Picking Tomatoes, Near Freeze, at Midnight (2015)

Picking Tomatoes, Near Freeze, at Midnight Richard Hague (bio) Almost twenty years ago now, one summer’s night, I led a party of the blind—myself included—into a deep woods full of copperheads and barbed wire. Scruffy partisans of the sixties all, we had sat on the porch of my trailer in the woods of southeastern Ohio drinking beer until the sky clouded over with the beginnings of a storm, and the moon fled the hollow and pulled the black hat over its face. We’d run out of lies and [End Page 28] quasi-autobiographical exaggerations and had reworked to triteness our chronicles of protest and violence and flight. The dog had descended into an immobile sleep under the trailer, and the barred owl, usually loud down Foreaker, roosted in mute stupor. As for us, drinking and drinking, the world seemed to careen and swerve, as if to spin us off it like the mud off a tire. We had to reassert our verticality, our uprightness in the face of all that leveling. So up we stood, and into the world we went, over the Russian-olived hill, past the Chinese chestnuts and the wind-ruined outhouse that lay like the wreckage of a longboat among the pitch pines. The going was easy at first; I was so familiar with the way that I could have navigated the initial fifty yards in my sleep. But twenty yards more and the path died out like a sentence with no verb. It evaporated, went away, and what brooded in the darkness before us was a tangle of burdock and tickweed and greenbrier strangling an old fence line, then a deep glade of white pines, planted as closely as fence posts, their lowest branches bristling with needles and broken ends. “Why are we doing this?” someone behind me said. “Because,” I said, “We got to find us some dark.” Earlier, before the clouds had moved in, and while the beer still hummed happily in us, we’d sat with our adam’s apples pointed straight up, and ogled the Milky Way. In that good dark dark, ten and more miles from anything even approaching a small town, we could see into the heart of our galaxy, spread like a faint silver eddy in the river of sky above us. We’d fed our eyes, gorged on that looking. But now, in the woods, it was time for the contrast, the absence by which rightly to judge the light. That’s what I thought, anyway. What the others thought, I had no idea. There we were, stumbling into our dread, disobeying one of the most fundamental primate instincts: never go around in the dark. [End Page 29] The guy immediately behind me (there were four of us, a shabby resurrection of pilgrims) suddenly fell. I heard his startled curse and growl. I froze. But then, realizing he’d not been haunch-swiped by a bear the size of a school bus, I relaxed. Deeper into the dark we staggered, whipped across our eyes by pine branches, tripped by briers and roots. My boot laces came undone; my hat, knocked wopperjawed and off by the flailing arm of another fellow stumbling behind me, flapped away down the gully. Someone started to hum nervously. A whippoorwill exploded from the lee of a windfall ahead of me, and near swooning with surprise, I saw stars. On we pressed. “Pointless,” one said later, back on the trailer porch. We all shivered. We’d broken out every blanket we could find and sat wrapped like whipped braves in dark’s tepee, mumbling bachelors gritty and smoky and pathetic at three in the beery morning. We’d stood at the far end of the ridge, relatively unscathed, a quarter of a mile back in the woods, and we’d stared out over a blankness that fell off into more of the same. The cloud cover was so thick, and the fog so heavy, that we couldn’t see the glow at the ends of our own cigarettes. We’d gotten some dark, all right. Lots of dark. A couple of years’ worth of dark. Cheap thrills in the...