I’m doing that thing where you stand in the shower in the steam and stare down the drain like it’s a cave whose bottom is deep and black and you’re about to jump. It’s my second shower of the day and probably the second out of three. I keep going outside and keep reapplying sunscreen every time I do and the only sunscreen in our house is this thick schmear of dry minerals that covers you hot white. It’s impossible to remove and about as comfortable as toothpaste.
It’s advertised to last in sweat and water.
I’ve been waking up with a puffy face lately, hot as a fever, and sometimes rashy, but I can’t seem to blame the sunscreen or remove it from the house. It’s not the product that’s to blame, of course, it’s my skin. Sensitive skin is written on the bottle! Is there one out there for stubborn skin?
You gotta sweat this stuff loose before you rinse it off hot. That’s what I’m doing. Smart to have an ice pack handy when you’re done. One of the greatest feelings you’ll have in this your short time on Earth is that of dabbing cold onto your forehead and cheeks and over your eyelids to change the temperature of your window to the soul. Second only to cool shade on a morning motorcycle ride.
Back on the farm
Temperature on a motorcycle is different from the temperature in your car. Obviously. At five, five-thirty a.m. it’s tolerable on the hills and in the sunshine and cold as hell in the dips in the road and the shade, where God won’t even ride with you at that hour.
I haven’t been on a motorcycle in a decade, I think.
On my rides into work back in Montana, in my half-wrecked Honda Civic, I could never tell what temperature it was, not even when I stuck my arm out the window, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it, how I was about to feel in it.
I was also thinking my face looks kind of great in the rearview in this early light, probably better than ever. This time of day my usually gaunt cheeks seem to be puffed just right, I’m thinking, from just the right amount of alcohol the night before.
A lot.
There’s a blue in my eyes, too, unnatural, like Mediterranean waters blue and eastern U.S. fireflies glowing. Maybe the best I’ve ever looked, I’m thinking, here in this rearview, and from doing what? Drinking till I die every night and getting four hours of sleep and working twelve hours a day in the sun?
I wish someone could see me.
I’m killing myself from this life I lead and I look great from it and no one can see me.
Dykstra’s
In the russet field by Dykstra’s I’m still thinking about this because no one’s seen me in any light other than a bar’s half-light or a streetlamp or cigarette lighter or maybe the moon. No one knows my eyes are blue. Like no one knows my bedsheets smell like sunscreen.
The field by Dykstra’s is long, too long for wheel lines. What we have going on to cover it is two long wheel lines with a hose between them. It’s a pain to move and a pain to watch pressurize given all that can go wrong and all the parts that can blow. Blowing’s not what I’m worried about today, though.
There was a gopher–actually we determined three or four or more gophers–trapped in this wheel line assemblage a couple days ago when the lines weren’t running and these lines are too hot to touch this time of year by ten a.m. daily unless there’s ditchwater in them, so the gophers were cooked to death in there by the time we wanted to run the lines again.
Wasn’t there an exit at the entrance they could get out? No, we’d attached everything one day before in lieu of firing up the lines easy when the time came. Even so, even if we hadn’t, the line as a whole runs more than an eighth of a mile, so even if there was no hose closing up the one end out or the middle they probably would’ve been baked delirious on their way to daylight, anyway, and their feet would have been on fire, think walking barefoot on pavement with no sidewalk in sight, and their hair would singe some when they stumbled and their noses and lips would sear and they’d succumb to the heat finally and lay down frying until their brains were melted butter enough to endure the heat while they died and hopefully that was pleasant, I’m thinking, their brains being mush. You hate to think of them suffering.
We had to radio the whole crew out to Dykstra’s when we finally fired up the line because all the cooked gopher guts were plugging up the sprinkler tips, something like forty-plus heads needed to be taken off and cleaned out and you can only do that with water running and that water is warm as vomit for five or ten minutes because it’s been stewing in the mainline for thirty-six hours and plus it’s got this whole hot aluminum straw to flow down, and we were cleaning the guts and fur out of the pipe and heads and risers and we’re taking it all apart with the warm dead water spraying all over our arms and faces and some of the guys were wearing their Carhartt jackets even though it was ninety out there in the field by that time already, but they didn’t want guts running down their chests. It’s hard to keep the spray out of your mouth, too, that’s the part that kills you, and even worse, you have to blow through the tips and heads sometimes to clear the guts and bone completely.
It was an hour before we’d finished and got the line running and we couldn’t have got it all, all the gophers, and days later I’m probably still in for a gross surprise. Turning the water off and rolling the lines and turning the water on again is just going to stir up more, and more. I’m no longer thinking about how good I look.
Narcissus stared into a pool, not a sprinkler.
The rearview mirror is long gone.
On the way back to the farm my shirt is wet but I got no water in my waders. The sun is in the dead treetops and the eagles’ nests over the river and I can tell it’s going to be a hot one again. It may not surprise you there are a lot of animals who get trapped in irrigation pipes. Fox pups, skunks, raccoons, snakes. Snakes can really tie you up all morning, and skunk obviously.
todd of tacoma 