The Pocket Ref

(Published in Cheatgrass 1999-ish)

The letter landed on Bob Schramm's desk as he and his assistants were busy checking the final draft of the 3rd addition of the Handy Pocket Reference. Tim, the smirking young man who worked as a fact checker--just until his novel was sold--dropped it onto the stained calendar pad along with his report on the previous day's progress. The postmark was stamped Baker City, Oregon and there was no return address.


Bob reached for the letter dagger in his drawer, slit the envelope open and extracted one page of spiral notebook paper, which shed confetti from the untrimmed edge upon his desk. He smoothed the paper out, sliced away the fringe with the sharp point of the dagger and hunched over the desk, hands folded, to read the letter:

Mr. Editor,


In regards to your second addition of the Pocket Ref., page 213 states that lodgepole pine, under the comments section, is given M-medium, for smoke and M-medium, for spark. Have been burning lodgepole pine firewood all my life and everyone knows that lodgepole is a low spark wood having been favored by the Indians for use in the teepee fire because of it not throwing sparks over the blankets and whatnot.


Sincerely, 


Dee Matthews



Bob folded the letter up and stuck it back in the envelope. "Tim," he said, "We have a little project here, an NVO." Non-Verifiable Opinions were Bob's vexation. He dreamt nightmares in which he was a prisoner of war and invisible tormentors jabbed at him with sharpened bamboo, chanting the awful acronym. "Bring me what you can about lodgepole pine, especially anything," he paused, "anecdotal." 


Tim smiled. Anecdotal was the kind of word he liked. "Sure, Bob. Right away."

Bob cleared the confetti from his desk and sat worrying his nails with the letter opener after Tim was gone. Bob's job was to verify all content of the Handy Pocket Reference, or the Ref. as it was known, and he was bound by the clear mandate of the title. He knew from past editions that pocket-sized meant no more than 542 newsprint pages, 5 1/4 by 3 inches. "Handy" implied that it must contain the kind of information a person would develop a sudden itch to know, such as the area code of Zimbabwe (263), the amperage capacity of 14 gauge copper wire (25 amps), whether or not Shellac was really made from the secretions of the Lac bug (it was). Handy also demanded that the reader not be left groping for definitions or fat encyclopedias. An ideal Handy Pocket Reference entry was like a haiku— simple, direct, and mysteriously satisfying.


The confusing, the redundant, and especially the outdated were to be eliminated. The last edition, for instance, had seen the ouster of a page about the various brands of typewriter ribbons and the inauguration of a chart comparing the relative sizes of kilo, mega-, giga-, tera- and petabytes of computer memory. Morse code was debated and argued over and finally retained, although Bob could not defend its elegance for much longer.


The weight of responsibility was heavy upon Bob, and he was a nervous man for it. Mornings were becoming a fest of nail picking and heavily sugared coffee. His hair was thinning, his waist expanding and his shirts were often stained with sweat and mustard.


The future of the Pocket Ref. was in doubt. Already the younger assistants talked of the day when people would carry around computerized reference cards and when they needed to know, say, the R-value of loose fill vermiculite (2.2R per inch), or the length of the Mesozoic era (65 to 230 million years before the present), they would enter their question and have it answered instantly by satellite link up. "No more Handy Pocket Ref.," they teased. Bob quickly squashed such speculation: "It was also said the telephone would end letter writing and that the television would replace radio. Besides, I don't suppose any of you own a video phone?" That kept them chewing for awhile.


Privately though, he worried. He worried not only for his job and for the Ref., but also for his readers. Bob had been untying Gordian knots of trivia long before the techno-jingoists had coined the term Information Superhighway, and it was not easy. Oh sure, anyone could look on the Internet now and find out how many gallons per minute a 1/2 inch water nozzle discharged (23.6 gallons at 10 lb. per sq. inch), or what the radio code 10-21 meant (use a telephone). Anyone could gather the random threads of the whole, the fingernail clippings and dust bunnies of trivia. Secretly though, people needed someone else to decide what was and what was not useful information. 


That someone else was the Handy Pocket Ref. Bob's mission was to screen the waters of trivia for a few useful, though random, jewels of knowledge. He worked as a miner pans for gold or, at more sublime moments, like a Maestro coaxing music from the white noise. The world, Bob knew, needed his services.


But these pesky NVO's...Bob was always entertaining speculation and opinion on such sections of the Ref. as the page comparing the merits of paint types or the recommended thickness of concrete slabs, and he accepted that on some matters he could not please everyone. He knew that as soon as the 3rd addition hit the shelves, he would get a phone call from some place like the Valpraiso, Florida Chamber of Commerce informing him that he had listed their population, in the Airports of The U.S. section, as 6316 when it was actually 6340. These quibbles the Ref. could withstand; people would understand that the population of Valpraiso was subject to change, or that paint selection depended upon variables.


When Bob imagined this Mr. Dee Matthews, this toothless old woodcutter from the boondocks, turning to page 213 and frowning over the simple M for medium spark, Bob frowned with him. Lodgepole pine either produced sparks or it did not. If the Pocket Ref. were wrong on that point, it left the matter to speculation and made null the reason for having the book in the first place. Perhaps Mr. Matthews would curse the editors as dumb city slickers and next time he had a question about the density of diamonds (10 grams per cubic centimeter) or the phone number to report his lost Sears card (800-877-8691, in the U.S.) he might not turn to the Ref. for answers. The future of the Ref. depended upon its authority, and a tricky NVO left no room for a final word.


Bob summoned up what little he knew about lodgepole pine. When he was a boy, he had been dragged along on a pack trip into the Yellowstone backcountry. He remembered his father identifying the various pines for him-which had two needles, which had three. Ted Schramm had been puffed up, childishly proud of this simple woods knowledge, he who had not been anywhere more rustic than a Chicago tavern in years. Bob remembered being introduced to each species as if they were important dinner guests, but he did not recall the name lodgepole.


Tim burst through the office door waving a fat paperback book at him. "Try this," he said, " It has great illustrations in it. Woodcuts. You'll love it."


"Thank you Tim," Bob snapped. The book was A Natural History of Western Trees by Donald Culross Peattie. Beneath the title was a drawing of some tree or another with a Medusa-like spread of branches and the twisted, malevolent posture of a goblin. Bob flipped the book over and read the reviews. "Both poetically evocative and deep with scholarly information," crowed one Thomas J. Lyon.
He opened it and found the section on lodgepole pine (Pinus Contorta var. latifolia Engelmann). Other names: Black, Spruce, Prickly, Jack, or Tamrac Pine, Tamarack. The second paragraph described the range as being from the Nutzotin mountains of eastern Alaska south through the Rockies. "Jack pine!" he said aloud. His father had called it jack pine.

"Bob," he had said, "We'll cut some camp logs out of that jack pine thicket over yonder. It grows real thick and there's bound to be plenty of dead wood in there." Bob had been stopped by his father's relaxed diction. Ted Schramm was a lawyer, a man of precise and urbane speech, a man who didn't use words like yonder. The warm command, the way he had tipped his head in conspiracy when he said "jack pine thicket", had promised something, some confidence Bob had never known. He had stood there looking at his father dumbstruck. Ted had smiled back at him and barked, "Well go on boy. Don't just stand there like a dude. Get us some wood." 


Bob sauntered toward the thicket of tightly-packed trees with a Hudson Bay ax whose painted blade was still fire-engine red, while his father removed the pack boxes from the horses. The sky was clear and high overhead and the boggy meadow grass sank under his boots as he walked. The whole world looked soft and summer-ripened, even the flies were too drowsy to bother buzzing in his ears and for the first time he thought he understood what his father was after by coming here.


Entering the thicket was like stepping into a cloud. He looked up but the sky was hidden behind the trees growing together like dog fur. Nothing at all grew on the ground, no other kind of tree broke the monotony. He turned around but could not see camp, though the horses nickered and stomped and he could hear his father talking to them as if they were close by. For just a second, he felt dread settling over him like a cold dew, but he laughed at himself and said aloud "What are you scared of, a few trees?"


He was strong and young then, about to leave for college and he told himself that someone who had placed 5th in his weight class at the Illinois state wrestling championships had nothing to fear from a bunch of skinny trees. Nonetheless, he cut up only a few limbs, hacking them with the ax and looking back over his shoulder as he worked.


When he returned to camp his father was watching him with his hands on his hips. Bob dragged the limbs to the fire pit and whacked the head of the ax into a round of wood that had been used as a stool. It didn't stick and he whacked it again and it caught and pulled the round over. When he looked up, there was a calm hatred in his father's eyes, a look like a brick wall. He was staring not at Bob, but at the pile of green limbs.
 Without a word, his father pried the ax from the round and strode out toward the pine thicket with the handle over his shoulder. He returned, after Bob had taken to his tent, with a pile of short logs, the ends neatly hacked into points where he had cut them from the deadfall.

The Culross-Peattie entry on lodgepole was a hodge-podge of fact and story. In one paragraph, the author talked of the dimensions of lodgepole lumber, in the next how Indians would make a travois by stretching hide between two poles and drag their possessions behind dogs or horses. Bob scanned the pages looking for reference to his problem, but his mind was filled with the sight of the red ax blade and the smell of the live bows, and the corny songs his father had made him sing that night around the campfire: Old Susanna and She'll Be Comin' Round The Mountain. Neither of them had enjoyed it. 


The entry concluded with a long digression about the differences between the crowded thickets from which the lumberman cut his poles and the high mountain, open grown specimen. The bark of the alpine tree was softer, thicker, with a warm living yellow-brown hue, or even a charming pink tint as if it had kept some of the afterglow of alpine sunsets, and how it mingled with larch, hemlock and fir. The final paragraph read:

Truly these trees have life stories quite as different from those of the pole-stemmed specimens, as they are unlike them in appearance, and they deserve a distinctive English name even if they cannot logically be granted a separate botanical one. But there seems to be none as yet and, when it is given, let us hope it is not made known by revealed authority of some deus-ex-nomenclature, but is born out of the imagination and experience of the western people, just as was the name lodgepole itself.

Mr. Culross Peattie wouldn't have made a very good Handy Pocket Ref. editor. Despite all of the poetic digression, Bob could find nothing on whether or not lodgepole produced any sparks. He was picking at his fingernails and remembering the way the pack horses had watched him with their big liquid eyes, never quite trusting his approach, when Tim returned with his notebook. "Well," Tim asked, "What's it to be?"


Bob searched Tim's face for sympathy and found none. He was going to miss this job. He answered, "Page 213, lodgepole pine. Spark N, for none."

I fought three am and won, or Kurt Weil versus outdoor lighting

(Anthologized in The Best of the First Line)

I remember the radio was playing the best song.

“Snap, Crackle, Oompah, Fuck!” is how I remember it, but that wasn’t its name. It was a kind of audio montage whose backbone was Kurt Weil singing pieces from the Threepenny Opera in German, accompanied by a wheezy pump organ. It was a very old recording; the scratch and pop of the aging vinyl sounded like a pinewood fire starting up. Rearranged samples of the Butthole Surfers would cut into the mix, guitars and voices barking like the shouts of a Tourette’s sufferer. “The old motorcycle will not get us to China!,” “Fantastic Noodles!” “I’m a certified radiator now!”It’s the kind of thing that is brilliant beamed in at three am from the community radio station 80 miles to the west. In the daylight hours you just smile weakly at it and say, “That’s weird.”

Out of the window of my cabin the stars were strung up bright as electric pearls over the gleaming snows of Mt. Adams. The dog eyed me from the corner by the wood stove; he was getting used to these late night antics of mine. The look on his face said, “I hope you don’t plan on taking me outside at this hour.” “No,” I replied to him, “It’s too cold outside and besides I am naked.”

It had started two weeks ago when a new neighbor had hauled a dorky looking doublewide trailer onto the hill above my property. No sooner was the trailer operational then there appeared a brand new American flag on a pole and a great big mercury vapor light was strung to the crotch of an oak tree. Seriously bad neighbors.

I had thought about shooting out the light the first time I awoke to see it shining in my bedroom window. However, there are limitations to these kind of antics when you grow pot for a living. The thought of the Klickitat County Sheriff coming up the driveway to question me about the light was a more ornery proposition than lost sleep. Of course I considered asking them to take the thing down, but the more I thought about it the more a dilemma arose in me. What if they said no? What if we got into an argument and they decided to keep a closer eye on me? Anonymity is my oxygen. But it was getting toward the time when I would have to haul my seedlings across the hillside to the gully where they grow in the summer. I would have to make trip after trip in front of the spotlight carrying water, bat guano, peat buckets, and shovels. I couldn’t tolerate having the light there either. It was them or me.

The song was reaching a wobbly crescendo of honking saxophones, groaning organs, and the word “Barbecue” repeated rapidly with an emphasis on a different syllable each time: BAR-Bee-Que, Bar-BEE-Que, Bar-Bee-QUE! “What,” I asked the dog, “Would a Dadaist do about this?”

The dog sighed and said, “Cut off your hair.” Of Course.The answer to the dilemma was to face its absurdity head on. I pulled out a pair of blue handled shears from the desk and went outside under the stars. Leaning forward, I gathered my long blonde hair into a firm knot on top of my head and hacked through it with the shears yelling, “That’ll show them!” The dog went back to sleep.