So Easily Swept Away

(1) As a boy, in the post-industrial days of Parsonage, Scotty used to love to run up and down The Green. That was after the first wave of manufacturing businesses moved away, and a little before long-distance commuters to the City started coming in. The hardwood of a community can pop loose where a nail slips in a deep freeze, yet still remain in place. Perhaps that is why small towns do not themselves go out of business. Today, the sense of what used to be here is both a blessing and a curse for the place. The time-worn homes and shops are a step back to an easier time for some, wrapped in a history several layers deep. They are a reminder of being a step behind the times for others. The young, like Scotty, mostly expect to move out, but often remain held by the very circles that kept them from being gobbled up, thieved away. They can feel trapped by the very same circles that other adults may spend a lifetime trying to re-create. The inner lining of circles is a smooth surface though, with no good hold when tumbling around. Especially when you find yourself at the tail-end of average. It is at the limits of the Bell Curve, where the line continues to press you into a wedge, making you a rounding error. Maybe it was the overbite Scotty had as a gangly boy. Maybe it was his awkwardness, his interest in cars, in learning the constellations, instead of learning to play baseball. Maybe he didn't open up as easily after his mother passed away in seventh grade. It is always easier to slide down a curved line than it is to try to wiggle your way back up it. So, with passions and ideas, with a laser-like focus on the things he liked and tone-deaf to everything else, he grew (as best one can) under the shaded area of the curve that lets the rest in the middle define what ‘standard deviation’ means. It is good to be an individual of course, not unlike a cow or sheep in the days of old, if you just stay within sight of the mean. If you are creative at the mathematical arts (or, if you ignore them altogether), and can pinch yourself past the outer point of that asymptotic end of the bell-curved line, where it forever almost meets the x-axis flat line, perhaps you can follow it toward some personal center point where another line goes nowhere but up. (Or straight down, be careful of that.) For those who want to know what the rarified air is like in the white space on the sheet above the bell-shaped line, there are at least as many coordinates that work above it as within it. These are what the others, inside the tinnitus ring of the Bell Curve, imagine must be the stars. To be free of convention without having to hate it. Free to imagine for the rest of us. Scotty isn't quite that. The low ceiling continues to define him. (2) Mary has her own panicked fears for her son, too. It comes from a very different context, but she imagines for Jarvi it is something not unlike her own - a helplessness. It is the jarring, leg-twitching moment of the nightmare, of a child always slipping away, no matter how loud you yell for them deep inside yourself. If she had the ability to read Jarvi's mind - that is, look within the swirling flashes that faintly illuminate through the murky grey matter - Mary could watch a vaguely familiar dream. It is one of a daughter, rolling on her bike ahead of him. He is calling to her. She looks back, she can hear him. But she will not answer. She only turns her head forward, rolling faster, the intersection not far ahead of them now. He is standing there unable to move in his frightened rage. (3) A rip in the earth. A tear in the fabric that so thinly binds us together. Along Bent Cross Road, many have either automatic generators piped to propane tanks, or they have portable gas generators. Their water is from their own wells. So, when everything goes down, they remain the same. Mostly, they live upon the sides, or tops even, of hills, and not in the shallows where the water collects. They are decidedly not in the places that become fetid when the warm mocking sun shows up after the deluge. In the basin, all water (and people) that is unable to grasp hold of any self-assuring space down the hillsides finds its own bottom. This is not because the water that tumbled into the Marsh District in Parsonage is fundamentally any different than any other molecule of water that is filtered through the same fine soil. Rather, it is only chance and circumstance that determines which water gets to reside in luscious trees and private wells, and which continues the tumble to where, at some point, all water is made level. (4) In the murky, virtual reality world of those in the resistance, there is no leader or committee or local chapters. It is just a cracked chorus of helpless voices, each like the monotonous radio ping of solitary weather buoys stationed throughout the North Atlantic. Each is a clarion for whatever are the conditions that surround them. None is individually capable of establishing a pattern in the circling currents that can leave us listless one day, and toss us in swells the next. In the exercise of sounding those hollow pings, each believes it can be a part of something bigger. Each must cling to the conception of a receptive network. One’s literal isolation must thus be a necessary burden for the larger pattern to become seen, fragmented and alone as each ping may feel.