Derwood and the Tornado

            Derwood and The Tornado

      Whenever it seemed outdoor art shows became repetitious and unprofitable I thought of Derwood. Derwood was fifth generation in Albion. He had worked his entire life in Chalmer’s water powered sawmill in small town Maine and when it closed after more than 120 years in business his life was set adrift. Derwood was somewhere between slow and retarded but he possessed the capacity to count the amount of board feet in lumber. In his epoch it had been required in school, to know how to figure how many board feet there were in a piece of wood. At the mill he was sometimes inundated by boards and planks coming off the saw yet he saw to it that each was marked with a number with a thick octagonal red crayon. All the while he kept the overall count in his head until he had a moment to physically mark that number on a peg board abacus thickly blackened with pine resin.

     Derwood was religious, sober, diligent, and honest. In Albion, Maine with its 1300 residents Derwood hobbled about awkwardly like a gnome over time becoming a fixture like an expected bloom of bluets,, however he had been rendered obsolete and was tossed upon the scrap heap of history. Too young yet for social security Derwood could be seen about the village doing odd jobs of a brutish nature, like digging post holes in the hard clay or even bailing out old septic tanks with a bucket.

     I recalled one Saturday winter morning leaving my house perched on Capitol Hill on cross country skis making for Fifteen Mile Stream. It was a frigid winter morning and there was a shallow lake of ice fog suspended above the snow. Ice fog is made up of suspended ice crystals. It only occurs when temperatures fall below -22 degrees Fahrenheit. When I left my house at 9:00 AM the thermometer on the porch registered -28. The temperature had fallen suddenly in the wee hours of morning. I had felt the cold creep into bed beside me. The night before night when it was warmer , the air must have become saturated with water vapor from the snow, then when the cold snap came down like a hammer conditions were too cold for liquid water to exist, and small ice crystals developed creating the eerie fog.

     I skied down through Mr. Gould’s fields and entered the forest. There was an opening in the fence next to the ‘barrel spring’. It was called the barrel spring because long ago someone had interred a barrel without a bottom in the earth about the vein. Even in this cold the water in the spring was visibly moving. As I emerged from the woods  I spied Derwood on the other side of the bog road embedded in the brume. He was splitting wood in front of the house of Mr. Gould. Durwood stood in front of a haphazardly piled cord of some of the largest knarliest elm I had ever seen. Mr. Gould was notorious for paying little and spending even less. He had hired Derwood to split this impossible wood, its grain tightly woven in smoke-like whorls. It could reject or hopelessly embed the sharpest axe. Derwood’s breath mixed with the fog in which he waded. His wore two sweat shirts under a soiled jacket from which trailed torn and tattered banners of cloth. On his head he wore a blue oversized watch cap baggy and doubled over at the top. He had no gloves,, probably couldn’t afford them I thought. He came down upon the elm with a wallop with his double bitted axe only to plant the axe deeply into the twisted elm grain. It was slow difficult work and no doubt Derwood was desperate to have it and had most likely contracted to split the cord for a set fee. Even a hydraulic splitter would have taken issue with this pile of devil wood. I was sure Gould had made a great bargain for himself. Derwood stopped and looked up at me knowing it would cost some work to extract the axe.

     “Peter”, Derwood said, always using the full name of anyone he addressed. How be you this cold morning.”

     “Fine Derwood, fine,, and you?” I spoke the words knowing that Derwood was anything less than fine.

     “Awww, I’m afraid Peter that I’m between a rock and a hard place.”

     “You don’t have any gloves, Derwood”, I asked.

     “No Peter they won’t let me get a good purchase on the axe handle.”

     Mr. Gould emerged from the warmth of his house and stared at us with an impatient look. He didn’t speak but I knew that his demeanor was saying get back to work and you on the skis, be on your way.

     “Well take care of yourself Derwood and remember to slab it off the edge.”

     “Thank yee Peter and godspeed”, said Derwood.

     Mr. Gould watched with narrowed eyes as I continued on my way.

     After Chalmer’s mill closed Derwood’s house began to visibly deteriorate. He could no longer afford the upkeep. First the front stairs to the porch rotted away. I often wondered how he could enter his house. Probably around back. Then the 4X4’s that held up the porch began to skew at precarious angles until after a wet snow one corner fell to the ground dragging the roofline down in a peculiar arc. What was left was supported precariously by some withering posts. It was like a form of leprosy. Eventually even smoke stopped swirling out of his chimney a sign that it too had hopelessly deteriorated. Derwood was much too proud to ask for help. Even when it was offered he would refuse.   

     That same winter, in the month of February, neither Derwood or his wife were seen about town for a week. His nephew concerned about the absence went to the house but after heavy knocking could elicit no response. The porch was treacherous and with difficulty he was able to push the door open. Once inside the nephew found a grisely sight. Most of the floor was dry rotted and had fallen into the shallow basement. He saw Derwood and his wife on a small section of floor still in its place. They lie there like two frosted dolls side by side frozen in death.

      

     That memory always rattled my soul enough to easily shake off any arrogance that might creep into my thoughts. My life was a cakewalk because I always had had what I needed and in addition I had the precious gift of time. An accident of birth, living frugally and making art had given me that. Albert Camus said that “We spend all our time making money when we should use our money to make time”.  He always magically reversed the norms to which we have become accustomed.                       

     Jesus I have always farted through silk I thought. A year ago when I was in Catskill, New York at the annual Jefferson Heights Art and Craft Fair, I remembered how crestfallen I had felt. Sales were painfully slow. My thoughts were all antagonistic and sour rejection. I should leave the art show circuit I thought for all the changes that had taken place over the last 25 years. The Jefferson Heights Show, like so many outdoor shows, had begun as a pure art show but now crafts represented more than 75% of the exhibitors. Many artists grumbled about this popular trend in the shows but I had always kept my own faith feeling the trend had actually worked out positively for me. Every year there were less art exhibitors and therefore less competition for prize money in my category. I only worried about the future when shows might become exclusively crafts. The tendency was in that direction.  Now however I had to contend with the nagging sagging slow motion sales. After three days in Catskill I had made some money, but not like in years past. This was the first year the promoters had charged admission to customers and that made a visible difference in the quantity of clients. The Greed Factor times the grinding law of entropy were at work on my optimism.

     It was Sunday about 5:30 on a balmy summer afternoon. The show had ended and I had broken down and stored my booth in my Van. Veronica Carlisle, an old friend, and my neighbor for the last three days was still meticulously packing her melted glass objects. I lingered a little talking to her while she worked. Distant claps of thunder could be heard as the sky to the east began turning gray and the large white tent billowed with gusts of wind.

     “Better hurry up Vero or everything is gonna get wet.”

     “Don’t fret Pete, I’m nearly there. You should go you have a lot further to travel than I.”

     I made my goodbyes, giving Veronica a good hug and took off up Route 9G heading north parallel to the Hudson River. At Hudson I turned to the east on 23 heading for the Massachusetts border. I crossed over just after Hillsdale, New York where the route number changed to 41. The destination was Great Barrington where I would continue north to meet the Massachusetts Turnpike. Just after South Egremont before Great Barrington a heavy rain began to fall, so heavy that the wipers on high couldn’t handle the quantity of water. The patter of the enormous drops on the van roof was deafening like an brigade of drummers. The sky had darkened to the color of wet slate as if night were falling. I glanced at my watch and saw it was 6:30 PM. It was summer in the north and darkness didn’t fall until after 9:00. This must be a whopper of a storm he thought that turns the day into night. I slowed considerably, my visibility severely restricted by the rain. In the distance distorted by the raindrops on the windshield I saw bright tail lights as if there were a line of cars stopped. I slowed to a crawl, and then stopped behind a queue of about ten cars. Traffic was stalled. I rolled down my window and asked an officer in a parka what had happened.

     “A tornado just cut a swath through here. You cannot enter Great Barrington it’s a mess.”

     “A tornado,,, in Massachusetts?”, I asked incredulous.

     “Yup, it was strong enough to tear gravestones from the cemetery and send them flying. It even picked up a Volkswagen with four kids and deposited their bodies about a half mile away. Downtown Barrington is a mess, just a tangle of trees and rubble. Sir you can’t pass through there.”

     I was stunned. I didn’t even know there could be powerful tornados this far north. I thought of the other exhibitors who might have traveled in this direction. If I had not lingered with Veronica I might have driven right into this. I must remind myself to kiss her when I see her again. I asked the policeman for an alternate route to the turnpike and was told to retrace my steps and in about a mile I could turn right on the Egremont Plain Road which would take me north into New York towards Austerlitz where I would meet up with the Mass Pike.

     The dark slate sky had turned to a lighter shade of gray but the sunlight that filtered through it was combed strangely orange. I made the New York border quickly and a few miles before Austerlitz I crossed the path taken by the tornado heading towards Barrington.

     “It passed here”, I said aloud. There was a wide cut like the initial clearing for a new highway, about 50 yards wide with abrupt sides like someone had laid down chalk lines and mowed with a giant bush hog. All the trees and bushes within the aisle had been plucked of all their leaves, yet only in this peculiar track, an erratic band that trailed off towards the horizon on either side of the road making it seem like a slice of autumn in summer. The highway was empty of cars so I stopped. On the left was an abandoned house squashed flat as if stepped on by a giant. Delicately leaning upright precariously propped against the pile of rubble was a large maple with an enormous crown of bare branches shorn of all their leaves. Thirty minutes ago it had been a shade tree. What was remarkable was that the roots were still in the ground untouched. The tree had not been uprooted. The wind had torn the trunk off where it met the ground, lifting the weight of the entire tree then depositing it twenty feet away, upright alongside the house to which it once offered shade. It was a surreal painting. I turned my head to the other side of the road. There was a high alder. Trimming the thicket of bare branches like ornaments and trailing off perpendicular to the ground were sashes of fiberglass insulation sucked from the squashed house, all extending parallel to the ground like frozen pink ribbons.

     By 8:00 the sky was swathed in charcoal. The heavy rain recommenced. I was west of Springfield and off to my right every two or three seconds the sky was illuminated by enormous multiple slashes of lightning coursing horizontally across the sky,, flashing like celestial roadmaps. With every blazing flash I was reminded of how lucky I had been. By the time I made Springfield the sky had been tranquilized and I felt I had left the worst behind.