The path is choked with wet, fermenting leaves as we trod deeper into the woods. The county has long since stopped paving the roads beyond this point, and residents maintain their own stretch with the rising and falling of picks like Chinese peasants bent over with coolie hats in the distant provinces beyond the cities with the bow and scrape of Confucian necessity to the harmony of "night-soil" and wailing, howl-cheeked obeisance to "fealty".

Our car had bumped up and down the gravel & mud hills with the bump of logs and worse, those deep furrows cut into the road by tires and scraping transmissions. Deeper, deeper, as we approach the houses on the banks of the brown, sluggish river like the snarl of a podunk eddie, rusted shovel, and bitten bullet. Some of them are abandoned, dilapidated, falling apart, up upon stilts, because of the reeking, tree-tangled floods.

Our destination is the one at the end of the line. Yes, the very last one. Slamming the car doors with a "chunk!", we cross a large wooden bridge spanning a muddy creek bottom of a miserable diarrhea trickle. There are sharp, forbidding rocks at the bottom, warning us against horsing around and falling twelve feet to our woeful, howling, flail-armed deaths-- our splintered bones sticking out from our skin like pitiless tragedy. So keep it sane, girls!

Then we resume our steps on planks, laid up one after the other, as a crude means to stay out of the leaf-slopping mud as the sky hangs grim, overcast, downright Medieval with the atmosphere of low-fi foreboding. Through the trees that dim the light is Uncle Jim's house. Sardonic hermit of the backwoods, across the river from the godforsaken shores of the deserted chemical waste dump of rusted-out toxic barrels and flapping labels like torn shrouds. It almost looks haunted, but he's certainly grubbin' around in there somewheres.

Notice the "Live Long & Prosper" sign, a dirty plank of wood spray-painted with blue lettering. There is the garish statue of a plaster Buddha, with drooping ear lobes of far-Eastern, pot-bellied myth, the "Porky Pig" glee of foreign lands that tells the hokey, CIA-backed world of Reader's Digest "to bite the big one" along with great grandma's fused-together candy-dish of sickly peppermint stripes that no one touches, except for the occasional desultory lick of the cross-eyed orange feline. Between the wheelbarrow, chainsaw, and logs, it looks like a demented sculpture park of the counterculture blue-collar zeitgeist. . . . .

Perhaps Uncle Jim is barbecuing on the front porch, up a steep climb of stairs. He wears a t-shirt, and presses down on the spitting meat with a spatula. Finally, he looks up and sees us approaching like supplicants to "the great curmudgeon of the woods", like the Mark Twain of hard-scrabble dirty living that winces at the crude friction which tears at the joints like snapped, broken sticks.

"Chuck that fire wood in the wheelbarrow", he recommends with a waving gesture, the spatula directed above his head like an easy-going general ordering the horses and cannons dragged out for a heavy slog through the mists of hell. His tone is sympathetic, soothing to our wheezing grunts of effort, because when we come out to visit there's usually strings attached. . . . . work to be done.

He has a way of elocuting, pontificating on high, a bearded eloquence that knows itself through exactitude. As his words cascade into sentences, he has a habit of rocking his head back and forth-- ever so slightly-- in factitious, offhand irony like Kermit the frog fed through the grinder of St. Gonzo like tragic-eyed maggot shit, fighting off the pain there but for a buffer of dignity.

My brother and I are wide-eyed and innocuous next to this stumpy gnome of the backwoods. Clayton kids, preppies, milksops stooped over our homework firmly like turds, like upper middle-class Talmudists who have not accumulated the layers of scales and callouses that thirty years of bitterness and aching shins and low-paying jobs adds to the sour, embittered ground-glass soul like a pair of measly dollars at the bottom of an old wallet, flapping between his fingers enticingly like a dancing spider. His back is bad, and Uncle Jim barely manages to get by-- with our help, in exchange for-- what else?-- FOOD!

The work out here could turn out to be endless-- buried under leaves, sticks, and flying mud-- but Uncle Jim allots a certain portion to be done today. Generous, because this is Sunday.

With a meandering pace, we gradually get into the swing of things. Hauling wood up those steep stairs. Or chopping wood across the bridge, pushing it one hundred yards in a creaking, rumbling wheelbarrow like hunched-over Medieval serfs in sack-cloth with the roll-eyed suffering of crude, manual labor. Jim revs up the chainsaw like a horror movie icon. His sole source of heat is a wood-burning stove, and it eats up fuel fast! It built character, that was for sure.

Yes, Uncle Jim is far off the beaten path. His life course is like an object, by the grace of it's own momentum, sailing forever through the void of outer space. Nothing intercedes on his behalf, except for a family support system and a core of friends from the "here today, gone to hell" ganja-smoking '70s of "Wango-Tango" handle-bar mustache scuzz. All the rest is the regret of slaughtered brain cells, but still somehow retaining "his punch" like a battered fighter, a shot-up frigate blasting us to pieces with his scalding wit that has age and long-fought practice on its side like an ancient breech-loaded carbine brought up to his shoulder like a British regular.

On his free time, it is the sowing daytime shadows of a musty bookshelf that creaks with the cough of dust and the dry flap of pages, if not the gurgle of Barque's root beer in a dirty Styrofoam can holder-- sipping that fine foam like a connoisseur who possesses the long view of burdened eventuality. He keeps himself well-read and wary above the raging dog-howl craziness of the day, watching humanity carry on foolishly like something out of a Mark Twain story as he cleans the snake shit out of his pet cage with the purple-buzz glop of natural process.

He is also a bitter old liberal.

How this world is irrational and unfair, how we have a narrow window in which to escape the harsh reality of working life before you can't fly away, hobbled with a bad back like the sear of fatigued struts bending with a groan. Well-acquainted with the egregious injustices in history, darting into your "Young Upright Republican" arguments before you even complete them, his open-and-shut pronouncements leave little room to fundamentally disagree with anything he's said, except to quibble over peripheral matters that don't mean much like a Fox cable news jockey upended "and lopin' for cover" as Uncle Jim stares on with cruel, knowing bemusement. The atmosphere is heavy; the narrative of how the little guy-- an archetype of tramps, hoboes, lumberjacks, and Detroit machinists from the '30s-- only through selfless organizing (-- through a "grit" which you won't find today in soft-bottomed influence peddling) kept big business at bay. Fighting from a sliver of legal ground that is frequently snatched out from under their feet as police officers take ahold of his arms and a plainclothes detective punches him in the face. Welcome to hard times, kid.

"Oh no!" we say, as reasonableness is swept along by grand Republican eminence like a barrel going off the Niagara falls. Today we can only be thankful that conditions are a little better, and we hold our hats to our chests with sadness as the splinters rush on by like the drowning of the lil' man who fought and failed upon the scraped knuckle-white of bloodied pavement with a ruptured gut.

We offer up praise to his garb, and he shows the Uncle Jim "surprise"-- eyes wide, mouth open, rocking his head back and forth ever-so-slightly like jackpot bells on "The Price is Right" and other early '70's cardboard consumerism like bop-a-lop pornography. To be witty, urbane, and not a little facetious my brother, Jesse asks him if he has been keeping up "with Hadrian", and other works of classical virtue. He says this in fruity tones, like a Shakespearean faker, fist clenched before him, head tilted backward, eyes closed in rapture of the glories of ancient Rome. It evinces dusty old libraries, turgid works, and a marble bust of Herotetus on a stand.

"Yes", Jim echoes back in mock portentousness, like a fellow craggy, white-haired professor laying a hand on Jesse's shoulder as they study the ruins of majestic antiquity in the wind-fart of a sandstorm. We're laughing ourselves into stitches. The electrical power cycles, and the lights dim for a moment. Everything barely works in this hovel. The more bitter Uncle Jim is, the more funny he gets. The more miserable he is, the more joy we have!

We play the game "Carrum", an entertainment descended from the Indian sub-continent like spearmen on horseback. A checkered board, upon which are red and green plastic circulets and like the object of billiards, the goal is to flick the white piece with your finger and knock your color into the corner nets like the pockets on a pool table. Through age and treachery (-- not to mention experience!) Uncle Jim skunks us every time. He knows how to plunk the pieces without bruising his nails with a crippling, sharp "ouch!". Slowly but surely, he closes in on his victory with not the most invisible hint of joyous smugness that kills.

The nature documentaries on PBS are a highlight of his leisure time, like the peanut-butter sandwiches of middle-brow endeavor. There it was, the thin flame of publicly-funded enlightenment (-- threatened with the rightist axe), and the subject tonight was walruses. Fat, sprawling, mustached creatures that looked quintessentially good-natured with their downward-pointing tusks as they turned their heads, checking out the scene like the patrons of a middle-aged singles bar or a faculty meeting of social worker-types.

*******************

"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Rheeee of Crickets)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

("I heard that, Missy!")