
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 9, 1994                   TAG: 9403090179
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ben Beagle
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IN THE DEBRIS, EL VIEJO REDISCOVERS HIS YOUTH

After my son and I cut our way out of Happy Highfields Road at 4 a.m. recently, I began to write like Papa Hemingway again:

The old man and the boy heard the trees falling in the darkness. That is the way it is, the old man thought, trees that are lovely in their time can become killers.

He looked at the trees, glistening in the headlights, and he knew he had not seen the Road of the Highfields blocked in this fashion. It reminded him of the shelling aftermath at Capporetto.

He felt his resolve leave him as it had at Capporetto, but the chainsaw roared in the ice-stricken darkness, and the old man could no longer hear the trees cracking and falling.

He became lost in the manly work of the moment. He cast aside huge limbs as though they were made of the foolish wood men use to fashion their airplane models. And he could feel some of the fat leaving his soul.

And when the road was clear, they looked at each other in the headlights of El GMC pickup. It was a glance reserved to brave men.

"Aiyee, mujer," the old man said when he returned to the house, "that was the work that hombres now abed in houses with electricity on uncluttered urban streets can never share with valorous men."

The woman's motion as she tended the wood stove in the absence of electricity were precise and grateful. Still, there an ancient sadness in her eyes.

"Si, viejo," she said. "It is the macho bonding of men, is it not?"

"Perhaps, mi vida," the old man said. "But for a time it stripped away the years."

"Ah, mi esposo," the woman said, "thee may soon have no concern for years as mortal men know them if thee exercise so violently at such an hour of the day."

"Still," the old man said, "it was good to toss the huge limbs as though they had no weight. And to hear the chain saw singing in the dark."

"Just do not overstep thyself, viejo," the woman said.

That is the way it is, the old man thought. A man recovers his youth at 4 a.m., only to lose it by 6 a.m.

Yet the crude pathway through the glistening trees would be a pleasant, manly memory.

The old man didn't tell the woman that the L.L. Bean hunting boots he had worn on that morning of renewal seemed heavier than they had years before.

by CNB