GASPING FOR AIR

So I emerge from days of semi-conciousness due to a pharynx suffocating me with mucus, and the world is the same old contradictory and mixed up place except that it snowed more than anyone expected. The cats have adapted and curled up where they could. Momentarily they self-sabotaged by unplugging the electric mattress warmer. The town is silent but when we were all up briefly at 4AM in memory of Paris in the summer, someone drove a big truck out of town past this house. Valier has become a bedroom community for truck drivers, who trust that the town will not harbor burglars while they are gone. They may be right, but things are changing.

This siege of coughing is connected to previous episodes dating back to a serious ear infection a couple of years ago that rendered me so dizzy that I could only get to the bathroom by either hanging onto furniture or crawling. I called the clinic up the street two blocks to ask for help and advice but made the mistake of mentioning “stroke.” They (nurse and receptionist) immediately said I should not come there but go to the mother hospital, thirty miles away. The road was bad but I couldn’t drive at that point anyway. The mirror told me had no stroke evidence. So I toughed it out, but there was residual vulnerability. I’m still feeling vertigo. I am solitary; I am hostile to my neighbors with good reason.

The next event was more serious and shared between me and my house. I tripped on a loop of jumprope sticking out of a pile of clothes I’d moved for the convenience of men who were supposed to install a new hot water heater. I chose them because they had connections to people I had taught and thought I knew. But one of the men was arrogant and critical while the other one sadly informed me that Gordon Monroe, one of the men I had worked with at Scriver Studio had just died. It turned out I’d given all the wrong information and they left indignantly. That’s when I tripped. I lay there for a half an hour, trying to understand what to do about severe damage from a dislocated or broken shoulder..

County dispatch did answer the phone but she said if at all possible I should avoid using the ambulance because it is so expensive. “Get a friend to drive you to Conrad,” she said. So I did, once I thought of one. Emergency provided a former military field officer who put me to sleep and restored my shoulder joint, strapping me into a velcro and elastic restraint worthy of S and M. My driver was the former mayor of Valier and I tried to repay her by giving her a binder of my blog essays on water. She was working for the Conrad paper.

The next incident with my house was a rather shady chance to get reroofed, necessary because of a terrible hail storm. In the course of that, it was discovered that the vents for the gas-fired floor furnace and water heater were totally corrupted and filling the house with strange gases. To pay for the roofing, I borrowed from my bank in Portland where I had excellent credit but didn’t fit their requirements. We went as close as possible.

Then VISA helped me get a new electric hot water heater for under the floor and replace the floor furnace with a wall furnace that vented directly outside. My health improved. It turned out that the gas meter was old and it leaked. Thanks to heroic efforts by the gas men, sacrificing knuckles and summoning patience, a new meter was installed. In exploring the subject, I discovered that there are ground swells of sentiment opposing household natural gas as poisoning plants. I read many stories of explosions, gas leaks, and the like. The piping of century-old Montana towns was wearing out. A mainstreet Bozeman art gallery exploded one morning, killing the manager. Infrastructure, your name is Montana, except to Gianforte who isn’t from Montana.

I got my Covid vaccine shots as soon as they were available and will get the booster as soon as it comes. In the meantime I was dismayed that my doc was an argumentative anti-vaxer and had suffered personality changes. He was aging and no one could stop him.

So the bottom line is that I chose a new doc and am hoping that she will work with me in these times so crazy and deadly so that I can do scouting and sorting. That’s how I self-diagnosed this pharynx mucus struggle, using OTC meds. It had been a minor problem for a while, but maybe because we are indoors now, this was much worse.

The main thing that needs to be done is housekeeping: removing dust and irritants. So far, I’m too weak and prone to coughing and no one in this town will even check groceries, much less clean houses. (No hispanics, no blacks.) As if I would let anyone in this house to clean, since they have no sense of what it is about, even before the cats. They don’t understand books or which ones belong together. Paper is for starting fires, esp if it is written on, “used”. I’m exaggerating but not much.

So while I manage to keep up my writing schedule, a bit shortened, I have several strategies: one is a hierarchy of procrastination. Some things can be put off so long that my heirs will have to deal with them. Other things must be dealt with immediately: for instance, property taxes. Never before since homesteading have predators been searching so hard for land acquisition. It is as if they know the value is going out of money.

Another tactic is zoning. Kitchen and bathroom are meant to be as orderly and equipped as possible because they tie most tightly to health. My front room is lined with bookshelves and looks the same around the space, but one alcove is reserved for current reading. It looks like “failure to shelve” but is in fact several books going on in parallel.

As I feel stronger and cough less, the next steps are clear. Christmas shopping was done earlier and luckily I’m not sending anything to Australia, since the US is no longer able to mail to Australia. (!!!) I can go back to the sequence I was following earlier. But becoming stronger is the memory of Seventies dogma that if a person is ill, it is related to the state of the land and the culture, that it keys into and results from cracks in the harmony of the whole. I wonder whether I still have some of those books.