I told my friend, "I'll write story, a real story, in five minutes about one of those pictures -- pick one." (I didn't say it would be a long story.) Anyway, here it is:
-- They left Maine at sun up. The excavator had been loaded on the trailer the night before. By six they were on the highway, drinking coffee out of styrofoam, and picking up WFAN out of New York.
-- By nine they were halfway through their cigarettes, so stopped in to a Milford Shell to buy more. And piss. They switched to music in the truck, Prince and Creedence, and this made them smoke more cigarettes.
-- They made New York at noon, and searched out the Garmin's promised work site. It was as advertised: a great wide open hilltop, and surrounding them in a mile wide perimeter were towers; a Stone Hedge of towers; squat monopoles, monolithic tri-legs, and heaven piercing guide-wire towers; towers corresponding to technological steps up taken by those red barn hamlets inlayed to the hills below -- here were watchtowers, radio towers, microwave towers, and, oh yes, satellite towers.
-- And now here they were, all the way from Maine, to grind out some dirt work -- had five thousand men, in seventy or eighty years, worked this hill in the name of communicating with anywhere but this hill? How many had sat up here eating baloney sandwiches, thinking, "What's this tower to me?", (besides a paycheck of course).
-- The drive had taken up the day, it was time to get to it. The one fella watched the other climb on the trailer, and get inside the bright orange Kubota excavator. Then the fella got back out of the machine.
-- "You want to know what I think?"
-- (Had he been reading his mind?)
-- "What do you think?"
-- "I think we left the keys to the excavator in Maine."
2 comments:
But he was just shittin' with him. He started the tractor and backed it off the trailer, still grinning.
Heh -- I like it.
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