Dawn Chorus

Being that it’s an airstream, the back end is curved almost exactly like a tilt-a-whirl. A couple days before she drove it home from Roanoke, I carry my sawzall up a ladder up into the limbs of one of the two huge crepe myrtles out front of the house and carve a hollow into the canopy so that when I back it in, jack and level it, it nestles almost perfectly underneath. It’s magnificent seventies era paint job is faded, with a patchwork of bondo. It’s name ARGOSY is printed across the nose. I feel like I should have something poignant to say about Jason and the Argonauts, but I don’t.

My high school buddy Matt who sold us this thing ripped out everything in the back half and retrofitted an exquisite perimeter of benches made from cherry plywood along with a platform in the way back which is where I sleep, going on a couple months now since she threw me out. 

I wake up with the birds, the dawn chorus, or sometimes it’s miles of train linking up not far away in the ACCA yard. I reckon the crepe myrtles were planted by the original owners back in ‘39, and even though this has been the coldest winter I can remember, it’s filled with enough birds every morning to sound a raucous cacophony heralding the new day.  

My sleeping bag is rated to -20 degrees and I’ve told everyone aware of the situation that if the temperature stays in the teens regularly, I’ll move back in the house. Thing is the snow on the roof, as well as outside, seems to insulate the camper. The snow at least has given me an advantage in the war against mud, being much easier to clean up at least.  I chose this over couch surfing because my tools are all here, as well as all my other shit, and I’ve got jobs to run. With the space heater, I’m able to keep it about 45 most nights. 

To make coffee, I have to turn off the space heater in order to run the antique hot plate my mother gave me that heats the espresso maker, so that i don’t trip the breaker via the cord that runs under the snow to the house. A tiny skillet on feet, it’s just big enough to cook a single hamburger. I usually turn on the hot plate, crawl back into my sleeping bag and wait for the gurgle of the moka pot. I watch the blue light filtering through the snow that's piled on the pill-shaped windows set into the curve of the roofline and listen to the birds.

I’ve swiveled the captain’s chair around so it faces the back and this is where I usually sit and wait for the sun to come up. Between this and my bedroom, I've ripped out a square of deep pile burgundy carpet, mud stained from the festivals my buddy drove it to and painted the plywood underneath with floor paint the color of a robin’s egg. The idea was she’d use this area as a tattoo studio, or maybe for homeschooling her kids. The bare ass floor is the coldest part, but it’s where I put my mat when I go to my online yoga class. Against the wall, under a bank of windows, I put a set of sawhorses, and a two foot rip of plywood, this is where my radio, the espresso machine and a 500 piece puzzle of a train in woods that I’m only halfway into. To my knowledge the camper never did have a kitchen or bathroom, the story goes it was custom made as a driving chapel, and later parked for good in a truck stop on 81, somewhere in east Tennessee. 

I urinate in a cat litter jug, and shit in a drywall bucket in the shed that holds my tools, so as not to wake anyone by coming inside. I don’t care what anyone says, I’m still taking care of this family.  

Don't get me wrong, it sucks, but to be quite honest, she did me a favor. I can breathe out here. Maybe for the first time in years. 

If my world has gotten smaller, it's also gotten a lot easier. Make it to work, come home, eat and do my yoga. Take care of myself. The basics. I tell myself I’m not a frozen ham in a can. I tell myself I’m free. 

I don’t usually head out for work until it gets above freezing, but seeing as I’m mostly just swinging a hammer for this job, I get dressed anyway. That way I’m not hanging around letting my mind devour itself. I usually layer up and then strip down as the day progresses, the sun rises, I get moving and warm up. But on this job, I’m in the lee of the house all day, in the shadow of what my client’s wife calls a mountain, but in my estimation is just a large hill. At any rate, there’s no stripping down, so all I have to figure out is my glove situation. Hanging siding all day, my left hand needs to have dexterity, mostly just for fishing nails out of my toolbelt. My hammer-hand, consigned to being the dumb one for this production, can essentially just wear a mitten. But I’ll get to all that in a moment. 

What I’m trying to say is if I can get out the door, make it to the job, get my body moving, I feel like I might make it. 

The job is in the East end, past the river, crawling out of the valleys and back into the hills, where hood fades into county and the roads begin to wind. My client is an artist and this is his studio. As the mountain had nearly reclaimed it, he got it for a song, the roof caved in, populated with saplings and drug addicts. He’s jacked and leveled it, installed windows and doors, but no bathroom yet. At one point he found a leftover pallet of cedar shingles on Craigslist and decided that would be the exterior treatment and so that’s what I’m doing out there.  At the base the shingles are almost an inch thick and came from Maine, apparently, designed for Nor'easters hammering the coast. 

I can tell you in all sincerity they’re magic. In the morning when I brush off the snow and peel the tarp off the palette, I feel an electric charge. Each morning I load up a wheelbarrow full and wheel them through yesterday's track in the snow. Approaching the area I’m installing them, or rather, when I approach the work, it gets a smile out of me, regardless of my mood. Occasionally, deep in the stack, I come across a perfect shingle, the figuring of the grain or whatever, yeah it smells nice, but that shit glows in the sun I tell you. I smuggle one home to put on the cracked dash of my camper where it can catch the sunlight. Swirling reds, pinks and magenta, trapped in the ghost-wavering of the grain. 

I’ve done plenty of siding, but never shingles. So, because it’s what I’ve been hired for, I go back through old issues of Fine Homebuilding and teach myself how to install this mess.  I build out a swale at the base, where the courses begin, so that it curves out over the foundation. My client wants the corners to overlap, instead of with corner boards, with the joints alternating each course like how they did it in the old days. This requires some mental gymnastics each course. Along with that I’m filling in between the windows he built and installed along the front, so the courses need to match up, which is no problem, but there’s a belly at the roof line where it got jacked out of true. Sighting down the line, it falls almost an inch and a half along the face and then back up again. I have no idea yet how I’m gonna address it. I tell myself I’ll figure it out when I get there. I always do. 

I’m about a third of the way through a box of nails before I finally give up on the siding nailer he’s bought for the job as it seems like every tenth nail jambs. The nails come in a coil, with two strands of wire joining each nail to the next. The coil sits in a cup and a small sled-like device advances the nails to the chamber where the piston drives them. I’ve taken it apart in my camper at night to try and fix it, I’ve smoothed every rough surface that might impede the flow, but nothing helps. My client brings me a different brand gun that’s the same thing right down to the iron casing that makes up the body. We argue about all this in the snow. I don’t walk off the job for some reason. I finally discover it’s the nails themselves, the parallel strands of wire, being a millimeter off, will never seat properly and will always jam. But these are the only nails available in town. 

So finally, I opt for nailing them up by hand, since I’ve got most of a box worth of nails left, and they drive just fine. I spend twenty minutes each morning clipping apart a hundred or so and filling my toolbelt. Standing quietly in whatever ray of morning light I can find, pliers in one hand and a coil in the other, it feels like a consecration.

Look I didn’t bring you all the way out here to talk about nail guns and snow. I need to tell you about YoYo Ma, and breathing. 

See, I’d started listening to classical again in the fall, Vivaldi and Bach, mostly, as my usual diet of thrash, grind, sludge and doom was just too much. No, that wasn’t it. I was working a job in Staunton when the summer heat broke at last, the mornings finally cool. I opened the front door to the job to let the brisk clean air in and let the music flow out and roll away down the hilly streets.  

I actually started out this job listening to the first REM album because the hill the house is set into looks just like it. Monstrous forms of trees overrun with vines and kudzu, dormant and gray, it reminds me of where I grew up in Georgia. But even REM got to be too much after a while, the nostalgia of it all, I guess. 

So because I can’t handle anything else, I download almost three hours of Yo Yo Ma playing Bach’s cello suites to listen to while I drive nails.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned about swinging a hammer all day, you have to make sure you keep breathing. Like my yoga instructor taught me- in all things, lead with the breath, so I do.

That’s the thing about yoga. It helps to remind me where my body is in space, which is useful knowledge to have if the objective is to keep from falling off a scaffold ten feet into frozen mud. Trying not to brace against the damp wind whipping around the corner of the house, the breath in my lungs pierces me. I remember my yoga instructor insisting that each breath is holy. She says it all the time. I mean, I hear what she’s saying, I just don’t know that I believe her. Is it the act of breathing that is holy or the breath itself? Or is the answer yes to both of these questions? We begin each practice with a guided meditation, which is where I consistently break down. If the body is a vessel like she says, then mine lies shattered on a hillside. 

The water in my cooler nearly freezes every night, cold enough to taste like something other than water, it’s an electric charge, it pierces me to my core.

At some point during the winter, I come across a musician named Colin Stetson. How can I describe the music this man creates? Avant garde doesn’t seem quite right. Primarily a saxophonist, he plays other brass instruments, bass clarinet, but it’s beyond music. Occasionally percussive, he uses circular breathing, called multiphonics, and some other tantric shit it seems. I’ve read that he evokes tones during live performances that occasionally cause people in the audience to get sick. I watch interviews with the man, mostly because I don’t know if I could trust a person that has such noises coming out of him. Impossibly muscled for a jazz musician, he wears a t-shirt and jokes about sweating through it all the time. He talks about the yoga he has to do to pull it off, both breathing into the instrument as well as singing, creating two different frequencies that overlap and wind into one another. I think about the physicality required of him to make his art, the same way I think about my own. It occurs to me that I’m actually terrified of my own body. That one day it won’t be able to get up and go do the work, and then what will I do?  

It takes a couple weeks before I realize what Colin Stetson sounds like to me. It is the sound of an injured animal, traveling an empty landscape, lost, searching for the “other,” long gone. The day I realize all this is the day I stop listening to the man. 

Which is how I got back to the cello suites. This is the part where I tell you something informative and poignant about Yo Yo Ma and his relationship with Bach, but I don’t have it. What gives me the right anyway? I have no idea how a cello or a fucking saxophone even works. Maybe I should stick to hammers and nails and ghetto houses overlooking flood plains next to unruly creeks that jump their banks. 

Look, it goes like this- at some point in the day, I find my flow, and for a minute I don’t feel like I’m falling apart and I realize my hammer is ringing, the sound of metal on metal, something clear and pure ringing in the woods, across the road, down to the creek, my hammer is ringing.  

And listening to Yo Yo Ma playing Bach, eternal Bach, I can see his face in my mind. You know his face as well as I do. It is the definition of radiant. He was made for this work. What does he feel in those moments? Is it anguish? Grace? Perhaps it is something that has no name. Joy with its face to the sun and sorrow in its heart.

One day I round the corner of the house and I’m in the sun again, putting together corners like I actually know what I’m doing.  I stop thinking about how many thousands of nails I have left to drive, just like I try not to dwell on the violence inherent in the act. I tell myself I’m not piercing this house a thousand times over, I’m giving it protection. The sun over the hill brings out colors in the sleeping woods, muted but not gone completely, purple, some orange. I notice that between the notes, I can hear Yo Yo Ma breathing, breathing hard because this is hard work, and I finally get what my yoga teacher has been saying all along. The breath is holy. And if the breath of Yo Yo Ma is holy, then perhaps my hammer is holy and if this is the case, then maybe everything will be okay. 

I make it to three thirty, which is all I can manage, and I head home, winding back through Fulton and Shockoe valley climbing Broad street then down the Leigh street hood pipeline. Or maybe I’ll slide along the canal, glutted with snow melt from Scottsville or Roanoke, before climbing the hills. I can’t deal with the freeway. I manage a smile and think about my night ahead in the camper, I’m living like a monk. Maybe I am a monk. 

I help with dinner, like always, and since it’s his birthday, her youngest is over. I sit through another uncomfortably silent dinner before adjourning to the Argosy.  I set up my coffee machine for the morning and before heading out, tell her I’m giving them space for cake and presents so that the kids might be more comfortable. 

I skip yoga. I make no phone calls, instead working on the puzzle and each tiny hit of dopamine whenever I fit a piece into place. A train in the woods, crossing a rusted iron bridge in the fall, it’s all rusted iron rivets, huge black pipes and pistons. Forest floor covered in oak leaves under the black webbing of naked canopy, stretched like lacework overhead. Even though it’s what’s best for everyone involved, I’m losing this family just like I lost my own. I tell myself I’m not just burning time until they leave. I might be lying.  

It’s started to rain, so I have to put on my rubber boots to go out into the night to pee. This will clear the snow, but I’ll have to start dealing with mud again. Passing a window to the dining room I see the little family, three kids and their mother, gathered around the table, talking. It’s bright and cheery, everyone is smiling. They’re having a good time and I’m happy for them. 

I have no idea how it happened, but I’ve found myself in the position of father here for some reason. I never asked for it, but I intend to see the job through to the end.

Back in my Captain’s chair, I remember a scene in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where the creature learns language by living outside a family’s cottage and watching them. Their mannerisms, listening to their talk. I tell myself I’m not hideous, nor exiled. I tell myself I don’t belong to anyone, anymore. I am free. 

This all happened two years ago. I can talk about it now without getting lost in it. They left not long after, in the spring. I moved back into the house and started cleaning. It took months. Some days I wasn’t able to do much else besides lay in the middle of the living room floor with my music and weep. I abandoned our bedroom for the room where the kids stayed. Not out of avoidance or bad memories, but because with windows facing both North and East, it’s always bright, no matter what time of day. In the winter, the sun through the window keeps the bed warm. 

Last week the birds woke me again, like usual, even though it was raining, and I found myself thinking about the Argosy. It’s still in Richmond, so I’ve heard, though I know not where. The thing is, I’m the only one who knows where to put the coffee can when it rains like this.. The leak will come where the arched ceiling panels join the side to the front, just next to the driver’s seat. The worn brown carpeting covering everything will continue to mildew, the plywood box underneath will rot and the two massive batteries it holds might get fried like before, but none of that is anything I have to worry about anymore. 

The birds are still raising hell outside, despite the rain, and I’m like, I get it, y’all, you made it through the night. So did I.