You Know Snorri
It’s like, you know, Snorri... Sturlson..., wrote the Younger Edda? Other Icelanders would go on vacation and return to pen, “B & B’s of the Hebrides– A Sailor’s Journey.” Snorri, he had to write, “VIKING! The Younger Edda!” Although his agent failed to convince him to call it, “Kerfuffel! One Viking’s Viewpoint,” she did get him to change his name on the dust jacket to Snorri from Schnorri. “After all,” she remonstrated, “it’s not just borrowing, is it?” But the point struggling to be made here is that, for Snorri, everything always had to be a saga.
We moved at the beginning of June, having cast our lot with a moonlight-manic wholesale crab-broker, who was only doing this sort of thing, he claimed, because he had always moved people and just didn’t know how to stop. It was a sort of boon to his clients, because he charged so little and worked himself to death, but what to do, he couldn’t help himself and he would understand if that appealed to our baser, more avaricious instincts. He didn’t hold grudges if people took advantage of him; we shouldn’t worry.
We didn’t...worry, that is. And if a handshake was good enough for him, no deposit even– after all, we were the ones holding the money, why wouldn’t a handshake be good enough for us? It was. It was! We were still shaking hands with ourselves after he left.
We did have some trouble selling our house. It was like an homely daughter–everyone compliments her; no one marries her. One sale evaporated because we would not agree to vacate and give possession ten days from the time the buyer first set eyes on our house, so that she might spend Christmas there with her children. So when the joh...er...the prospective buyer said that he wanted us to move out immediately upon completing the sale, we felt we should hustle up a house to move into and make that man happy. Although we are rather wealthy, it is in relationships–friends, family, children, grandchildren–rather than rhino, which closes deals in real estate; definitely, we needed the money from the sale of our house in order to buy another. Hence, we arrived one day in position to load up the moving vans, attend closing for the sale of our house and then make tracks hot-foot to settlement on our new house and meet the movers at the site of our new home by lunch.
The hard-shell/soft-shell, job-lot/odd-lot, go-on-take-a-little/why-not-take-a-lot-Swell! broker had come out a couple of times to see to the more delicate packing (the stuffed sail-fish I caught when I was twelve, heirloom tchatchkes, china, a Nepali wedding umbrella, the grandfather clock, bits, bobs and bangers of wall art, tea churns, an anvil and canoe). But he never seemed to bring enough packing materials or to allot time enough to get the job done. Like a fly on a sugar cube, rubbing his hands, he rejoiced strangely that our kitchen would give his lads valuable packing experience. We came to suspect that he had never had a job as large as ours before. Comments let drop suggested, rather, that his experience was in moving the contents of one city apartment to another. First he rented a truck from U-Haul and then another, then a van and two trailers. Well, we thought, so much the better–he’s underbid himself but we have him by the nadgers anyway: after all, he shook on it.
If we were up early, we had to blink at how early the All Jamaica Moving Team must have risen to be out in the burbs at that time. They had packed the first and largest truck the day before, loaded it like a cartridge. Surprisingly, the boss didn’t show. He was in New Jersey–even wholesale, crabs take some catching, we were given to understand. Jay, his stand-in, was a young man, but a good man, though–a fortunate concurrence; it was like being moved by Harry Bellefonte playing Superfly.
Our buyer showed up to run through the house prior to sale at just about the same moment that the big truck was discovered to be dead in the driveway. A lot of phone-calling ensued, mostly by me, as pressured Jamaican transmits less well over phone lines than it might. Finally, I simply told Jay he was free to use the telephone as much as he liked, just please remember to pack it before the trucks pulled away–we had to run off to settlement. “You have to learn to trust people in life,” is what we reassured each other, belting down narrow buggy roads which had been resurfaced for motor traffic with that queer-but-quotidian optimistic conservativism so common among township supervisors.
After the rush and bother of transferring money and titles on a hot day, a little solitude in our new house was actually going to be welcome. After an hour, except for the lack of anything formal to sit on, we were feeling pretty comfortable. After two hours, and still no truck, we were at ease, but alert for the sound of an engine. By mid afternoon, we were pacing luxuriously in the ample space which our furnishings would soon fill. By four, recriminations over having packed the phones could be cast aside because we heard the driveway fill with vehicles. But, it turned out, only the small truck with its trailer and the van had arrived. The large truck, they told us in lip-curling disgust, had broken down for the third and final time about ten miles away. What Jay and his boys unloaded turned out to be mostly the sort of useful idiocy to be found lurking in any garage when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of snow removal, lawn care, light carpentry and interior decoration. Jay let us know that he and the crew were going to be at the break-down bright and early. U-Haul had promised a tow-truck to deliver the hulk to our door. But they had brought the beds, so we went out to eat and slept the light and easy sleep of retirees. The next day I stubbed my toe and broke it, an incredibly painful thing for the size of the little toe. Who put that flight of steps there? It was never there before. Oh, wrong house. It went on in like manner, full of unsound fury, a toll tallied by an idiot, and a Snorri could have made a saga out of it, if we had one.
But the monsoon wore on and we began to develop psychic fuzz, what might be first roots on a transplanted soul. The unexplored area we had moved to, albeit in the southern part of the self-same county, has the je ne sais quois that only very humdrum souls could find as exotic as it appears, even yet, to us. For example, who could it be that supposes curious drivers must wonder, and so erects signs along the roads to inform them that they are entering the Chesapeake Bay watershed? The air is more moist and mild; wading birds are seen striding through the air–herons, large and small, two sorts of egret and, once, a lone ibis. Strange bushes stand about neighbors’ yards, undergrown by unknown weeds.
During the prosperous period recorded in the mythologies of Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald a good bit of Italian labor found place in the horse farms west of Philadelphia, places owned by socially registered names: Dupont, Phipps, Wannamaker, Strawbridge and Clothier. They brought with them their deplorable poverty, smelly eating habits, pious obedience to authority, cynical industry and obscure, peasant skills, for example: a knowledgeable enthusiasm for weeds to cook in the spring. They were given plenty of work and a modicum of pay, which they foolishly mistook for prosperity, and they were allowed to have all the horse manure they wanted. Given lemons, make lemonade. Today, the horse manure is not sufficient because the local mushroom industry is the world’s largest, while equine aristocracy fades. In actual matter of fact, American ingenuity (not quite as depraved as that which is on exhibit in European museums devoted to medieval implements of torture), has created an entire heavy industry for the manufacture and supply of artificial horse manure as a growing medium for the mushroom of commerce– chopped hay, grown especially for the purpose, grain, limestone, sphagnum moss... Their dump trucks, steaming under their neat bonnets, are to be encountered barreling down in the rear view mirror on the most winding and bucolic country lanes; they are modern diesel oxen, the ‘bu’ in modern Bucolia, which we moved here to partake of. But imagine– a substantial industry for the production of modern horse manure in greater, more dependable quantities than could ever be available to those still using the ancient horse-powered processing system. With what stunned wonder must underdeveloped nations look at us! Italian names pop up over the doors of businesses fragrant of money, which smells like growing mushrooms. And now, natural tropisms direct the children of fungi barons toward the light, leaving vacancies for those willing to be kept in the dark. While Italians put their names on doctors’ and dentists’ shingles, rock-group and political posters and build comfortable modern homes on three acres of lawn, Mexicans swarm intently into the dark of the mushroom houses, where they are given hope of better days to come and quantities of horse manure. The Mexican presence extends to shops, restaurants, services for the international transfer of funds and a desire to put up signs swearing, “Se Habla Español.” Here and there, it’s not even unexpected any more, Mexican salsa adds unconscious brass to the soundscape.
State route 41 is known as Gap-Newport Pike. A whole history leaps out of the name, with a little contemplation. Gap is a small town in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, now most notable for its enormous diner, which serves hearty portions of plain food to large people. The Amish are rarely overweight; in fact, they make a point bordering on vanity of their appetite for hard work. So it’s safe to assume the impressive diners are Mennonites...could be tourists, but there’s a lot of them. For its part, Newport is an unexplored (by us) harbor in Delaware, across from Wilmington, on the west side of Delaware Bay. How unexpected that there ever was a need for the two places to be connected, that a road would spring northwest-southeast out of the ground. But a little thought shows that, if you were Dutch farmers up-country, probably you could get a better price for your stuff at pier-head than you could have gotten by following the larger highways east into Philadelphia, where brokers waited thickly to insert themselves into the market. Big tobacco growers, were those Amish. And they never supposed it was good for you to smoke the stuff. Themselves, they never did touch it, except to raise it and sell it to others. A thousand dollars an acre, it used to bring, lifting mortgages like nothing else– better than growing ketchup for Campbell’s, over the bridge in Camden.
So, we find, the Amish have been making the run around the west end of greater Philadelphia (oxymoron alert!) for a long time and the arc of the circle brings them more prominently into the mix down here– a Germanic Anabaptist infiltrate of the Italo-Mexican overthrust on an eroded bed-rock of earth-Quaker Anglo-Welsh Episco-palio-Methodism, as it were.
We chose an absorbent afternoon for tooling the Subaru up route 10 through filling summer’s golden fields. Up above Reading I scored enough moss-like seedlings of deciduous azalea from an acquaintance in the Rhododendron Society, were each to survive to maturity, to restore the Holy Land. Pottering on back, we kept a sharp eye peeled for one certain Amish lad of whom we had taken note on our outward course, a Norman Rockwell cover-portrait of a boy, whose wheat-blond hair darkened the straw of his hat by contrast. He was main prop. of a folding table of sweet corn that we could tell at fifty miles an hour was more sh2ugary, fresher, more s(ugar)e(nhanced) than the soi dissant PA Dutch edible Americana of any other possible vendor of highway tchatchkes. So, I braked into the compact car, tops! space between table and road and Nancy jumped out to partake of nature’s bounty and the fruits of the land. I followed behind, but felt somehow like the donkey trying to join a team of plow horses. So I took up the bag of corn, to improve the moment by stowing it in the back seat, while the subtracting of a dozen ears from five dollars worked itself out.
...and I slammed my finger in the car door, trying to get it closed while removing myself and turning quickly as oncoming traffic on the road whooshed by. Such a thing has not happened to me for...well, it must be forty, fifty years, now..., not since I was a boy. No one noticed, not Nancy up in front of the car, settling up with the little tow-headed farmer-boy, not Nana, deaf to my bottled agony, in the back seat next to the ears of sweet corn on the floor beside her. It made me irrationally angry not to be noticed. I could have been dying, I thought, for all my kin by marriage knew. I walked around to lean away from traffic against the passenger side of the back of the car, squeezing my finger in hope that, somehow, pressure would ease pain, and hope was proving false. Nancy turned from the boy at the table and, seeing me leaning in what must have looked like ease against the fender, asked if I were ready to go. When I did not respond immediately, being curled up in body/mind cramp around my throbbing finger, she asked, “Are you alright?” It was too bloody much. It all flashed before my tightly squeezed eyes: first, they set up this damn table full of corn, as a sort of trap too close to the road, then they drive too fast and too close to the back of my vulnerably parked car, then I decide– gratuitously, mind, I didn’t have to do it– to speed things up by putting the lousy corn in the stinking car to save a few rotten seconds, which nobody asked me to do and nobody was going to appreciate anyway, then I go and smack my finger in the door like a child, which was probably a first, prominent sign of early-onset senility, just like George W. Bush, then nobody even notices that I am suffering, and then the pain is so ridiculously intense for the size of the damned injury, just like my still broken toe, and I haven’t even had the courage yet to look at it, supposing blood, a nail torn from its bed, a crushed finger-tip, with visions of the E.R., surgery, amputation, bandages, casts, slings, crutches and a wheel-chair pushed by Eleanor Roosevelt, work in the yard going undone, our new house falling farther and farther into chaos and disrepair as the unpacking piles up, my remorselessly sainted wife inevitably flinging herself into the gap to tussle to exhaustion with large boxes of poetry and scarcely budge-able furniture, while I would be going to sit uselessly on the sidelines, ludicrously incapacitated by toe and finger... It was too much!
“No, I’m not alright,” I burst out. “I smashed my goddamned finger in the door. You’re going to have to drive.” Eleven feet away, the eyes of the pure-hearted Amish lad sank in their sockets, as he blanched beneath his straw hat. That was too much, too. They shouldn’t leave these pure children out by the road side where they could be violated by the passing world’s necessary vulgarities. I couldn’t even get the car door open.
Everything has to be a saga.