Yard Work
An exploration of life and how we live it, published in the memory of my dear friends Joan Smith and Emmett Borcick.
Antidote. Pt 3.
… to Antidote.
We found Captain Billy right where you always find him, by the burn barrel. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that he’d bought not a river house but a burn barrel on fifteen acres of fuel. He grinned like a guilty middle-schooler, clutching a book of matches.
An entire folk cycle has developed around Billy’s childhood pyrotechnic exploits in Alexandria, where he and his friends, the “big kids” in the neighborhood, prowled suburbia’s Summer nights equipped with face paint, walkie talkies, coolers of Foster’s Lager and poster tubes full of bottle rockets. ”Mobile Unit One . . Mobile Unit One, do you copy?” They launched elaborate raids on the local high schools using Estes rockets capped with custom “warheads” that exploded on contact and, later, Billy having received a number of small gyros and radio controllers from friends of friends in the DoD, on re-entry, detonated remotely from tree lines and ornamental shrubbery.
“Might wanna stand back,” he said, flipping match after impotent match into the mouth of the barrel. There are few feelings as intense as the feeling you have waiting for something to explode in front of you. “This thing’s loaded with boat fuel …”
Antidote. Pt 2.
So we drank our coffee fast that morning, and we fed the critters and headed East, bound for West Point, Saluda, Topping, White Stone …
Antidote. Pt 1.
We went out to visit my old friend Captain Billy this weekend. He’d called earlier in the week to say that the Bertram and the liquor cabinet were both full. “Come on out to Antidote,” he said. “There’s a bit of chop, but the water’s fine …”
I’ve known Captain Billy for more than thirty years. When we were kids, his nickname was “no shoes,” because he rarely wore shoes. He wears shoes today, most of the time because he has to. He’s a power broker for a living, so he often wears shoes with little spikes on the bottom. But on the weekends he leaves them in DC and makes the drive down 17 to Antidote, his getaway on Antipoison Creek, where the natives took Captain Smith to administer the antidote for Stingray poison. Billy raises oysters down there, and he fishes blue crab and keeps the burn barrel lit with the debris he gathers along his four-hundred foot stretch of tidewater shoreline. It’s his antidote; now and then, it’s ours too.
Past West Point, enshrouded in wood-pulp vapor, surrounded by septic waters, a geography rode hard and put up wet, America’s forgotten bad dream, fading even as you try to recover the details …
And the way to this place, like the way to most places in Rivah Countrah, is a labyrinthian, corkscrew envelopment into land’s end, past parti-colored shantys and dilapidated farms, through landscapes more fecund than floral, through alternating banks of cow shit and Honeysuckle so immediate, so thick they seem artificial, and all of the land, as far as the eye can see, cross-hatched by pastureland and forests of Loblolly …
