Nystrom's Pride, Stoker's Ferry

Solving the firewood problem would entail one of two options. The first was to log my own firewood on public land. The second was to have wood delivered. I chose the second on the strength of a casual risk-benefit analysis. Like running a chainsaw, felling trees is never without risk. I might like to log and section my own trees just to see what it's like, but doing so under the pressure of exigency with zero experience did not appeal with its judgmaticness. I called up the only firewood listing in the yellow pages and asked for a quote. $270 for two cords of dry Lodgepole Pine, cut and delivered. I consulted with neighbor Steve. He told me I was getting a deal, so I accepted, with delivery scheduled for Sunday afternoon. I got a call from the wood guy at around 2:30 yesterday. He was about 45 minutes away. Not wanting him to lose his way getting up to the house, I went down to the mailboxes to wait for him. He showed up as scheduled, and I led him up the way.

To call my driveway slick would be to understate the reality by a wide margin. Its iciness is the result of torrential snows while I was gone combined with several daytime thaws over the past two weeks. Blame Darren: If he had shoveled, ice would not be an issue, and I would not be faced with the grim prospect of wipeout every time I set foot on it, sometimes with the danger doubled in the form of an axe, a chainsaw, a hot potato. Irregardful: The wood man was unable to get his truck all the way up my drive. He stalled out halfway up with the load facing the wrong way. A diagnostic poke around convinced him that the problem resided in the fuel pump. Lacking the needed part, the diagnosis did not translate into repair. I ventured that he might be able to get the engine running by letting out the brake and engaging the clutch once it had rolled to speed. He tried it, but the engine would not turn over. Worse, the truck ended up blocking the drive of neighbors Steve and Terry, with no way to move it. I offered the wood man some coffee, but he declined, asking to make a call instead. He called his wife to explain the situation, and said she would find him walking down the West Fork road. The situation had frazzled him, and he took off walking to cool his heels. Far from frazzlement myself, I viewed the 8,000 pounds of wood at the bottom of my drive as an opportunity to get some exercise. I set about it by nuzzling Nystrom's Pride back against the wood truck so that the gate just about touched the other truck's frame. I then scrabbled atop the load and began heaving sections of wood down through the topper window into the bed. The wood clanged dully on the metal, and neighbor Steve came by to see what was happening. He was not terribly concerned about the truck blocking his drive, and reasoned that he would be able to shave a section off a snowbank to clear a passage. He was soon helping me relay the wood from truck to truck just the way you see strings of workers propagating sandbags or rocks or what have you down the work detail in propaganda pieces plugging industrial harmony. I was able to get through three of four loads by dusk, when I repaired to the Log Bird to make an elk stir fry.

I'd like return, for a spell, to the theme I opened with yesterday: The dialectic of writing and reality, where the writer is constantly either amplifying or eliding his subjective experience of the real. As I noted earlier, while engaged in the act, the writer is attempting to transcend his subjectivity in favor of a linguistic performance that he desires to be universally, or at least widely accessible. Of course, a person can only escape his subjectivity into the rarefied air of the universal for so long. Even at the height of inspiration, his being-in-the-world as animal, as the subject of base drives, will inevitably reassert itself in the form of hunger, libido, or the need to piss.

This is exactly what happened to me yesterday while working on this blog. No, the reassertion of my physical drives did not take the form of peeing on the carpet and then wolfing down a steak while masturbating. Instead, after several hours of confinement I was overcome by the need to use my body, to move around. In what I cannot help thinking of as an elegantly germane proof of the foregoing, I went outside to finish unloading the wood from the delivery truck. It took me about two hours and it wore me out. Which was the point. Nietzsche goes on at some length about the utility of "mechanical activity" in the priests' struggle to get "work-slaves and prisoners" (most of us) to accept slave morality. I like to think that I've managed, at least in cases like this (where debt and taxation and piecework are not involved) to liberate mechanical activity from its oppressive context, applying it instead as a salve to a mind frayed by long effort.

After the final load [which I left in the bed of Nystrom's Pride to have more weight over the rear axle for a difficult journey I am thinking of taking, on which more soon] I went back inside to finish the blog post. I opened a beer as I sat down, and was promptly furnished with more proof of the antagonism that prevails between writing and reality: A tiny dribble of beer splashed onto my keyboard, instantly causing a short circuit. The screen went blank, and I was unable to power the computer back up. Half of what I had written was lost. Of course, this was more than a simple antagonism between reality and writing. The beer, after all, while nominally representing reality in this struggle, is also the means of distorting and filtering reality par excellence. But this is too rich. Suffice it to say that I managed to get the thing running again this morning.