When I was a kid my brother and I let our ski passes accumulate on the zippers of our parkas all winter. When we actually skied, these growing bouquets of heavy paper and wire flapped wildly in the icy wind, painfully beating our frozen faces. But we took great pride in our collection, knowing our peers perceived our prowess and admired our dedication.
One day in spring when the wind warmed, whipping into the valley, we put away our skis and assembled our kite, always bat-shaped, with big bloodshot goggle-eyes, and sent it aloft. When we reached the end of one spool of heavy duty string, we tied on another, and another. By noon we had added six or seven spools. The kite was a speck, impossibly far away at the end of the curving, straining line, pulling with such force that we took turns holding it, sometimes tying it temporarily to a fencepost to rest our arms.
Then, one by one, we snipped our ski passes off our parkas and hung them securely on the kite string. Up the passes would rise, twisting and flapping in the strong wind like tiny sail powered trams, sliding steadily up the stretched line toward the ominous kite. As one pass disappeared from sight, we added another. Gradually, our zippers were empty and all the ski passes reached the kite. And though we couldn’t clearly see them, we felt their pull and imagined them, huddled together in a growing crowd at the kite’s keel, rattling and flapping together in an increasing cacophony. Eventually, as the afternoon wind intensified and the kite grew unwieldy with it’s proud burden, the string would snap and the distant kite would twist and loop out of control, spiraling madly down toward some remote part of the world. Gone.
Today, as winter breaks and the days lengthen, my wife and I are settling into a funky hillside bungalow in Cottage Grove. The low, mossy structure doesn't get much light, but when sun weaves through the morning hemlocks and slides through the chilly windows slanting just so, spilling gold from wall to wall across the low beige carpet in the sunken den, magic flows. The sudden silence such a dazzling glance of sun evokes from the forest induces automatic meditation. The warm beam languidly travels, splashing partway up the stout noisy fridge, illuminating the tattered quotation I hand copied years ago:
“As a result of the war corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed...”
-Abraham Lincoln.
This hastily scribbled passage has presided, stuck with a dangerously powerful magnet, to the refrigerator of every hovel, every shed, every trailer, camper, wigwam, cabin, garage, loft, lodge or yurt I have inhabited in the long years since I left home. Scrawled in urgent red ink, this quotation has served as my philosophical anchor. In trying times, I envisioned Abraham Lincoln, in his dim, flickering study, intensely worried for the welfare of his torn country, mulling over heavy thoughts, bending deliberately over his prescient pen. Because of these words, I never wholeheartedly joined society. I’ve worked on the fringes, eking out my existence from job to job and position to position, never completely failing, but never joining the race. I'm one who has barely hung on, who slipped through with some luck--a perpetual renter; a seasonal employee; a contract worker; a substitute; extra help.
The handyman, dispatched by the landlady, arrived to bolster the dangling microwave oven, and introduced himself. “I’m Steve,” he said. Sure enough, his name tag agreed. I fleetingly pondered the many name tags I’ve worn, like so many expired ski passes, since those bat-kite days.
The boy from next door who shoveled your driveway for a half dollar? That was me, with my homemade nametag. Another knock at the door and there I was, stenciling your street address, white on black, on the curb, careful, neat and lasting. I cleared your table and washed your dishes. I tossed your salad. I knocked and offered you candy, I knocked and offered you magazines, I knocked and offered you Jesus. You checked out through my register at the department store. And later, when you returned the Epilady® hair remover, that was me, too, at Customer Service, smiling. I watched you read my nametag.
“This is just springs that twist and spin,” you shouted, waving the tortuous instrument, “It yanks!”
“I know,” I answered, “All the men bought one. All the women returned them. I tried it on my arm. I know!”
I wore nametags in college, too. You saw me in the bookstore, stocking the low shelves with heavy overpriced texts. I mowed the quad. I irrigated the soccer field, tapping into a main, calculating precipitation. I screen printed thousands of baseball caps with the logo of a movie that you never saw, because it was never released. Then, because of the quote, I dropped out of college and you encountered me on vacation, guiding your raft and barbequing your dinner. I woke you up early for more, I taught you to kayak. I made coffee for the people who read you the morning news, I held lights for the hotel promotional film. I made your sandwich, I filled your order, I brought you juice. Then when you went downtown at night with your shady friends to the punk rock show in the venue that made you uneasy, there I was, schlepping in my broken amplifiers and unwinding the cords, making noise instead of money.
I spent two decades on the move, staying less than a year in each abode over thirty states and six countries. Each place, however humble, had a fridge, and to every fridge I attached my guiding quotation.
I arose from my reverie to Steve laughing, pointing to my cherished Abraham Lincoln quote on the humming fridge.
“That’s a forgery,” he said, waving a sandwich toward my prize possession.
“They’re Lincoln’s words,” I assured him.
“Where’d you get it? Off the internet?”
“I found it in a book. I’ve had it a long time,” I said.
Steve looked me in the eye seriously. “You checked your sources?”
“It’s from a letter to Colonel William F. Elkins dated 1864. Archer Shaw published The Lincoln Encyclopedia in 1950, wherein he traced the letter to page 954 of Abraham Lincoln: A New Portrait published by Emmanuel Hertz in 1938.”
“Hmmm,” said Steve thoughtfully, biting his sandwich, “You ever heard of Joe Cosey?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Lot’s of people haven’t, but what he accomplished was pretty special. He kinked the whole system.” Steve continued:
“In 1929 an unassuming little floppy haired man named Martin Coneely signed into the Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress as Joseph Cosey and pocketed a 1786 pay warrant issued by Benjamin Franklin. He used it to practice. Over the next twenty years he forged documents by George Washington, Edgar Allen Poe, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson, Mary Baker Eddy, and two dozen other famous Americans.”
“Including Lincoln,” I confirmed.
“Yeah,” said Steve, “Hertz was duped and cited a fake letter in his New Portrait. Then Shaw, in his Lincoln Encyclopedia, passed faulty information on to you. That quote circulates a lot whenever there’s war, and there’s always war.”
Life, barreling headlong, has firm ideas about how to direct us, blowing whatever sail we hazard to hoist, toward nirvana. If an overseeing entity beyond life exists, she drags us all at our own pace inevitably toward heaven kicking and screaming. Just as our spent ski passes fluttered upward toward disbursement, we humans each learn our lessons, every one, in time. And even if nobody but the wind is out there pushing, we learn them anyway.
I don’t always obey all the rules; I never have had much use for nonsense. But I understand that what holds the kite in the sky is the line linking it to the ground. The kite soars because it can’t escape, and likewise we fly when we clearly perceive our purpose and pursue our principles, adhering to something coherent. Because of its convoluted and disputed history, I’ll never know for sure to whom to attribute my beloved quotation. Because of it I dropped out of college five times and worked half a lifetime of menial labor. I became more obsessed with rivers and flow and dynamics than with gathering and leveraging money. Perhaps I’ve been swindled, maybe I missed out. But I’ve lived a lot of stories, and I take some comfort in what Steve told me as he tested the firmly mounted microwave and gathered his tools:
“G. William Berquist investigated literary hoaxes from 1929 until 1946. He was a real expert, with a lot of exposure to Joe Cosey’s effort. He became enthralled with his work, calling him ‘the greatest forger of his kind in this century.’ Over time, Berquist befriended Cosey, and in 1934, in order to educate the innocent and remove forgeries from circulation, he established a special exhibit of fakes called The Cosey Collection at the New York Public Library. Today, Cosey’s forgeries are considered works of art in their own rite, fetching prices hundreds or thousands of times higher than Cosey ever sold them himself. Lots of them still circulate as genuine. Nobody knows how many. Before disappearing in 1943, Cosey called on Berquist one last time and requested three dollars for train fare. Berquist obliged him, and where Joseph Cosey went nobody knows. But as he left he handed Berquist a note dated August 5, 1907 that read, ‘Taking the pledge will not make bad liquor good, but it will improve it,’ signed convincingly in Mark Twain’s hand.”
I stood at the window for a few moments looking out through condensation, watching the fog drift back over the sun. Having just learned that I tied half of my life to a lie, I felt a little bewildered. My reality rippled. But what a beautiful fraud, what a genius ruse! As Steve drove off in his noisy truck, I slowly, lovingly, removed my worn-out quote, crumpled it gently into a tiny ball and placed it carefully in the smoldering fire. As flame flared, consuming the paper but leaving the idea intact, I looked back at the fridge and saw a picture of my family, a picture of my friends, a picture of my wife. And there, among the others, a faded photo of my brother and me, our fat parkas bristling with crumpled ski passes, and a bat-shaped kite held reciprocally aloft in thin-aired heaven by a delicate cord binding it to earth.
