The Essex Sublime By Elba Kramer

One of the queen’s ministers gave us a ding last week and said that little Liam, aged four, was going to have to go to school on his fifth birthday next month.  Isn’t that a bit young?

    “Kind of you to remember his birthday,” I said, in my American immigrant’s accent.

    Unschooling, is what I started thinking. 

But maybe if we can find a great way to get to school, school would be okay. We set out today, the first warm day in March. Back home in the states, the senate has voted to drill in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, but we don’t need to know about that yet. Maybe it’s better if we don’t ever know about it.  I’m holed up here with the family as part of a sort of retirement program for guys like me, the ones who last skied at Beaver Creek when it was, you know, a beaver creek.

I quit my job so we wouldn’t be paying war taxes and asked my partner to do the same. She told me to take a hike. So here we are. We’re still partners, but the good side is, Liam and I get to ramble. 

The queen’s minister said there’s a school across the estuary. That’s just a couple hundred feet of mud, but the mud looks like the real thing. Liam and I look both ways along the estuary. What would the queen do? Wasn’t this her idea? 

It’s six miles up to the bridge and back, with what looks like trails all along this side, and maybe on the other side. Public footpaths. This is what we came here for, though I have to be honest that England wasn’t really my first choice. It was maybe forty-third after Patagonia. But expat anything was looking good when we made the jump, on or about November, 2004.

    “Let’s go,” I say.

A couple miles up the Colne estuary, near the university, we come upon an old man picking up trash along the bank.  My kind of guy. 

    “What’s that smell?” asks Liam. Come to think of it, what is that smell?  In the states, that would be a sign of human sewerage being dumped into a river. But they don’t do that here in Europe, do they?

    “Okay,” I ask the old guy, “what’s that smell?” 

He points to a couple of pipes coming out from under some dumpsters, emptying into the Colne. 
  
     “That’s the River Bourne.” Says it with a little flourish, like it’s something romantic, and we’re standing on the Rive Gauche. Okay, so you’re crazy, I think. We’re half a mile away when I understand that he must have been ironic, and by the time we get back to the same place, the man is gone. The stench of sewerage is still there. I remember what everyone keeps telling me here: this isn’t Europe. Maybe Europe isn’t, either, I think. 

    He was being ironic, wasn’t he, that guy?

Just fifteen minutes later we’ve crossed the bridge and we’re in the front office of the East Anglia Water company. The belly of the beast. “Why is it called a water company if they have poopie?” Liam wants to know. There’s no one at the desk, and I realize the extent of my retirement when I notice two necklace visitor passes sitting in a box and I ignore them.  In fact, when a middle-management person finally shows up through the security doors, I propose a tour for my son’s school class.

    “We’ve never done that before,” she says.

    “Me neither,” I say.  Leaving it a little vague about what I’ve never done. 

But then suddenly she doesn’t see why not, and it’s arranged. Now that I’ve taken care of my son’s school class, all we have to do is find him a school.

Outside, the sewerage is channeled in long open tanks, and a pipe heads off in the direction of the river and the university. Like a connecting clause in a sentence. “They study it, up at the university,” the middle-management person had said.

    “Study what?” I’d said.

    “The system,” she’d said proudly. “How it all works together.”

    “Come on,” I say to Liam, “we’ve got a school to catch.” 

    Insert child according to illustration.

At the edge of town, the south wind registers an abrupt change in the ambient fecal.  We get over the stile, and the smell shifts from human to bovine. It’s Lent, and my not-entirely-post-Catholic partner has the whole family on a strict diet of not using the S word. I don’t say anything.

    There’s a cowpie there, like a cairn.  Life is a journey.

    “Vegetarians,” I say to Liam, approvingly. Part of my retirement is: taking beauty where I find it.  You can never go back to the beaver creek. 

Most days, I go on about what a muck cows have made of the world.  Today, they’re my friends.

People in England seem to be pretty good at keeping their towns separate from the rest of it. The rest of it isn’t nature exactly. Let’s call it the pastoral. 

    Life is sublime. Just don’t step in it. 

There’s a crashing noise behind some bushes as Liam and I set out onto the moor. We look behind the bushes, back into the industrial zone. Like we’re the opposite of Adam and Eve looking back into the opposite of Eden. Two giant blue machines with the words “FUCHS” in bold letters across their backs have seized a red Honda four-door from a forklift and are squabbling over it.

Along the side of each machine it reads “Fuchs Terra.”  My Latin’s not so good.  Fox terrier?  No wait, Terra means “the Earth.” 

    “Fuchs,” I say out loud. 

    “Don’t say that,” says Liam. “It’s Lent.”

One of the giants drops the Honda. The other quickly seizes the roof and does something technical to it. Suddenly there’s no roof.

           
    “Trepanation,” I think .Remove the top of the skull and suck out the juice. My Latin’s getting better. One of the giants grabs all four seats of the Honda in one hand and tosses them away. Like it’s looking for something. It has flexible fingers, and carefully opens the trunk. When it finds nothing, it drops the Honda and wanders off. Perhaps what it seeks is ineffable. What, to a giant blue machine named “Fuchs,” would the ineffable be? 

The other giant shakes the vehicle, trying to break its back. I avoid thinking about the metaphorical side of deconstructing the family car, and attend closely to the visceral and spiritual aspects of the event. When the car stops struggling, it lies in a delicate limp curve, like Jesus on his mother’s lap in an Italian statue. I practically am Latin by now, I’m so cultured.

    “Awesome,” we say.

The giant flicks the corpse upward toward the top of a pile of similar scraps. It hovers for a moment in the air. Globalized safety glass from Tokyo or Taipei glitters around it like fairy dust.

Behind us stretches the lovely moor, and far off lies the school. Maybe we’ll get there, maybe we won’t. For now, the Honda is floating in the noonday Essex sun high above our heads, and everything is possible.

--Elba Kramer, Wivenhoe, England, St. Patrick's Day, 2005