Red Shed Shrine, and: Sizing Up Cape Clear Island with a Trigger Thumb

Red Shed Shrine

Growth of trees is measured against the red shed, loud edifice now clear of old hay and dung, though still cluttered with rolls of fencing wire extracted and collated from the block, and tools for keeping the grass down, and paraphernalia for running the pump, and the air pump itself, its hoses reaching out under the red walls to outposts, wells sunk deep through hills, sucking at the conflicted water table, though now the pump is at ‘stop’, having rarely lifted beyond dead slow ahead. The red shed shines in reports in its discomfort, its red entanglement with a killer sun, its ventilator moving when the breeze will barely lift a leaf on the York gums towering nearby. Bees have been attracted to its gutters but don’t stick around, it’s that forbidding; they prefer the trees whose growth we track. The red shed barely knows itself as waste, believing its divine purpose: shade to insects, pupae clinging to sundry items, snuggled into the dirt floor. I don’t agree with most of its choices, and though lingering in its cave even when away, a niche or recess in my mind concentrating on the scene at hand, I don’t worship its structural integrity. I have wondered, a copy of Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class flapping its yellow brittle leaves when the great sliding door is wrenched open, a copy just flung there on the floor, this sentence underlined: ‘expresses itself in some form of conspicuous waste.’ From memory a ‘spiritual’ want languishes in the factory where shed walls are rolled, or is that far from the comfort zones of mansions down in the city, offices of the Club where red sheds are tossed back with a drink of fine wine? Captains of industry. Conspicuous behind closed doors. The fencing wire, the pump, the pupae, the pipes snaking out into places where they grow soggy with heat, then brittle when the frosts come, cracking their covenant, drawing nothing from below even when the pump is fired up, thirsty heart of the shed.

Sizing Up Cape Clear Island with a Trigger Thumb

Out of the heavy quota of mist the bevelled peaks of Cape Clear Island demand you take reference: lock surveillance from the sunny heights across Roaringwater. So up high, you lift your thumb to take measurement, to work proportions, how many heads of land make a body length, how many heads above sea-mist constitute the hidden island, its lexicon of distance, its iceberg beneath. It’s not so cold here: Gulf Stream, folklore, quadrupling of population and rents in summer, legacy of mobilisation. Sizing up the emergence, protrusion, floating islet, you concentrate on your thumb, forget what’s blocked out, when it clicks down, trigger thumb, ordnance action on the pacifist hand, on the arm that bears no arms, warped peace sign or Vulcan adieu amidst prosperity. Thrown off by the odd angle, the crowd’s call, the big thumbs down meaning thumbs up now, the translation all wrong, mist seeming to reach over waters and up the ranges, you don’t recognise yourself. Hedges close in, an ambush from ditches is possible, the lachrymose cows you’d registered in their dead-shadowed shed, staring into the sunlight over dozens of worn-out tractor tyres. You snap your thumb back into place, the bevelled peaks of Cape Clear Island resolving to shape an image, a knowledge from here you can share with the islanders over there, hidden in mist, unable to see you unless they’ve scaled the heights.