Camp Guthrie

4:13 am, 1-3-10

I'll carry you over the greenbriars
And make a crown of 'em for my head
And I'll find the soft green cedar boughs
Come time to make your bed

I've been working on Camp Guthrie, clearing brush and tending a little fire. I like to think, as I work in reverent silence, that someday, after the Collapse, when money means nothing and we start anew, learning more about ourselves and each other and the world and Gawd and how it all fits together than we ever even imagined we could know... I'd like to think sometime after that, there'll be a real settlement in this same blessed little spot. Not likely. It sits just this side of a low-lying levee on Army Corps land, a cool Northern slope hugging the purgatorial little swale where the steep glade and woody bluffs slope sharply and finally into the coarse and oft-flooded bottomlands. It's lowland, and it'll be flooded again come Spring, especially now that they've fucked up the White River Valley watershed with the dams and their infantile lakes. But maybe that says something about me, my dedication to this doomed little camp. I take such joy in building bridges, but I feel incomplete until I can sit on the shore and watch them burn.

The moon's always waning, the snow makes it seem so much brighter than it actually is, and my heart is such a wheel. But fuck all that noise. I'm building an altar at Camp Guthrie, and I mounted upon it that armadillo carcass, his shell and his skull and his tail, and they're held in place with barbed wire and twine. Soon I'll bring down more string, and some nails and a little jar of black paint.

And Spring's coming soon, baby. We got plenty of firewood to burn; I've been cutting it by hand with a busted little folding saw. Camp Guthrie's gonna be underwater come June, so let's just stand in front of that little altar and get married. Some old ghost will officiate, and the cedar will bear witness, and we'll honeymoon in the bottomlands and just law down under the creek rocks and cedar boughs and wait for that dirty old lake to come a-hissin' across our fire pit. If I don't wash away with you, I'll probably wash away alone. Either way, I'm washing away, and I'm sorry I couldn't stay longer, if just to watch it burn.