The Trail Of The Eagle

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The dreams I had last night were of happier times with my ex-wives. We laughed and giggled and acted like the world was a bowl of cherries. I knew when I woke up my dreams did not speak the truth of what happened, but some of it came close.

One of the happiest times between my second wife and me happened when we drove from Reno, Nevada to California. We drove along the Trinity River where we climbed a small mountain, and then took our clothes off and ran down the hill screaming for joy. The oldest daughter of that marriage wrote an e-mail to tell me my former wife has now bought a home very near to where that happened.

The temperature outside is presently 68° (20° C), and its supposed to reach up into the low eighties. Not a cloud in the sky. Ah... Spring. Outside my upstairs door that leads out on to the second floor deck the male bumblebees are buzzing around protecting a territory to attract females to bore holes in the wooden sides of my house to lay their eggs.

In the distant I hear the low hum of the maintenance room noises over at the Wal-Mart SuperCenter. It's about two miles away. After the whole county not having electric power for three days it's kind of comforting to know the power is back on. The updates on when they would get it back up said that it would be three more days before they could get it working again, but suddenly, yesterday, it came back on.

It's true that when I was a little boy there wasn't much electricity around. There was none in the town in Mississippi where I was born. They only had kerosene lamps and candles to see by. When my family moved to North Carolina the house we rented did have electric light bulbs, but that was all. There were no electrical appliances.

We didn't even have an ice box for refrigerating things until we moved to the next small town where there was an ice-making plant close by enough to deliver it. We didn't get a refrigerator or a clothes washing machine until the next town we moved to. This town. I watch the women of the third-country worlds on TV still washing clothes by hand and have a deeper understanding of the physical toil involved.

I have a two-inch scar on my right foot from using a hatchet to cut kindling wood for my mother's wood cooking stove. The hatchet hit the hard pine lightard wood at the wrong angle and it glanced over and struck the top of my foot. I was around nine or ten years old. There was blood everywhere. I thought I was dying.

People all over the world still do without the advantages of electric power and the tools it provides. They probably don't know by experience what a difference it makes to be able to wash their clothes while they're doing something else. They know maybe from watching television where they have such a thing, but not from experience. Maybe the development of solar and wind power will make at least some of these things available where they can't afford power plants.

The welding school I went to in order to learn how to do that put me into a world I didn't understand before then. I didn't know through experience how power plants got there. When I learned to weld pipe many of the job sites I worked at were building power plants. That was an education. So was all the oil refineries and chemical and pharmaceutical plants I helped build.

If I had followed my father's ambitions for me I would have ended up teaching school in some building somewhere, and never known the way that world works. I probably wouldn't have known the kind of people who build the large industrial plants around the world, because most of them, except for the engineers and administrators didn't have much formal education. They didn't need it. Why bother?

I believer that if I had learned to weld in my teens and went to work as a welder as soon as possible I might have led a happier life. I learned most of the technical stuff I keen through working with my hands. As it happened, I graduated from high school and went to college off and on for years and years without getting a degree.

I didn't want a degree, and seemed to have deliberately avoided getting one. Getting a formal education seemed anticlimactic to me. It's like putting life off for as long as possible and merely becoming a consumer and a dupe for the military/industrial complex. That's probably not true for everybody, but it seemed like that's how it would have been for me.

It seemed impossible for me to acclimate to the notion of being some woman's husband for my entire life. I guess being raised around farm animals had a lot to do with my attitude. In that world the males are fairly expendable. All they're good for is breeding. To me that was a good thing. Breeding was the only reason I felt the need to be around women. Otherwise, I just wanted to wander and see the world.

What I craved for was to be a charismatic. I wanted to possess or be possessed by the talent for drawing people to me when I wanted them there, and the ability to walk away from them when the thrill was gone.

That is the way I actually did live, but as I got older I didn't even want that. There are still people who want me to revert to my old snake oil ways. They love a parade. They thought they hung around me just to watch the rubes fall into my power. They were the biggest rubes of all. My ambition is to leave the trail of an eagle as it flies through the air. Here today, gone tomorrow.

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