Sketches of Overlooked America V.6
Magammon, CO.
Zeb Lemieux hangs up the phone. He sits in the long cast of late afternoon sunlight. He hollers at his son from the three-legged stool on which he's perched. He delivers good news: the Magammon Zielschuss Organizing Committe had verified the vote tally and confirmed Ephraim the sole winner. A joyful whoop is returned from the front room where Zeb’s son, Ephraim lays prone on the sofa, holding an ice pack to a fracture beneath his left orbital.
Magammon is a small farming town in a dead-flat hanging valley on the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains. Further east is the vast American Great Plains. To the west are mountains and more mountains until the ancient seabed of the Great Basin.
An aerial view of the town displays the quilt work of faming tracts established in the wake of the California Gold Rush. Those who went west, but didn’t quite make it all the way to the Pacific.
Zeb has always lived in Magammon. He was born on the family farm which he still owns and operates. His father passed away last year at the age of 92. Of the eight children, only Zeb has stayed.
Ephraim Lemieux sits up on the sofa, ice pack still pressed in place with his one good hand. Ephraim is twenty-seven. In his early 20’s he was considered one of the more promising guitar interpreters of Manuel De Falla. On his twenty fifth birthday Ephraim set his guitar in its case and has not touched it since. He was, and is still at a loss to explain the arbitrary beheading of such a promising career. And then the liposarcoma appeared in the left wrist as though supernal confirmation of the choice already made. The broken orbital is recent and was sustained in last week’s Zielschuss. A full recovery is expected.
Inside the local branch of Square State Farm Insurance, Inc., in the fourth cubicle from the back, Marguerite Tandry is clacking away at the keyboard. An affected air of busyness is donned like a jacket when she sights the silvered head of her superior over the maze of cubes. Marg shifts a little in her chair and goes to scratch the phantom limb where the lower bit of her right leg used to be. Instead she finds the carbon fiber post of her prosthesis. On her computer screen sits a half-populated Excel spreadsheet listing policy numbers and the names of the insured. Cell p63 holds only gibberish. A minimized window contains the outline of her forty-third volume of Albert Camus fanfic: The Erotic Adventures of Dr. Reiux: Before the Plague. Outside Marguerite’s office a blue jay caws in the still of the morning air, ripe with the bucolic scent of the nearby dairy farm. The bird trots around, hopping along the hood of a parked car, canting its head this way and that, lending its brutal salutation an air of curiosity.
Magammon sits at an elevation of 7925 ft. The thin atmosphere has contributed to an epidemic of skin cancers in the residents who matured before the popularization of sunscreen. Dr. Willford Wells owns and operates a dermatology practice situated adjacent to the last remaining Shakey’s Pizza parlor in the state of Colorado. Dr. Wells has fallen under investigation by the Colorado Medical Board for intentionally misdiagnosing benign skin lesions as metastatic squamous cell carcinoma.
Trees are sparse in Magammon. Those that do exist were planted by farmers as they fought against the rocky soil of the area, introducing irrigation grids and industrial scale sprinkler lines. As water was drawn into the soil productive vegetation outstripped the native sage and manzanita. Cottonwoods grow along the driveways of many of Magammon’s farmhouses and lawns of varying degrees of upkeep lay out as aprons to homes and wings to front walkways.
In winter the fields lay fallow, the plentiful snowfall scoured from the flatlands by the omnipresent east wind. West of Magammon is Onyx Lake, a cistern of glacial melt whose water temperature never breaches 60 degrees. It remains frozen from late September until May when the annual Magammon Zielschuss Ice Breakers festival is held. The brainchild of Wes Manhattan, the festival began with Wes and two friends going to swim beneath the ice with a tether after watching a NOVA program on scuba divers communing with leopard seals at the North Pole. From this initial, fool hardy adventure the festival has grown each year. The tethered ice swim remains the vaunted mainstay of the festival, but the Zielschuss event has grown to be the most popular. In the Zielschuss, a track of packed snow is prepared on the slope which leads into the water. The track is made by hand and honed to a sheen prior to the festival day. At the beginning of the event all comers are invited to bring the snow sliding device of their choice and navigate the in-run, either splashing into the frigid ice-melt of the lake, or skimming across its surface as far as possible. Awards are prepared for best splash, furthest skim, and best costume. Townspeople line the track in order to cheer and taunt participants. In this year’s Zielschuss Ephraim Lemieux entered to defend the crown, which was his two years running. Having taken two wins in the skim division with use of his uncle’s circa 1988 Dynastar monoski, Ephraim moved his focus to the best splash. In an effort to secure the win Ephraim went to the Zielschuss site under the cover of darkness and prepared and alternate in-run. Not forbidden by the loose collection of bylaws that govern the event, but certainly unexpected. At the terminus he piled snow into at ramp that would ensure not only an increase in impact velocity, but also the likelihood of punching through the unbroken ice.
The festival day dawned bright and hopeful. The mid-May morning was all warm optimism. All along the farming track that led to Onyx Lake were cars and trucks and four-wheelers and tractors of every sort, festooned with ribbons and balloons and streamers. Ephraim pedaled a bicycle alongside his girlfriend of five months, Blanche Jones. Ms. Jones is a striking woman, nearly six feet tall and a newly minted FIDE Master. Ephraim harbors some mix of resentment and jealousy for the Tuesday nights she spends traveling to, and participating in weekly matches at the Denver Chess Club.
The two pedaled side by side over the rutted farm road, discussing the likelihood of a three-peat. Whenever Ms. Jones invokes her chess games Ephraim fights against a nascent agitation. The feeling that festival day, Zielschuss day, was his day. He had supported Ms. Jones in the matches leading up to her new ranking, never a word about his back-to-back Zielschuss wins.
At lake’s edge Dr. Wells sat beneath a canopy distributing promotional samples of sunscreen from a folding table. Next to him are Zeb Lemieux and Herbert Humbert — sixth-grade teacher at the local elementary school — working at a series of camp stoves which had been ported up to the lakeshore for the day.
Festivities began with the vaunted tethered ice-swim. In the shade of the mountains, where the ice was still thick, an opening was cut. On shore Ms. Tandry sat wrapped in a blanket, holding a notepad on her lap. A rope was tied fast around a boulder and the length of it dropped into the water.
Further up the shoreline lay the prepared Zielschuss. Contestants were hiking in costume to the top of the in-run, shouldering their skis or snowboards, plastic toboggans, rubber inner-tubes and so forth. Adjacent to the established track, extending to the waterline was Ephraim’s ramp. In order to hit it properly Ephraim would veer off course halfway down, bank an easy right hand turn and point it off the lip of the ramp. Beyond the intended flight path lay the sheet of ice, and beyond that the black alpine water.
The tethered ice-swim concluded as the Zielschuss participants queued at the top of the in-run. Ephraim stepped into his skis, each heelpiece clacking around the boot with a sensation that approximated foreboding. Peering down the snowy track, glinting with ice, Ephraim took a moment to visualize the increase in velocity, engaging his edges to cut from the established track to that of his own making, the force at which he would hit the incline of the ramp, the kick, the flight, and the impact through the ice and into the water below. He hitched the strap of the orange USCG standard floatation device and pulled it snug around his lederhosen — a gift from Ms. Jones upon returning from Switzerland the previous fall. All secured, he tugged the hem of the shorts and pointed the tips of his skis down the fall line. The sound of the air over his ears rose as the speed increased, the faint right turn, and then the preparation for the compression of the kicker. As Ephraim reached the shoreline the force of gravity won out and forced Ephraim to sit back on the tails of the skis, the tips still aimed into oblivion.
And then flight.
In the air, Ephraim could tell that things were moving the wrong way. Not how he had visualized. The in-run, the shoreline and spectators appeared upside down behind him. His arms pinwheeled through the air trying in vain to correct what physics had set in motion. The ice approached and Ephraim paused, at least in his own estimation, and knew it would hurt. Face first. The impact was blunted by the shock of the cold water rushing in and enveloping his head, face and then the rest of him, feet last of all. His tongue ran a quick lap around the inside of his mouth to survey potential tooth loss. All were accounted for, but the metallic taste of blood filled in where the lake water was shut out. Overhead, his skis remained attached to his feet, and lay across the hole in ice, mooring him in his upside-down subaquatic attitude. From across the water a paternal howl was heard. Zeb calling from behind his place at the grill, spilling two half-cooked bratwurst into the snow at his feet.
Ephraim was pulled from the ice after forty five seconds submerged. Long enough to make things exciting. Shaken and bloodied, he slid his body across the unbroken sheet of ice to shore like a bedraggled elephant seal. Ms. Jones helped him into her lap while first aid staff applied pressure to the laceration beneath his eye.
