Fast Day 188 January 8 2010 {Old Man Meets American Century}

 Lee and Grant Chromo on a Cigar Box

Old Man Meets the American Century

Winter’s army comes on with bluster and with brass

advancing now as it did when I was young like you,

fighting with broad lath swords and beating drums of tin;

following on the harvest parliament of wheat fields:

where hand-picked and hand-raked barley-bearded quorum

of serious representatives  - who do not

hold with mythic summer’s hoop snake, gold bear, and snipe -

meet to palaver about seeding times to come…

usurped by winter’s coasting time, a sledding time

down long slopes, past stands of pine, and over rivers

frozen as they were when struck by the crystal spear!

We used to play and then go in to warm up by

the stove beneath two chromos of Grant and Sherman.

I went to meet the American Century

as it came downstream on January third, for

it carried coal to the Edison plant and was

not a metaphor for the future anymore,

not Manifest Destiny, but a working boat

that needed customs work done which I would do-

January as well as June, cold or hot nights

under the umbrella of Homeland Security.

The Great Lakes freighters stoked the arsenals

of democracy in the world war; the mate

was John and he said that it had been a slow year

this year, but not as bad as oh-nine and then laughed

‘cause everyone knew oh-nine was the year without…

just without… like it never was, and then we laughed

and drove at four o’clock in the morning to the

Customs at the Bridge, where we had our pick of

agents, for there was no truck traffic on the third…

We talked on the way back down through all the little

towns: he had been married once before while I 

was looking at forty years, and he asked if I was now

planning something special. I said if I were not

then forty-one would never see the light of day!

John invited me aboard, but security

was much tighter now than when I was a boy

and clearance had to be issued ahead of time…

One more trip up to Two Harbors before they lay

her up for the winter season. It was time;

ice hung like arctic bunting up and down the bow

from the trip down from Duluth. She used to be the

Star, the Columbia Star, until a couple

years ago when Columbia went out and sold

the boats, and American Steam bought her and

she was the Century! My grandpa, he did see

the Columbian Exposition in Chi-town

and the Pan-American in Buffalo, New York…

I was born in the American Century...
the twentieth, after we took the Philippines...

and I stood right close enough to spit that night,

but I had no clearance, and I thought of when

Joe Nutt used to take me right up to the stack base

at the Edison and the wind blew me dizzy

and I saw so far that I believed that I

could see the curvature of the globe beneath me!

American Century as the Columbia Star

-- 


Meeting the freighter American Century at 4 in the morning just seemed like going to meet a metaphor "The American Century" in my dreams. It is a very quiet time of day.
The monumental has lost no bulk, but it has lost its grandeur.