RUDIMENTS 1122.

RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,122

(clearing roads and cleaning ramps)

Without all these normal failings

hype and commerce and overblown

balderdash -  when you come right

down to it  -  I don't think America

would have turned out the sort of

miserable nation it is now. There's

a sweeping disease, and I don't mean

this Covid crap, that over time has

swept through and ruined everything.

If you had, ever, an uncle in the

advertising business, an aunt in

finance or retail selling and service,

a family member as a scientist who

worked on, not pure science, but

developing product, your lineage too

is suspect. And I want reparations

for a ruined land and life and place,

for you have done this to.

-

Just after the Civil War most things

began turning over. For those, of

course, who were here then. For the

others, of my ilk, whose waves of

people came later on,in all those

arrivals of packed ships and boats

and steerage, this raw land was just

as much their destruction too, but as

a different breeding ground of misery.

The high-mindedness was gone and

instead was presented as ragamuffin

misery, hovels, tenement rows and

ethnic enclaves. The outer edges of

settlement still had not stretched or

organized that far afield; there was still

a frontier limit of sorts from the Ohio

and Alleghenies, on out. Uncharted

lands for settlement still lay to the

north and west and southwest, paths

and map roads, riverways and mountain

passes. Lots of things still held promise.

A man had a meaning, and a man packed

a punch, with a hearty appetite for 'Real.'

When men weren't slaughtering and

killing each other there was sometimes

room for things to get done. The form

of towns and villages had not yet been

set into place as commerce hubs of hype

and bureaucracy and misparlance, as

we now know them.

-

When I lived in Columbia Crossroads,

as a for instance, reflecting the 1970's,

it was a far-off enough hinterlands that

the sort of set-up I mentioned was, yes,

in place, but, compared to now, few

and little cared. The few men who

worked for the town itself carried

shovels and had an old truck. o

one would even think of freeloading

off a local tax dollar for the impending

comfort and expansion of living as

if they'd actually done something

worthwhile with their work time. A

rutted road, a burned-out home or

barn, a fallen tree or most anything

of those natures got taken care of  -

precisely, efficiently, and quietly, w

with none of the endless paperwork,

review,  permit processes and endless,

quarrelsome and didactic push/pull

of any of today's entrenched town

bureaucracies. You certainly saw

none of that little clipboard-men

brigade of people checking thing

off and inspecting every pipe and

draw-down ditch. A person could

get a shovel to the side of the head,

back then, for such intrusion. It was

a fine and different world. (Using the

actual definition of fine; not as money

penalty). It was about quality, but when

'Quality' had a different nature; now

people gleefully live in a quagmire,

and call it home.

-

I mostly stumbled into nothing out there,

learning quickly as I went along. If one

thinks of life as a dream, my entering

Pennsylvania consisted of the part where

the nightmare aspect of what's presented

gets slowly settled and turns back into

the dream that you can wake from, rested

and more without fear than if it was a

simple nightmare break-out. I had an

ante-room, so to speak, where things

could clarify while I figured or 

perceived a next step.

-

What did I enjoy about that? Lots of 

things, and notable stuff too. First off

I'd never really had a relationship with

the physical world before  - hammers 

and nails, shingles, cutting, oils, lubricants,

measuring and fitting. The same went, 

of course, with farms and farming and

livestock  -  all those scheduled and

habitual things that such husbandry

calls for. The times of day were all 

different, how and when people ate, 

and the importance of it; personal energy,

a more intrepid and strenuous view of

life itself. Animal kingdom? Yes, but

no; more like just 'real' humankind.

All of that took getting used to, and

then, just as much, was the learning

curve of subsistence  -  money, outlays,

paying bills, buying things to store up,

fighting real Winter  -  in fact sometimes

just figuring how to be moving about,

clearing roads and cleaning ramps.

-

I always found it simper to be civil, 

even to an uncivil man. There were

any number of those, and I just stayed

back, to watch what others did and how.

The local situation was pretty separated;

there were the poor, the really poor, those

who had working farms, those who had

working farms and some community

involvement, and  -  at the top  -  those

whose family, life, and privilege gave

them the run of the place; local community

leaders, the ones with graveyards and

schools bearing their family names, from

years back. At the bottom, I guess, even

below the far-country renters, were the

trailer folk  -  not trailer parks, I mean

the isolated, weirdly set, distant dirt-road,

trailers, out along streams and rivulets,

marshes and strange fields. Assistance

got to them by snowmobile or whatever

other conveyance worked  -  for snows

and blizzards and rains and the rest. As

a school-bus driver roundabout those

parts for some time, I got to know. Kids

went to school, sometimes and maybe.

Nothing got enforced; the rules were 

spared the rulings and edicts held no 

sway.

-

To compare any of this to the way the

rest of the normal, urbanized, world was

 going  -  with its large stores and bubbling

desires and wants, manufactured promises

and images of faux-grandeur, was to be

comparing the local Ben Franklin store

to some megalith horror like Macy's or

Penny's or Sears and Roebuck. Funny

thing is, they're mostly all gone now too.