Climbing over deadfalls and picking through an overgrown trail
the mind goes into a kind of idle, fastening on subjects at a far
remove. Was it generous or merely meretricious of Ken Lay to settle
for 30 million as his Enron going-away gift when he could have had
60? Does any CEO walk away from the corporate deathbed with less
than 10? And what do those sycophantic board members think when
they cash their attendance fee checks, having agreed to re-price
the chief’s options so that he has an immediate profit of 350
million instead of a wash? Do they snicker when they propose
floating more stock for “employees’ incentive programs,” knowing
the respondent stockholder will vote “yes” as they recommend,
envisioning a harried company bookkeeper who has three kids at home
and will work extra hard to earn incentive stock, not knowing it is
pledged to the CFO beforehand?
Coming upon some bear scat still steaming in the deep gloaming
of the trail tends to return that idling mind to the business at
hand. The bottom of a deep ravine in Montana has been reached and
there some fifty yards up a trickle of the crick (“run” in
Virginia, “stream” elsewhere, but “crick” in Montana and Wyoming)
is something not part of the original setting. A cabin. Well, what
was a cabin, now a shack, nearly roofless, giving way to time. The
logs had been rough-hewn, but not large. Yes, one man with an ax
and saw and hammer could have done it. Enough year-stained labor
said there had to have been enough color somewhere in the vicinity
to warrant such an enterprise. Or was it that he was tired and this
was as far as the search could go? An inflection point in a
life?
Ah. There. Hanging from an extended part of the siding. Could it
really be? Yes, a pot, a flecked pot still hanging by its handle,
as though awaiting a hand to reach for it, fill it with crick
water, boil some beans, add whatever the hunt had brought. Mountain
supper. A gentle examination revealed this pot to be like none
other seen in our time.
The bottom had been repaired. Not once or twice, but three times.
With round, ready-made pot patches that filled in the burn-throughs
wrought by open fires.
It was not the finding of a simple household implement; it was
the economic message stamped those three times in the bottom of it.
A hieroglyphic of another time that needed no rosetta stone to
explain tough times, needful husbandry of manufactured goods. And
care. God, yes. Care. A look upstream, into the darkening woods,
said “be aware.”
There was no temptation to retrieve the pot, to bring it out, a
souvenir of some difficult day. It was in fact imperative to put it
back and make it as secure as anything in that settling scene can
be. And then to climb out, look back and realize as pilots do that
darkness does not fall; it wells up from the deeper ground, from
within the earth.
If anyone ever knew who was there and searched for gold, he has
died, or moved away. Locals are not sure just which ravine you
mean. And anyway, their eyes are fastened eastward, at those
burning towers in the city. Where, as here, re-priced options do
not matter and precious things must be repaired.
