Everyone needs a little success

 

What a nice thing it is to have a rural post office in the great North woods. To have a key for one little PO Box, and your own strange ZIP Code, with the window and neighborly teller. Where out front there is a great American flag on a strong flagpole, and when the cold winds come the line bangs against the pole. And an old talking drop mailbox, on 4 feet, a blue box with an open and shut maw.

Along the face of the post office is the only landscaping: a long bed of blue Russian juniper here, and a short bed there. Although the blue juniper is overtaken with the pins and needles of horsetail weed, and it looks like light green spikes standing over a bad gray toupee. That’s a problem without a solution.

The horsetail has infested the bed. The roots have gone deep – deeper than the juniper. They will not respond to pulling out, nor to herbicides. To save the juniper bed, you’d have to destroy it.

In “Silkwood” (1983), Kurt Russell is shacking up with his girlfriend Karen Silkwood (Meryl Streep) at their lover’s (Cher’s) house. As things at the atomic plant melt down, and their relationships all devolve, Kurt finds himself sitting on the back porch in the desolate Oklahoma evening. And he says to himself: “Don’t give me a problem I can’t solve.”

Like this:

Along the side of the nursery’s property, back behind the shops and greenhouses and cabins, is a deep ravine, and a drainage some forty feet down. We got a tall wood fence at the top of the slope. The slope has been giving way for years, and the fence is falling backward. The problem is propping the fence back up. There’s nothing on the backside to prop it up with. No more soil to pound posts into. No way to pull it to flush. I have no solution.

Or this: I’ve got four or five tomato plants planted inside of last year’s compost bin. But behind the bin is an old uncle balsam fir. Over the top of the tomatoes is a long, shading fir branch hanging southward. It starts up on the fir about 17 feet, and itself is about 11 feet long. Just enough to shade the tomatoes during mid-day, or to shade the compost bin last year. I’ve been looking at that long, high branch all summer. I’ve been looking at it for a couple years. I can’t figure out how to take it down.

How about the problem with the cocker spaniel, who, upon being left inside while away, tears through the place like a tornado.

I’ve developed a theory about small engines that goes like this: “Some small engines just were just not meant for this world.” Like my father’s black Mercury outboard when I was a kid. I’ve had this one chainsaw for about six or seven years. I’ve got two chainsaws; the better of the two is (almost) a joy to work with. Purge, choke, depressurize, throttle, and – often-times – one pull. The first though was never meant to be touched by me. I say not that it wasn’t meant for this world, since I’ve had it looked at and tuned up twice – once by the dealer, and once by my buddy. And they’ve okayed it. But it’ll never start well for me. Best solution is to put it out at the end of the driveway.

I’ve developed a second theory about small engines: That I’ve got an anti-King Midas touch. There’s a brand new woodchipper in the middle of the landing that I’ve only been able to start once in three years.

Another example unrelated (I think) to small engines: I had two young women who recently struck up conversations with me and I couldn’t strike up anything in return, and I never been able to solve that problem.

A drinking problem is a problem I cannot solve. Ice dams. Clam-packed products. My saucy mouth, sometimes. Fruit trees that do not fruit; strawberries that do not strawberry.

Here’s another: when I first started fishing – meaning fly-fishing – Trout Lake back in 2007 or so, I could always guarantee in the evening catching a couple stocked rainbows for supper. And I could use goofy flies to catch them: green Humpies, red Humpies, Royal Coachmans, White Wulffs. But as the years have gone by and my fishing knowledge has theoretically improved, I have caught fewer and fewer, and been less and less close to catching anything. So now I go out of an evening and feel lucky if a fish even slaps of my fly. I’m at the point of saying that this is beyond me.

There was a gentle English teacher back in high school. Very sympathetic. But no pushover. He looked at the longhaired losers (this was peak longhair loser in the 80s-90s), and said, “Everyone needs a little success.” And some of them or us that hadn’t earned it or deserved it or gotten enough of it took that to heart. And almost all of us survived to middle age. Everyone, regardless of whether they made it to middle age, needs a little success, is the true theory.