Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Life and Limb
He came back, and I had to revise my assessment. The guy who was breaking down the fallen boughs returned to finish the job. He wore the same clothes, but didn’t seem to have washed them or himself since he last took on the manual destruction of a dusty pile of dead limbs. His hair, once disheveled, was now positively alarming, a halo of grey neglect. His clothes, once just barely unpresentable, were by now a filthy map of sartorial misconduct. And his eyes, once merely shifty, were now goggling in their sockets, outbulged and restless. This was no well-meaning hippie. This was a man who had lost touch with a reality that had long since lost touch with him.
He’d taken a day or so earlier in the week to break down the wind-tumbled tree limbs that had fallen onto and blocked “my” path, across the street from my house. I’d appreciated his many hours of hard, dirty, manual work, unassisted by any tools but the ones with which his maker had endowed him. The evidence of his handiwork lay undisturbed in the disreputable ivybeds - a bier of twigs and branches, each individually broken off and broken down to manageable size. All that had been left were the three large boughs that had supported it all, and that had fallen and taken each other down in the first place. These were each between ten and twenty feet long, as large at the big end as a big man’s thigh, twisted and bifurcated into sinister tines. These lay on the small patch of lawn near the corner, beyond the ability of any rational man to break them down further without the use of some kind of hardware.
Rationality was not a relevant consideration to this particular civic-minded maniac. It seems he’d grown tired of being mocked by those big old limbs lying in state on the grass, so when I came home from work last Friday, I found him working to break those down too. He was surrounded by a cloud of dust and dirt, and his movements and posture revealed his increasing levels of exhaustion and frustration. He’d obviously already tried all the easy ways to bust these branches into smaller bits, so now he was taking extreme measures. He’d hoisted one bough up against the side of a heavy concrete trash can so it’s smaller end towered high up in the air, and was using a smaller branch about five feet long and six or seven inches in diameter as a club, smashing it down first on the side of the big limb; after several vigorous but unproductive axe-swinger’s strikes, he moved up to the lofty upraised tip and attacked it with overhead blows. With each attack, the bough shuddered and shifted on its precarious perch at the edge of the active sidewalk, but it did not succumb to the assault. It just released, each time, another cloud of dessicated dust, and emitted a low “thump” that bespoke more of futility than achievement.
I was walking past him with a small clutch of fellow muni riders, and we exchanged glances with each other as we circumnavigated his workspace, giving him and his wild wideswinging club as much room as they could want. Some of the people there with me looked amused, taking some entertainment from the spectacle. But I felt it differently. He would never break down those limbs - they’d just exhaust him, soil him, infuriate him and then leave him feeling impotent. After a day of work that had produced obvious results, now it didn’t matter how hard he tried - he would fail, and fail publicly and on a large scale. The more inevitable his defeat became, the more desparately he seemed to attack the deadwood. After a particularly viscious blow, his club shattered in his hands. The limb was unaffected.
Eventually he gave up. The next morning I saw his handiwork where he’d left it, where I’d seen it the prior evening - a jumble of large boughs on the grass, barely affected by his long arduous efforts. A few subsidiary limbs had been separated from the whole, but mostly it was big, battered branches, as unchanging as the sea, mocking the new day’s sunlight. The man, of course, was long gone.
