Davidson - Sarah Court

Squirrels cause suburbanites more grief than any creatures under your sun.

Squirrels tore up my garden! Squirrels ate the seeds left out for the robins! Goddamn those marauding buggers!

Id laugh, were I capable.

The Eastern Gray Squirrel, sciurus carolinensis, is, on average, fifteen inches from nose to tail tip. Weighs, on average, one pound. Pick up a pair of wire cutters. Snip your pinkie finger off below the nail. The size of a squirrel brain. A homo sapiens synaptic clusters produce enough bioelectricity to jumpstart a Chevrolet. A squirrels fail to produce enough to jumpstart a wristwatch.

Yet despite their many handicaps, they consistently outwit humankind. Ive seen a grown woman crouched in her nightgown on a freezing winter morn lubing her bird feeder pole with bacon grease. Saw one man shoot a squirrel with a twelve-gauge Remington. Obliterate it. To quote an old aphorism: Theres a difference between scratching your ass and tearing big lumps out.

Sarah Court had squirrel problems for years. Until its residents domesticated them. Ushering hobos from gutter to penthouse, according to one disgruntled homeowner.

Sarah Court: a ring of homes erected by the Mountainview Holdings Corporation. Cookie-cutter houses put up quick. Residents digging gardens will encounter broken bricks and wiring bales haphazardly strewn and covered with sod. In a town twenty minutes north of Niagara Falls. Grape and wine country. Crops harvested by itinerant Caribbean fieldhands who ride bicycles bundled in toques and fingerless gloves even in summertime. A town unfurling along Lake Ontario. Once so polluted, salmon developed pearlescent lesions on their skin. Ducks, pustules on their webbed feet. They seizured from contagions in their blood. Children were limited to swimming in ten-minute increments.

You really are such magnificently grim bastards. Trashing utopias is how you party.

A town where, as they say, everybody is in everybodys pocket. Where any resident can ask another resident if they have seen any other resident and the answer will be: Ive seen him around. Everybody is always seeing everyone else, around. A town where those who suffer a flat tire are apt to drive on the emergency spare for six months. Whose more corpulent residents have been spotted Whose more corpulent residents have been spotted HOUR FAMINE with no discernible hint of irony. Whose denizens have been collectively referred to by graceless out-of-towners as resembling your standard roller derby audience. A town you cannot truly label multicultural, though its undertaker does craft specialty coffins for Muslims to be interred on their sides facing Mecca. He also receives a fee from town coffers for indigents who are interred in industrial rollpaper tubes: basically, toilet paper rolls roomy enough to fit one deceased hobo.

A town where young men barrel out of downtown boozers to find their gaze fastened upon the starstudded sky, gibbous moon tilting over the low architecture and streetlights of St. Paul street, knowing this is ittheir place in the world. A town where if you get away, you get away young. Otherwise inertia locks you into acceptance. A town where men return to their old high schools after the bars shut down. Always a case of warm beer in somebodys trunk. The Mobile Party Kit. They huddle on bleachers talking about that football game they lost but how afterwards they scrapped the winners and sent them home bust up. A town adept at reconfiguring losses as wins. One friend inevitably challenges another to a hundred-yard dashTracks right there, fucko. You chickenshit?so they run drunkenly yet somehow desperate, warm beers in hand, on legs already turning soft round their bones.

A town where most work at fabrication plants, dry docks, Redpath Sugar. Half a lifetime at one mind-crumbling task: pressing sheet metal into fenders or arc-welding ships hulls or filling bags with ice tea mix. Drive past the GM factory at six a.m.: greenhorns coming off skeleton shifts pin-eyed and pasty as arctic zombies while older men with tin lunchboxes festooned with Chiquita banana stickers punch in. Men forever smelling of acetylene sparks, industrial glue, unrefined sugar. Who smell of such on their marriage altars and will smell of such in their coffins. Or should their lives spin terribly awry: rollpaper tubes.

A town like so many others, with a right and wrong side, delineated by the CN Pacific tracks cleaved through its heart. How is it so many of your kinds habitations are thus separated? As if when railcars offloaded the town founders, all the promising citizens disembarked out one side while the wastrels, knaves, scoundrels, and pariahsslithered out the other. Go rip open a bag of trash on the east, or right, side: name-brand products. Rip open a bag on the west: yellow no-name packaging, Black Cat cigarette butts, bottles of Wildcat lagerwhich legend has is concocted from vat dregs recarbonized and sold stone cheap. Sterno Dells on the westside: a wooded bowl strewn with mattress skeletons where rubbydubs slept the summer months. That is until one shambles dozed off with his cooker lit and burnt it to an unhealthy blackness. Had you been hovering above the fire you would have seen wild animals fleeing all robed in flame. A sight not unlike solar flares releasing from a suns superheated corona.

Not a town without charm. An escarpment fringes the southeastern edge; the millennia trickle through its steep cliffs. The lakes sailboat-studded green shading to glassy gold lit by a harvest moon. The people within its limits are good stock. If anything, they meet the challenges life throws at them too quickly. Marriage and parenthood arrive and with them the cessation of so many wild ambitions. Some call this an unbeautiful place containing a few quite beautiful people. Others say this is an oddly beautiful place containing a few right bastards.