Boaz Bloom and Tumble-Down Row, Part Three

November 13, 2007, 10:30 am; posted by
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The last of the Best of Job, continued. Lost? Read part one and part two.

I didn’t mind the work at the sawmill actually, except there was absolutely no talking or singing while you worked, or you’d spoil your appetite on quarts of sawdust. But it was solid work, the kind that builds muscle with power.

“Localized power,” a friend in Maine used to tell me. “When you get attacked by a man in your home,” he said, “you’re not going to settle it by asking him to see who can bench more weight. You’re gonna wanna get his blood flowing into his eyes so he can’t see, and then you’re gonna want to work him over real good, top to bottom, so he can’t run very far. And you’ll need power for that. Localized power.”

Lifting wood at a steady pace is pretty local. And while I enjoyed the opportunity to think, I sorta began to dread lunchtime a little — the only time during the day when the drone of the saws died down, and everyone could talk about last night’s game or whatever. We’d all gather around Dean’s truck bed to eat, but I found their conversation hard to engage.

They went to pretty good lengths to let me join in, but in the end, my presence was a little disconcerting for everyone, what with my choice of somber silence or lame attempts at noise. I didn’t want to eat apart, but still at the mill (lest they get the impression that I thought I was better than they were), so I elected to simply make myself scarce for the 45-minute break.

And that’s where I met Boaz.

The mill was built into a hillside (or what passes for a hill in Missouri), and behind its sheds was an old portion of the town — abandoned, I was told, because an earthquake 80 years prior had shifted the ground in such a way that almost every foundation had been ruined. Roofs had collapsed and entire structures softened. I guess the Midwest does have a pretty big fault line under it. I read about it at the library once, but those kinds of books need more pictures.

Devastation requires more than Times New Roman, if you ask me.

The buildings had been scuttled of their valuable parts, with siding and shingles taken down to the lower portion of Chap and put to use — but frames and some of the cracked foundations of the old homes and bank were left. Over time the town came to refer to this area with equal amounts of affection and embarassment as “Tumbledown Row.”

I had a good doorstep, covered in shade by an oak that must’ve slept with one eye open (with the mill chopping up her kin right behind her), and this was my lunchtime throne, from which I surveyed my 45 minutes of quiet kingdom. Sometimes I’d see the carcass of a beer party strewn about an old well ten paces to my left. It did have that quality. If this were New Hampshire, my friends and I woulda claimed this place too for such things. It had the romance, ya know?

I enjoyed Tumbledown Row. The devastation must have been shocking and tear-worthy back then, but what was tear-worthy then was a punchline of a picnic table for me now.

My third day eating lunch on the Row, I heard some jangling coming up the hillside. It had a musical quality with a steady rhythm, and I didn’t feel imposed or intruded on in the least — which is a good way to remember first seeing and meeting Boaz. The jangling was the chain on a bicycle, and the rhythm was Boaz’s steady pumping of the pedals, as he crested the “hill” and entered the Row. What a sight.

The going rate in town for his age was 67, and he was pure bald, with an upper torso that must’ve weighed an easy 200 lbs. alone, full of a big, bulbous gut that was far too curious-looking to be repulsive. I only knew Boaz in the summertime, so I can only dress him for you in the series of Navy blue T-shirts, tube socks, thick glasses and gray Ocean Pacific shorts he always wore. And my noon hour interactions with him were always after he had pedaled himself into a red, flushed face.

But this man’s legs were massively powerful, and with every stroke he took on his bike, every step he strode, his legs came to life with a flurry of muscle and vein. This was a man who lived on his bike, and he was an interesting composite of its ill effects and positive benefits.

Boaz rode his bike on an obsessive-compulsive path that I later learned was his own creation, from years and years of riding the same route. It was a solid, packed length of earth about 4 inches wide that spread around Chap’s upper half. I’d run into a section of it once behind the IGA, when I went to get some ice from their machine, and I saw the trail cut straight through the field, then disappear as it ran into Fair Street.

I distinctly remember ignoring it; I figured it was a Missouri thing. Something religious, or mule deer, an old boundary or something.

Indians maybe.

Oh, and the ice was for my shoulder. Localized power, dontchaknow.

–TO BE CONTINUED–


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