Trailer

we bought one

We bought a trailer. We wanted to buy a truck, but because we’re carrying insurance on multiple female teen drivers and their cars, we have waxed poor (grown impecunious), and cannot afford a truck. So we found a real piece of shit trailer and bought that instead and we are now as happy as depression-era dirt farmers and pile our trailer high with our sad belongings and haul them to remote locations and try to back the trailer up in the middle of the night on the edge of a road which staggers along the edge of a thirty foot cliff. Sometimes we sit in the trailer (careful to avoid the abundant jagged rusty metal) and dream of the many things we can now move immediately to the dump instead of heaping them beside the house until we work up the courage to ask someone who owns a truck if we can borrow their truck. Working up such courage can take as long as eight months. You wouldn’t believe the number of vermin that can take up residence in a pile of refuse in a short eight months.

We exhausted the pile of decaying bicycles and bicycle racks and cardboard and old garden hoses, but the blood was up. Why spend the money on the trailer and then not use it pretty much every day to haul something? We now thought of taking anything anywhere in the shitty trailer as a way of amortizing the outlay of funds invested in the shitty trailer.

So I stalked the backyard looking for trees and shrubs that could become a beautiful pile of chaotic trash loosely contained in our unlicensed utility trailer. I took a chainsaw to perfectly healthy trees, dragged the groggy flora within spitting distance of the trailer, and dismembered them.

I don’t use a chainsaw much. I have a certain attraction/repulsion attitude towards objects like chainsaws. I am not altogether clumsy. My wife is constantly impressed by the coordination of my embarrassing body. But I can easily become consumed by intent, which blinds me to physical reality and its obstacles. If I want to cook a bratwurst bad enough, I could easily lose track of my body’s relationship to the kitchen island and the metal stools that surround it. I may lurch into the butcher block island, bruise my hip, rebound towards a metal stool and become complexly encumbered by it, entangled in such a way that I end up flailing with my head in the recycling bucket. The desire for bratwurst is the root of all kinds of injury.

But as I used the chainsaw to take apart various perfectly good trees, my only intent was to not injure my fingers or hands. I am solidly in my forties, so I probably have almost ten years of life left to live. I play guitar well enough, and if I think about forfeiting my guitar playing due to finger loss sustained while doing menial yard work, it just doesn’t seem worth the trade-off. I have nearly ten years in which I might perfect (or at least improve) my execution of a first position F barre chord. Therefore, the only thing I’m thinking as I’m using the chainsaw is, “Focus on not doing anything that will result in significant damage to a hand or finger.”

So that I will take the peril seriously, I concentrate deeply on the outcomes of losing a finger. I imagine one of my favorite fingers from my left hand lying on the ground, the stump a red circle with a white bone circle in the middle, the blood geysering with the rhythm of my heartbeat. I imagine putting the finger on ice and negotiating with a daughter to drive me to the hospital in her fully insured vehicle. I consider the long rehabilitation, which gets me to the point where my finger is basically a jointed piece of hard wood, numb and slow. It does not dart, it does not flick. It only moves. I then see myself sitting in my shop, which contains guitars, guitar amps, guitar pedals, and feeling the horror of these things staring back at me as though they cannot recognize me. I can’t help but feel they have betrayed me. These objects have the dark look of friends (met by chance in a bar) who have decided my pursuit of the truth (articulated in a long Facebook post) about vaccines has forfeited our heretofore meaningful relationship. I imagine a growing rage at seeing ten fingered street performing guitarists. I imagine accosting a singer-songwriter in a coffee shop and tearing off one of his dreadlocks. I imagine myself nearly fifty-five years old, on my deathbed, wishing I’d been careful.

And then my reverie ends when the chainsaw catches a whip-thin wand from the branch I’m cutting and yanks my pinky finger into its teeth. I immediately release the trigger on the saw, but it’s already got me. I drop the chainsaw and press my injured finger into my opposite hand. Blood drips down my palm and I don’t really want to look at what I’ve done to myself. Then I do, and it’s a substantial wound, the flap of skin and flesh in a crescent, hanging like a large scale from a snake.

The whole damn point was to avoid this. But my intention of making the consequences real overwhelmed reality for me. Very dumb. I get the bleeding stopped and try the finger. No mobility issues. Exclusively due to luck. A warning shot from God.