Fiction

A month passed. Tom was stocking the empty cupboards of America’s soul kitchen like a madman. And get this, it was fun! Sometimes it barely required any effort. It usually never cost a cent. Tom couldn’t believe how much stocking his country needed. Every morning he wrote about his experiences. There was no goal when writing them up. He just wrote the way the Columbia River used to flow before humans murdered its watershed.

Jimmy monitored Tom’s progress and they maintained their correspondence. He went nuts with the ink pad and made art everywhere with his hands, feet and tail. He opened new doors of perception with his art. When people noticed these doors, and many did not because they were fiddling with gadgets, they walked through and saw strange faces in the rain contorted with pain and they wanted to help.

If you ever encounter art made by chipmunks blazing on magic mushrooms, you best pay attention. If you do, your world will never be the same and it finally might start making sense.

One evening, Jimmy typed a message to Tom and a conversation ensued:

Ever read The Grapes of Wrath?

Yes, decades ago.

Read it again on mushrooms.

Okay.

Jimmy left behind some of his stash. Tom procured a copy of Steinbeck’s great novel chronicling a terrible American diaspora. Tom ate the mushrooms, stayed up all night, and read the entire book. At dawn he stood outside his rig and laughed. At long last, he had a title for his novel: The Grapes of Meth. He would write a great novel about the new terrible American diaspora, of the new Joads who no longer wanted to work, who had quit, checked out, tunneled into the margins, and didn’t give a shit.

Tom typed a note to Jimmy about his breakthrough. Jimmy wrote back, congratulated Tom, and asked for a double serving of Hamm’s, double cracklin’ cold, to celebrate. His work with Tom was complete.

But there were others in the RV park who needed Jimmy’s help. There were also plenty of magic mushrooms around.

Jimmy glowed and soared on psilocybin by the light of the sunset as he mulled over Tom’s response to the phrase Soul Kitchen. He dug it. It was pithy, dead right, and communicated a secret alphabet.

Maybe Tom had the goods. Not as a damn writer! Not one of those writers who practice empathy on the page but rarely or never in real life. Too many of those phonies, as Holden might have called them. No, maybe Tom had the goods to break on through and actually help people and animals and watersheds.

Jimmy typed:

The cupboard is bare. So start stocking it with art, music, poetry, love, friendship and succor. Yes, I am a chipmunk that knows what succor means.

Jimmy

Tom read the message in the morning with his coffee and Calvados. He was somewhat disappointed. He thought he might receive some writing advice.

Unbeknownst to him, he had. Some writers never realize the best advice to become a writer has nothing to do with writing.

Tom wrote:

Ink pad is at your disposal. I left a sketch pad out. I’ll start stocking the cupboard today. Going to help an old man in the park transplant his tomatoes to get more sun. Then driving two meth miscreants to their probation meeting. Fixing up a couple of abandoned bikes, too, and donating them to the animal thrift store. Is that the kind of stocking you mean?

Tom

Yes, that was exactly the kind of stocking Jimmy meant.

And in short order, Tom would start writing about the stocking and keep on stocking, and he would begin to find a voice as writer, because sometimes when you stock the cupboard of the soul kitchen, you talk to the people who need the goods and hear their stories, stories that need to be heard but no one is telling.

They lost things in the grass. A bicycle. Water hoses. A barbecue. Kiddie pool. A roll of barb wire. Coffee cups. A bag of concrete. A swing set. A tether ball pole.

These things were not discarded or abandoned in the grass. They were lost.

There had been a first use or non use, a summoning of some minor or grand initiative (let’s attract ducks with the pool!) some dollars spent, some effort expended, and then…and then…the grass took over and these things were hidden and not remembered. What can’t be seen can’t be remembered. At least things can’t. Most people, too.

The grass perpetrated no malice taking over. It was happy grass going to seed, waving in the wind, uncut, chemical free, occasionally integrated with colors from other flowering plants. Please don’t call them weeds. Bumblebees rejoiced!

The dog wouldn’t shit in the grass. He figured he might get lost, too, or host a flea festival.

Richard Brautigan called this sort of grass The Revenge of the Lawn. He got that right.

Grass just wants to be left alone. And here it was!

So why does it make me sad to see it? I suppose it’s because I think first of the people who aren’t mowing this grass and losing things in it.

Let us ruminate now on the people who let the grass go wild. Or did they? Was there anything conscious in the decision? Or what is a non-decision? Maybe they’d read Brautigan and became disciples. Maybe it was some kind of protest against mowing, the useless mowing of grass, laboring only for an aesthetic. All that snarling noise, black smoke and sharpened metal.

If only the people had invested in a flywheel mower! Now that’s something bucolic and makes a pleasant trilling sound. A flywheel also misses most of the dandelions. They escape the blades and go on tilting at attention, like tiny flags in a groovy country.

Wait! A flywheel mower was also lost in the grass. They let the handle fall to the ground one afternoon and it vanished.

You can’t really say people who lose things in the grass have gone to seed. I used to believe that, but I’ve changed my mind, my definition of the phrase. People who have gone to seed are waving in the wind, uncut, (usually) chemical free, spreading their wild seeds and sharing the field with other plants and tiny creatures of the field.

They are not part of America’s manicured lawn. They are not conforming. They will become part of a meadow! Or a glade! Who wouldn’t prefer that to a lawn?

Most. It’s so much easier being part of a lawn.

Think about something else, too. The wilder the grass gets the less likely invaders, such as blackberries, gorse, scotch broom, bamboo and capitalism, will find a foothold, then spread, spread, spread and then occupy forever.

Also consider this: a perfectly operational riding lawnmower stood parked at the edge of the grass, near a large spruce. Actually there was another mower as well! No, wait, it wasn’t a riding lawnmower. It was a small tractor with a mower deck. It could have cut the “lawn” with two passes. Five minutes.

Both were shiny and new and cost thousands of dollars each. Give it a couple of years, and they’ll be lost in the grass, too, near the rowing machine and council of lawn gnomes.

So if the people in the house who lose things in the grass have not gone to seed, where have they gone?

They are merely gone.

Americans dissipate. In great numbers these days. Grass doesn’t.

Once the grass had been a front lawn, disheveled for sure, but a lawn nonetheless, a lawn at the end of a long gravel driveway. A home stands there, barely. It would become lost one day, along with the people in it.

A house lost in the grass is sad when so many people live in tents on concrete or out of their jalopies. Or ride a bicycle 10 miles in the rain with a ukulele to play for a free breakfast.

The grass where things are lost is not Walt Whitman’s grass. Walt’s wild grass had promise. Every single spear. You put a spear in your mouth and you feel wild. You walk with a spear in the mouth, and you don’t feel lost at all.

Elmer learned that Maggy descended from Pacific Northwest beaver royalty. Her mother served in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) during the New Deal as one of the socialist beavers released into the wild to help rebuild ecology in Oregon and Washington watersheds stripped of vegetation. Her father volunteered for an elite unit of beavers that parachuted inside wooden crates into the remote back country of Montana. He, along with 2500 other beavers, chewed their way out of the crates when they landed and went to work restoring the health of wiped-out watersheds. Some 75 years later, Maggy met Ernie near a river extolled in a classic of Oregon literature that no one reads anymore, and they settled in, procreated, and earned a stellar reputation for kick ass dams and lodges.

As Maggy narrated, she nibbled on the rolled lily pads. At turns, she became wistful as only beavers can be.

Ernie died at the hands of a fiendish trapper who sold his pelts to a far flung furrier who sewed them into loincloths for a super model who modeled them in a magazine read by sociopaths. Maggy had received many offers for a new mate, but she rejected the suitors, preferring to remain alone rather than partnering with a mediocre beaver and damming watercourses with mediocre constructions. Maggy wanted excellence in love, life and architecture.

Maggy finished her story and asked Elmer about himself. He told her he didn’t really know who he was or where he’d come from. It was as if he had materialized out of the clouds. He just knew he loved the life of the beaver and the simple purpose and total anonymity it offered. He also loved chewing and gnawing trees and watching strange humans pick up the pieces he left behind.

“Why don’t you stay here in this lodge?” said Maggy “and we can hang out and get to know one another.”

Elmer looked at Maggy, the lodge, the cans of unopened porter. He could hear the stream crackling outside, flowing, flowing, running down, down, down to the ocean, and completing the eternal cycle (he still retained a tiny bit of Siddhartha) that began with evaporation, traveled upward to the clouds, fell to the land as rain, and then found its watery way to the great creator of all life. He sensed beavers were at one with this cycle in a way most humans were not—and never would be. Elmer also sensed that one day, beavers would (re)inherit the earth or at least what was once known as North America.

“That’s a wonderful idea,” said Elmer.

Maggy brought over two cans of porter and handed one to Elmer. They hoisted their cans to each other. Maggy punctured Elmer’s and Elmer punctured Maggy’s. They shotgunned them down and then embraced.

Summer turned to fall and rain began its reckoning with the Oregon Coast. James felt completely at home with rain. One day, he followed an elk trail that led to a lush meadow right out of fairy tale. He explored the meadow and discovered a beaver pond at one of its fringes. There was the lodge! The one right out of the pop-up book. James wasted no time and dove into the pond and began swimming toward the lodge. His strokes cut through the water, and as he swam, he heard a cacophony of curious slapping sounds coming from multiple directions.

A short distance from the lodge, James plunged underwater, and searched for the entrance. It didn’t take long and he wriggled into the opening, breathed sweet beaver air, and found himself inside a larger space than he’d imagined. It was a damn sight bigger and more comfortable than the studio dumps in Portland he had rented decades ago, the ones now going for $2000 a month.

James inspected the interior of the lodge. It was tidy and neatly decorated with built-in shelves displaying toy soldiers, Lord of the Rings action figures, lighters, fishing flies, shotgun casings, prescription pill bottles (lots of those!) and all other manner of river detritus. James also noticed a couple six packs of porter stacked in a corner. Something odd, however, struck James. The interior looked cared for but not lived in.

The call of a porter beckoned and James cracked one open, naturally shotgunning it in the process, and he soon felt drowsy, curled up and fell asleep.

James awoke to the sound of a shotgunned porter and beheld a beaver. He sat up.

“My name is Maggy,” said the beaver. “This is my lodge. What’s your name?”

James didn’t know, although he did understand her question. Something about entering the lodge had erased his human name and left his human language behind.

He tried out a new language with a stutter. “I d-d-d-d-don’t know my name,” he said.

“I’m going to name you Elmer,” she said, “Elmer the Beaver.”

Elmer didn’t protest. It’s not in a beaver’s nature. They flow.

“My husband Ernie and I used to live in this lodge,” said Maggy, “but he was killed by a trapper. All our kits have moved on and I’m living nearby in an old wooden fishing boat that I turned into a lodge.”

Elmer nodded.

“You want a beer?” said Maggy.

“Y-y-y-y-es,” said Elmer, staring at Judy. Those shoulders! Those brown eyes. Those long white white whiskers! Those sparkling orange buckteeth! She was foxy.

“You sound a little hick,” said Maggy laughing, handing him the can.

Elmer smiled that weird beaver smile, more of a smirk really. It’s hard to smile memorably if you only have four teeth, although many men and women in rural Oregon taverns manage to pull it off.

They clinked cans together and shotgunned the porters.

“I’d like hear more about you,” said Elmer. The stammer was gone. Shotgunning a porter is a great remedy for speech impediments, among other ailments.

“Sure,” she said. Beavers love telling stories and beavers never embellish. There isn’t any need.

They also don’t practice capitalism, enslave other creatures, truck with politicians, and are unpretentious vegans.

Maggy pulled a rolled lily pad from a cookie tin, mouthed it like a cigar, settled in, and began. Elmer listened and groomed his fur.

The transformation began subtly enough. One morning fording a creek, James realized the multitude of beavers in his life. There was his favorite childhood stuffed animal the cat used to hump. There was losing his virginity in a town called Beavercreek in a wooden lodge his high school girlfriend’s parents owned, and losing it on a rug stitched from beaver pelts that her father had trapped. There was even a taxidermied beaver mounted on the wall that surveyed the action! Then later, he dated a woman who lived in Beaver, Oregon and they once made love on a downed tree across another Beaver Creek.

Summer on the Oregon Coast induces laziness in the locals, but not for James. He built a lodge entirely of beaverwood not far from the Honda. He happily moved the little gear that remained into the lodge and set up a cozy little home for himself. He donated all the rest of his possessions except the clothes on his back to the animal care thrift store. The clothes were already threadbare, and when they finally unraveled, well, who needed clothes when you’re turning into a beaver.

James gave up making campfires. He stopped shaving, his hair grew out and dreaded, and groomed himself in the manner of riverine animals. He gave up all food except wild plants, foraging along the river, streams, intertidal areas and the nearby hills for sustenance. He ate better and more regularly than our boys at Valley Forge who subsisted on owl’s heads and and tree bark.

James liked his stouts and porters, and one day, the pull tab on a can wouldn’t open. James had a pocket knife at the ready to make a repair, but he cast the knife away and simply punctured the can with his front teeth and shotgunned the beer in the process. A porter never tasted so good.

Another day, James saw his reflection in a washed up Japanese float and noticed he’d lost all his teeth except two incisors on top and two on the bottom. They were orange in color.

For a few weeks that summer, James kept his phone charged and occasionally texted friends. But at one point, the phone slipped out of his pocket and into a stream and that was that.

James began taking short glides in the river at dawn and dusk. He was not alone. He knew beavers were out there, beavering in the side channels, the sloughs, the tributaries, building, building, building. He wanted to meet them. But how to initiate first contact? He still hadn’t found a suitable lodge to visit, although he had seen many dams. Where was it?

One afternoon, it occurred to James that he hadn’t spoken a word of English in weeks. It was later that afternoon that he was hiking along a stream and he stopped, knelt down, and begin gnawing at a low hanging alder branch. Soon it detached from the tree. James gathered up the branch. He began stripping its bark with his teeth. He bit into the inner bark. Oh sweet cambium! Two hours later, James had felled a dozen young alders and willows and was utterly gorged. He fell asleep in some sedge and dreamed of babbling brooks.