This is ludicrous. I know it. The tree knows it. The woodland creatures know it. By Zach Hively When I was a younger man, I had a grand vision for my future: I would buy (or otherwise acquire) some land, and with this land I would grow a Christmas forest, planting a pine tree each year to create homes for woodland creatures until enough of them became my friends that I could dispense with human interaction altogether. I have grown and matured, though, and so has the vision. Namely, I am less certain that the forest is a Christmas one. I might more honestly call it a solstice forest. Or a Thanksgiving forest, since that is closer to when I buy the trees. Or a January forest, because that is when I plant them. Or, perhaps most accurately, I could call it a money pit. Regardless of cost, this is one dream coming true. I may not be a world-famous paleontologist ballplayer with a commercial pilot’s license (yet), but by Jiminy Christmas I have a forest. It is five feet tall, four trees large, and counting. Mostly it seems to be counting up. It almost counted down last year, when one of the trees developed an infestation of some kind--not the type of woodland creature I hoped to befriend—that made me abandon, with prejudice, my no-chemical kumbaya approach to winter forest management. This tree also had a comorbidity, a second infestation, that I could not identify despite my four years’ experience in forest stewardship. I showed a picture to a man at the nursery. “Looks like bird vomit,” he said. In hindsight, I question if he actually worked there. These are the difficulties that confound my annual tradition. You see, growing a magical EOY forest is less simple than picking up a tree from a lot and strapping it to the roof of any ol’ car. It is predicated on several factors, chief among them that picking up living trees is really, really hard. Living trees require dirt. Dirt is heavy. It is also notoriously difficult to strap to the roof. If we are perfectly frank—and why shouldn’t we be—half the reason I keep the registration current on my thirtysomething pickup is so that, once a year, I can drive it to my tree dealer, and he can direct two much younger men to hoist the tree into the bed, and I can drive it home where I unload it by my much older self. This is relatively easy to do; I have the advantage of gravity. The real trick is sliding this half-ton or so of wood and soil from three feet high to ground level without seriously injuring the tree, or myself, or my pride. If we are still perfectly frank—why stop now—this moment, usually taking place in dwindling daylight and encroaching cold, when I must navigate this living being and its dirt to the earth without the aid of an advanced pulley system, this is the moment I use to assess the state of my physical health. In short, it is my annual exam. When getting the piñon to the ground goes well, I am also doing well. When it is a struggle, or I throw out my back, or I wonder legitimately at any point if I will be spending the night pinned under a root ball, this motivates my exercise regimen for the next twelve months. I say this in earnest: other people train for beach bods or lower cholesterol. I look at a pull-up bar in May and think, “Better try to jump and touch that—I got a tree to unload this winter.” This is ludicrous. I know it. The tree knows it. The woodland creatures know it. But I can make myself think that I can indeed transform my body and my physical capabilities from one winter to the next. It sure seems much more plausible than transforming my body in a month, which is about how long I have to enjoy the tree, festooned with white twinkle lights outside my living room window, before I need to put it in the ground. This requires an even greater feat of strength than dragging the tree out of my pickup truck. Because I cannot get the tree back into the pickup truck, I have nothing but my wits and my muscles—mostly my wits—to walk the tree, all while battling friction and pine needles to my face, from my living room window to the Yuletide forest and the too-shallow hole I tried to dig after the ground had frozen.
Still, somehow, I have survived this odyssey every year, and so have the trees. We will more likely than not survive it this year, too. The forest will not be any taller, but it will be one tree bigger, and I will swell with pride every time I gaze upon it instead of doing a workout. In the spirit of frankness—in for a penny, in for a pound—I sure hope the birds don’t hurl on it. Zach’s Substack is free. The free stuff today will remain free tomorrow. Someday, he might offer additional stuff. Zach+, as it were. You can tell Zach that you value his work by pledging a future paid subscription to additional stuff. You won't be charged unless he enables payments, and he’ll give a heads-up beforehand. You can subscribe for free to Zach's Substack to receive weekly short writings -- classic Fool's Gold columns, new poems, and random musings.
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Bringing fresh blood to old things. Zach Hively My dogsitter leaves me surprises every time I return home. A book to read. My dogs’ poker winnings. Streamers and empty wine boxes from the dogs’ wild parties (which reportedly keep him up too late). One time, he left me an axe. This axe was not a new axe. Its head was rusted over. The handle, washed-out gray. You couldn’t swing it without the head sliding four or six inches. It was perfect.
“Found it on a hike,” he wrote in the welcome-home note. Where? I asked. “The dogs swore me to secrecy,” he said. “Better ask them.” I figured this axe would make a perfect wall-hanging. It had that rustic feeling that city folks pay big big dollaz for. Plus, if my home ever stumbled into a slasher flick, the axe head would come flying off riiiight when the masked lunatic went to swing it at me, throwing him (or her!) off balance and giving me my window to pee myself. But I didn’t hang it, because of course I didn’t. I let it sit by my firewood rack all winter. Then I tucked it in the shed. Then I pulled it back out this fall. Was I ever going to do something with this? Or should I just toss it back into the desert for someone else to find? Because I had big projects that required a solid reason to procrastinate, I said, I’m a-gonna re-handle this axe. So I am. It’s not done yet, because it turns out that a distinct lack of woodworking tools and general axe-shafting knowledge is a detriment to successful (or even unsuccessful!) axe restoration. But I am falling in love—deeply, madly, Christmas-movie-level in love—with bringing new life to old things. This undoubtedly has nothing to do with the fact that I am careening toward forty and looking to make certain I am both relevant and useful. Nope. It might have something to do, however, with making something tangible with my hands. Hands that are increasingly knurled from using the wrong wood file and trying to open a dried-up bottle of wood glue. Could I buy a new handheld wood-splitter at the hardware store for under a hundred bucks? Absolutely. Am I likely to spend more than a hundred bucks on this project with a reasonable chance of ending up with a handle-shaped piece of kindling? For sure. Could I, though, grow as a human being, developing skills that bring me closer to my forebears who knapped their own flint and smelted their own iron and probably, at more than one point, cut off their own fingers? Perhaps. But my ancestors aren’t likely to get too close until they’re reasonably certain this antique axe head won’t come flying off the handle. Zach’s Substack is free. The free stuff today will remain free tomorrow. Someday, he might offer additional stuff. Zach+, as it were. You can tell Zach that you value his work by pledging a future paid subscription to additional stuff. You won't be charged unless he enables payments, and he’ll give a heads-up beforehand. You can subscribe for free to Zach's Substack to receive weekly short writings -- classic Fool's Gold columns, new poems, and random musings. Fool's Gold
~Zach Hively So this’ll teach me to be efficient: I was being so very on top of things the other day. Like, I had run all the errands I really had to, like getting groceries and stopping for a latte, and I decided—in lieu of going home, where I like to be very much to swing by the dry cleaners, drop off my one real suit, and see if they had any clothes of mine that I had forgotten about. This is the danger with dry cleaners. They, in my experience, do not hound me to come get my winter coat or my comforter or either of my nice shirts. Nor do they appear to take my clothes home for themselves within, say, three to five years. They just … store my clothes for me, free of extra charge, on those cool conveyor-belt clothes racks, until I show up on a particularly efficient day, figure out which false phone number they have on file for me (because I hate getting automated marketing messages like “Save 15% this weekend” or “Your items are ready for pickup”), and take home what feels like brand-new outfits for the low low price of what I paid for them at the thrift store in the first place. Such was my state of mind—total #bossbabe—sitting at a red light shortly after leaving the dry cleaners. I felt accomplished. On top of things. Soon to be well-attired. Then I felt rear-ended. This is largely because I was, in fact, rear-ended. In the other driver’s defense, the light had indeed turned green. I saw it. The driver in front of me saw it. The driver in front of him saw it. But none of us had yet ACTED on it when the woman behind me did. “I thought you were going,” she summarized, “but you didn’t.” We pulled to the turn lane where we could inconvenience the greatest number of other drivers while walking around each other’s cars and rubbing the backs of our own necks. She said this was her first accident, which I am inclined to believe, because a more experienced rear-ender would know to have one current registration in the vehicle instead of two dating from different administrations in the 2010s. She would also have an up-to-date discount insurance card instead of texting someone to Photoshop her one real quick. I didn’t call the police or file a report, because the last time I called the police for a non-emergency incident they ultimately told me to go home, and then they called me at 2 a.m. to talk about submitting photographs by 4 a.m., and quite frankly we are all lucky I didn’t get arrested at 2:15 a.m. that night. Besides, it’s all good. I, having come of driving age in New Mexico, know to carry excellent uninsured motorist coverage. In such a seemingly minor bumper-bender as this, I am confident that my automotive repairs and personal bodywork will both fall well short of my deductible. I cannot be certain, however. Lawyers from network television shows have advised me not to make public claims about my wellbeing until I have been thoroughly assessed by medical professionals who stand to make much more money if they declare that I may need months of rehabilitation and—I hope—therapeutic massages. The problem here is that, whatever my dry cleaning adventure has you presuming to the contrary, I am really, really busy. Like, I am too busy to understand why, exactly, I am so busy. I’ve officially reached the stage in life where the worst thing about an auto accident—even worse than the thought of lifelong whiplash symptoms—is the inconvenience. This factor is intensified because everyone else is even busier. My medical providers can’t book me for three weeks. The earliest the body shop in bed with my insurance company can fit me in for a damage appraisal is a month out. And I’m taking my legal advice from TV. And all this because I deviated from my norm—because I went against my true nature—because I decided to Be Responsible and do One More Thing While I’m Out Anyway. You’ll never see me making THAT mistake again. In fact, I now possess a sound excuse for never running errands ever again, except for getting lattes. I hope my dry cleaner gets good use out of that three-piece suit. By Zach Hively Fool's Gold Injustice plagues us. So very, very many injustices. A man can feel overwhelmed by the great variety and scope of injustice out there. Partly this is because, being a man, he is unfamiliar with experiencing any injustice more severe than a bad umpiring call. Mostly it is because he can do very little to fix all the injustice, and he would much rather fix the injustice than think about it. Unfixed injustice makes him uncomfortable.
If you sympathize with this man, he’d rather not talk about it. Feelings make him uncomfortable too. But I—I would recommend identifying one single injustice you CAN fix. Preferably a personal injustice. Taking direct action against it will do wonders for your self-esteem, much more than wanting to fix the whole world but ending up falling asleep on the couch. My chosen injustice is this family I see in town with an impeccably trained border collie, the kind who locks eyes on its human and reads their minds and can go into public places without stealing someone’s french fries or attempting to play tug-of-war with their forearms. I love my dogs very much, and I almost never forget to walk them or feed them. They are Very Good Dogs. But when I watch this border collie, I suddenly and deeply appreciate those old “My kid can beat up your honor student” bumper stickers. You adolescent Einsteins would be safe with my older fella, Hawkeye, who has never beaten up anything tougher than a tree branch. If your kids are smart enough to throw a tennis ball, Hawkeye will be their friend. He has border collie-like focus on anything thrown. He also has no desire to interact with strangers outside of this throwing-things arrangement, which means he and I understand each other. My younger dog, Ryzhik, on the other hand—he really COULD beat up your honor student. He would not do so out of academic inferiority. He would, however, do so out of sheer and boisterous friendliness, and a strong misconception about his own body mass. I am fairly helpless to prevent this ballistic playfulness; Ryzhik knows all his basic commands, but he knows them best in two languages I don’t speak: Russian, and English with a Russian accent. You see, his foster dad was from Russia. “I have been teaching him in English too, so that he is learning how to listen to you,” his foster dad explained to me. “Also, we have not been calling him by his name. We have been calling him Ryzhik. Is a cute nickname. You pronounce it well. But you are not needing to follow his name with saying ‘and squirrel.’” I have now spent the better part of two years perfecting my terrible Russian accent, the better to communicate with my dog. This does not help matters when Ryzhik is joyously beating up a schoolchild, though, or a grandma out for a walk—honor roll or not. So: to mend the sense of injustice I experience when I see the border collie intensely NOT gumming the skin off some elderly pedestrian, I took Ryzhik to a professional dog trainer. I anticipated learning some insightful hacks to create more effective two-way communication with my dog, which I could then use to tell him to sit down and get over here and drop that old lady RIGHT NOW YOUNG MAN and other useful things. Ryzhik is indeed very smart; I just needed him to learn to listen to me through my thick American accent, thus becoming not only a Very Good Boy but an immaculately well-behaved one too. Let him become someone else’s injustice—let them envy me and my dogs! Little did I know I would be the one getting trained. First up, I learned that I most definitely was not using enough treats in my daily life routine. I thought that a command well executed was its own reward, plus massive amounts of praise and physical affection. Nope! Turns out that I, like my dogs, need more than that. What my dogs want most are pellets of salmon and peanut butter the size of your typical pencil eraser. These are how I let my dogs know they are safe and loved. And after a successful training session, I give myself pieces of chocolate. This is how I know I am safe and loved. Second up, I learned that there was far more to my early childhood education than I ever suspected. One of my earliest school memories is showing up one day and being expected to conduct long division. But did you know I had multiple years of schooling leading up to that triumph? I did not! It must be true, though, because dog education is founded on the same principles. Whatever early schooling Ryzhik had, we’re starting fresh. Which is fine by Hawkeye—he gets treats simply for hanging out with us. He really likes training. As for fixing injustice? The biggest injustice is how little I’ve worked with Ryzhik up til now. But that’s all changing, and I will keep you posted on our progress. Just as soon as I get my arm back. Zach Hively
Fools Gold As a man with an advanced degree in English, I must say that few literary delights compare to building something tangible with my own two hands. Barring that, because in fairness I use English far more often than I use corded drills, very little compares to getting my dad to build things for me. With me! I mean WITH me. Father and son, drawing up plans, watching instructional YouTube videos, buying carloads of hardware from every home improvement store in the county then returning everything because the hardware they bought was the wrong size hardware—this is as American a pairing as playing catch in the yard. It’s even more American if one of them is playing catch by himself because the other one has a job and responsibilities and doesn’t have TIME to do this right now, Dad. But—I wanted a pergola. It would make me feel more retired, even though I’m not and (being an English major) probably never will be. So unless I can build a pergola out of a comparative analysis of magical realism in the collected works of Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, for which I would have to read a LOT more of both authors, I needed to suck it up and dedicate some of those endless working hours to helping my actually retired dad get excited about starting a new temp job, only for free. Because I sure can’t research all this lumber by myself. And boy, is there a lot to consider with lumber. Such as: why is a two-by-four actually a one-point-five-by-three-point-five, yet when they say it’s ten feet long it’s actually ten feet long? Did the definition of an inch shift since the invention of lumber, while feet stayed the same? Or is this, as I suspect, a dark conspiracy backed by Big Wood to nullify all my lumbering calculations? Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself. You see, before we even started with the lumber, we had to set the concrete. The cardboard forms for concrete pillars, as you may know, are round; bags of concrete, on the other hand, are not. This set up Pops and me for doing some math. It being a word problem, I felt qualified to help: “If a pillar is eight inches in diameter,” Pops began, “and we need to bury them thirty inches deep…” “Are these real inches or lumber inches?” I asked helpfully. “And, how many inches equal a pound of concrete?” Like a couple of smart fellas, we budgeted the entire first day of Project Pergola for buying concrete. This disappointed me somewhat; I had visions of pizza and margaritas under the pergola before sundown. But, Pops knows best that some things, like his son, take longer to reach fruition than you bargained for. Day Two, Pops called in to his one-day-a-week volunteer gig, and I had to find a decent bookmark for the novel I was reading, so that we could dedicate ourselves to mixing concrete. You don’t want to half-ass mixing concrete—not if you ever want to use your wheelbarrow as a wheelbarrow again. But you might want to half-ass mixing concrete, if you have any desire to move your body without hurting ever again. It turns out—despite suggestive adjectives to the contrary all over those bags of concrete—that concrete requires a great deal of force to mix. Strangely enough, this might have been the moment that Pops chose to disclose to me, in a moment of male bonding, that he had scheduled surgery for his hernia. “I can handle the hose,” Pops said. “And I can poke the air bubbles out of the concrete after it’s poured. But you get to mix.” So I did. I flexed every muscle in my body mixing concrete. And when those gave out, I flexed the muscles that aren’t actually muscles, like spotting an its when an it’s is needed, just in case they might help. They didn’t. But I mixed the snot out of that concrete, until Pops said, “Let’s call that good enough; we don’t want it to set before we pour it.” He handled smoothing that concrete and setting some brackets with a master’s touch, and I made sure his dialogue included semicolons correctly. And that was the end of Day Two. I’d like to say Day Three saw a pergola. Instead, it saw Pops drive home for some much-deserved R&R and a long session of researching bolt lengths. It saw me gazing proudly, for a great many hours, at the six concrete stumps sticking out of my back yard. Someday, I will have a pergola to enjoy. But even that cannot compare to the pride I feel today. It’s like I am standing taller. Which I am, if you measure in lumber inches. ~Zach Hively
Fool's Gold Look, I realize that vacation rentals—let’s just call them “Airbnbs” because that’s what they all are—are responsible for a great many of the world’s woes. These include housing shortages and jacked-up costs of living, gentrification, several Kardashians, the lion’s share of the endangered species list, and methamphetamines, probably. But they are still my preferred way to stay in a stranger’s home on vacation, when I actually go on vacation. In adulthood so far, this averages once each decade. Plus, they have kitchens. This is preferable to hotels, where I cannot even pretend that I will cook my own breakfast. Not using the included kitchen that I COULD use is just one Airbnb perk among many. I’d like, for your vicarious vacationing pleasure, to declare several other benefits—unlike the apples and the baggie of ham that we did not declare at customs on our way home. We brought them along for the flight after not eating them for breakfast for a week. Then I did not take them out of my backpack before customs because I was hungry, and also because I forgot. Speaking of hunger, let’s make you hungry for travel with these Many Benefits of Staying in an Airbnb. Ease of Access After a long day of international plane travel, all one wants is to lay one’s head on another person’s used pillow and fall asleep so fast that one cannot wonder for long about how foreign head lice differ from domestic ones. Such was our wish. We were in good spirits after traveling by car, plane, moving walkway, plane, bus, customs line, and bus to the one coastal town in Mexico that spring break hasn’t heard about. I was able to use our Airbnb hosts’ directions—and the knowledge that “a la izquierda” means either “to the right” or “to the left”—to guide our taxi right to the front gate. The taxi drove off, and I pulled up the Airbnb host’s instructions for easily and safely accessing our new home away from home. “The purple gate will appear to be locked,” the instructions read. “It is unlocked.” “It’s locked,” said my travel partner—let’s call her “Maggie” because that is her name. I, being a man, tried the lock myself. It was locked. I managed to message our Airbnb hosts. I’m not sure what I wanted them to do, seeing as they were at that moment in California or some other place that was not Mexico, but I hoped it would be something useful. They, however, did not reply in a timely fashion. So I did what any former middle school math student would do: I skipped to the next word problem—the keys to the house, reportedly left, securely, under a cloth on a table by the front door. Unfortunately, the front door and this purported table were inside the gate, which had not yet unlocked. The irony of a gringo jumping a wall to get into someplace in Mexico gave me the boost I needed to do so very quickly and discreetly. Maggie guarded the luggage because she is scarier than I am, while I fetched the key. This was challenging, considering there was no key. “There is no key,” I muttered through the gate. “No key?” Maggie said back. “No key,” I said. “Unless you can find it,” which, her being a woman, seemed likely. My whole life, women are finding things that don’t exist until I ask them to look. Maggie passed our backpacks over the gate and then jumped it herself to prove me wrong about the keys. But the keys did not materialize. I wrote our hosts again, as timestamped proof that we were not breaking and entering in case the authorities ever got involved. We made ourselves right at home on the rocking chairs on the patio and watched the sun set on the locked doors and welded-shut windows of this beautiful one-bedroom casa with well-tended garden and fully equipped kitchen. We laughed a little, we cried a little, and we got hungrier and hungrier, until I decided to jump the fence again and fetch us some food and possible camping supplies from the mercado on the corner. While I was away, the hosts responded that this situation was very unusual and they would try to get ahold of Juan the property manager. In the meantime, they suggested we dig for the possibility of a spare key buried in the corner of a flower bed opposite a radiant pink bougainvillea. We did not find the key, but we had corn chips, real Mexican corn chips, made with actual tortillas and not whatever comprises a Tostitos. And we had a bottle of tequila from the highest shelf in this little mercado, which I ordered using my best Spanish pronunciation of the label over and over until the clerk understood my accent from sheer repetition. We were prepared to hunker down for the night, mosquitos be damned, when Juan arrived with a hefty set of keys and a heftier set of apologies. “I thought today was yesterday!” he said many times. Now we move on to the next of many Airbnb benefits: You get to leave public reviews. Beautiful outdoor space. Through the window, the kitchen appears useful. Clear directions and very communicative hosts! I already can’t wait to go back. |
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