Phenology Rant: Enter This Poisoned Neighborhood...

(Remember Shel Silverstein? “Enter this deserted house / But please walk softly as you do...”)

Poison was sprayed on the west end of my town on Friday. I woke up at 3 a.m. with my nose gushing. That’s the time the railroad company like to poison the railroad. I live about half a mile from the railroad; whether or not I react to its regular poisoning depends on which way the wind’s blowing. Most years I don’t notice a reaction, but know when the railroad’s been poisoned by seeing the dead birds along the road and blighted flowers in people’s lawns. On Friday the wind was gusting in all directions. By 8 a.m. I was dehydrated enough to stop sneezing and walk wearily into town.

Walk with me, why don’t you? Take a tour of what glyphosate does to a neighborhood.

The first person we meet is a young woman whose dull eyes and tired voice might not catch your attention, but they do mine, because ordinarily she is if anything more annoyingly perky than I am. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she says wearily, although she and I had not scheduled a time to meet. She has something to explain about herself. “My daughter was having such a hard time with allergies, it was hard to get started. She was just sniffling and dragging all morning long. She even lagged and dragged eating breakfast. I like to never got her off to school.” Her voice and mood show that the kid’s being a few minutes late for school is the tip of an iceberg. Both mother and daughter are ill. Nobody will officially admit knowing why.

We proceed into the Friday Market, passing several people we don’t know personally. Does the ugliness of the crowd strike you? It does me. It catches my attention because it’s illogical and abnormal. I don’t know most of their ages, but many of the ones I do know are fantastically well preserved. That grumpy, whiny old gossip over there might look like an obnoxious fifty-something to you, but he’s actually eighty-seven and has the town’s permission to be obnoxious. Then again, that skinny one with the silver-white hair, who could be some sort of model if he didn’t look so sick? This morning he’s walking as if he were eighty or ninety years old too, but he’s only about sixty; he has an official diagnosis of Crohn’s Disease, and on some days, like this one, it flares up. About a third of the shoppers come in from out of town and still look healthy and well preserved. The regulars, who live in Gate City, look ghastly.

The so-called aging process is very largely a matter of individual health; the people we see in this marketplace, whether we know their age or not, all look “older” than they did last week. (Exceptions come in from out of town, because on the surface it looks like a perfect open-air market day.) Note, underneath the ugly sags, puffs, and wrinkles and dull eyes, the classic bone structure of most of the faces. Note the flowing manes of black, brown, blonde, and one extraordinary head of gray-white hair. Some people are obese, but many have good figures. Clothes are casual but mostly clean, tasteful, even good-quality. Several Friday shoppers have minor disabilities—only one of the wheelchair crowd rolls out today, the market often attracts half a dozen—but most of them, too, normally look well preserved. Sometimes some of them make themselves ugly by sneering, at me and my wares or at the “friends” about whom they gossip, but not today. Today what’s so unpleasant to look at about the faces is the anguish. Eyes are slitted, eyebrows clenched, mouths drawn so far down that one young woman makes me think “Is it possible to draw your mouth that far down, if you try?”

A woman with black lamé hair, about the same shade as mine, calls attention to herself, causing her husband to growl, by giving her visiting brother a sisterly side-to-side hug. Public demonstrations of affection are not Gate City’s style. Most of us feel that we ought to be able to send loved ones off to school, or war, with a brisk handshake at the station or airport, having already done all kissing and crying at home. “Nothing wrong with a hug,” the woman says in a bantering tone. The brother cracks a joke. The husband laughs. Obviously these people like each other and are glad to be together. They’re not old. The brother is obese; the wife and husband, who are teasing him about that, might be pointed out as “the good-looking one” in a crowd. But today they look grumpy, as if their sinuses are either painfully dried out or clogging up.

A man who leaned over to pick up a box of toys easily, last week, has trouble leaning over to pick up the box and digging out money to pay for it, this week. At least he's able to carry it once the box has been emptied into a shopping bag.

A woman who often buys a book pokes at the books I’ve brought out. Because the weather looks so unpredictable I’ve brought out only as many books as I can carry inside in case of rain. Possibly she’s looking for a title I didn’t bring out. She looks at some of the books I did bring out, only a glance or a squint. I don’t ask, but she looks as if she’s finding it harder to see the print than she did last week.

A man who was walking without a cane, last week, is limping and leaning on his cane, this week.

The oldest regular shopper (so far as they admit!) is a neat little man who often drives through the market in a neat little car. Well over ninety, he’s noted for his alertness, presence of mind, and precise driving. A few years ago, they say, he had just one lapse where he climbed into his car, forgetting either to pay for his purchase or to start the engine as he released the brake and let the car coast downhill. People’s screaming and scattering reminded him to throw the brake before the car rolled into a booth. This week he doesn’t get out of the car. He looks apologetic. I wonder whether he’s afraid he might have another lapse.

It’s a day for Senior Moments if ever one was. Two people’s greetings make sense only when parsed as things I can imagine them saying to other people that I know that they know. One of those people is a relative; since she inherited the gene for Real Cherokee Hair her hair is thicker and blacker than mine, although she’s twenty-five years older. Her complexion is much “redder” than mine, but I’m wearing a red dress and sitting in the sun...

I feel tired, so tired. I feel dehydrated but I’m not too dehydrated to need to rush to the bathroom. Here comes a shopper who I know will be driving right past the convenience store—no, he’s not driving today. He’s not yet eighty years old, but some days he’s fit to drive and some days he’s not; he’s riding in a car pool. I dash out after another shopper and beg a ride to the convenience store. What I flush away in the convenience isn’t blood—yet. That’ll come later.

I still feel tired. Luckily someone has lent me a chair for the day. I sit in the chair and doze in between customers. People joke about that. Normally I can stand up in the market all morning, no trouble. Then again, normally I sleep until six or at least five o’clock in the morning. Maybe that’s all there is to this tiredness. Maybe it’s not the poison affecting my kidneys. One of my grandfathers died of kidney failure; his main symptom was that he didn’t sleep through the night and didn’t stay awake in the daytime. Eventually he dozed off and never woke up. That’s not a problem I have, except once when I had Lidocaine instead of Novocaine for a tooth filling, and once or twice when I’ve been exposed to glyphosate.

It’s ironic because this is the sort of Friday, and it’s promising to lead into the sort of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, that normally give people “spring fever.” People should be feeling exhilarated, in the mood for spring cleaning and gardening. I...was feeling that way; yesterday.

It’s perfect spring cleaning and gardening weather, brisk and bracing, sunny with a cool dry breeze. The mountains are still yellowish green. The off-and-on spring weather is allowing irises and azaleas and violets and fleabane daisies and trilliums and dogwoods and redbuds and vincas and tulips and a few late-blooming Prunus to be in bloom all at once, which people are blaming for their “allergies”—pooh! I’ve been down that blind alley before; I have no true allergies to any natural flower on Earth, and I doubt that ninety percent of this morning's "allergy sufferers" have, either. 

Birds are singing, or they were. Butterflies are flying, or they were. Such perfect weather for so many outdoor things won’t happen again this year, and I am not fit for another minute of outdoor work after midday, when I head up to the café to rehydrate and finish a hack writing job.

In the café restroom mirror I suppose my face does look as “old” as that relative’s, the one who’s twenty-five years older and has always been heavier than I am. My face puffs and sags in a similar way when I’m dehydrated and/or ill.

We go out into the café. Where have all the customers gone? Possibly they’ve been scared away by the workers; I’m used to them enough that what I feel for them is empathy, but I will admit that neither of them is very appetizing to be around this afternoon. One of the two workers on duty has suddenly developed a horrible-sounding cough. Well, she did have a cold last week, but it never sounded that bad before. The other one, looking surly, says several times that she can’t wait for this Friday to be over; suddenly it’s “been a long week.” Well, she is young enough that it could be hormones, but she doesn’t usually act “hormonal” in front of customers. You might not notice that; I do.

The Cub Scout who usually comes in after school, and is almost (to an aunt’s eye) as lovable a child as The Nephews were at his age, doesn’t come in at all. Most people probably don’t miss a little boy; I do. Maybe he’s found a place to be outdoors today; all children ought to be able to be outdoors this afternoon. Maybe being outdoors today won’t make him ill. I hope.

Mid-afternoon I make another extra visit to the restroom. I feel completely empty, afterward, and refill my coffee mug with water twice. I dab discreetly at my nose with my napkin rather than honking or sneezing.

I walk all the way home, noting the slow traffic for rush hour on a Friday afternoon. Maybe a lot of drivers left work early and drove to the lake; I hope so. The laptop, which I need to take home to transfer May’s book reviews onto it, is not heavy but feels heavy to me. If you were really walking beside me you probably would have offered to carry it, unless you felt sicker than I did, which is possible.

I’m cramping; I wouldn’t have believed I could have any further use for a toilet this afternoon, but I have to duck into the other convenience store, the one I try to avoid. The time I bought a snack in there for Miss Manners, I opened the package and saw a clump of green mold. The time I bought just a box of salt for Miss Manners, it had a hole in the side of the box under the label! And I’m sure they have to charge more than the small-chain convenience stores like Addco and Black Diamond because that’s where they restock their shelves, but with an Addco store only a mile away...! That couple snatched up that store because other people could not work with it, because it’s so close to the wretched railroad that no longer contributes any good to Gate City to offset the inconvenience it causes, and the kindest thing I can think of to do for them is to encourage them to go back where they came from.

Once, long ago, it was an asset for convenience stores to be near the railroad, which is why most of them are. Maybe, if people thought about this and leaned on the railroad company, it could be made an asset again. We could actually have commuter trains to Clinchport, Kingsport, Big Stone Gap; we could cruise through the Natural Tunnel. People just have not been thinking creatively about those coal trains. Nobody even burns coal any more, so those trains are a pure inconvenience to us, but they could be a vein of money, the way they used to be. But that’s another rant.

Anyway I trudge into the store and a horrible-looking old hag scowls across someone else’s shoulder to squawk “You need help?” and I think, as I trudge back to the restroom, “Miss Manners doesn’t want anything you have to sell, y’old blind BAT!” Then I look at myself in the mirror. My face has gone from florid to ashy. I really look like someone whose answer to “You need help?” might be “Do you have Epi Pens?” or “Call an ambulance, please.” It’s possible to look worse than the hag keeping the store, and I do. Actually the storekeeper looks fat, but not otherwise unpleasant to the eye, on other days; I don’t think she’s much older than I am, or even as old. She’s having a horrible day, too. She doesn't wear glasses yet, either, and for all I know, clogged sinuses made refocussing her eyes on me painful to her, the way it is to me when I have a clogged-sinus headache. I don’t blame her for being rude any longer, but I still think Miss Manners doesn’t want anything from her store.

I go home. I let Samantha-cat out for the evening and cook dinner. I doze off suddenly halfway through it, having just enough presence of mind to cover my dish before I lean over and nod off right at the table. I wake up, put away the leftovers, bring Samantha in for the night, and sleep nine hours, with two more sprints to the bathroom in between.

Saturday is a beautiful day. I have a lot to do: those book reviews, including a brand-new book I've not even finished reading yet, spring cleaning, gardening, some tax and family stuff. I do not even find the energy to take the laptop out of its case and start transferring book reviews. I sit up, read a few chapters of the new book @bachiles sent me, doze off, repeat. All. Day. Long, with a few more dashes to the bathroom, during which the blood starts to appear. Also, when I rehydrate enough, a few more sneeze-seizures. I am not a happy camper. I hate losing the best Saturday of the year this way.

I hope youall enjoy your first reading of this novel more than I did; it's not the novel's fault.

On Sunday I stay awake all day, but I'm grumpy, draggy, and still too feeble to get any use out of having the laptop at home. I sit up and do some of the family stuff, rush to the bathroom again, lie down and read some more of the novel until I recover the energy to sit up again, repeat. All. Day. Long, with an interlude when I hear Samantha retching and bringing up only the grass she's chewed, on the porch. 

This is very bad, especially with that precious kitten in the box in the office room. It's not easy to get up and mix up a cup of powdered charcoal in water. (Ooohhh, on a day when I ought to be pruning and digging and hauling big storage drums in and out of the barn...!) I try not to think about the next step--getting charcoal into ever-wary Samantha. 

Well, she is a Listening Cat, and she does feel the benefit of the first sip. I sneak up on her and squirt one-quarter of the syringe before she realizes what I'm up to. She gulps it down, then draws back and glares and growls, predictably, and sticks out her claws. I explain to her, knowing that there's no way she really understands most of the words I'm using, hoping some of them get through...I wanted to call her something other than "Samantha," which was the name of two other loved and missed animals I used to know, but she's learned that name and likes it. "Samantha, dear, I know you're not feeling well. Neither am I. Samantha, we've been poisoned. You ate something that's been poisoned; that's why you're sick. This stuff will help. Samantha, I've seen other cats react just the way you're doing. The ones who had charcoal lived. The ones who didn't have charcoal died, or their kittens died. I want you to take all of it right away. Please, Samantha."

And, miraculously, she does. She stops retching; later she has a healthy appetite, and tends her kitten, and the kitten sounds normal back there at the back of the nest box.

On Monday a certain person calls. I don't particularly like his company because he works with a lot of nasty-mouthed, nasty-minded men who apparently gossip all day about things they're unlikely ever to do again. "Why don't you sleep over at my house? Everybody thinks you do, anyway, riding around and doing errands with me." I'll say this to any of those nasty-minded men who know how to read. Sex is one reason why people do favors for other people. Barter is another one. Obligations, like trying to compensate for something nasty their idiot young relatives have done, is another. What's going on is none of your business, and if you have time to think about it you need to have more business of your own to mind, but let's just say we're not talking about the one living man to whom my middle-aged body still has any physical reaction whatsoever. And my body would not be in that sort of mood, even if he were here, and in that sort of mood, today. And if he'd thought about coming into Gate City today, I'd warn him to stay away until we've had a good rain. On the other side of the mountain is a good place for him to be.

But I let this guy have his want-to-be-fifteen-again joke, because I had planned to walk to the grocery store on Sunday and I don't think walking to the store is a good idea. I have managed to set up the laptop and transfer three-quarters of the book reviews, and want to be able to finish at least that job today. So I go out to the store with him, and talk seriously about barters and obligations, and about how beautiful the weather is in the Boondocks--which is the actual name people have proposed for his neighborhood--and how miserable people are in Gate City.

"Joe Blow had put out a big garden. Say, his field's near the railroad. Said everything but the winter onions is dead. And I saw a big old crow lying dead beside the road."

I always see songbirds, after glyphosate poisoning. I've not seen a crow killed before. Those animal studies at epa.gov do show that toxicity builds up with repeated exposure to glyphosate. If we don't get it banned now, who knows, during the next fifteen years we'll probably see dogs as well as cats, geese and crows and herons as well as sparrows and robins, very likely cows...

I have enough energy to cook another meal, having bought fresh supplies, and eat dinner. While I'm eating Samantha starts spewing froth again, without even having swallowed any grass to start the process. I give her more charcoal. She takes it without much of a fight but afterward, just to show what she thinks of needing to be given medicine by a human, she play-bites my hand. I push back into the bite. She doesn't bite down hard enough to break the skin. In another five or ten years, if she lives so long, she may mellow enough that I'd trust her around children or visitors.

Tuesday morning, the kitten is still squeaking normally, not silent or screaming, and Samantha eats breakfast in time for me to catch a ride into town. In the cafe I hear that "everybody's having allergies."

Right. Allergies. Hah. Nothing started blooming on Friday that hadn't started blooming last week. Do not let anyone tell you that all this yuckiness has anything to do with the pretty flowers outside, many of which have actually withered up over the weekend. Not the flowers, which would have withered in any case, but the whole plants. The nights were cool, temperatures down around the freezing mark at the Cat Sanctuary, but not cold enough that anything was actually frozen, either. The flowers are reacting to poison and so are we.

I am still cramping. I still gushed blood into the toilet the first time I used it today. At home, yesterday, with the good old prevailing wind blowing the poisoned air back toward the railroad, my nose wasn't gushing; here in the cafe, every time someone opens the door, my sinuses are...not clogging up completely, but dripping a little. 

Do I really feel what I felt when I wrote that Irish Curse poem last summer--that anyone who sprays glyphosate deserves the full agony of a slow death from cancer of the kidneys, and more? Yes. And if Virginia's legislators had enough sense to recognize that spraying glyphosate is a crime of "disregard of life," just like drunk driving or letting children play on a railroad trestle, it would be a good thing. And if I were on the jury (some of that business I didn't finish over the weekend had to do with jury duty) when someone admitted having seen someone else spraying glyphosate and stabbed that person in the back...poisoning the air is like raping the lungs. I'd do what I would've done in the Bobbitt case. I'd say it was temporary insanity, and the person should definitely get counselling in case of any relapse.

But seriously...even though, if temporary insanity could happen in the vicinity of anyone as deserving as a rapist, it would be a poisoner! Seriously, both rape and glyphosate poisoning are societal problems. Killing one perpetrator does not solve the problem. There are others. What we really need to do, I say (even at the depth of a celiac moment of rage), is educate everyone about how vile these crimes are. We may need somebody like Lorena Bobbitt to dramatize the understandableness of temporary insanity in the presence of this kind of crime, but it would be better if we didn't. We could just choose, as some addicts do, to hit a relatively shallow bottom with these things. The more people can stay out of jail, stay sane, and help others understand what their "allergies" and disease "flares" and "aging" are really all about, the better.