63 Ingredients from the Frontier

I. Part One
II. Part Two
III. Part Three
IV. Part Four
V. Part Five
VI. Part Six
VII. Part Seven

When a place changes your life you need to sing about it. And you ought to. You can’t allow anyone, anything, or any other place to get in your way.

Most of my packing is done. I’ll be leaving headquarters and heading out to the frontier. I’ve had to pack a little earlier than expected because someone else will be moving into my room here first thing tomorrow.

I still need to roll up my air mat, do some grocery shopping, pack the cooler, slice up some cheese, make a couple bags of beans ‘n’ rice, fill the big water container, fill the solar shower, and make detailed records bit-by-bit as the hour of departure draws more near.

Impeachment coverage on public radio. Highway 100 headed out of town, headed to the frontier. Look out Mr. President, look out cedars. Missouri ground white with snow, the sun not strong enough to melt it.

Crows. White boughs of trees, snow held aloft, in place where it landed. Neither gravity nor wind can bring it down. Stark stone bluff, compacted sand naked as a beach. New gas station, school bus deploying a stop sign like a tiny left wing. Morning miércoles.

On the side of the road a dead doe, slender neck, frozen blood. Impeach? Impeach and remove is more like it.

On arrival, the kitchen is mighty moldy. Spreading along the wood panel ceiling is condensation, dampness, a white mold that’s as bad as it’s ever been. Is there any way to keep the air moving in this kitchen when no one is here?

Found five or six wasps in the pump room. They were paper wasps and that other kind I can’t identify. Could they have been overwintering queens? I wasted no time in quashing them. They were docile, even stagnant. Thought they had picked a good, warm place to stay the winter.

Back in the kitchen, a paper wasp in the coffee maker, in that circular plastic basket that holds the grounds and the filter. It was holding on there, with its head just over the edge, like Kilroy. Must have been watching me as I wiped the mold from the ceiling. I went and got new bleach from below. The jug I left here a while back went bad; it was just water; had no smell.

Lone wolf, time alone, no expectations. There are signs of deer in the area, and coyote scat. I’ve heard that deer don’t sleep much. I’ve been finding their bones, first chewed clean of meat, then cracked up for marrow.

I unearth items of interest in this ancient home. What to the eye first appears a random collection of useless bric-a-brac tells a story of life here that once was functional.

On the dusty screened-in back porch, there’s an old can of four-cycle engine oil. It’s a brand I recognize that disappeared a long time ago, a company that must have been bought out. I assume it was for mixing with gasoline, to power a chainsaw. In those types of engines there isn’t any separate compartment for adding oil to the engine. You have to mix the oil in with the gasoline, in a specific ratio. Usually 50:1, where fifty is the amount of gasoline (1 gallon) relative to the amount of oil (2.6 oz).

There’s an old chainsaw file on a lofty shelf back there. It’s rusty, and I don’t know if the size is quite right, but in a pinch it would get the job done. There are a number of sockets to fit a variety of spark plugs. There’s a hefty antique fridge. The ice box compartment down below is full of nothing but old spark plugs! Dozens and dozens of them.

It’s sad to think of them never getting used. Laying inventory away, and never getting to use it. There’s a necklace of spark plug gapping keys. They’re also rusted, kind of like rusted trading cards all hung on a string, still hanging on a nail in the corner, swinging lightly in a strong-enough breeze.

Up in the attic is the surface of a failed planet. Nest after mud nest belonging to generations of mud dauber wasps. Dozens of paper nests, too. The ones that look like honeycombs. It’s cold now so I can stick my head up there and have a look around but it’s got to be buzzing like mad during the summer. A wasp hostel and some of those wasps are hostile. No thanks!

Whoever was assigned to this place before me took sheets of corrugated metal and nailed them to the underside of the roof, presumably to act as something of a second roof, to catch leaks and redirect their flow out to the eaves of the house, to save the rooms below. Maybe the sheets already in place work perfectly well. I guess they do. But the house still leaks bad in several places when it rains. New leaks have a way of springing up. Tomorrow, I’ll go out into some of the sheds and see if there’s any more corrugated lying around, so I can pick up the patching job where the person before me left off.

The makeshift has a happy place here at the frontier. Is there an opening in the machine shed where a frisky calf from the pasture could wander through? Just stick an old chair there. That one with three legs will do. All the junk, the old stuff. A boot, pieces of rope, warped gasoline cans, piles of engine belts, broken pitchforks, a puddle of sickly creosote. Tube of caulk maybe born before me. Carbon dating needed.

Spiders, rodents, snakes. Groundhogs, skunks, armadillos. Gunshots off in the not-too distance. A comrade said to me once, when we were all here, and someone was shooting a little ways off, “Someone’s always shooting something around here.”

Where am I going to wash my clothes? What am I going to do when it gets really hot? What about all the wasps? How am I going to run the tractor? Who will come to see me? How will I bathe? Will I try to get television? Does the phone work? The radio? What about a gun? Hunt? The same old food? Hot plate? Gas hookup? 1-800-Got-Junk? Latrine? Dig out the toilet pipe? Dog? Scary room? Attic? Spiders? Still? Truck? Chemicals? Desk?

Those two bucks, though. Young bucks, if I had to say. Spring loaded. Muscular and taut, hood ornaments come to life. I could feel them running a couple of seconds before I heard the sound of their hooves. I didn’t know what was happening. I was right at the pasture fence but I had my back to them, squatting.

They appeared to be flying as they romped their way from the south end of the pasture. I turned to see them bounding, leaping, a choreography. They were lean, with stiff tails, flexing to the max with each long stride, jumping through the morning light, soft velvet covering their newfound antlers. The two of them running past the old barn and out of my sight, rushing into the coming day.

It’s no joke I quit my old job in the still-coursing wake of a sortie to the frontier. All that sky, las estrellas, la luna. Old wood, gray and gnarled. If that stubborn old barn and shed wood thins out; if it’s reduced by time and nature, it just evaporates and what’s left isn’t something soft and crumbly. It’s never rotten, it just becomes a little less of what was good, and still is.

What I like about the frontier is that I can work here, and work pure. Work hard and without any particular purpose. If there’s a deadline it’s a daily one, the sun going down. Can’t cut rampant cedars in the dark. Or maybe the curtain comes down with the advance of summer, the grass a-growing, getting in my way, littered with ticks. Come the rains. The air thickens, the heat descends like a soggy donut.

It’s a place for a guy who likes to sweep. And I like to sweep. Push broom, hand whisk, corn broom, broken broom. Rain like a broom to clean behind me on the rock, as if I were willing it, calling in an airstrike.

A little bit of lightning to shear off an oak limb. A rain of ice to make heavy the tallest reach of evergreen cedar. And then I come along, pull the starting cord on my saw, bite into the years, their residue, nature’s notebook at my feet, in a pile, the growing season written on my boots in the cold of February.

A second kingfisher appears. The rattling call is unmistakable. Earlier there was just one kingfisher working the creek, mid-March, the trees not yet in leaf. I could see the bird clearly as it flew up and down this stretch of the Tavern, fishing.

For months I believed I heard a kingfisher along the creek but I wasn’t positive. I never got my eyes on the bird. The creek, I thought, couldn’t possibly hold enough food to be worthy of the bird’s attention. The call I was hearing could have been that of a pileated woodpecker. But where the pileated’s call is laugh-like, soft, and tubular—the sound from a muted trumpet—the kingfisher’s call is sharp and ratchety, something caught in a wheel, spinning away.

There are, I now know, small fish in the creek. Shiners, darters, sculpins, shad. They get trapped in shallow pools when the rain goes on hiatus, when the water table falls.

I was listening to the kingfisher work the creek when the same sound came from the opposite direction. From the pasture, above the rock, to the east. Then straight above me, calling out, flapping and gliding, flapping and gliding, with wings that seemed slightly large for its body and a blue-against-white v-neck collar visible from underneath. A second of its kind. Suitor, mate, sister, foe? I ask but I won’t know.

I think of people, people I haven’t seen. Weeks, months, a year. Faces and names blend together, bleed away. Who are we to separate ourselves like this? We can’t protect the future by freezing the present, by wishing it the past.

Oh just wait, just wait they say. What until what? The all clear? Humans have terrible timing.

Seeing a few flies now, warmest day of the year, adding fifty degrees to the temperature this time a week ago. The sun asserts, it asks me back. A woodpecker—what else could it be—has worked its way into an important post in the machine shed. Termites and other grubs. I need to find some castoff pieces of board to tack up there in the way of deterrence.

I’ve hauled one tarp-load of aged cedar limbs to the fire spot down the hill. I think the pile will burn with gusto, with aplomb. But I don’t need the heat anymore. The sun is back and stronger than ever. It’s time to apply some sunscreen to these red, winter-burned cheeks. I’m even going to spray my socks with deet. It could hit sixty-five degrees today.

A thicket of blackberry vines comprises much of the brush lying between the house and the road. Checking on them this morning, I found that the berries were plentiful but not yet ripe. They are hard, small, and green—half of the way through their transition from pretty white flowers to ripe black berries.

The whip-poor-wills stop singing about the time the blackberries ripen. These birds that sometimes keep me up at night aren’t calling for a mate. No, they’re coaxing blackberries to fatten. Asking over and over in the dark until they get what they want.

Food donkey, jumping mule. Calling on a neighbor. Down by New Salem Baptist. Dated campaign flag still flapping blue in the breeze. Dogs in pens, pining and pinging. Outside. Sacks of empty generic dog food. He’s in a thick mustache and camouflage boots when he opens the door, and I’m bracing.

Hell, I can’t sleep. But I’m up reading so it’s alright. I’ve got a couple of warm beers, this notebook, and books full of essays and poems, some that are new to me, some that are familiar like good friends. I’ll fall asleep sometime, and sometime I won’t.

Waiting for the dew to dry. Mold on failed peanut butter bait. A fly with very green eyes. In the treetops, a cuckoo chuckles away.

It’s nice to wash my hands. It’s nice to have running water, even at a trickle, even at a whisper.

Fog of deet, tractor hum. Shut the front door. No, really. It keeps the flies away.

I cleaned up at the sink using wood-warmed water, a gym cloth, and Dr. Bronner’s. Is the pump cutting out too soon? Any water system subjected to winter’s freeze went through straits. It’s too soon to tell.

I’ve got pea soup warming in the sun. A baseball podcast flews into mine ear. Earlier today I reeled in a podcast about the WeWork hype-screen/investment debacle/spectacular collapse. I’ve been doing Adam Neumann’s yoga-mantra bullshit out here for years. No one’s made any money but no one’s lost any either.

The bristly greenbrier is thorny but edible. The thorns are small, black, sharp spines. With adequate gloves, it’s tempting to remove it all but I tell myself to mind my brethren, the small mammals, the winged birds. I need to leave oases for them, thickets, cover.

The tender, fleshy stems of new greenbrier shoots can be snapped off right at the ground and served as an asparagus-like vegetable, cooked or raw. To cook them, boil or blanch. Dream of eating them with just a touch of butter.

Not yet five and it’s starting to get light in the east. That’s what I like about this time of year, all the sunlight. It was past nine last night but it wasn’t dark yet as I was grilling my dinner: rabbit and cast-iron veggies over a charcoal flame.

Now a whip-poor-will starts up its morning soliloquy just outside the window, a last call of sorts, heralding dawn. They won’t be calling too much longer. I’m not sure if they move north or if they just stop singing once mating season is over, or what. They’re like roosters here, only an hour or so ahead of the sun.

A three-note cry, over and over, from the corner of the stone porch just a few feet outside this bedroom window. Some people can’t sleep to the song. I couldn’t either, the first time I heard it. It sounded like something between a broken record and an endless clap-track. I don’t mind it now. I’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Who gets the gatherers together?

Who hunts the hunters?

The eastern redcedar (juniperus virginiana) occurs on glades and bluffs; in rocky woods, pastures, and old fields; along roadsides and fencerows. Some gnarled cedars, living on bluffs in the Ozarks have been aged at over a thousand years old, making them the oldest trees in the state.

If I’m ever able to feel good about leaving here, one thing I’d really like to do is grab up as much of all this musty, old bedding from out of the house—the crusty blue duvet, the long in the tooth bedspread on the smaller bed with the springy mattress, some of the sheets—and I’d like to take all of that stuff to the nearest laundromat. Where would that be? I’d take a fistful of quarters and wash those iffy bed-rags to within an inch of their threaded lives.

I had one pesky fly in here. One fly that didn’t want me to sleep, kept landing on me—on my face. One fly too spry for my towel-snapping attempts to swat it.

About four in the morning, I went and retrieved from the back porch a box of fly-paper cartridges. Eight to a box. I just found them back there, happy-go-lucky.

I took one cartridge from the box; pulled on a little red ribbon to unfurl a sticky spiral of fly paper inside. Hung that from the ceiling with a tack that conveniently came pinned to the top of the cartridge and—voila! Within ten minutes of hanging the fly paper, the fly that plagued me was drawn to the paper and is now stuck there on the gooey, brown, translucent pheromone-laden adhesive. And now, if I want, I can try to get some sleep.

Stay north, big storm, stay north. There is a toad in the kitchen. I don’t know how they get in here, but they do. I’ve eaten all the blackberries but I still get caught in their thorns.

Cows in the fields voice heavy. I lay towels out on counters, put clean sheets on bare mattresses. With the doors flung open, pasture air can repopulate this rain-dank house. The day is a bit humid but filled with birdsong, the buzz of insects, and now the scent of deet as I spray my long pants and prepare my ears for engine noise.

Autocracy of octocrylene. Maybe sunscreen does give you cancer.

I’m surprised as always by how much the grass is growing this late in the season. But I did cut here late last September, about a year ago. I hope the mower runs today. Last time out we had a bit of a tussle, me and that machine.

A red-shouldered hawk circles, its wing tips black, its call a series of piercing single notes, eight or nine of them in a row, then silence.

I gotta see if headquarters can send fresh wood out here. Not firewood—I’ve put away plenty of that. I’m talking about construction wood, exterior-grade if possible. Plywood sheets, two by fours, all varieties of length and thickness. The soffit and fascia are failing in certain spots. The kitchen floor sags and pouts.

The more I drink the more I convince myself I don’t need to take a shower. But I do need to take one. I know I do. It’s like a dream falling. I gotta snap myself out of it. That’s what the writing’s for.

I’m naked in the kitchen. Feeling mischievous, listening to old music and dancing with the open door.

This is the last salt. Rub it on your lats.

Just received a communique from headquarters that some comrades are headed this way. Some of whom I know but haven’t seen in what feels like a long time. It will be nice to be here with people again.

I’m going to get the house looking real good in anticipation of their arrival. A couple of them are brothers. Their ancestors used to live here so they outrank me. But they pretty much let me stay here whenever I want. I do maintenance for them in return: light carpentry work on the barn; keeping the grass cut; spraying the ivy; caulking, foaming, and painting; firewood harvesting; wasp mitigation; managing the mold in the kitchen; window repairs; and clearing the overgrown areas up on the rock and down below toward the creek. There’s no work I’d rather do.

“Did you hear the helicopter at three o’clock?”

“Yeah, it scared the shit out of me.”

Frosty morning. Stakes coming out of the ground. Another Frontier Party coming to an end. Not too much trash about. Keep the dog out of the prickly pear. Water boils in an electric kettle. Wood smoke, clear sky. Someone dragging a tent. Call it a mobile home. Dew glistens in sun’s ray. Grass cut just last week.

“Seein’ if I can get this to dry out just a little bit.”

“There’s that sun.”

“Bud Ice, anyone?”

Last night I stayed awake for a few minutes after everyone else went to bed. It was nice to be awake and outside, under the stars, with people I knew sleeping nearby. I listened to the night sounds of cows and dogs and coyotes and crickets. Down below, on the bonfire spot, a bed of coals was glowing bright. There was not a cloud in the sky. Orion was blazing clear in the west. License plates reflected back an eerie mint-white when I hit them with my headlamp light. On the ground the dew glittered, too.

Leaving, they are leaving away. Car doors shut, cars slowly descend the driveway. Goodbye, mon frére, I’ll see you next year. A clearing out, a stone’s roll, the end of another chapter.

Trash & recycling. Leftover food. Two cast iron skillets that need to be heated back up before they become clean once again. Where should I start that fire? On the stove? In the charcoal grill? On the fire spot down below? It’ll probably be the woodstove. That would be the easiest, but I really don’t want to start another fire. I’ve had enough smoke. I need cereal, a hard-boiled egg, cheese and crackers, spinach, and carrots.

Possumlight. White face like a dim moon scavenging in the dew-free grass.

Unlike so many mornings that have come before it, this morning is not dewy. It is breezy. Fall is born on a windy night, lands on a dewless morning.

Layers, layers upon layers, cotton blubber. On top I’m wearing a long T as a base. Above that a collared shirt I bought years ago, XL tall, a prescient purchase made at a long-defunct outlet mall not an hour from here, as the crow flies. Above that a thick, clunky vest. Then an XXL swim-in hoodie, the perfect final outer layer for colder temps.

On my lower half I start with a thin layer of long johns, topped by a torn-up pair of lined athletic-style pants that date back to my cadet days, the nineties.

Call it functional frontier grunge. My style!

When I returned from a short expedition to the river, there was a dead mouse in each of the two traps. The north burrow under the house was reopened! Dexterous mammal. Next time use concrete.

The bottom latch on the pump room door had been undone. Ditto: the dexterous mammal. Claw marks on the wood panel serving as the back porch screen door kicksaver. Animal’s nails punctured just a bit of the screen, a slight tear. Right at the zenith of its reach, not high enough.

The water damage was not as bad as I feared. Miles away, the Gasconade is heavily flooded. The cattle were gathered, many of them austerely seated, along the pasture fence when I strode up. They since have left but what a chorus of greeting they arranged.

I am a packrat gathering time, winning songs of Election Day, shards of distant learning loose like scraps of Halloween candy gone feral in a roped-off park. Feed me now, I’m falling. Distended at the waistband, creck and skagg and harrow like bright moons arcing from me to you then back again. Kisses like memory bruises in the backseats of our fathers’ ancient Buicks.

Orange berries still visible in winter, the only color now. A vine, bittersweet.

Just like in March, one color standing out. Pink blossoms of redbud. Which are tasty, with a tang worthy of their sudden appearance in the otherwise brown and dreary woodscape of late winter. They make an excellent addition to any salad lacking inspiration. Bittersweet berries, alas, are poisonous.

I search for ‘woodstove.’ I search for ‘splitting wood.’ A whole planet’s library system is the database; the search scours all possible disciplines. The top results returned to me are the works of poets. Coincidence? No. But what does this say? What does it mean? We can’t leave the frontier solely in the hands of the poets can we?

Some hijinks out on the road. Twenty minutes past nine. Plenty dark. A vehicle turned around in the back drive, then idled. Then some slower vehicle came up the road from the direction of the old conservation area. The slow-moving vehicle sounded like it was on treads. Sounded heavy. It could have been a tank but it was probably a dozer.

Then someone started laughing. A guy calls out. Female laughter. Then what sure sounded like a gunshot. My stomach fell through my pants. I was on the back porch priming a piece of plywood to span that spot in the kitchen floor that’s starting to sink.

Maybe it was just misfits but it scared the hell out of me. That laugh. I was reaching for anything that looked like a weapon. Shovel, knife, chainsaw. The gunshot sound could have been a backfire, I suppose. But it sounded like a shotgun. Maybe a deer rifle.

In 2016, the candidate for one side wins and from the losing side there is immediate recrimination, denouncement, delegitimization, cries of racism, warnings of fascism on the rise.

Then, four years later, a candidate from the other side wins and his opponent, the incumbent—who had been drooling about a rigged election even before the election took place—unleashes a tsunami of fuzzy election fraud claims, meaning that once again the losing side framed the result as stolen and illegitimate; once again saying things like, “He’s not gonna be my leaders.”

I’m out here wondering if my compatriots and I are ever going to have another election for leader that feels conclusive. Are we crumbled? Can the one side lose an election and not accuse the other of stealing votes? Can the other side lose an election and not accuse half the country of being white supremacists?

All we ever have, basically, is two choices. You vote for one and you’re a dumb bigot. You vote for the other side and you’re naive and ready to give the country away. We do our duty in the ballot box by showing up but either way we lose.

The splotches on the rock that look like ruffled, dried-out raindrops are lichens. They are made of one part fungus; and one part either algae or photosynthesis-capable bacteria. Lichens have names like dixie reindeer, speckled shield, variable bead, rock tripe, and oakmoss. Some are especially stringy or spongy or mossy. They come in pastel-like shades of white, pink, yellow, and green.

The parts of a lichen that are capable of photosynthesis somehow find a way to work with the parts of the lichen that are fungus-based. Two distinct forms of life find a way to coalesce, living happily on the bare surface of a rock through any season—hot or cold, rain or shine.

If these are gooseberry bushes, then why haven’t I seen berries on them before? Is it possible that they bore fruit only during that short window, back in July, when I had been called back home from the frontier, for reasons beyond my control?

The gooseberry bush is rather thorny, one of several species here—along with blackberry and brier—that I refer to generically as bramble. I admit I didn’t realize what these bushes were at first. Is it possible that they have had berries on them—small and green, taut and tart—that I have simply overlooked?

It’s also possible that they are old gooseberry bushes. Still alive but past their fruit-bearing prime. It could be that, should I want gooseberries, I will have to cut some of the stagnant stems back, to make way for new growth capable of making fresh berries.

Headline from a financial news website overnight: “Bitcoin Link to Coup Attempt”

Canis Major, dog at attention. Canis Minor, star’s ascension. Twins of Gemini, one side has to win. The whole sky shimmering with tension.

Picked up debris along the road this morning. Beer cans and busted tires. Empty bags of fruit juice gummies. Plastic bottle of Pepsi with a dark, amber liquid in it. Then a tea bottle with amber liquid in it. I held my nose when I was pouring them out. A can of Hop Valley beer. Plenty of Natural Light, Bud Light, and Goodyear.

Have you got any ivy, they asked. I said, yes. I’m pulling it out with my eyes closed. I’m pulling it out in my sleep. Trios of pointed leaves seared into my mind’s eye, flashing there, glowing in the afterimage. My eyelids itch with the burning.

I am not feeling well today. No, I haven’t got a virus. My temperature is normal, my senses of taste and smell are intact; I’ve got neither a cough nor a headache. I haven’t seen anyone in weeks, not even the farmer. He came by one morning to leave hay for the cattle but I stayed inside; we didn’t talk.

I’m upset by the rancor. I pull in public radio here. At night, the feed switches to news from overseas.

I follow what’s happening, and I can’t shake this feeling of nausea. I pace, I ponder, I pause, I drink. I don’t know who to talk to about it. I don’t want to pick sides. I don’t want to convince anyone about the rightness of my opinion.

Maybe this war has been going on longer than I realized. I have been sheltered here, remote, aloof. This is a struggle for power. The longer it goes on the less the prize will be worth.

The wind is picking up. The geese are honking. An hour ago they were moving south. Now they are doubling back, toward the north. They know something I don’t know. What are they trying to tell me? If only I could listen. If only I would know.

I could search online for something like “field dress a deer.” Then, the way these deer have been mutilated might make more sense to me—their back halves nowhere to be found, their eyes left open, their tongues hanging out, random strips of pelt flung willy nilly like a pack of wolves had done the killing. The only thing clean about the scene was in the way one of the deer had had its antlers sawed clean off at the nub. But I’m not going to do that search. I don’t want to make sense of that brutality, not yet.

Alcohol does appear to calm my nerves. So does the passage of time. And randomly trying to send headquarters an email from my phone at four o’clock on a Sunday morning in mid-November while wood pops in the stove and overseas radio plays low in the background, low in the background, low.

I’m tired. I did a lot more work today than I would have guessed; than I would have hoped for or envisioned. I started by planting seeds behind the house, in a corner made by the south side of the house and the back porch, where it juts out there. I used a shovel to disturb the top layer of earth.

I put in chamomile and basil. It could be the wrong time of the year but what the hell. Why not? Storm clouds were gathering to the west. Gray and blue and dark and dour, a suffocating blanket I prayed would fly away in another direction.

I’m just too tired to continue writing in such detail. I hauled six or seven tarps of cedar today. Was run at by the bull. Got a big callus on my right foot. Dirtied myself in the mud dauber attic. Dug a drainage ditch. Fried bacon. Thrice revived a fire. Talked to no one.

The sounds at dusk, which first I attributed to strange and forlorn birds, are, I realize, the songs of tiny frogs.

I turned on the feed from British radio and the demagogic former president was speaking. He’s back. He never went away but there is ground under his feet again. He’s moving around pretty well. His campaign has started. This will go on for years. The current president is a sitting duck. He’s fish in a barrel. If the last guy hadn’t been so bad this guy we got in there now never would have had a chance of getting elected.

Porridge contest winner’s dish: oatmeal, mushrooms, white wine, and lemon zest.

I had signed up for some course, environmental studies, or maybe even international environmental studies. The first session began, and I was there, but I didn’t want to be there because what I really wanted was to be out on the frontier all day. I had tuned out the speaker, put some ear plugs in, and fallen asleep. My peers were getting very excited. They were singing and chanting in unison about how great everything was going to be, how much change they were going to inflict. I was getting ready to bolt and I’m still unclear about why I was there, what was keeping me there. It was time to start on our first project and everyone was supposed to buddy up. Some guy grabbed my shoulder to wake me up or—

Moss on the facing of the large rock outcropping, the bluff some call it, the glade. The moss omnipresent, a bright green. Lush and luscious, soft enough to nap on, epiphytic.

The voice I heard this morning, the one that woke me up was hers. From headquarters. It was like a whisper, like she didn’t want anyone else to hear.

I barely heard it myself. First I woke up, looked around. She wasn’t there. It was dark, and cold, and I wished for more bag to into.

However many minutes later she was back, ten or fifteen. Her polite voice, not high or flinty, not young, not quite any of those qualities but approximating them all. She would touch my foot, the part right around the ankle, opposite Achilles.

“John—”

What time was it? Was she really there? It was cold and dark and I was in a dying farmhouse at the frontier. My back ached, or maybe it was my kidneys. The sun would be up before long. I put her out of mind as I went outside donning gloves and found a shovel.

Snow geese shimmering with early morning light high in the sky over the edge of somewhere. The sound of them like loose change in the pocket of the sky. Hundreds of geese, thousands maybe, all in formation, all going somewhere together.

I can’t keep this up much longer. I know that. Into the fields of pepperweed. Into what once was grazed pasture. Past where the trees fall. Past even the past beyond that.

Spooked. That business with the salt lick hidden out there along the fringe of the south pasture. The bullshit on the road. A loud engine came through 2:45 and woke me. I fell back asleep but it couldn’t have been much longer before I awoke to a sense of the whole house shaking and someone pulling hard on the front door.

This last part I imagined, I guess. Dreamed it. Hallucination station, party of huh? My worst night here in a while. I look forward to having some company sometime again. Never too soon. I’m not sure I’ll be able to fall asleep until five or so. I can drink a little; read.

At 3:54, a vehicle goes by with a mercifully good pace. On up the hill toward Adler Spring.

What else? I need to get my mind fixed on something else. NM. Headquarters dropped that in a text to me earlier. My first thought was that there was news about New Mexico but no. It means nevermind. Which is one heck of a coincidence because Nevermind, the Nirvana album, is thirty years old this week. I was listening to a podcast about it this morning as I picked up trash along the road. A different guest was brought in to talk about each of the tracks. Cobain and his fuckin shotgun.

Deer season. Firearms portion supposedly over. But someone—the farmer maybe—went by along the road on a four-wheeler this afternoon. I heard shots down the way, across the road, southwest of here. A few shots, a few more. He could’ve been shooting at groundhogs, or dillos, or coyotes, or deer.

Should you find some bones here, let them be mine.

I’ve been called back to headquarters.

A Thursday morning. Wretched weather, unusual amount of gunfire in the fields surrounding. Packing up fast. The water is off, the pipes are bled. No dithering, no ramble, no peripatetic.

I leave behind the following. Three liquid IV. Nine instant coffee. Plenty of slow-drip grounds. Two boxes granola. Ten English breakfast tea. Nine Stag. Two fake beers (sorry). Six sparkling water. Numerous packets of mustard and ketchup. Half a jug of vinegar. Olive oil. Salt. Two tins of tuna. Three freeze-dried breakfast skillet pouches. Proprietary blend of unnamed spices

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