Shelter from the Machine by Jason G. Strange

Author:Jason G. Strange [Strange, Jason G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252084898
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2020-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

7 Hard Living

It’s early November, and unseasonably warm. Indian summer lingers. Gathered around the dying embers of last night’s campfire, Boyd Garrett and three companions sprawl in lawn chairs under a shady oak beside his trailer. A Sunday morning breeze stirs the ash, twirling little gray vortices into the air. Boyd keeps a half-acre of open grass around his trailer, but it’s just a clearing surrounded by forest. The leaves swish like rushing surf, but not for long—the trees are aflame with a thousand scarlets and ochres of autumn. Their limbs will soon stand naked and stark in a frozen sky.

The men trade insults and tall tales, reckonings and insights, puns and punch lines. Their masculine banter is like that on the local factory floors and construction sites, with a similar style and range—witty, quick-moving, and seldom straying far from women and sex. Among other things, they discuss homosexuality and religion and race, three points of divergence between country and bohemian homesteaders. They passed the morn pitching horseshoes—spinning the iron crescents toward the posts with expert ease—but the day has grown hot and the beer has grown cold. Boyd, Delia Howell’s older brother, holds court like a jolly pirate captain, with an unruly golden beard spilling across his thick neck and long hair drawn beneath a red bandana. A T-shirt stretched across his chest announces, in neon-yellow letters, “DICKIE-DO AWARD: my tummy sticks out farther than my DICKIE-DO.”

Boyd lives on a two-acre parcel just down the gravel road from Delia; you could almost throw one of the horseshoes from his front porch to hers. Some homesteads look like Virginia Webb’s, with a hand-sculpted cottage, ducks wandering among the marigolds, corn and beans and squash intertwining in verdant profusion. Some look like Nathan Hamilton’s, with a barn full of stables and horse tack, a soft-eyed Jersey cow grazing beside the root cellar, rows of potatoes measuring the valley floor. Boyd’s place looks like neither. The centerpiece is a rusty Elcona mobile home, baby-blue paint faded in the sun, parked in an island of patchy, slate-crusted crabgrass. A grid of concrete blocks pokes up like gray tombstones on the roof, holding down a sheet of black plastic to keep the rain from leaking through.

Nonetheless, Boyd’s land is, by any fair accounting, a homestead—a place created substantially through the labor of those who live there. Boyd didn’t build the Elcona, but he bought it used, towed it to the land, sat it upon a block foundation, and added two cedar-post porches, one on the front and one on the back. He and his brother, Willie Garrett, connected the electric lines and installed the septic system. After about a year, Boyd and a friend, Steve Lewis, built a tiny house on a corner of the property. It’s ten feet by eight, framed with two-by-fours and sided with free slab pine from the same Bear Lick sawmill where Ann Duncan bought her rafters. It’s just big enough for a sliding glass door in one wall

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