Doubt

A. Blinken..... I lay waiting for sleep in the cold of night. My Honey has had her hours cut. It was a "fire somebody or reduce everybody" choice. At my shop (I don’t use this space to advertise my business) I am worried about some new State regulations which will change the way I do some of my work, though even the experts aren’t sure how, yet. It is possible I’ll no longer be able to afford to provide some of my services, which means I’ll have fewer customers. I’ll cut those farthest away first. I filled the tank on my truck last week and seriously considered that when the tank ran dry I’d just park it, pull the insurance, and give the keys a toss in the weeds. I spend more a month on gas now than my truck is worth. The keys stayed in my pocket because the truck is the only four wheel drive we have, the only thing that will reliably make it to Granny Wise’s cabin, the only way to serve a few of my customers, who I would lose, and no matter, I can’t afford a better truck now. Granny has given me a long-standing nod to sluice the creek, but she and Greatgrandad Aaron took most of the lumps and pocket dust, and I’m not the first person to scour the side canyons and ridge tops looking for the original source of the yellow shimmer. It takes weeks of bar work every spring just to keep Granny in whiskey and cheese in the way she likes, though a mouse couldn’t live on what she uses. No, there is no bell-ringing nugget, probably no single source of the gold which accumulated from ancient gravel bars in the hillside above, which we don’t have the equipment and surely not the will to mine. There is no thousand dollars a month for us in Granny’s creek, and no money at all in Granny’s cabin, barn, orchard or anything, since the U.S. Forest Service has a big box of dynamite with Granny’s name on it, and when she goes, the cabin goes and the land becomes just another piece of government dirt. Honey and I will make it somehow. I still know how to work a standing drill, and when the economy bottoms, gold will be high; I’ll find work somewhere. My cousin Randy lost his summer job to the gas crisis and fewer tourists, and his winter job to retirees working part time driving snow plows, since their medical benefits were cut. His girlfriend Freda makes good money, almost $1800.00 a month, doing phone sex while she types medical transcripts on her home computer and watches little Randie. If Randy doesn’t pay some bills she’s going to oust him and let her sister and kid move in and they’ll open a little day care; her sister could learn to do phone sex, you don’t have to be pretty on the phone, just have a nice girly voice. Randy got through the summer by growing 30 plants in the hills, which netted two pounds of grade AA bud, two pounds of round bud, and four pounds of nugbud and bud shake which he let go at local prices to strengthen bonds with his friends, all of which netted about twelve thousand dollars. He is thinking about hanging a light in his garage, but weed doesn’t grow that well in the cold season even inside, and the power bills are already through the roof. With so many Mexican nationals doing warehouse grows in the southern part of the state it’s hard to sell an inside crop, which would be three months away at best. It’s a bitch when crime really doesn’t pay. He normally would go south to work construction, but there is no construction south this year, and the price of gas makes driving from site to site begging work a stupid idea. He’s 28 and thinking of going rudeboy, which means he’ll go south and work as a thug for people with things to guard they can’t get a regular security company for. Instead of a radio and a flashlight he’d carry a Glock. If he goes rude, he’s lost to the hills until he finally comes home in a can, or with the cops on his ass; we’ve seen it before. I love you, Randy, maybe you’ll get hit by a car in town and the insurance will let you stay in the hills until summer, my Cousin. I worry about the other cousins, too, who had been working down canyon and making the long drive home, often over an hour each way, getting home long after dark, if at all, in the icy winter months. As gas goes up, they lose money on the commute. One cousin told me of a silver lining: with more women out of work there is more cash-basis child care available locally, and the cost has come down a little, somewhat offsetting the gas increase. In other words, their shortage is spread through our community, eventually costing Randy’s girlfriend and her sister. We worry, we watch the news. Last night I saw a guy in a suit that cost more than Honey and I make a month together, and he was telling us not to worry, that a recession or even a depression could be avoided by "Consumer Confidence... We can spend our way out of a recession." I almost threw my nightly bottle of beer (Honey says I go to bargain beer next week which comes in an aluminum can; the urge isn’t going to be the same) at the bastard. Consumer confidence? How sunny that sounds, we all simply spend more money! Those of us who have no more money to spend have Dark Doubt; we have no confidence in anything except that we and our people will suffer first and comparatively more than those with comparatively more power than we. When Honey and I are eating beans with the lights off and hoping the bank is too busy to take our house, the suit bastard will have to switch from very expensive whiskey to expensive whiskey. Vast armies of us, rural and urban poor suffer first, then slowly the better-off folks we know, then the folks better off than those we know, and slowly, if ever, the rich. As a kid, there was many a night I lay cold in the dark of the cabin waiting for sleep while Granny Wise told me stories of the Great Depression and the hunger and poverty that persisted years after Wall Street called the Depression over, and how one man out of five was out of work, his family destitute. Could it happen again? What if the Chinese called in our debt, or worse, stopped taking dollars and insisted on Euros? The dollar is becoming wallpaper overseas; how far will we drive on $4.00 a gallon gas, or $5.00? Our tax dollars gush from the serious wound that the current "war" has inflicted on us. The soldiers may fight across seas and sands, but the hurt of it is being felt in our homes, and more than just mourning. We fear the cost of disease more than disease, and envy those who go too quick to drain the livelihood of their loved ones. We train our youth to be unemployed, to be cynical about buying their own homes, to prefer short term benefits. Our little community can only absorb so much. I wait for a call from Randy saying he’ll be south for awhile, but have no idea what I’ll say, except "God protect you, if He will." At Honey’s work, the next cut will go differently. This time everyone voted to share the cut in hours; next time I know they will vote to cut a staff member, and in the meantime, everyone is keeping ledger on everyone else to see who might not be pulling their weight. We all stay standing for now, but how much worse will it become? What kind of strain will bear on our families, what things will we have to do to stay alive? I lay in the cold dark waiting for sleep, my chest leaden with doubt.