Loggers Landing

Purchase of goods and wares, storage of nuts and energy drinks, rendezvous of rough characters maybe too rough with smooth characters maybe too smooth, the mind with the body with the soul…the trichotomy of the American consumer lays bare at the convenience store. Without digression into small towns, big dreams, and smaller hopes that throws our tragic arc into the wind until we settle like dust…never doubt that the gas station is good business. They possess the cathartic moments of our delusions.

My matters of inconvenience…cottonmouth, stomach waging revolution against water, brain thinking complex thoughts of what if, why, and how…lead me to the slaughterhouse of hot-case corndogs and mountain dews. Too much to drink, not enough time to contemplate, and the ever present didn't drink enough…water, along with social anxiety, family history, and rejection by dreams, your dreams, my dreams, not to mention the acceptance of failure, just saying that cult of winning parallels that cult of losing, and of course we drink too much and not enough water.

Knowing a few loggers, I am confident that I know little to nothing of logging, but I know they take their job seriously. Some, maybe many, have gotten their teeth knocked out by chokers and coworkers. Others, not many, understand what to do with a choker when handed one. Some drag it and the attached cable and lasso it around the log. Most move on to other jobs on the hill and some quit the choker setting gig with their body whole and not broken. What is a broken logger? I mean what is a broken man? It’s despair. Despair in the bones, despair in the blood, despair in the thoughts, despair in the flesh. The constant variable of danger deranges one’s sense for it.

My Grandpa Ray had many occupations of time and space in the universe, but I know him for two-World War Two veteran and logger. The first he survived. The second he did not. Imagine a logger’s landing to be a hollow graded flat into the middle or on the top of the hill. Take a long look at the river valley and remember the blindness of never shutting your eyes to the perpetuity of shit grunting above and below. Signal whistles toot, the choker is yarded in with logs, signal whistles toot, the choker is yarded out empty. Machines are loud. Danger is present. And men scream at each other under physical and emotional and operational stress. Screaming is sometimes necessary if one wants to be heard and not be forgotten and swallowed by the perpetual shit grunting of man, machine, and earth. The logs are stacked on the landing. Grandpa Ray ducked some bullets, but it’s hard, nearly impossible to escape a log stack that breaks the grip of gravity.

Loggers Landing is the only gas station in my hometown. I wish to avoid it, but I cannot. Need some gas to get downriver, want a five p.m item at five a.m that you absolutely need after turning the dusk over into the dawn, want some gas to get upriver, need to grab a gallon of water to make it home? Survival considers the road…in between the destinies of day dreams and Monday morning, at the whim of white lines and ditches…this road crosses over the yellow line into homes, trees, and telephone poles.

Pay attention I have heard some poets say. Potholes in the parking lot, people everywhere from anywhere, a man asking anyone, anyone to spare him a dollar. At the pump I give up on paying with my card after five slides and send my friend in to pay with cash…long wait, someone cannot make up their mind at the hot-case before they order one of everything…bean and cheese burrito, barbeque beef burrito, corn dog, jojos, chicken strips, fried fish, taquitos, and undiscovered creatures of the deep fryer. Cars of all types and temperaments, everything, everyone, me, you, pay attention, anyone anywhere anyone is a plot vehicle of dirt, steel, and flesh. I’m concerned that the man who asked me for a dollar comes out of the store with a bag of hot-case.

No beer. No cigarettes. No energy drinks. No water. Just begging for grease, cheese, mysterious meat, bread, and grease. I said no to him, and I said to myself…no fucking way.

The most time I spent at Loggers Landing was in the middle of my childhood. I’d get out of school, walk down the hill, and order a burrito with a dollar's worth of jojos. Ranch dressing? Oh yeah. Then I’d turn to my friends and whisper, oh fucking yeah. One of us might have scraped enough change from their mother’s purse or the console of their dad’s truck to buy thirty-two ounces of fountain soda with a look-the-other-way refill. From there we wandered, running from and into adolescence.

At five p.m my mom arrived at Loggers Landing in her work van. Then we could wait inside the store at tables. Now you can’t walk to the cashier without bumping into stacks of random shit. Loggers Landing is a smaller seedier version of Costco. You fall for a few things on your quest to find what you need, and when you pay your tribute to these gods-business owners, trickle downers, these ceilings, these floors, whatever you want to call your mercantile spirit-then you can land on your feet with their hotdogs or hot-case.

The Ten Percenters

Ten pennies and you smell freedom fries

Two nickels and you can own some skin

Five pennies and one nickel and you get something that tastes good but feels bad, a peace of mind that comes with conditions like Jim Crow and calories and arteries that age prematurely

One dime, just enough to end the war and start the globalization of nukes and cholesterol

Ten cent jojos

Late 1980’s early 1990’s…hot-case

U-pick

Or trust the cashier

She finds you the biggest one buried at the bottom

You’ll get almost half of a russet that missed the cut and got thrown overboard into a tub of fat

I always asked, do I have to pay tax?

She said, read my lips…

No…new…taxes