Nicholson Baker: Traveling Sprinkler

The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,

For he heard the loud bassoon.

Coleridge didn’t know much about the bassoon either, or he wouldn’t have said it was loud. The bassoon’s liability as an orchestral instrument is that it is quite soft, much softer in volume than its size would suggest. At a wedding reception in 1797, when Coleridge was working on his poem, it might have been used to double the bassline played by the spinet or the cello. But bassoonists the world over are grateful to Coleridge for including them in his stanza.

Charles Darwin knew slightly more about the bassoon than either Coleridge or Tennyson. When he was old and sad he asked his son to play bassoon for a heap of earthworms, to study their responsiveness to low sounds. He also played a tin whistle for them and pounded on the piano and shouted at them. “They took not the least notice,” Darwin said. There’s also a poem about the vowels by John Gould Fletcher, one of the Imagists. The letter U, according to Fletcher, sounds like “torrid bassoons and flutes that murmur without repose, / Butterflies, bumblebees, buzzing about a hot rose.” Fletcher read the torrid bassoons passage to Amy Lowell in London, and later he wrote an autobiography called Life Is My Song. Later still, depressed, he drowned himself in less than three feet of water in a recently dredged pond in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Selling my bassoon was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made. I’ve regretted it a thousand times since. And here’s the strange thing. I’ve written three books of poems, and I’ve never once written a bassoon poem. I have never used the word “bassoon” in a single poem. Not once. I guess I was saving it up, which is not always a good idea.

• • •

NAN, MY NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR, asked me to help with her chickens. She has five hens plus one droopy-tailed bantam rooster who has a reputation for being fierce and territorial, although he’s always fine with me, staring at me warily from one eye and cock-a-doodling a fair amount. Nan is away in Toronto taking care of her mother, who isn’t doing well. She, Nan, has been acting a little odd recently — preoccupied and remote. It could be that she’s worried about her mom, but also I think her “friend,” Chuck, is maybe no longer in the picture. He takes care of submarines, and there was an arson fire at the Navy base in Kittery that caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage to a very fancy nuclear submarine. A worker at the base confessed to setting the fire because he wanted to leave early that day. That’s how things are in the Navy.

All I have to do is let the chickens out in the morning, so that they can spend the day pecking for trifles in the grass. I scatter some cracked corn under the bushes to give them a better peck-to-success ratio. Then, as dusk comes, I wait for them to file back into their shed and I close the door. You can’t herd them, you just have to wait till they go in of their own accord. I’ve gotten in the habit of bringing my white plastic chair over to Nan’s yard and waiting for them to be done with their day. If I don’t close the door, the chickens may be attacked at night by raccoons or foxes.

Ah, there they go now, filing into their enclosure. The hens are big and brown and fluffy, and their back parts are white with chickenshit and egg laying. The rooster is small and iridescently blue-black. I guess they mate all night, I don’t know. There’s a faded sign on the door that says “Every Birdie Welcome.”

• • •

THE WHITE PLASTIC CHAIR is comfortable, but not as comfortable as the driver’s seat of my car. I practically live in my car these days, and I usually buy gas at Irving Circle K. One reason I like Irving is that they play oldies music from tinny speakers at the gas pump. Another reason is that they leave the little clickers in the pump handle so that you can start filling your tank and then go inside to buy a bottle of Pellegrino water and a bag of Planter’s trail mix from a man at the register who looks like he’s nursing a massive hangover.

Today at Irving I went back out to the car with my purchases and I absentmindedly tried to drive off without removing the gas spout from my car. I heard a clunk and looked back and saw the pump hose lying on the ground, surrounded by what seemed to be a dark spreading stain of gasoline. I thought I’d torn off the handle. I said, “Oh, no!” and got out, and then I saw that it was just a trick of the shadows. The spout was fine. It had pulled free of the car and fallen, and there was no sign of damage to the hose and no leaked gas. I felt a huge relief. I drove off singing a song that I heard a few weeks ago in Quaker meeting, called “How Can I Keep from Singing?” One of the meeting elders, Chase, had stood in the silence and said that all morning he’d been remembering a song that Pete Seeger used to sing. Pete Seeger learned it from a singer named Doris Plenn, Chase said, who learned it from her grandmother. And then he sang it. He wasn’t a great singer, but it didn’t matter. “My life flows on in endless song,” he sang. “Above earth’s lamentation.” I was so impressed by the song that when I got home I looked it up on iTunes and bought two versions of it, one by Bruce Springsteen and one by a group called Cordelia’s Dad, accompanied by slow fiddle chords.

Long ago the Quakers were opposed to music — they said that the effort a musician expended to learn an instrument kept him from worthier pursuits. But now they sometimes stand and sing at meeting.

I really need a guitar.

I HAD LUNCH IN WALTHAM with my friend Tim at a bakery he likes. He teaches at Tufts. He’s a good man, and he is truly obsessed now with killer drones. Once he could talk about nothing but Queen Victoria’s war crimes, now it’s Predators and Reapers and the CIA’s chief of drones, John Brennan. Tim’s new hero is Medea Benjamin, of CODEPINK, who’s published a book called Drone Warfare . He’s back from a drone summit in Washington, where Medea and other anti-drone people gave talks. He asked me to go with him, but I said no — it’s too far, too upsetting, too awful, too current.

While Tim and I stood in line waiting to order, he told me about what happened when Medea Benjamin went to a talk that John Brennan gave. It was apparently quite a scene. Tim whipped out his phone and played me a YouTube video. Brennan is talking about Al Qaeda’s killing of men, women, and children, and suddenly Medea Benjamin stands and says, “What about the hundreds of innocent people we are killing with our drone strikes in Pakistan and in Yemen and Somalia? I speak out on behalf of those innocent victims.” The woman moderator tries to quiet her, but Medea won’t be silenced. A huge man with a yellow POLICE shirt on seizes her and lifts her and she’s dragged out, still talking loudly about the killing of innocents and the Constitution and the rule of law. She holds on to the exit doorway, trying to stay in the room, while the huge yellow shave-headed policeman hauls at her, and she says, “I love the rule of law. I love my country. You’re making us less safe by killing so many innocent people around the world, shame on you!” And then the door closes and she’s taken away. Brennan adjusts the microphone, quietly says thank you to nobody in particular, and continues his address.

“Can you believe her?” said Tim.

“She’s really something,” I said.

We reached the front of the ordering line. “You should get the tuna and artichoke sandwich,” he said. “The economics of this place escapes me. There are nine people behind the counter. They bake their own bread and they make these fantastic tuna and artichoke sandwiches.”

We sat down outside and Tim asked me what I was up to. I told him that I’d been taking care of some chickens, and that I’d stopped drinking Yukon Jack because it wasn’t working for me and I had to finish a book of poems. I said I was thinking of trying Skoal smokeless tobacco.