Another Sound Entirely

Don Coates reaches into the Jag’s open cockpit and turns the key to the “on” position. A high capacity fuel pump whines to life. He then turns the key to “start.” The straight six fires almost immediately and settles into a fast idle with the uneven gait of high lift and duration cams. That it starts from cold and runs so well is testament to his thoroughness and care, especially in the fuel injection department. Six throttle bodies hiss and suck big volumes of air, the barely muffled exhaust barks and snarls percussively as he revs the engine. With a grin just this side of evil the otherwise quiet spoken Coates looks at me and shouts, “You don’t think it’s too loud, do you?”

Delighted, I smile and shrug my shoulders. Loud is a relative term and the sounds this engine makes are music. When it’s the right music, I like loud music. “Sounds good to me!” I yell in reply, doing my best not to spit in his ear.

To be around a running race engine where emission and sound levels are not parts of the design sheet is to realize how toned down, sanitized and arguably civilized engines are in road cars, even the high performance ones. Whether a Honda Civic or Porsche 911, dozens of sensors send signals to electronic control units which crunch the numbers and spit out commands to fuel injectors, ignition coils, air valves and the like. So appeased, the Gods of internal combustion smile and the engine revs, and the car goes. But regardless of how fast the processors are, well, ok, maybe this doesn’t apply to Formula 1, there’s a perceptible disconnect, a numbness between the driver’s right foot and what happens in the engine bay.

Not so with Don’s Jag. While the car is intended for the road, the engine is one hundred percent race. Based on a 4.2 litre series 2, it’s been built with all the right stuff by noted tuner Lou Fidanza. Throttle response is instantaneous. It snaps to attention. Stand alone electronic fuel injection relies on very few parameters, the primary one being throttle position and the rest is pure mechanical work. No microprocessors and servos hunt for what to do, there’s no thinking about it. Give it the gas and hold on. No, actually hold on first. Things happen that quickly.

What about the rest of the car? I don’t want to give away the story quite yet, but suffice it to say it’s a one-off E-type, built almost entirely of carbon fiber, by hand by Coates. It is mouthwateringly beautiful in engineering, design and execution, with the maiden voyage slated for next summer.

For now it’s the sounds I relish. Once the car is on the road… my oh my. Stay tuned.

Gordon Bunker

Sounds In The Forest

… in Wildness is the preservation of the world.

H.D. Thoreau

In the forest, air pushes and parts and comes together again around Ponderosa pine needles. The branches and needles bend and sway and spring back. A multitude of tiny oscillations of pressure occur and spread out in all directions, and I hear a whoosh. Nearing the summit of Mount Atalaya the wind picks up and the early snowstorm intensifies. Falling snow streaks sideways. I can hear the whoosh of approaching gusts traveling up and over the slopes. And then they are upon me. Snow pelts and stings my face. I have strong associations with the sound of wind in the trees, this is being in the forest, this is being in nature.

Coming down the mountain I cross paths with a flock of Juncos, a dozen or more birds in all. These little members of the sparrow family are ground feeders. They flit around and ahead of me and stop to peck for seeds, I walk the trail and they fly along. The sound of their wing beats fascinates me. Each bird quickly flaps its wings gaining altitude of about a foot, then glides and falls and then again flaps its wings. Thus they travel in a bobbing up and down way, their wings make a rapid puttering sound, their glides are silent. And so being surrounded by them is to be surrounded by a lovely three dimensional ensemble of putterings and quiet. Each soft little drum beat the beat of a wing. The Juncos and I are together for a few moments and then we part.

There is order in nature. There is freedom of greed and artifice in nature and this is why I go for hikes. Time in nature - the setting is not important - renews and refreshes my spirit, it gives me hope.

Gordon Bunker

The Huntress, Part Three

The man hears the lever and breech, he looks up and this time sees her. It would be a “hunting accident.”

Like him, she is hungry. Unlike him, she is not criminal.

She sees the fear in him, she sees the greed.

Greed.

She snaps the safety on. And turns and walks away. Steady. Let him live with it. It is early and there are other deer in the forest.

The man watches her until she is gone, then starts gutting the buck.

They will always know.

It is a small town. She and the man will see one another from time to time and she will always see the hunger and fear. He will always see the huntress.

She makes her way up the mountain, and crosses over a stone wall. She materializes out of the woods and walks the moss covered clearing past the church by the road and melts again into the cover. The farms and the people are gone but the church stands well kept and painted white, it stands against the trees. The moss feels like pillows under her feet. She will marry in this church, her daughter will marry in this church, but this is unknown to her. She will be mourned in this church.

She is the one in the family who always comes home with game. This is her source of pride and she will stay out until it is done, even though it will be further to get it home. Up Cotton Mountain, she walks slowly quietly higher and colder, looking at the sky she estimates it is noon.

There is sign, deer have yarded up at the edge of a field where lightning started a fire and the trees burned and the thin soil eroded and it’s been sixty years but still no trees. There are blueberries and wild rose now with bright red hips and the deer know. She follows tracks but is upwind of where they go, so circles around to a place where a farm also went with the fire. The cellar hole is all that remains, the foundations, granite blocks are impervious to fire and time. But not ice. Again and again water started with the tiniest crack in the front step, froze in it and split it apart, now an inch gap. She marvels the slow strength of ice.

There is a place where the earth is always wet, a spring, and apple trees were spared. The deer will be there and she will come from down wind.

Thick grey clouds drift close and spit snow.

And she sees them.

And moves in without a sound, low in the brush and wind, and in the cold she can see their breath. It is close range. Four thin streams of cloud sweeping away.

Again the fluid motion comes and she stands and snaps off the safety and the deer know. And she is breathing and hot, feeling the taking of life, the edge of utter confusion. There is no thinking, rather in the realm of instinct she makes her choice. It is a young two point buck and her shot, the second of the day cracks and hits in its ear.

This shot her father did not hear. He does not wonder about her, it is not too late yet.

The young buck drops and as the others scatter she considers taking another. But she can carry only one and the carrion eaters would find the second before she could get back.

Life’s clarity has already faded from the animal’s eye and the tongue hangs out.

She puts her knife in the buck’s throat to bleed it.

The blood steams, it smells clean and rich. The first and the last, the huntress tastes it, the salt.

It bleeds.

Her knife is from Sweden, a gift from her aunt, it is sharp as a razor. Her aunt got caught smoking cigarettes in an outhouse in Sweden. Thinking of this the girl giggles, oh Dear Aunite, the moment’s relief from killing is welcome. With the tip of the knife she carefully cuts around the anus and then up the belly to the throat. She cuts the esophagus and windpipe. She works and reaches and pushes the lungs and entrails out. They are warm, they steam.

She will keep the heart and liver, the remaining entrails the carrion eaters will get. The stomach contains acorns and apple. The offal will be gone before the next day’s light.

Life to life, earth to earth.

She wraps the heart and liver in a piece of oil cloth brought for this purpose, and washes the blood from her hands and knife at the spring and sheaths the knife. The sound of the snap on the small strap of leather which retains the knife in the sheath reassures her. Her job is well done, now there is the carrying. She rests and eats the cookies and cups her hands into the spring. The water is clear and tastes of stone. She ponders her location and checks her rifle. The chamber is empty.

She rises and hoists the carcass and drapes it over her shoulders. Despite her being all muscle, the weight is all she can handle. She squats and picks up her rifle. And starts for home.

Home is five miles away and darkness comes early. It is in season and so she will walk the roads and maybe someone will come by and offer a ride.

Her father will hang the deer in the barn and be pleased. That night they will eat the heart. The next day her father will butcher the carcass and the huntress will hunt and kill again.

Gordon Bunker

The Huntress, Part Two

On the front step, a massive granite slab she pauses and loads six cartridges into her rifle, a lever action Winchester .3030 with a shortened stock. The rifle is her own. The casings are shiny brass, the slugs dull grey lead. They are warm from her pocket. After chambering a cartridge and snapping the safety on, she rests the gun over her shoulder, holding the stock with her left hand. It smells of hoppe’s and oil and burnt gunpowder. The girl writes with her right hand and shoots with her left. No one understands this.

She melts into the woods and is alone. A web of stone walls speak of farms, hopes and boundaries, most forgotten. The walls run for miles through the woods. They are testaments to men’s back breaking labor clearing fields. The stones are granite, dark grey in the wet. Lichen is bright green. Fields, so much hard work to clear quickly fill with trees when the people go. Her small frame is an advantage in the woods, she moves without making a sound. Two oatmeal cookies are wrapped in waxed paper in her jacket pocket. She buttoned the pocket for safe keeping. She knows the streams and will drink from them.

Smells of leaf mold and fir balsam fill the air. She stops and takes in a deep breath and feels the cold rush of it, then moves on. The earth is wet, in places water squeezes up around her steps. Sound travels in the damp. She knows this. She places her feet flat and slow, careful not to step on any twig, and listens and looks. She looks at everything and nothing, she looks for shapes and movements out of the ordinary. Thus she walks.

The girl crouches in a low spot partly covered in beech thicket, she has seen deer droppings, small piles of dark glistening orbs, they are fresh, there are large tracks pressed into the leafy ground cover. The last shrubs and grasses to hold their foliage have been nibbled at.

She is quiet and waits. An hour passes and then a twig snaps.

Up on the ridge a buck, tawny grey brown and ghostlike materializes, it moves slowly, cautiously, it is cross wind of her and does not know she is there, it is out of range.

So she waits.

She will shoot only to kill. She must conserve ammunition and she will not allow herself to wound an animal, for that is cruelty. She knows the cruelty of shots to the withers or the gut, the animal running with its insides torn apart, losing blood, bellowing and gasping in pain. Cruelty knows many ways and she has seen it. Men whipping horses, men and women under the strain.

Her method and aim are precise, she is confident. She will make a shot just behind the front shoulder, a heart shot.

She waits.

The buck comes down the ridge, the cover becomes less, he is four points.

He comes within range but again into cover.

She waits. Waiting is a skill. The huntress feels her pulse rise. And the heat. The heat always comes before the killing.

The buck comes out of cover and is perhaps a hundred feet away.

She draws a breath and lets half of it go. In one fluid movement she raises the rifle snaps off the safety and takes aim. Her eye, the notch, the bead and the bore come in line with the heart.

The buck hears the tiny metallic snap, foreign to him and swings his head, anything foreign is feared. He looks at her, the worn tip rifle’s cold blued muzzle, and is about to leap.

But it is too late. She has squeezed the trigger, the hammer swings.

She has seen the dark fire in his eyes, the beads of moisture on the hairs around his nose, the hot exhales turning to grey condensation, his life breath.

Life and death are a chain of events. One shot splits through the forest, the sharp percussion carries and echoes.

Her father hears it and smiles and knows there will be venison on the table. He is rigging a plow to the tractor for snow. And then it is just the wind in the trees.

The buck gasps and feels heat searing through its chest and then nothing. Blood plumes behind its left shoulder. It falters and is dead before it collapses to the ground. It rolls down the other side of the ridge, out of view.

She hears it tumble, tumble, twigs snap and she runs to the top of the ridge and crouches at the spot. There is blood, bright red glistening on the brown leaf cover. She looks down the far side of the slope.

The buck lays near a rock outcrop and there is a man.

He has his knife in the buck.

There was only one shot, of this she is certain.

But the deer belongs to the hunter with their knife in it first.

The man has thus stolen it. He knows this, he looks around.

She sees the blade glint silver and red, the nervous working of it.

The man does not see her.

The blood flows.

She is outraged, but absolutely quiet. There is the heat.

The man is known to her.

She considers shooting him. For a good long moment she dallies this thought, his life hangs in the fine distinctions in her mind. But there is no fury.

She rises, chambers a new round in the .3030 and knows want.

Gordon Bunker

Thanksdrinking

Someone important gets born, a bunch of people have a neighborhood dinner party, or a prankster named April gets foolish. This is how holidays start, innocently enough, and so it is with Thanksdrinking.

A little over a year ago it turned out like me, my friend Ken had no plans for Thanksgiving. Neither of us were upset about this course of events but speaking on the phone that morning we agreed it wasn’t just another day and celebration was in order. After discussing our options we decided to meet in town mid-afternoon for a beer or more accurately, beers.

Downtown Santa Fe was eerily quiet, there was practically no car traffic, and likewise for people on foot. Apparently everyone was merrily stuffing their gullets or having seconds or having seconds regret. Or… well, my sister and I were both born in August, four years and 364 days apart. When quizzed about this, our folks glanced at one another, blushed, and claimed, “you know… those Thanksgiving parties.”

The place we decided to meet, The Catamount, was closed so we hiked over to Rio Chama. They were open and a small number of patrons sat around the bar. The atmosphere was dominated by a football game on the XXL big-screen with the volume turned way up. Beggars can’t be choosers so we bellied up to the bar, ordered beer and proceed to shout at each other. One beer’s worth of this was more than enough so we headed toward the plaza and the lounge at La Fonda. It was busy but not a shouting match so we hung out for a couple cold one’s and guacamole and chips. After La Fonda we wrapped it up. I thoroughly enjoyed this new way of celebrating the holiday; low key, hang out with a great friend, I didn’t eat (or drink) too much and facing the mountains of dirty dishes and pots and pans a thing of memory.

This year for Thanksgiving Ken and Shannon headed east to be with family and R and I headed across town to be with family. Nonetheless I called Ken and suggested we have a beer. After all, last year had been such fun it seemed worth making a tradition of it. Things however didn’t look good. The open spots on our calendars were out of synch. Maybe after the holiday… so to clinch the deal I suggested we create a new holiday and call it “Thanksdrinking.” Capital idea! There’s no particular date to it, just within a week or so of Thanksgiving; don’t bother with the food, skip the dishes and give thanks by drinking a beverage with a friend. Ken was in.

Last night we met to celebrate the new holiday, and to our astonishment it’s is already catching on. The bars at both Pranzo and Junction were busy. Revelers clinked glasses, made toasts, shared the goings on of life, watched and hooted at football and generally were thankful. Yeah, Happy Thanksdrinking!

Gordon Bunker