Shelter
In the last days of my son’s life, he told me he was constructing a shelter in the forest.
You tell me that wealth will solve all our problems, but what it seems to be doing is creating people who hate poor people.
Private property sits on physical land. If you go down far enough, you’ll hit water, gravel, more rock, magma, the molten core.
This is not a poem.
This morning in bed while I drank coffee, I listened to an astrophysicist tell me that the same molecule that passed through my kidney because I drank a glass of water also passed through Genghis Khan’s kidney. Harriet Tubman’s kidney. Your kidney.
This is not a metaphor.
Yet, you continue to maintain that a small wooden fence makes us different. A small peg in the soil marking a coordinate around your private property separates me and you.
No one means to be cruel until they are. Someone’s garbage gets on your nerves. Someone’s dishevelled tarp gets on your nerves. Your nerves, according to the astrophysicist, must also be in some part my nerves.
I feel your tension: your desire for everything to be good and nice. Your nice version of the world, built on a thin crust of soil, over top eons of time, protected by a cute wooden fence.
A broken plastic chair, a blue tarpaulin, a bicycle with no seat.
I never got to see my son’s fort in the dappled shade of the forest. But I imagine him tying rope to trees, spreading tarps in the summer heat. Stopping to flick a lighter to a glass pipe, energy to continue his task of creating shelter.
In the early days of this country, people took what land they wanted, set up shanties and lean-to’s; built paddocks and barns; estates and manors.
This is not a story.
Fences divide us, but science tells us that we are not only similar, we are the same.
The drug my son ingested, it flows through me to you by some magical measure only scientists can describe.
Smoke rising up through the leaves and into the stratosphere. Tolerance slipping through the leaves and onto the forest floor.
No, not only scientists. Chiefs, rabbis, imams, holy men and women. Our great, great-grandmothers, suspending a rope between two fir trees on the edge of a cut-block, drying laundry in the summer sun.
Hello woman stringing laundry between two trees. Hello Aubrey. Hello this eternal and shared action of erecting shelter, wind blinds, blinds. Where in the dappled light we make our selves and land something we remember. I wish you could find this fort--in some ways not, though. Because although it is a record of his wish and his choice, it would still be sad.
Exquisitely written. And true.