AS THE SNOW DEEPENS

night snow

Snow is falling steadily in small flakes, has been for several hours. I'd venture four inches by now. Not going outside to measure it. Going by how it looks out the window, how high the snow is piled on top of the bird feeders. I feel for my donkey friends and the calf. The snow is coming out of the east, or anyway the wind carrying it is coming out of the east, flowing into the donkey shelter. It looks like the temperature is somewhere between fifteen and twenty. I'd like to be able to give my friends a place out of the cold, the wind and the snow, but it can't be done. They have to take it like a beast. Jenny has been in moods lately, makes me wonder what she'll be like in the morning going out into the snow. I'll give them hay close to the fence where they are not so exposed. It's a cove of three trees along there and the wind current that runs through the meadow doesn't include this corner of the meadow. The three of them are doing whatever they are doing. They might be taking turns through the night to be the one with the back to the cold. Yesterday I saw the calf licking Jack behind an ear and then licked Jack's neck. Jack stood and let the calf do its licking. I saw the calf and Jenny eating from the same small mound of hay, their noses a few inches apart. I've seen the calf munching like that with Jack, too. They have become friends to the calf. Jenny has brought the calf to life. Now that it is lively she has to teach it to stay out of her space. The calf is catching on. It stays back at carrot time. Jenny won't let it approach me for a carrot, so I toss a piece to the calf. When the calf became conscious, it had to start learning the rules. It is in learning process now. I see every day its uncertainty about the rules in a given situation. When it's caught on to the donkey rules, it will be at home and comfortable. I'm catching on that the calf has learned to kick backwards from the donkeys and I stay away from the calf's backside.

 

shadow on snow

 

The birds will be anxious for seeds in the morning. The squirrels and chipmunks will hole up and maybe snack from a midden somewhere close to where they nest. If the snow continues all night, we will have appreciable accumulation by morning. Snowed in. One thing I love about being snowed in is my mind relaxes its ongoing mantra, I GOTTA. I don't gotta nothin. If it can't be done inside the house or within easy walking of the house, it's not getting done. It is a fine powdery snow. I've been told it was really a slick snow. Justin was driving on Glade Valley Road when it was maybe a quarter inch on the road. He said when he was at a place where he had some room, he stomped it to see what would happen, a big pickup. It spun in a 360 and he kept on down the road to home. He loves driving in ice and snow. For him, that spin was the hillbilly equivalent of doing a 360 in the air on a snowboard. On a snowboard would be cool, but he thinks it's a whole lot cooler in a truck. He likes to go out after a good snow before the back roads have been cleared and nobody is out driving. He practices high speed driving at slow speeds in the snow, drifting slowly around a tight curve. It's driving practice for him. He is in full control when he is spinning in the road. He is in full control at all times behind the wheel. I feel safe when he is driving, safer than when I'm driving. Going by what he said about the snow being especially slick, I see these tiny flakes ice crystals showering down. The state's present remote-control republican government has cut funding for everything having to do with the people, and giving tax breaks to big corporations. Snow plows have not been by and won't be for a few days. Budget for the state road crews has been slashed to give the major corporations what they want, which trickles down into the politician's bank account.

 

the new round bale

 

A freak out is coursing through facebook dreading the snow. Mark the calendar, nIne months from today, a baby boom will occur in the South. Mid November. Thousands of kids with the same birthdays. The lumps on the ground out the windows are levelling out. It's like a sandstorm passed through and left sand everywhere, white sand. In the morning it will be big white desert everywhere with trees and fence posts sticking up. I can't help but think the fracking that is fracturing the crust of the North American continent is making desert. Texas will be the first place to go to desert as it's so close anyway. China advanced desert into the grasslands of Inner Mongolia by destroying the grasslands, attempting mass agriculture. Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas will turn to desert next . The Appalachian chain will no longer be the water source it once was. Springs have been drying up steadily over a period of several years. Fracking is fracturing all the Appalachian chain. If you'll look at maps, you'll see rivers start in the mountains all over the world. America's rivers are being dried up at their source. Another century and the Mississippi river basin could be an arroyo. The damage has already been done and there is no reversing it. White man came through, superior to all other races in his own mind, and turned a continent that was a cornucopia of plenty into desert in just a few hundred years. White man is not a good steward. American individualism degenerated in a hurry to self-serving narcissism. Altruism isn't even an alternative. It went poof, like irony.  

 

more snow

 

The snow outside is piling up. It is almost level with just a few humps that a few more inches will level. I'm recalling a year with sixteen inches of snow, electrical and telephone lines out. Neighbor Tom Pruitt walked down the road with a cane in snow up to his knees. He came to the door and asked me to walk up to the barn and put some hay out for the cows. In the meadow I found a newborn calf, born on the snow. I knew I had to do something, but did not know what to do. I decided to pick the calf up off the snow and carry it to the barn, put it down on some hay and let mama take care of it in the barn. Mama would not follow me. I carried the calf to the barn. I carried it back to mama to give her a sniff of it and asked her to follow. She didn't. I put the calf down in the barn, took hay out for the cows and made a nest of hay on the place where the calf was born, carried it back from the barn to the hay nest. The calf was light picking it up at first, but carrying it back and forth it grew heavier and heavier until I was glad to be done with it. I did not feel that anything I did was sufficient to the need of the moment. At the same time, I could not find anything else I could do. Couldn't get there with the truck. Roads not even graded yet. The calf made it. That done, I walked up to Tom's to tell him what I'd found and how I took care of it. I wanted him to know right away in case he could tell me something I could do that I had not thought of. Nothing to do. I sat down by his fire and we talked awhile, him telling me something from his experience that the calf born in the snow brought to mind. I went to the door to look outside to see if snow was falling. It had stopped, but wind was blowing snow off the roof suggesting it was snowing. I saw how easily that snow blew and my mind's eye saw big drifts all over the roads as soon as a wind comes along. It's a beautiful snow. It will be easy to walk in, powdery and dry. Maybe it won't be so hateful for the donkeys, a fluffy snow that offers little to no resistance to the feet.    

 

jack and jenny before the snow

 

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GRUMBLINGS IN THE EARTH

        kurt schwitters, 3

In all my time in the mountains, I have had the same bed, a wooden frame with a 3/4 inch plywood surface and an old, like something Social Services would arrest me for sleeping on, cotton mattress, all fluffed up after a day in the sun, it's about 4 inches thick. After being slept on every night and countless days it's about an inch thick, if that, where the imprint of my mortal frame has custom-fitted it for me, personally. Like the way a shoe feels better the longer it's worn. That imprint is my hammock and with the blanket makes my cocoon from which I rise refreshed and ready to face whatever is next. I don't have wings, but my spirit has me upright, the spirit being what the wings symbolize, unless angels really do look like white doves flying.


I knew an old Regular Baptist elder who died of old age 20 years ago; he told me of a time an angel came to him in the living room and he recognized it for a winged angel. Another man told me of a time an angel came to him. These were old mountain people, the origin of American pragmatism. You're not going to fool one of them with an hallucination or a dream. Maybe you could fool one, but it wouldn't be Millard Pruitt getting fooled. Millard's credibility was a hundred percent with me when he told me he saw an angel. Accuse him of lying about it and he'd be up out of his chair before you could say scat. Though that wasn't the reason I believed him. I believed him because I knew him.


Back to the wooden bed. It has no springs, no cushioning. I prefer to sleep on the board itself, which I have done, but the mattress is the same thing as on the board, having no cushion value. The mattress is a mold for my frame that holds me in place comfortably like an old shoe. Some years ago reading a book about Shirdi Sai Baba, I saw that he slept on a plank of wood. It took years, a lot of years before I felt I was ready. From that moment on, it subconsciously became my goal to be able to sleep on a board. Chiropractors recommend a hard bed. I found I like it even better than on a mattress. My mortal frame feels best when I sleep on my bed that is the same as a board, as the mattress I lie on is about as thick as a thin blanket. I like it. It is the only bed I can be comfortable in. I've never liked a big mattress bed. They're more like wrestling rings without ropes than a place for repose. All the sheets and fitted sheets, box springs and all that goes with it, I'd rather use an open sleeping bag for a blanket. Wear bed clothes and it doesn't get dirty so fast. I'm not looking for a spread in Southern Living. The only way SL would look at my home would be an example of a Feng Shui disaster.


This is taking the long way around of getting to being able to feel grindings of tectonic plates way down deep. Most often, and consistently until the last few years, I felt the same kind of grindings. It was so subtle vibrating I'd question if the vibrating might be coming from inside me. I wondered what it was for a very long time, until I felt a fairly strong vibration, by comparison, from an earthquake maybe 300 miles away. Of course, I thought, a shock wave travels through rock way down deep underground perhaps at least as fast as sound travels through air. Maybe it's simultaneous. That one was notably a hair stronger than was the norm. Enough to make me notice it. It's amusing to be lying in bed and suddenly it feels like the Fifties motel room bed that vibrated a few minutes for a quarter, long enough to make you wish it would stop long before it does. It's like when the tree frogs are trilling and I can't tell if it's in my head or outside. That's the feeling. Am I trembling or is it the ground? By now I'm used to it. It was never enough to wake me, only felt it while awake.


Over the last year I've felt odd scrapings like I'd never felt before. They started getting my attention again after noticing the grumblings were becoming unsubtle enough to wake me from a light sleep. Then one came in rapid succession, like a slow Uzi, but more like slamming a fist from one hand into the heel of the hand of the other at a fairly rapid pace, though not all out rapid. It woke me and did that quck-punch grinding long enough that I grew tired of focusing on it and went back to sleep. Another time was a long, powerful grinding that felt so unnatural it flashed: fracking. Oh no. Halliburton, naturally. Dick Cheney, naturally. Enemies of the American people. It is seriously poisoning the water all over the country, doing it fast and doing it bad. By bad, I don't even mean where ethics is concerned, only the nature of their product: seriously poison water on a very large scale, like all the underground water, the source of our water. Soon we'll be like Bermuda, an island without fresh water. They keep the roofs painted white with lime and catch the water in barrels when it rains. If fracking goes on much further, at all further, our nation will be devoid of the next resource to go to war over, water. All the more reason for perpetual war for perpetual peace.


Allowing Halliburton and the others the right to destroy our ground water all over the country is beyond absurd. Yet, the gas corporation lobby insures full scholarships to the right schools for Congressional kids, the privilege of membership in the right country clubs, a nice car with a driver, expensive lunches and dinners for free, for corruption, for rising in society, for being sucked up to as a big dog. I look at the kinds of people who become politicians and they make phys ed majors look brilliant. We trust our very existence to them. How ignorant is that? They call the Indians that lived on the continent savages. They at least honored wisdom and after how many thousand years left the continent as pristine as before the first human set foot on it. They flowed with Grandmother Earth. In canoes they could see the bottom of the river and the fish, which were plentiful all those millenia of ignernt spear chuckers running about half naked and beating on a hollow log with sticks.


Don't laugh yet. We got nothing on them. I repeat. We got nothing on them. You and I are not the ones destroying our planet. We get the blame. We are doing our part for the destruction by allowing the corporate world to have its way. Now is too late to take control away from them, even if we made a commendable effort. But what can we do? The system does not include us. United States of America is out of business when the government does not protect the American people from predatory corporate targeting. Why would it? Our government has been usurped in the Shakespearean way, democracy outlawed while We the People watched it happen on tv every evening and never noticed. One thing we do know. The oil corporations are going to do what they want to do and we're not even the bother of a swarm of gnats to them. Not even the bother of a cell phone dead zone.

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