11/18/97.. Shifting gears.

Annie's tractor grumbled to life just before daybreak this morning. She must have another load ready to go out. Listen careful and you can hear that diesel rattling in the icy air. At least I can. All the machine noise over the years has killed the high frequencies for me. Shoptools, unmuffled boat engines, shotgun blasts. I can't hear a phone tweetle.. which smoothes life out.. but crank up a road machine in the next county and I hear it in my bones.

After her old man died, Annie slowed down a little. She's a hard-muscled woman in her, what?, late sixties.. with a tongue of sandpaper. Fieldworker, sardine packer, Jane of all labors. Not one to sit still, or take any guff. She took in Chico when he was a state kid and raised him up good. Well.. he did get in trouble as a youngster, but who didn't smash a window or two? She sure showed him how to work, and having them living in this neighborhood reminds me how far you can come in this country, by pure sweat.

Annie lives in a trailer two houses up, and Chico's doublewide is two houses downhill from here. When we first moved in, Chico had a mob living in a little house. Grown kids, grandchildren, big garden out back. Said it was driving him crazy. One week, when they were all away somewhere, he chainsawed along the sills, hooked his truck to the building, and pulled it down. Hauled in a trailer, and evicted the whole lot. Now he's comfortably settled into a manufactured house, with the trailer attached, and a string of outbuildings. The kids still come and go. Annie has new yellow vinyl siding on her trailer.

Six-eight years ago Annie bought an over-the-road rig. Conventional tractor.. with the long snout. Hired a licensed and experienced driver, and took to the hiway. Russell is another wellworn elder, with an occluded face, who lives to drive. They seem to get plenty of practice. He and Annie are out of here most of the time. Running as far as Texas. Nebraska. Independent truckers, who play the telephone-dispatch game with a Maine broker.

Annie was doing well enough for a while to buy a second tractor, a cab-over with better accommodations, and she hired another driver to run it. Son of a bitch. A local truck jockey who cheated me out of $25 the first month I was here. Never did make good. He did her dirt, too, and one tractor or the other has been sitting idle ever since. This last year she hired someone to refit the conventional, put in new plumbing and bedding. Now she travels in style, and the cab-over is temporarily retired.

Annie broadened the shoulder across the road by inviting contractors to use it as a solid fill dump, and bulldozing it into the gully periodically... in the days before that was politically incorrect. A lot of this old house is now under her parking lot, and that conventional is hitched up to one of Sawyer's trailers over there, growling to be away.

She timed it just right, I'd say. They boogied in here last Thursday, and it snowed like Christmas all weekend. Our first, and a biggie. I felt pretty smug. Boat hauled and snug, wood in a pile, storms up, garden winterized. I'd even connected with some mulch hay that week, and banked the perennials. Moved the lawn furniture into the livingroom. I was as ready as you can be for the big white. Which is never ready enough. Temperatures that'll have us unzipping our coats in March have me hunched and shuddering in November, and the first real snow always comes as a surprise. I feel just like the cat facing snow on the step, struck dumb in the doorway.

No frost in the ground, so Chico's first run up the drive with his plow graded off the lumps and left a pile of gravel in the snowbank. I went out in the fluttering down and we talked barter. He's been collecting gemstones in riverbottoms all summer, and making necklaces out of Tiajuana Gold to string them on.

"You make a pretty good picture for an old fart," he gushed, talking about the prints I've got at Jeanine's. "Maybe we could do some trade?" A while back I traded making a gunstock for some snowplowing. That's how it goes.

It came down all weekend. I dug out the winter boots and hoofed around with a roll of slides loaded. Snapping candids for the art factory. Plowtrucks and sanders. Bob's boat covered in snow on the mooring. The sudden hardedgedness of buildings in the softening fluff. I spent much of yesterday concocting a work station upstairs, where I can sit in a sunny window, and paint from slides projected into a dark box. Actually conjured the first from-photo landscape. Felt like cheating.

Tell the truth, painting seems like cheating to me. At some level my real work is shaping wood into tangible images, and I've been avoiding that, Bigtime. Dabbled in the shop, but hurried out to paint when I felt the boogies rising. Fulfilling commissions under duress, but hiding in cyberspace when THE BIG QUESTIONS arise.

That's the problem, of course. When you find your true work in a creative medium, you pour everything into that bucket. Then it swims around waiting for you there. I can casually just draw, because it's just drawing.. but I can't just carve. There are too many fish to fry there. Where I used to be able to whip out a pocket carving to peddle on the street, or give as a symbolic gesture, it now becomes a major undertaking to wrench a handful of imagery out of the woodpile. I seem unable to carve the least form without going through the whole schtick. Angst, depression, self-loathing, irritation, anger, desperate thrashing, and then manic enthusiasm. Whew. It's disgusting.

It began with deer this time. Don't ask me why? I'll tell you anyway.

It's hunting season, of course, which makes the dogwalkers hug the roads, and stay home in the twilight. The wooden pieces which come now all seem to be of the time they happen in. And my inner eye sees deer as evening messengers from the mythos. Boundary creatures who move through our quantum space, but live in an alternate universe. A deer in your headlights is more than a brake-stomping hazard, it's a glimpse into the other. For me. That's why that Lascaux shaman still shivers us these eons later. And I can empathize with the local boys out stalking in the snow. There's a fundamental mystery snorting out there. That's the real quarry. So it's a twilight time.

This full moon has been rising way north of East, and has hung full for days. The tide has been up into the lowlands. The birds of passage have flown. And the doorway is ajar. To my shop, particularly, since that's the place I come to grips with the stuff hiding behind things.

I've got a longterm commission to do an earth-mysteries piece for a woman friend, and I've been staring at her pictures, doing sketches, encountering synchronistic elements, since Halloween. And there are deer dancing through the sketches . Whenever I go in and wrestle with myself in the dustorium, now, deer dancers come out to play. While it was snowing I carved a pair of them, pocket-sized. So it begins.

Primitive magic. I'll rub on these fetishes until the big critters come out of the woods. The deer are going into rut. Bucks tending their scrapes and the does lifting their tails. There's a decidedly erotic aspect to my dancers, now. Damned foolishness, of course, hobbling yourself with all this symbolic baggage. Especially when all anyone else will see in these deer is.. "aren't they cute?" A sensible man would just make a bunch of stuff he could sell, and flog it. Stay away from things that make your brain fog over. Drive a tractor-trailer.

We're shifting gears here, double-clutching like mad, and trying to keep this rig on the road. Welcome to winter.