A Woodchuck's Daydream

So far as I know it there’s a place where I cut my toenails a hundred times or more over the years. Where I tossed thirty or forty teabags over the fence each week until I saw them all sittin’ there and said to myself “hell I probably ought to pick those up before they all sprout and I got a tea plantation on my hands.” But the funny part there is that tea won’t grow in this place. We’d be lucky to get ninety frost-free days in a year up here — and at that, lucky to get more than a month or so of the summer days where you aren’t breathing no-see-ums into your throat every time you breathe. It’s not a tea-growing type of place, suited as it may be to the drinking of the stuff.

Instead it’s a place where the peat moss lays all out like shag carpeting in a 1970’s type of house. Where I sat each morning for some hours doing nothing really, just fiddling with the radio trying to get those pretty Quebecois women drawling the newscast from a foreign country of Frenchmen but instead it’s Ontario’s version of Rush Limbaugh. Where I’m sitting then, that’s where the porch slumps over, over the granite slabs we put there — the ones my cousin and I pitched down underneath one night when the porch was half-caved in and we thought ourselves to be just a bit too respectable for all that in spite of being drunk as fools and howling like monkeys. It was a half-assed job, like all jobs around here.

The milky way hangs over that spot — seems not to matter what time of year, really. It’s always there, pouring sweet cream down onto a scene that glistens strangely like a painting, and I do love it very, very much.

Sometimes at that spot, I receive a few letters from strangers, sent from elsewhere — men I don’t know, or sometimes nice old women. They ask: “Why do you live all the way out there?” And the truth is that my answer isn’t very enlightening. I’m here, I think, because I’m stupid. Stupid and bruised up. I had no business coming to this place, but then again — I’m not sure I had any business going anywhere else either. A stray dog needs a place to lie, and this place was what came up in the newspaper. A cheap place where the neighbors don’t bother calling you in — where no one’s watching. I got tired of being watched, frankly. Tired of people. Tired of all the guile and guff — I wanted a haven and I guess I got it. Once I got it, I learned to be lonesome properly, as a man like me ought to. My wife and daughter helped a lot with that; I wasn’t so lonesome owing to them.

And as far as I know that place stays warm on pinewood that gets burned by the flame I lit once — though I don’t exactly remember when I lit it, because I don’t really leave and it’s never really warm enough to snuff the stove-flame.

If I have boots, they don’t see asphalt hardly ever, except when I go to the village for Mass and to see old Dick to buy beans, bullets, and liquor. Dick knows I buy more than that of course, but so far as he ever tells it around town — that’s all I buy. He doesn’t mention the green tea (a suspect beverage in these parts) nor does he raise the issue of the special-ordered mineral waters and fancy cheeses from France (a homosexual nation, as I hear). If some of the people here found out I was living like that they might think I was a communist. Instead, Dick takes my money and keeps quiet — he knows me to be a man of taste, though whatever taste it is wouldn’t be one that’d suit him. I should have him over sometime, but then again, since the road washed out that there’s a big ask so I doubt he’d do it. Plus he doesn’t like that strange French cheese I’ve got.

Morning comes in that place, too. Though most often I’d say it comes so silently it wouldn’t register but in the eyes of real connoisseurs of the dawn — for it comes wrapped in the heavy woolen packaging of menacing overcast — when it comes I do notice, and I am glad. There are a handful of days there when it comes so bright and clear that I really just weep over it there alone. My wife knows I do that, she doesn’t mind. Knows I’m out of my cotton-picking gourd anyhow and if I asked her, I think she’d say the sunshine is medicinal for a nutcase like me.

We try to grow cabbages there but they die. And when they die the heads curl back like the lips of a sick old drunk, smiling and burning up in the acid of the bog, their heads lolling back such that any decent con-man would be compelled to ask whether anyone’d taken an insurance policy on them before they went belly up. If I answered “no” he’d say “too bad.” My baby thinks it’s funny — she puts those old stinking heads of cabbage up in my shirts, sitting them up in chairs, making them look like sad old men who’d come out here to die. I wonder if I’m one of them.

Then again, I suspect she likes it here, and her smile makes me feel anything but dead. She goes out where we’ve planted highbush blueberries and crans with the coal-black dirt on her face, chuckling at the birds that do come out for a rendezvous out here — they’re of the corvus clan; they come to laugh at the human beings foolish enough to settle in a desolate spot like this. She laughs with them, and I start laughing — the whole muddy little peninsula we’re on starts feeling like a funny farm of some kind. There’s mostly silence but when there’s laughing, we’re all feeling real good.

We’re so far out that strangers do not come around. The law does not come around. When an ambulance driver might have to come out here he says “holy shit” right aloud when he gets here and we all laugh. Nobody comes to visit either except people just as foolish as we are — and so by that metric, we know we’ll like them if they do make it here, and they tend to stay a week or more. And I try to give them land. Hell I have so many old lots in this place that I offer them to visitors like an old woman pushes candy on her grandkids — “here, I’ll sign it over to you right now, we could use a good neighbor!” But so far I haven’t found any takers and if I’m honest I doubt I will. A theoretical prospective neighbor is probably a lot nicer than a real one anyway, if I were to guess.

By the time we arrived in this place, so far as I can remember, we were so shriveled up that we couldn’t go another mile. Something came up into us like saltwater; we came to look like members of a clan who boiled their own cheeks in caustic soda in some kind of somber shamanic rite. Our eyes looked like big, swollen, GMO grapes grown in a part of California where all the fruit gets painted in the same sad sorry factory. I began having panic attacks in those days — certain that I’d gotten “the sugar” or was soon to succumb to the mighty, mighty gout. I was convinced I’d gotten cancerous lesions in my innards; that death was on its way for me. None of it was true of course — I’d just run the track a few too many times. Same track as anyone else walks, I guess; I was just weaker than them and for it, desolation out in this bog was my grand prize.

Yes, it’s that place where I cut my toenails, my legs hanging down like the great big haunches of a sleeping mutt over the rough old hemlock boards I’ve come to call a porch. It’s where I do drink my tea, read my books, mutter to myself, and wander around chinking out the chunks of spruce gum from the tired old midget-trees. I’ve now got over five-hundred pounds of it I’ll someday make into original-style Adirondack chewing gum to sell to the ragtag few who come to visit.

I’ll never do it, of course — I’m far too busy. Some will ask: “Busy with what?” and frankly, I can’t answer. Many a man who came before me in my bloodline would lie about how busy he was but I learned they were liars myself — I figure it’s better to tell the truth. And the truth is that I’m a do-nothing, a bum, a guy too broken and stunted to do much else but sit in the woods like a muskrat, grinning like a fool, surveying the splendorous riches of a man who sided out into the woods like a busted old truck in a bad crash and nary a tow. Instead of calling for help, I only smiled and got drunk — and the crows blessed me with a good bout of cackling. Somehow, my wife thought that was the right thing to do, and my baby wasn’t the wiser anyhow.

Now I haven’t actually been to this place yet. Far as I know it does not exist but in my own mind. But I suspect it’s real, and lately, I’m only focused on going there. I’ll go there and it’ll be a real hoot — and then years will pass like seconds, one after the other real fast, until I keel over in the swamp and die happy, running my race ever upward to (I hope) meet Christ Himself. When I see Him I’ll thank Him for giving me a good swamp to grow old in, and a nice family to enjoy it with.

So anyway, I’ve got to set out on my journey because I’m going there. My baby’s been telling me I ought to just get over to that place. My wife accedes in her quiet way, too. Those two girls aren’t like other girls; they’re not of the disposition that everyone all my life told me all girls are of. They seem to crave the swamp, too — the thicket, the cedar brush, the place so choked with blackflies that nobody’ll go there except us. Like kids building a blanket fort, they push me to buy sheets of tin and rolls of tarpaper, woodstoves, axes, big barrels of syrup, a propane freezer. I hardly have a clue what I’m doing but I’m doing it and smiling as I go. In our minds we’re already building that old place; they’re already both staring at me daily with eyes that seem hungry for veering off from that big strange sorrow we all came up in. They don’t want us to all wake up one day trapped in some kind of a nightmare, and they’re right to worry about that at least a little.

For that reason, the iced-over gravel is now underneath me and I’m traveling at a considerable speed. Big tracts of land await me like carmels for a big fat boy — I’ll take my goodies to some dreary little law office in Watertown and sign over the check for a paltry sum. The clerk’ll laugh because the sum I pay will be so small. She’ll say “hell my husband paid that for an ATV just three weeks ago — you’re buying a house for that!” My wife will give that little smile she gives, a knowing type of smile, and the lawyer will dribble his glassy eyes all over the paperwork like some kind of sun-bleached lizard, coughing as he dryly says “sign here.” When he sees what we paid, his eyebrows will go up so high his head’ll be looking like those dead dry cabbages out back that my baby laughs at. But we’ll remember him — we’ll invite him over, though he’ll never come.