Day Four... The Incidents at German Bridge

“Flat shod, style racking…” Donnie Nelson is talking to me about a horse. I can’t figure out where the spaces are in between whatever words these are, “What dragon?” “Style. Rackin’ Hooves come up to here when he walks.” This is a thing. This is a thing that’s impressive. A horse who high marches his front legs and picks his feet up like to here. Like this high. Wanna see a picture? Donnie’s off to get his folder. Donnie’s got a folder for everything. Because everything’s for sale. That statement is ubiquitous. What did Donnie teach his boys? “If they’s giving a good price, you take it.” Donnie fetches his folder of horse photos out of his red Ford pickup. He had nine then he sold five so now he’s got four and he’s gonna sell three more. What about that last one? “Well, that’s my horse.” Donnie’s got an ambling gait, fresh cropped blonde goatee and thin hair, tanned skin and a happy face, and he gives me — and everyone he’s ever spoken to — shit. He gives shit with approximately every third sentence. Eventually, I’ll catch the rhythm. Although at the moment I don’t recall initiating the conversation. Donnie doesn’t need all these horses anymore cuz his grandkids ain’t interested in riding em so much. The oldest two are going off to college already. I’m just tryin’ to mess with Donnie back and I know he wishes I would, but I’m terrible at that game, I usually wanna talk sincere, even to strangers, where ya come from, where ya going. I’ve learned to be delicate about that because not everyone’s as excited for full transparency as I can be. But I hit a tripwire.

Donnie’s wife caught dementia. She’s been gone since 2015. It was beyond painful for Donnie to watch her disappear. He took her to all the specialists up in Ohio, but it didn’t matter. There’s no cure. She died just a week shy of their 43rd anniversary. They’d been together since high school. Donnie’s eyes mist and he pulls on a cigarette and he looks to me and smirks and squeezes loose a tear from either side and says well since then he’s been spending most of his time at German Bridge even though he lives 20 minutes away, courting Dreama with rum cakes he learned to make from his wife’s recipe. Dreama, he says, well she’s here 365 days a year, workin’ to the bone. Seems he’d like to help her, like he’d like to free her, I’m gonna catch that same implication off her Mother and Sister too. Everybody who loves Dreama seems to have to come here to spend time with her since she can’t break herself away. The pieces of the mystery will fall into place a day later. I’m not really trying to unravel it. Although, I guess this is what people do when there’s no tv. Talk to each other. 

Oh. That’s right. I came up to the office to ask to use the phone. Dreama comes back and sees me sitting with Donnie and she’s got the cordless in her hand and passes it over gladly and I get my father on the line to tell him a bit about Buffalo Creek. I also want to let them know where I am, you know, half out of love, half out of just super dark suspicion, you know the strangers might murder me or something. I’ve got a pretty sweet supernatural campground monster movie percolating in the back of my head already where a guy and his dog and a lady and her family and her horse and some trucks have to beat back an invasion of river-shark people or some shit. So obviously I gotta tell my family where I am. My Dad checks the map and finds I’m right near his friend John Rosenberg who lives in Prestonsburg and he wants me to call him so I do. I get a machine. I leave a message that I’m basically unreachable and I’ll try again the next day. 

With nothing to distract me, without a thought in my head, I spend the rest of the day taking inventory. I get done all the scripts I’ve been meaning to read to and I write email responses to all the writers even though they won’t send until I re-grid. Sadie lays in the grass beside Dumbo while I stretch and exercise which turns into an impromptu dance session blasting Marshall Tucker Band, Old Crow Medicine Show and Traveling Wilburys out the back of my van. After last night’s burrito, Sadie didn’t eat her breakfast this morning, but she did eat her pills wrapped in salami. It’s been a week on the new anti-inflammatories. Also she drank rainwater from puddles on the Jesus walk at Paradise Island. Something’s making her feel fantastic. Her breathing is relaxed and easy. Her energy is up. She walked all over Man and Paradise Island and Matewan and German Bridge and several places in between. She’s getting the hang of the bedtime conversion. Last night, I rolled her over to check for fleas and ticks, pulled off one of each, and then dropped the backrest to the side to make the bed full. I, however, struggled so hard to fall asleep without Netflix that I resorted to a four hour long old Persian military history podcast on my laptop un-erased because I can’t figure out how to alter the setting. Somewhere during my sleep I learned that Darius is pronounced Duh-rye-uss. 

Inventory…

I want a fishing pole. I want to go fishing. My skin is greasy and dirty and my neck is red and I’ve got bug bites on my ankles and calves. It’s Thursday. I left Washington DC on Monday. I almost bought a tin of dip yesterday. I check my wallet and make the executive decision to remove my Metro Cards from my billfold. I need… cash, water, bacon, beer, whiskey. I’ve been drinking more Pepsi than Coke, but that may be because the can is more beautiful… 

Donna and her Mother have picked up a pile of pizzas and pizza breads (from Gino’s) and they offer me some and I’m not allowed to refuse. The Mother, Barb, has things on her mind regarding someone’s son and the way they was treating someone. I try not to pry. Sometimes I stare into the distance and feign deafness either outta politeness or cuz I’m genuinely not interested in everybody’s business all the time. Donna and Barb are up from Georgia and as anyone’ll tell ya, Donna will say anything to anybody. Like she don’t give a darn. “Hillary Clinton is an evil woman,” she offers for way of starting the pot. I start to share my nascent understanding of Coal Country, but Donna’s shaking her head side to side, I’m not on the right subject. “You ever see a 36 week old fetus?” she raises. I don’t want to get into it, but the technical term for a 36 week old fetus is a baby and far as I know they get delivered not aborted. She’s shaking her head at me again. “That’s murder.” I don’t disagree. I’m pretty sure there aren’t clinics in the U.S. that will abort a healthy 36 week pregnancy. “I’ve seen videos,” Donna shows her cards. And Dreama’s seen Jaws. There’s sharks in the river. 

This cheese bread cost me, not money, but something. They tell me there’s a Wal Mart in town. And a McDonald’s. And a Subway. I think these are points of pride. I tell them I don’t need to go to those places. I don’t mean to offend. I hope I don’t. Family Dollar doesn’t impress me either. Mass production is killing America quick. These towns need a chef. How can there be so much farmland and so little fresh food? And clean food? And healthy, delicious food? They need to eat better. Instead they’re dying in mines and smoking cigarettes and getting hurt and hooked on pills and drinking beer and whiskey and driving something fast. 

Clearly, I’m struggling with the unplugging. 

Sadie and I walk over to the stables to meet Dreama’s horse Nuggett and keep on going to the other campground where it’s quiet and there’s no one. Except for Jack Varney who’s showed up to fix the riding mower and cut all the grass. I give him a wave and he says something and I say huh and he cuts the engine and I don’t know what I say, but… Jack’s wife Gilly took sick and she’s poorly, but he found someone to watch her for the day so he could come out and tend to the chores. Jack’s the manager, Dreama’s boss, grey-faced and sad, sitting astride acres of fresh-cut grass. All this rain and sunshine. Yeah. Well, I’ll pray for her. Jack sniffs away tears, “That’s all we can do.” 

I don’t know where to turn next. 

And then I meet Brandon Crawford.

I’m writing this 500 miles later. My own eyes well up remembering Brandon and his brother Chris…

An unfamiliar pickup has turned up by the flat launch next to the bridge. Sadie’s napping off some cheese bread scraps in the van and I see an aluminum boat on the grass beside the truck. I wander down solo to investigate. There’s two guys quizzically hunched over the micro outboard engine, it’s not on, but they don’t hear me approaching. I call out, “Y’all need any help?” Lead with vulnerability, assistance, kindness, a smile. The skinny one looks up, heavy blue jeans on a hot humid day, a sweaty brown tank top, and under his hat I see kind eye despite an entire missing row of front teeth that caves his face in on itself. That’s Brandon. He’s 33 years old, he kicked meth about three years ago, but not before it done in his teeth. He works as a driver in the mines, but they’ve got off for a while because a couple months back their mentor, the man who’d got them in, well, he flipped his dozer. It landed on top of him, “Crushed his head in. They put him back together, I hear, it was an open casket, but… I didn’t even go.” Brandon wipes his face, it’s quivering. He loved this man. 30 years driving a dozer. It could happen to anyone. 

There’s still work up there, they’re opening more, he says, and he’ll get back to it, but for now on a hot day like this, he’s just looking to get out on the creek, but you know, you got to watch that mudflap out there, “We could get stuck in that mud.” They’ve got a 14 foot fishing boat with the tiniest blade rotor on it you ever saw, hooked up to a marine battery. It runs like a kid’s bath toy, “But it’ll take us up and down this creek.” Brandon wishes he had a shorter one, maybe 10 foot, and a trailer, they had to strap her down to the back of the truck. He grabs a Mountain Dew out the cab and sips while we talk and Chris grabs a pole and casts out into the ripples around the bridge. He’ll swap out a couple of poles and lures, but occasionally throw us a word. Chris is a few years older, been married and divorced, got a big distended belly with an insulin pump plugged up on his right side and tucked in his shorts pocket. I notice his left eye is wonky, “Came on when you was what? Four?” Brandon yells at him. Juvenile onset diabetes took it. He bullseyes a ripple.

“Whatchu doin’ in these parts?” Brandon asks me. And I  point out my van under a tree in the distance. He eyes it covetously and for more than a moment, my paranoia creeps in. It’s lizard brain, I know. But I still service it. I still check the worst case scenario. Which in this case now revolves around a couple of backwoods hicks taking my ride, my dog and my life and leaving me to bleed out in a bend of the creek and the last thing I see is NO SVC on my cell phone. I carry a pocket knife. I tell strangers I ride with a pit bull. I’m not a total fucking idiot. Sometimes I try to suggest I’m just as scary as they are. Peace through mutually suggested destruction. 

I catch a pang of feeling manipulative. The barest scratch of the surface reveals depths of pain seemingly endless. I feel overprotective of myself and I reveal more pieces. I tell Brandon how my Dad worked on coal mining disaster cases in the 70s, helped defend survivors and get the Coal Mining Safety Act passed. I tell him how I believe you gotta have regulations and his eyes glow. “Yes! You get it. These people round here want no regulations. The Trumper fanatics. Just open it all up. Can’t do that.” We both say, “Can’t do that,” at about the same time. Brandon didn’t vote in 2016. Didn’t see an option. His family had been fighting to hold on to their trailer since Bush was still in office and the mine work started getting cut back. It was harder to scrape together the payments in Obama’s time and they just tried to stay ahead of the finance company who not once never came to visit them. No person ever showed up to talk to them about losing their home until a repo man drove it away. That’s offensive. Just disembodied voices on the phone making threats and getting curse words back from Brandon’s father. 

He actually says, “If we didn’t have bad luck, we wouldn’t have no luck at all.” As if he coined it. I know he didn’t, but he did teach me “that the elk bugle” when they’re rutting, that the creek turns “straighter than a mule’s nose,” and that these high school drop outs around here are cooking up “shake and bake meth.” In the brief minutes we do on Trump, together we established that “Just because he’s a liar doesn’t mean he can’t accidentally speak the truth. Just because he’s a crook doesn’t mean he ain’t onto something. And just because he’s dumb don’t make him useless.”

It’s a lovely conversation. We laugh a lot, probably fish-scaring loud, cuz Chris keeps moving farther on from us. Brandon gives a long look at the van and me and tells me he’d like to try that some day, he’d like to go on out and see, feel, freedom. I tell him I worked 20 years, 15 of em in an office before I got the sense to go and see these places my father had told me about. “I’d really like to shake his hand,” Brandon says in a voice like nothing else could matter. “Would ya shake mine?” I put out my hand, “I’m Jesse Stern.” I give my full name. He shakes my hand firm, but not showy, “I’m Brandon Crawford. That’s my brother Chris.”

And then…

“You got Facebook?”

After they shove off onto the creek, I decide to treat myself like my own dog. Or horse. I take an amazing shower in the shower house. I clean myself good and shave my face with the new razor my father gave me and I slap on aftershave and stand in front of my air conditioner and feel a new kind of cool. At 920pm I watch the moon rise and daylight fade and listen to the engines of trucks and cars and the occasional motorcycle or atv on the road. A flat boat or two goes by in the creek. Everything moves save the people. Me and the dog drift off to the sounds of crickets. It’s been a full day of nothing. No mindless distractions on my phone or on the computer. Just read and write and walk and talk and eat and be and love. That’s a good way to live.

I need to stick to this diet.