But Don has nothing else he needs to be doing. I started the digging by removing clumps of sod in a five foot line and then let Don take over while I went off to the building behind Creekside that had once housed Bob's Autobody Repair. I know from the experience of burying beloved dogs and cats that digging a grave is a good physical way to process grief and help with closure.
Hoagie had gotten interested in welding around the time my father had died, and, with my council, she'd gone and bought a bunch of equipment and put it in the old body shop. But then she'd left it unused as her dementia gradually devoured what was left of her ambition. I'd already taken the Hobart plasma cutter, but now Joy said I could take all the rest, which included a bright yellow DeWalt grinding chop saw and a fire-engine red Lincoln Electric 240 volt stick welder. That welder weighed nearly 100 pounds, and it had to be dragged through the overgrown trackless brush around the old body shop, up and over a bridge across the creek, then through the weeds (some of which included poison ivy) to the car. I did it in stages and, once Don was weary of digging and returned from the hole he was digging, I had him help me get the welder into the Forester. I also grabbed an extension ladder and a six foot step ladder from the grounds around my old childhood home, since I had a roof rack that would allow me to transport them back to New York. Then it was time to start driving back home to the Hudson Valley. I didn't get very far, though, before remembering that I'd left the USB-C charger for my laptop back in the Shaque. So I turned around and retrieved it. While briefly back at the house, I used crushed jewelweed to go over possible spots of my legs and feet where I might've been exposed to poison ivy (which is everywhere both at Creekside, around the Shaque, and encroaching on the abandoned remains of my childhood home. I also found a few more things in the abandoned house worth taking, including some hardware dating to my mother's interest in leather working (that would've been in the late 1970s).
Not far up I-81, someone got in front of me to signal something was wrong with my strapped-down load. I found that the ladders had shifted and were now pointing somewhat sideways, cantilevered out over the highway. I tied them down with more ropes and decided I couldn't trust a metal hook staying hooked over a piece of rope. I also tightened the staps holding the bike rack to the back, though all that stuff seemed to be doing okay.
I cracked open my first road beer of the drive somewhere up I-81 and would go on to drink three in all. But I spaced them so far apart that they didn't affect my driving. At around milepost 40 inside Pennsylvania, I went to a Sheetz station to refill my gas tank (though it didn't yet need it) and initiate navigation in case there was a better way to go than through Scranton. But no, that was the way Google suggested I drive back home. (Interestingly, a Guided by Voices song came on the Sheetz outdoor audio system as I was refueling, and it wasn't even one of their most well-known songs.)
Once I got back out on I-81, I got stuck in traffic for a few miles beginning at milepost 47 or so, driving slowly enough to get a good photograph of a billboard commissioned by PETA to convince people to stop consuming dairy.
I made it back home a little before 9:00pm and immediately removed all the incriminating stuff attached to the outside of the car, since I didn't want Gretchen knowing I'd just brought home some zombie bicycles and a couple ladders. (She was out at a music show at the time with a couple friends who would be spending the night.) I'm not sure where I will put the bicycles, but one possible place is beneath Gretchen's screened-in porch, since that offers similar conditions to the place where they'd spent more than three decades. As for the ladders, I could put the long one in the pile of existing long ladders.
When Gretchen came home, she and I stayed up kind of late chatting with them in the living room. They were Griffin and his wife Rebecca (or girlfriend; they've been together but living apart for decades in Manhattan). Griffin is a transgender writer and psychotherapist who has written several books and famously appeared in a segment of This American Life where he detailed what it was like to transition from butch dykedom to manhood with the help of testosterone injections.
Tonight as I lay in bed, I could hear the katydids doing their raspy late-summer chant. It had a characteristic amateurish quality I've heard before, the sound of katydids chanting for the first time without quite knowing how to do it.
Creekside viewed from the west. The mailbox still reads "Shifflet," the family that lived there between when Bobby Shipe died in 2002 and my parents bought Creekside in 2007. You can see the zombie bikes, still red with clay dust, on the back of my Forester. Note the architectural malpractice in the site design of the doublewide trailer, with no windows at all on the narrow south-facing end.
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The floodplain south of my childhood home, looking south. You can see the large sycamore that produced many offspring nearby. There are also the visible relic skeletons of several white ashes killed by the emerald ash borer.
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A vulture above a walnut bough, viewed from the north end of Folly Mills Fen.
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Poison ivy growing on a tree just north of Folly Mills Fen.
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Swamp milkweed on the north end of Folly Mills Fen.
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Folly Mills Fen, viewed from the north.
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Don digging our mothers' grave in the "goat pasture" west of the honey house.
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It's hard work, digging even a four foot grave.
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A billboard designed by PETA to get you to stop consuming dairy near milepost 48 northbound on I-81 in southern Pennsylvania.
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I-81 passing through a massive roadcut exposing an anticline coincident with a mountain ridge. (Possibly near McAdoo, PA.)
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