For the past couple of weeks the air each morning has smelled like the whole of creation has vacationed in Havana and developed an addiction to cigars. Smoke permeates the atmosphere, and, with any time outdoors, our clothes. It gets in your nostrils. It permeates your hair. Some days are worse than others, but everyday the tendrils of the smoke wrap themselves around your very psyche and squeeze. We tried to sit out on the deck on a few recently warm late afternoons, but we couldn’t stay. The smell got to us. Our solar panels aren’t doing so well either what with the smoke veiling the sun.
I have only scattered and indeterminate ideas as to the source. The cornfield across the road looks singed, but I’ve seen no fire to account for it. A few miles away the culverts have been burned, which surely accounts for some of the scent, but there isn’t evidence of continuous burning, and none in recent days. But still the smoke persists. Someone, somewhere nearby perhaps is clearing land and burning trees, but the duration and intensity of the smell suggests a fire of such a scale as to be noticed.
But nothing. No word on the news, nor social media. Nothing. Nothing, that is, except the smoke.
I’m not casting aspersions. Don’t hear in my voice any condemnation or disapproval. Years ago, B.J. Thomas had a song on the radio that asked, “Hey, won’t you play another ‘somebody done somebody wrong’ song.” I liked the song, but that’s not what’s been playing on my jukebox. I’m neither whining nor complaining; simply noticing. And thinking about our intertwinement. No one starts a bonfire in isolation. All of us participate in one way or another, whether we like it or not. Or as John Muir once observed, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
Take Dwayne for example. Dwayne is the foster rooster who came to join our flock a few years ago as a favor to friends who live in an area inhospitable to anything that makes a sound. And this guy, indeed, makes a sound! Far from content with merely crowing up the sun, Dwayne can be heard to have a cockadoodledo of a comment about virtually everything - all day. And he’s loud. Surely our neighbors hear him, even out here in the country. But thus far they haven’t used Dwayne for target practice. Perhaps they find him quaint, or simply part of the price of living in the country.
And before long the farmer across the road will fire up his equipment belching anhydrous ammonia for all the world to smell, and we’ll once again be looking for indoor distractions and occupations until the breeze can clear the stench. Again, it’s part of our interconnected bucolic bliss. He is certainly entitled, and owes me neither apology nor explanation. But while we derive no benefit from the crop he will eventually - hopefully - harvest (there are, after all, no guarantees) we make our own olfactory investment in the process just by being where we are.
Because what one of us does, all of us experience. We are inextricably tied together. We affect each other - affect each other, too, as far as that goes. Out in the country, or deep in the city, there are no isolation chambers keeping us pristinely separate. Nor would I want there to be.
At the gym where we walk on the track up above an older man frequently occupies the floor shooting baskets. It’s only him, all alone on the hardwood, shooting baskets by himself. And he’s good, swishing the net from corner to free-throw line and points in-between; underhanded, overhanded, hook shots and trick shots. He doesn’t hit them all, but his average is good. The thing is, though, it’s hardly a game. Basketball is not finally a drill, it’s a team sport; with other people and all. There is passing and assisting and rebounding and plays; there’s offense and defense and fouls and blocks - none of which is possible with but one player occupying the court.
But sometimes we live like that, as though we were the only shooter on the floor, throwing up ball after ball, oblivious to all the others smelling our smoke.
