Ursula is fifty-four and has a son and some ex-husbands and lives alone in a pre-fab house on two acres of sun-baked scrub grass in eastern Tennessee. She chain smokes and has a prosthetic leg, the original she lost in a motorcycle accident. I met her two summers ago, the friend of a friend.
For a living, Ursula raises chickens, ducks and turkeys of various varieties and sells eggs, chicks and birds. Behind her house, she’s constructed a large fenced pen with coops scattered about inside. The work is rough, four-by-four posts, weathered two-by-fours and chipboard, chicken wire, nylon tarps, a torn shade tent with a splinted aluminum leg, sun-greyed barn wood, sagging and decrepit coops scavenged from failed farms, two aluminum enclosed trailers with shelves of nests and flat tires, plastic sheeting, ropes, straps, wire and whatever other materials came to hand. A red and white “Yield” sign is mounted on top of one of the fence posts, an odd juxtaposition.
Her birds and dogs follow her around the yard as she does her chores. When she sits to rest and smoke, they tussle to sit on her lap. She has conversations and lectures them, “Bernie, leave her alone. You know better than that. Oh Abner, stop it. Come here buddy.” Bunny, the one-legged chicken that was living in her living room when I was there last has died. Ursula celebrates the joys of birth and life and grieves and prays over their loss; she misses them, her animals that have died, and talks about them but doesn’t seem to mourn them. It’s farm life.
Predators, raccoons, foxes, rats, raptors, and neighbor dogs, are a constant menace. The neighbor’s pit bull broke into her yard and went after her birds and she shot it in the face with her air rifle to drive it off. The dog’s fine and hasn’t been back. She trapped a raccoon that was stealing eggs and chicks. The trap was a live-trap, I watched as she shot the raccoon dead with the pellet gun as it snarled at her through the wire cage. She threw the carcass into the woods behind her fenced yard. She has three small dogs, the black one, Sportster, kills rats.
She has a Harley, the one she was riding when she lost her leg was totaled and she bought another one. She doesn’t ride it much and she’s been trying to sell it but that would make her a biker without a bike and she’s priced it accordingly. Her daily driver is a faded-black, rattle-bang Ram pickup, the black plastic dashboard broken and sagging from the Tennessee sun, the cab and the bed littered with poultry farm material, equipment and bits. Money is tight and she works several days a week as a home health aide for her neighbor, Mr. Glenn, he’s 95; Mrs. Glenn died a year ago. He pays her cash. Ursula texted me after I left, “I took a fantastic nap after you left and then when I got to Mr. Glenn’s house, I made chocolate chip cookies and then a good supper and now I am headed to get minnows for the ducks.”
On the grass just outside the fence gate, she has a weathered coffee table and two chairs. We leaned back in the chairs and rested our legs on the table as the sun set and the evening cooled the air around us and we passed a joint of Michigan Lemon Bar and drank Coors Light. She’d left the gate open and the birds pecked at the grass around our feet and the dogs jumped onto the table and squirmed into our laps and the angel moths flitted about. As birds came close, she picked them up and cuddled them and talked about their personalities and then about their genetic makeup, what was good and what was bad and how best to interbreed to encourage the good. She used the multisyllabic language of science, like she knew what she was talking about.
After a while, I asked her, “Is this really sustainable?” And waved my arm at her creation around us.
Bird farming starts early and ends late and demands a lot of chasing, stooping and lugging. She got a new leg this spring, it has suspension and a greater range of ankle motion than the old one and it’s easier on her body. But it’s a prosthetic leg all the same; ulcers, pressure sores, blisters, prosthetics are uncomfortable and need constant care. At the end of the day, she’s tired and sore. She’s talking about veterinary school. The University of Tennessee has a program. It would take her eight years to get her degree. She’s thinking about it. She wants to work with farm animals. She’s worried that she’s bad at math.
She didn’t hesitate to answer my question, “No, not sustainable. I’ve been doing this for four years, I’m tired.”
Ursula wasn’t raised country, she was a Navy brat, she grew up and went to high school on the Naval Weapon Station in Charleston, South Carolina. Her father was career Navy, a submarine man. She worked for twenty years in banking and commercial real estate in Chicago. She has most of a bachelors degree. Her last husband beat her. I asked her what she thought of Harris. “I’m not voting for her,” she said, she said it fast so the words were a blur of syllables, like she was pouncing, like she’d been ready for my question to poke out of its nest. And then she said, “Let’s not talk about politics.”
I owned a construction company. We worked all over the country for commercial and federal government clients. Titus worked for me as a job superintendent and project manager for a number of years then left to work in the North Dakota fracking fields. They paid him more than I could afford.
Titus lasted a year in the oil business. The wife and two boys in the Twin Cities, the thirteen-hundred mile weekend home visits, the man camps, the disintegrating asphalt, the trucker-bomb litter, the crime, the drugs, the alcohol, the simmering violence (he carried a .40 caliber automatic under the seat of his pickup) were hard on the marriage. Tiffany wanted to live in Kentucky. The North Dakota money was good, they moved to Stanton. That was ten years ago.
My ride took me through Stanton. The last two years have been tough for Titus; Tiffany had a mass removed from her brain, a surgery that required the removal of much of her skull, and had both knees replaced. Her recovery has been slow and painful. The boys, Tristan and Jeremiah, are married and gone and Titus has had to manage her care alone. When I met Tiffany again yesterday, she was chatty and sweeping the stairs and laughed at my jokes.
At his house, Titus showed me one of his rifles, a Masterpiece Arms .338 Lapua Magnum with a Defiance action and Trigger Tech Diamond set at 1 pound with a Valdada Recon G2 optic 4.8-30x56mm scope. He put it on its bipod on the dining room table and after we pulled the bolt and checked the chamber, we took turns sitting on a dining room chair and squinting through the scope through the open front door at the fine lines of the reticle and the blurry green foliage beyond and squeezing off a click against that 1 pound trigger pull. He hits targets at 1650 feet with that rifle. That’s a third of a mile.
Then he showed me his Daniel’s Defense M4A1 SOCOM 14.5 in 5.56mm. He had targets set up in the woods behind his house, and after we shooed the dogs away, we each took a few shots. I hadn’t fired a rifle of that sort since, hmmmm, 1977? (We didn’t have laser sights in those days, either. Just sayin’.) When we got in the truck to leave, he shoved the M4 under the cushion of the rear passenger seat, so we had it with us.
Titus drives his Tacoma pickup on the tiny, hyper-curvy, up-and-down, no-shoulder, no lane marking, heavily treed, occasionally trafficked, can’t-see-shit Kentucky roads with a maniacal glee and no seatbelt, the seatbelt alarm taking many miles to stop beeping and restarting at every stop sign (the red warning light on the dash never goes off). After a while, he asked if I was motion sick.
We drove to Natural Bridge State Park and hiked to the top of the natural bridge. It’s a steep climb and we took our time. As we paused to catch our breath, Titus for no reason asked me who I thought would win the election. I said, “Harris.” He said, “I don’t usually vote that way.” He likes Walz, he’s not comfortable with Harris. I said, “We need responsible government.” He sighed and shook his head and we didn’t talk about politics anymore.
We stopped at a Mexican restaurant on the way back to my motel. We both ordered carne asada tacos and no alcohol and when the food arrived, he asked if he could say a blessing.
I stayed the night at the Quality Inn in Jeffersonville, Ohio and ate dinner at Wendy’s, the only walkable restaurant from the motel. I had a “Dave’s Double” cheeseburger, fries and a Coke; should have had Dave’s Single but I was tired and hungry and making poor choices. I ate the whole damn thing.
I spent the weekend celebrating my cousin Betsy’s wedding to long-time beau John at Pine Lake Trout Farm (just outside Cleveland). Eighty hilly acres of towering deciduous forest with five 1940s pine-paneled cabins nestled about. A stream that here and there widens into fishing ponds runs through it. I had Cabin Four; a queen-size bed, a screen porch and a wooden rocking chair.
The ceremony was held before a hundred people seated on white folding chairs on a lawn in a sunlit clearing next to a trout pond at a balmy noon-hour. The minister had a ponytail and wore frock coat. His sermon was short, secular and included a Carl Sagan quote. He made no speculation on a higher authority.
At the reception, the chicken cacciatore, eggplant parmesan and risotto were all wedding-grade fine. The pies, blueberry and cherry, were made by a fellow guest. I didn’t meet the baker, but her/his crusts had that delicate, flaky mouthfeel that makes good pie crust so wonderful and all other pie crusts so disappointing. The fillings were the perfect marriage of sweet and tart. As a long-time pie-maker, I recognize the artistry. Compliments.
For the evening, the party moved to John-the-groom’s house where he had two aluminum canoes sitting on hay bales filled to the gunnels with plastic tubs of pulled pork, jerked chicken and noodle salad. As it got dark, John lit the twenty-five foot tall bonfire he’d spent the previous day constructing (photo courtesy my aunt Signe). The embers blown vertically into the night sky became a silent fireworks display and the warmth and light wrapped around us.
The next morning, we had brunch at Betsy’s house. I took my cousin Molly’s son Will aside and had that conversation. He’d been ROTC in college and hadn’t been selected. He’s twenty-three with a masters degree in economics and working as a roofer. I encouraged him to reconsider the military, to simply enlist and if he wanted to be an officer, to go to OCS (Officer Candidate School) as an enlisted soldier. The military is a formative experience; you learn a lot about people, you learn a lot about life. You learn a lot about yourself.
Before I left, Muskegon yesterday, I bought some pot at Highway Dispo. Large, open retail space with shiny floors, they offer Flower, Pre-Rolls, Vaporizers, Concentrates, Edibles and Tinctures (I learned to smoke Mexican pot in the sixties, I have no idea what half those things are). Andy, my sales associate, mid-twenties, clean cut, knowledgeable about his product, encouraged me to buy the Lemon Bar flower. And when I agreed, he stopped talking about pot and talked about how much he liked my governor (Walz, in case you didn’t know that).
Last night, I stayed at the Star Motel in Milan (Michigan) and had dinner at the Milan Coney Cafe. The sign on the front window declared it “The Best Food In The Galaxy.” The white board above the cash register advertised the special for the evening, “Fried bologna Sand w/ Fries or Soup $9.99.” I had the fried chicken. I’m not sure about the “Best In The Galaxy” claim.
The Star Motel is one of those privately-owned brick motels built in the sixties with tired carpet, frayed towels and a clogged bathroom sink. I checked in at three in the afternoon, the owner was in his seventies and came to the window in his pajamas and gave me a long course in how to work the TV remote including which of the clearly labeled buttons did what. Then he lost my drivers license and argued that he didn’t lose it and then found it in the copier and somehow it was still my fault. The room was $65.00.
Larry was my neighbor at the Star Motel. He was gone when I got up at six. He was born in Alabama and travels the country working on high-voltage power lines. Bald, beer-gut, worn and wrinkled complexion, he smoked a cigarette and leaned on his twenty-year old Tahoe while we talked construction. He said he no longer works at heights, that the high work is “a young man’s game,” that he’s fifty and wants to retire in five years and wander the country on a motorcycle “like you.” There’s a lot of lonely guys living in these old motels.
This morning, I’m on the Lake Express ferry going from Milwaukee to Muskegon, the Harley Davidson’s strapped down on the car deck below. I’m riding to a trout farm in Cleveland for my cousin Betsy and her beau John’s wedding. The extended, the sibs, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, cousins, spouses and hangers on, will be there. This will be the biggest Banks family event in years, we’re going to have a blast and the gossip’s going to be great. And enough of us will drink enough to make the memories memorable.
From the fish farm, I’ll ride south to Stanton, Kentucky to visit Titus, a friend and former job superintendent and project manager (he quit my company and moved to Kentucky, I hated losing him), then to Niota, Tennessee to visit Ursula, a beer-drinking, pot-smoking, bird-farming, god-fearing, Trump-supporting, one-legged, Harley-riding friend, and then on to Pensacola to visit Colonel Sawyer, my former commanding officer from the Army, now retired (he was a captain in my day). I admired him enormously.
From Pensacola, I’m riding to Louisiana to try to get a fingernail under Cajun culture and peel it back. I had a Cajun friend in the Army. Bobby grew up in the bayou and swore in French. I’ve long since lost track of him, but he told wonderful stories, bragged about the food, swore beautifully and I want to visit his culture. It’s swampy down there so I’m a little worried about the bike.
