A Matter of Survival

A short vignette of memoir focusing on the sounds of language

Use the audio player below to listen to me read this piece in my own voice

I don’t really know how anyone gets from A to B on any given day of the week. There’s so much that can go wrong. We’re just dropped here in the flats in our big red shoes. I still feel guilty for having been a bad guy, you know, sometimes, once or twice, back then. As if being unaware, or unsure, or being blind, or hungry, or being desperately sad and alone—none of which are my own damn fault—as if being me could be used against me. And yet those things are used against me—and in some ways, some of those things are my fault.

When I was a kid, sitting at the piano upstairs in our big house at the top of the hill on Hill Street with the view of the city spread out below us, my dad turned and said to me, “you’re a rude person.” Not that I was being rude, but that I was that kind of person. Rude. Well guess what—fuck you, dude! Exactly how is a ten-year-old supposed to know how to be? Even then it was clear that someone was supposed to fuckin’ show me—and, needless to say, that that someone was he.

And so now, do I get more satisfaction out of chancing into the right kind of tea than the average civilian on bliss Planet Three? It sure feels that way. Finding my way feels like very much like not a sure thing—it feels like rolling the dice, like sliding in safe, all covered in scrapes. Finding my way feels like saving my life. Saving my skin sure trips the right switches—as it damn well should. It’s a matter of survival. Life and death, every day of the week. It seems like a dangerous place to be, and, it is, it is. It is.

It’s been long enough that there’s finally some evidence that I can’t screw it up, and yet every move still feels like the crux. The sack on my back, that broken-down truck, the misshapen ship-sign leading straight to dead fucked. Every climber’s worst nightmare, the hidden crevasse. Beneath every sharp-edged snow bridge lies the invisible threat of being sliced up and swallowed, silently lost in an ice-tight vice, crushed—eventually, long out of breath—by the impossibly slow glacial grinding grey granite perfectly smooth, leaving gods’ eyes reflecting pure alpine blue—and no room for you.

No doubt, it’s important, doing it right, but which is the point? Is it being on time or my intimacy with time, and the dance that gets done by my left and right arms as I paddle along the windows and willows and the wind in the whorls of the wood of the world? Are the windows open? Is the sun coming in? Is there cool air to breathe? Can I be the light in the trees and the soft smells of dawn, the voices of birds and the fruit growing sweet, as I wait, with care, to wake, not too late?

This orbit, this morning, going around, racing through town, I drifted along the columns of air like the spare snowflakes of a dark December afternoon. It’s three pm in Maine and the sun is lying down low and grey. Unfolding the Sven-saw is an incantation of its red metal arms and Swedish steel blade shifting into a triangle shape. This magic, it works. It jumps out, it’s bold—and it’s gentle. It’s safer and lighter than any sharp axe. I tighten the wing-nut. I bend down, I make my cut, and then I pack the saw away. My mother and I lift the green tree and take slow steps in the snow, rough bits of sawdust marking our path. She wears thick glasses with green plastic frames and a wool scarf wraps her head against the cold. My hands are sticky with sap as we walk back to the old car, my share of the weight pressing on my small boy shoulder.