Young Democrats

I keep thinking it’s spring and the weather continues to surprise me. Monday it is warm and calm and clear, the prefect day for digging trenches for sprinkler lines in the courtyard. Tuesday it’s cold enough to bring out the coats and gloves again. I know, that’s the southwest. After a lifetime here I’m beginning to think that only a crazy man or an imbecile would even try to predict the weather.

I’ve been out there, though, digging away, raking the rocks and moving piles of dirt around. There is an outline now where the rocks for the planter will go and a nice space up against the back of the garage for a fountain. I’ve trenched right up to the willow tree that will shade this area in a few years and soon the sprinklers and drippers will be quietly working away to keep everything from drying up and blowing away. It’s slow work. Last summer it was the front yard which needed sprinklers, a lawn, metal boarders, and a boat load of gravel. It took months, actually years if you count the time it took me to move the boulders into planters and a nice rock wall along the front of the property. There was a time, while everything was torn up with long trenches and pieces of pipe laid out willy nilly that I was sure the whole thing was for naught, that it would never be finished, that my yard would always look like we had a problem with Chernobyl gophers. I’m not the most patient man and that kind of perspective is alien to me but it all worked out and now people stop on the street to look at my yard with its big shade trees and thick dark green grass that looks like it belongs on a golf course. So too will the courtyard, eventually.

It’s patient work, the kind of work that requires vision and an ability to sustain that vision during the summer heat when sweat pours off your head and stings your eyes and the very air you breathe feels like it is on fire. It is the kind of work that requires faith, mine to be sure even more for my wife and for my neighbors, none of whom are ever sure that I’m going to be able to finish an ambitious project and I certainly understand that kind of skepticism as I’m not always sure myself.

Two years ago we had a bunch of boulders dumped in our yard. The plan was to have a tractor move them into a wall along the front, the kind of rambling line of rocks that you really only see in nature. The pile was enormous and it became obvious that there was no way to get a tractor up to where it could move them and that it was going to be up to me to do it. One at a time I moved the smaller ones with a long steel bar and plenty of scraped hands and feet. A couple of times the rocks rolled back on me and I had to jump out of the way and told my kids to stay away while I was working on them. It was slow going and cost me multiple trips to the chiropractor without whom I would be stove up in bed like an old man with arthritis.

I got them moved, though, all except the four largest ones and no matter how I tried, no matter the mechanical advantage tricks I used, I just couldn’t get them to budge. For weeks I went at those rocks with the tenacity of a three year old holding on to an ice cream cone in a tornado and was unable to move them one inch. I cussed and kicked and threw my tools at them and stomped around the yard which was then still mostly weeds and piles of brush. I thought about shooting them, blowing them up, covering them with dirt and just having a nice hill in my yard.

One afternoon I was moping around the pile, gloves on my hands, poking and prodding with my long steel pry bar looking for some angle, some inspiration that hadn’t hit me before when my wife came out and stood on one of the rocks. She looked around and asked a few questions which I answered in an annoyed voice waiting for her to suggest something that I had already tried and already failed at. She didn’t disappoint. Sensing that I was about to explode she stepped off the rock and threw one last thing at me, like she was tossing a ball of paper into the trash can on her way past.

Why not just make it part of the planter and leave the boulders where they are? I yelled. Told her to leave me alone that I knew what I was doing and if she wanted to come out here and move these damn rocks she was welcome to it. I yelled at her back until she was in the house and the door was closed. I yelled to myself for an hour while I did exactly what she said and for another hour while I admired how good it looked and how it was just the right thing to do.

I haven’t thought about that incident in a long time but I was listening to the news yesterday about more then a hundred Iraqi’s killed in an explosion and about how President Bush just wants to throw more money and troops at it and hope it will somehow get better. Forgive me but I can just see him out there stomping his feet and shaking his fists and swearing and shoving and not accomplishing anything. I can see him in the oval office looking at the thing wondering where he might try next, what angle he can use, what tools he hasn’t already tried. It’s got to be frustrating to see your plans all turn to crap, to feel the pressure from the neighbors to hurry up and clean out the mess. I understand it. I certainly do.

It doesn’t help, either, to have people offering suggestions, especially when you don’t want to hear them, when you feel like you already tried them, when they don’t meet the original goals you had for the project in the first place. No one likes to move piles of rocks over and over again and I’m sure that our President doesn’t want to go back and reconsider his entire landscape plan.

At least I knew I was whipped. There was no way in hell I was going to move those rocks with muscle power alone but it took someone else to point it out even though it should have been obvious from the get go. I knew it but wouldn’t have admitted it and that, when you get right down to it, is a crying shame. When stubborn ego gets in the way of making smart decisions we accomplish nothing but looking stupid, yelling and screaming out in the front yard while the neighbors wonder about how full your basket it.

You can see that I’m not one to talk about putting my head down and carrying on when there is no hope. I’ve admitted that to you because I’m just a guy and no better or worse then anyone else. Still, you’ve got to wonder about that guy who goes out there and bangs his head against a rock thinking that the rock will get softer or maybe move on its own. You’ve got to wonder about a guy who tries for the better part of a year to accomplish something that just isn’t going to be accomplished.

How much more so should we wonder about our political leadership under the same circumstances? No one likes to admit to a solid ass whoopin, certainly not a man from Texas and I’m with you on that. It’s bad enough having your butt handed to you and even worse when you have to go home with a shiner and a nasty limp and tell Dad what happened. I can’t speak for you, but I know there are times when I need a good old-fashioned, ego-stomping, confidence-shattering blow to put my feet back on terra firma. Sometimes I need my wife, with her clean hands to come out and show me how stupid I am. I hate it but damn if it doesn’t do the trick sometimes.

Of course, it only works if I pay attention and I guess that’s what is so upsetting about our situation in Iraq. We have the mightiest army in the world. No doubt about that. We have the best technology, the best equipment, and beyond question, the best soldiers. Our nation has thrown the money and the effort into moving this boulder and still, it sits in the same place now as it did in 2003 and that is what is so frustrating. We are no better off then we were and it could certainly be argued that we are worse off then ever and still we press on.

Alternatives have been suggested, different approaches have been encouraged but that old ranch hand mentality persists and our nation still tries to move those rocks with nothing but military might and it is long past clear that it isn’t working. Perhaps it’s time to reconsider our objectives, to erase some of the lines on our landscape plan and make some changes. Maybe it’s time to put the tools away and incorporate the rocks in some different way.