Will the Circle Be Unbroken by Sean Dietrich EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Sean Dietrich
- Publish Date: March 10, 2020
- Language: English
- Genre: East South Central U.S. Regional Travel
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 3 MB
- Pages: 272
- Price: Free
- ISBN: 0310355753
CAMP CREEK
The day before my father shot himself, I saw a blue heron. I
was standing on the muddy banks of Camp Creek. The bird
was there for the same reason I was. We were fishing.
I was a child, standing onshore with a rod and cork float.
The bird was taller than I was, with shocking eyes. He stood
upright, perched on a fallen spruce that was half in the water.
The elegant bird looked straight at me. He was the picture
of mystery, with his shaggy feathers, his S-shaped neck, his
slender beak.
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My father had always reminded me of a heron. Once, I told
my father and it seemed to amuse him.
“No way,” he said. “I’m not as ugly as a heron.”
My father wasn’t ugly, but he was lanky and birdlike. His
long legs, his lean neck, his beak nose. My father’s arms hung
below his knees, almost like wings. And when he walked, it
was with a forward lean, like he was keeping his center of
gravity in the right place.
His build suited him. He was a welder, an ironworker, and
birdlike qualities came in handy on the iron. He could crawl
upon the skeletons of skyscrapers like a tightrope walker.
Only a few days earlier, I had watched him climb a fiftyfoot tree to hang a tire swing. He did that just for me. He
risked his life to do it. I’d never seen anyone climb a tree that
high and live to talk about it.
“Be careful!” I yelled from the ground.
“Careful?” he said. “This ain’t nothing! On a jobsite, I
climb thirty stories sometimes!”
My father scaled a mostly limbless tree like a native,
barefoot, jeans rolled around his ankles. Then he walked along
the branch, arms spread outward for balance, a two-inch-thick
rope over his shoulder.
Finally, he draped the rope over a sturdy limb and tied a
bowline knot. The swing was exquisite. On his downward
descent, the bark cut his forearms so that he was bleeding. But
he didn’t even feel it. Ironworkers are like that. He only
fastened a tire to the other end of the rope, and that, by God,
was that.
I burned up entire days on that swing. On it, I was a fighter
pilot, a trapeze artist, a sailor of the high seas, a cowboy riding
his faithful horse. To a boy who lives a hundred miles from
town, a good tire swing is everything.
It’s funny what you remember. There are entire years of
my life that blend into beige mush, and I can hardly remember
what I had for supper last night. But I remember that swing. I
remember the rough, orange-and-white rope that left blisters
on my hands. I remember the smell of that tire, warm and soft
from the sun. I remember the way it’d be full of water after a
rain, and I remember the hole I punched into the bottom of the
tire with a pocketknife to prevent this.
Sometimes I remember too much.
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