Burying the Lede

T. Mazzara
Oct 3, 2019
7 min read

“We are resident inside with the machinery,

A glimmer spread throughout the apparatus.

We exist with a wind whispering inside

and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts,

inside the basilica of bones. The flesh

is a neighborhood, but not the life.”

— from “Kunstkammer” by Jack Gilbert

On the walk back down the hill from work the other evening, the wind had picked up and the hour was late, the moon was fuller than I've seen it down here. The whipping blow buffeted my shoulders and made everything colder. Yet as cold as it was, I was secure in my coat and layers, my watchcap and my gaiter, these heavy trousers and these gloves. And I thought that I could walk for miles like this, alone and out into the open plain of frozen sea ice ahead of me, across the rocky Royals, and out into the great white nothing, this steady blast pushing me along like a sail across all that emptiness. I could step one foot after the other until the wind and cold or my legs decided that the distance was far enough.

As I stepped down the rocky hill, these wispy, spectral gasps of particulate snow blew across the road and from behind me. The contrast between the blowing white and the dark gray and brown volcanic rock was exaggerated by one of the several streetlamps on station. They all rushed, these gasps of ice particulate, white and together between my legs and around any opening in the drifts, between buildings, finding the path of least resistance. I wished I’d had my camera. It was haunting to watch them come together at bottlenecks, slipping inside a tumbling braid of themselves and singing as they went, like they were hissing "us" and "we" together as they passed, and then suddenly rushing on to wherever the wind goes after it blows. And I thought that Nature is indifferent to both our passing and our desires. This made me unafraid. And unashamed of my life before that moment.

Prone to making things accessible—to me, if nobody else—I used to describe life as a bundle of choices. My only certainty then was that I made wrong ones with some frequency, but all of them took me where I needed to go. This figure of a bundle is not wrong, but life is not merely that. Life is not merely anything, certainly not just this reductive image of a bundle of decisions. And as lovely and efficient as it might be to imagine, life is not merely moments I’ve collected inside the magazine of my mind, my brain matter, this body and all the machinery inside, our biology. It is not a mere iteration of all my chemical reactions, however much the simple math of this idea might be appealing. Nor is life a binary switch of on and off, not electric currents snapping without rhythm across neurons.

But I am certain there is no soul, that nothing essential in me is infinite, as sure as I am of the strength and resilience of the human spirit. Is it strange or contradictory for a consummate atheist to be so certain that a life, however finite, is not a self-contained event? Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio? What we do affects.

Fuck. I’ve been cold and confused these past few weeks.

I knew a man once, a long time ago. We were young together, just learning how to be men, really. It was a time in my life when I was consumed with the idea of revenge. My heart was full of hate, not just for the object of my vengeance, but for the world, my people, and very specifically for myself.

If all of this seems vague, it is only that I have a difficult time both forcing myself to remember how I was and admitting to others the same. Understandable, I think. Forgivable, I hope. Maybe someday I’ll tell you.

Anyway, this man was a friend in the best sense of the word. There was a connection. We drank together. And learned how to be. Made mistakes. Refused. He taught me to play pool and how to dip when we couldn’t smoke in the barracks. We tooled around Yuma, Arizona together in this broke-ass car. He took me on the back of his motorcycle to buy booze on my 21st birthday. Found a gas station off base that’d take my expired license because I’d misplaced my military ID. I’m certain we laughed at all the same things, but for the life of me I can’t remember what was so funny. He saw me at my worst and somehow stayed friends. That’s the first quality, the ability to see the world from another perspective, to at least try, understand how somebody's shoes might hurt and sometimes forgive. This ease and constancy became a benchmark of some note, a lesson, representative of a set of qualities I would look for in the new friends I would meet as I drifted my way through life after.

Honestly, I was lost after the Corps, caught short, with nothing and nowhere to go. It never occurred to me that I might go home. Home then was as much a moving target as it was before the Polak. Happily, the movement has slowed since her. Someday, when we’ve bought a house and had a kid, the target will slow more and maybe settle. Back then there was no Polak. She was living through dramatic social and political change in a land so distant as to be imaginary to me. And I was anchorless, had nothing but my freedom.

This friend and another took pity on me, wretch that I was, and decided on a bold road trip. We drove to San Diego, then north, up the Coast to San Francisco. Stopped here and there. We had beers down by the water in San Francisco. And then drove north. They left me with some family about an hour or so outside of the city. Dropped me off and hauled ass back to Arizona, back to the Corps, back to real life.

It’s a story I’ve told my students. We talk about myriad everyday concepts in my classes, necessarily. They’re English classes. We spend time on definitions, actual and personal. It’s not just teaching them to think and write creatively or critically. Sometimes my classes, probably more frequently than the academy might encourage, are really about how to live.

This story of my friends usually slips out when we’re reading Tobias Wolff’s “Hunters in the Snow” and contemplating the notions of selfishness and compassion, masculinity and the wretched way people might treat one another. I hold up my own story as anecdotal evidence of the good. Here were two brothers who saw a third who was lost and decided to put him on a path. Hell, they traveled the first long leg of that path with him. Slapped him on the back at his waypoint. Shook his hand. Told him, “Good to know you. We’ll see you when we see you.” And then went back to the real business of growing up, knowing the lost one had to take on that next portion of his trip alone, suspecting he knew heading out that he had once belonged, hoping he remembered their time together, or at least the pervasive sense of fraternity that the time had demanded.

At this moment in my meander through life, I’m finding it quite difficult to understand how the hell I just met one of those friends again in a smoking shack in Antarctica.

That is not a literary figure of speech. There was no art in that statement. I literally shared a cigarette with a friend and a stranger in Antarctica. They are the same man. A really good friend of mine, the man who taught me to play pool, and did me a tremendous kindness once when I needed it the most, treated me with respect and brotherhood, a buddy last seen dropping me off in a small and sleepy northern California town, I met that same guy some two decades later in a ragged and over-decorated smoking shelter on Ross Island. We sat across from each other and smoked cigarettes on the southernmost continent of the planet. Damn, he looked familiar. And then he was there. Wrap your fuckin brains around that one. I was speechless.

We are different people now. And the same. Older men. But the youthful versions of us still linger. Neither one recognized the other until we did. And when we did, we both stood, with zero hesitation, and hugged. Easily. I hugged this strange man who I knew and didn’t know at the same time, and I was blinded for a moment with what I think must have been joy.

I’m uncertain how our time together on the Ice will pass, if we’ll remain friends, become friends again, but I do know that I have not been so dumbstruck by any event down here. That includes the awesome vastness and all the wonder and all the goddamn beauty that wants us gone. That includes my last trip down, when the plane I was strapped to nearly crashed. And my friends on the ground around station thought we, all of us silently shuddering through the haze above, we would all probably die, and then spent a chunk of their day preparing mentally and practically for the distinct possibility. Our choices led us here.

My choices led me here. And I can’t help but ponder those gasps of white that haunted the darkness a few feet from the ground the other night. They sped around me and through me, indifferent. They sang “we” and hissed “us.” Time clearly articulated. Those ghosts will dissipate and separate when the wind reaches its end. For a moment though, they belonged to something bigger than themselves. They moved together in strange ribbons across stranger terrain. Charging into the dark. Pushed together against the world. Traveled as one. And then the moment passed. And they were no longer together. Perhaps someday they’ll meet again.

I mean, fuck, anything’s possible.

“‘Frank,' Tub said after a time, ‘you know that farmer? He told Kenny to kill the dog.’

‘You're kidding!’ Frank leaned forward considering. ‘That Kenny. What a card.’ He laughed and so did Tub. Tub smiled out the back window. Kenny lay with his arms folded over his stomach, moving his lips at the stars. Right overhead was the Big Dipper, and behind, hanging between Kenny's toes in the direction of the hospital, was the North Star, Pole Star, Help to Sailors. As the truck twisted through the gentle hills the star went back and forth between Kenny's boots, staying always in his sight. ‘I'm going to the hospital,’ Kenny said. But he was wrong. They had taken a different turn a long way back.”

— from “Hunters in the Snow” by Tobias Wolff