Tuesday, 4 April 2023 // The Crossroads - A1 and Carver Way
4:00 PM
40 km on the odometer, from London. Of course the odometer is also not working well either.
It was 3:30 when I left the agricultural center west of Main Camp.
It was 2:30 when I was speaking with Robin.
We hadn’t spoken in at least a week. She is well, of course.
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5:07 PM
68.5 km
Poland
About a half an hour ago went through a puddle about half a foot deep and bike stopped running. On the horizon, looking west where I was heading, there was a fork in the road. The right track skirted around one of the numerous lagoons. Three motorcycles ahead of me at that fork. I couldn’t hear them and I guess they could not hear me trying to start my bike. Two ride off towards Poland and one motorcycle eventually reaches me, although it was not running. It was being pushed by one youth, with a rider on the seat.
When they stopped, I learned their chain had broken a couple hours earlier. The two brothers were on their way to Main Camp, with a bit of copra.
The older brother reminded me we had met just last week, a week ago today. Then I was on my way back from the south-east point — the End of the Earth at the End of the Earth — and stopped when I found a dead tern on the road, the result of my inadvertently riding into a nesting colony on the road a few hours earlier.
Now, having passed through a puddle that crossed the road, I had been trying for the longest time to get my bike going. Without asking, the older brother began poking around the bike’s battery, the wires. Slim and handsome, I noted his hair, a braided rattail sneaking from the gap in the back of his ball cap. When I was 24 or 25 I wore a 3-inch rattail for a spell.
He told me to put the bike in third gear, gave me a running jumpstart and I was off. Hated to leave them behind, but they told me this was not the first time they’ve walked back to Main Camp from this far away.
Now I stand on the eastern-most outskirts of Poland, looking up at the water tank, the house behind it, where Keiti and her husband and children live. I’ll do a sketch because it looks great, an iconic view as one first arrives in to Poland. Iconic on a small scale I guess.
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1:04 PM
90°.
Joe slipped his fingers inside the shell of the nut, his fingers rooting through the flesh. The supple white flesh was not yet meat. It’s taste was almost absent, yet the freshness, the warmth slipped through his fingers as he pulled the flesh away from the shell, and drop the dangling whiteness it into his mouth.
He thought of the nut as it aged. The smooth, pudding-like consistency of the young fruit slowly turning to a tender flesh, and finally becoming the thick, chewy meat that most people knew as coconut. Well, most people not living in the Pacific.
He dug his first and middle finger further into the nut, curling them into the flesh , curling the flesh away, the succulent and fine water running down his fingers as he dropped another piece into his mouth. He recalled his fingers dipping into succulent flesh of another kind, and wondered how long it had been since he had been with a woman? His fingers wet with the water of the nut, he put them in his mouth and sucked them clean.
Who was the last woman he was with? He could not say her name.* To say her name aloud would be a bad omen. He didn’t know why, but maybe if he put a name and a face to a memory he might break, knowing it had been so long since he had felt her touch, heard her words, the sound she made on his ears as much a caress as her fingertips on his flesh.
When was the last time he had eaten an apple? When did he last eat grapes? The apple, the grapes, her scent on his fingers, so far away in time and place they all seemed a long lost and forgotten dream.
He tossed the spent shell toward the base of the tree, along with the dark, dry husks, the browned fronds, and then stepped from the shade and shadows back into the sunlight to work.
- Joe English was “left at the alter” according to a woman in Oakland, California, who, unprompted, wrote him on Christmas Island. She hoped to kindle a romance with Joe. His two-word editorial on his transcribed copy of her letter: “She’s nuts.” Maybe not. But in 1917, the mores of the day did not advocate women pursuing men.