​ 
            Smells: “they” have done studies on the effect of smells on our memory and emotions and have found this effect truly profound, reaching not only into our more primitive psyches, but also our otherwise-forgotten past.  I have often cursed my sense of smell, I admit.  Vomit and rotting meat bring me close to gagging, and back in my dating days, I just couldn’t abide some very nice women, not because they smelled bad, but because their smell wasn’t right for a romantic relationship.  But it is memory where smell is the most interesting for me, and there is one smell that brings back a lifetime of minor memories: the smell of two-stroke oil. 
 
The first ones go way back, to when words were too new to properly anchor time and place.  Then, the blue-smoke odor was always combined with the stench of low tide and sea weed, my parents taking us out in the sail boat with a dinky 5 horse power that was essential for getting us from the marina to the sea and then back to the marina, especially near dusk after the winds had died.  I can still feel the discomfort of the sand and salt rash around my waistband, squint from the memory of the intense glare of the sun, and recall that queasy stomach dis-ease from rocking and rolling for hours on end.  Even at night that rocking would continue into sleep, and with it would be parred the smell of two-cycle oil.  So often these memories come back to me, drifting from an imagined sea with the rainbow sheen on the inlets everywhere.  Only the foulest of mud flats could blot out that smell, but even then only for a while. 
 
The two-stroke odor sailed on with me as I got my own boat and crappy small engine.  With that came uncounted stories, but the oil clung to another contraption as well in this later life: a 400CC Honda hill climber, a one-lunger that was all torque and no comfort.  The oil was self-injected from a separate well, a relief at the filling station, but if you forgot to check the oil, the engine would freeze and that would be that.  It never happened, though, as the blue smoke and smell always reminded me that I was driving a two-stroke. That and its rough vibrations.
 
Talk about rough; not long after I had bought the thing from a hill-climbing friend for a song and a dance, I had the great idea to take it up to the lower cape (that is, the northern tip, a reverse of what you might think.  The locals see the peninsula as an arm, with the “shoulder” being at the south end.  It kind of makes sense on a map, but really, I think the old Yankees named it to confuse the rest of us).  It was a four-hour trip that might have been pleasant except that I had to stop every half hour to shake my limbs, so numbed were they by the vibrations.  By the time I made North Truro, just south of Provincetown, I could barely light a cigarette, which I needed badly for my jangled nerves.  I did have some fun later blowing donuts in the sand, but you couldn’t go far into the dunes, being against the law.  Not that those kind of laws used to bother me, but the “man” would have heard that loud soma-bitchn’ two stroke and certainly would have smelled it.  I did, and that’s why I remember that ignominious trip all too well.
 
If I had bought that little monster for a song and a dance, I had to sell it for a song, as further college beckoned to rid me of the problem of punching a time clock.  Years passed until I again was smelling two-stroke inboards on the fancier “bongos,” or dugout canoes, motoring up the tributaries of the Orinoco and Parucito rivers in southern Venezuela.  There, the odor of oil and sea-salt and mud flats were replaced by the exhalations of deep tropical forest, fresh-water mud, and fish.  Therein lie many more tales, the presence of gas-oil, as the caboclos (mixed-race backwoodsmen) call it, as memorable as the soothing smell of wood smoke around communal fires.  But life moved on, and through time came another machine in a completely different clime: the snowmobile.
 
I didn’t really want one, as I could never find joy in tinkering with small engines, but after one adventure hauling my stuff over almost 5 miles of snow to our huddled cabin in the northern forest, I had to concede.  I reasoned that it could be a cheap old thing, as I would only use it for that 5 mile stretch, or so I thought, but the need grew.  My wife decided that having another might be fun and my junior-high school son thought this machine the greatest thing ever - so great, in fact, that on the third day of driving around the back field, he sped into an elm, cracking the fiberglass shell and his own lips.  $600 dollars of repairs later, and that only on the snowmobile, erased the entire idea of frugality. 
 
It was going to happen anyway.  Snowmobiles break down all the time, and much more so if they are, say, twenty years old, which our first was.  Ever try to pull-start a 600CC engine for an hour and half?  And then haul all your junk and your wife’s 5 miles back to a parked Jeep?  Fortunately, I only had to go a mile before someone on a snowmobile was kind enough to haul our stuff to the parking lot, but that was enough.  After that, we bought a good machine for several thousand, which we used, on average, about two weeks a year, each year dependably decreasing its value.  On top of that, we bought a covered trailer that was needed to keep highway salt from spraying into the engine.  Then there was the price of the trail tags.  And, lest we forget, the semi- annual registration fee and the mandatory yearly tune-up. 
 
Yes, a snowmobile is a hole in a snowdrift that you pour money into.  And more: fancy equipment doesn’t protect you from foolishness.  Rather, it increases it with false security, as with those people who wiz past you on snow-covered highways in their new four-wheel drives, never understanding that the breaks are still no better than anyone else’s.  Such false confidence happens with new snowmobile owners too, even to such fools as myself.  So is was that, with Vicki riding shotgun, I attempted to cross what’s called the Kingston Plains.  It is not one plain now, but a series of plains interspersed with new pine growth, but the wind still blows the snow around into huge drifts, and in the ground blizzards the blowing creates, one direction looks about the same as another.   It was supposed to be a fun shortcut of about 4 miles; instead, we ended up driving around in circles for an hour as night approached, nearly getting stuck in said huge drifts, barely avoiding crashing into several ancient tree stumps and, at one point, nearly driving into a sequestered pond.  We did finally manage to get back to where we started, thanks to the compass I found in a deep coat pocket.  If not for that bit of luck, they might have written songs about us, like “Ghost Riders in the Drifts,” or “The Wreck of the Frederick Fitz-snowmobile.” 
 
Vicki has gone up a few times more in winter, but always with our son along and never with me alone, off trail.  Never again. 
 
All this under or besides or near the pale blue smoke of two-stroke oil. 
 
Now, even though our newest is a four stroke, our son’s and almost everyone else’s still loudly puff and belch around us. 
 
Two-stroke oil is the stuff of young people with energy to burn, of poor people with money for only the used and the simple, of lumberjacks and fishermen, and of old people with nothing more to do than to pretend to play until their bones ache or their skin burns.  Then they retire to the cabin or the bar or to the living room where they sit in front of the same old tube, relieved.   
 
We have had all the snow we need down here in Southern Wisconsin this winter, with brutally cold temperatures to keep the powder and base in place.  Just last night I was dragged by my son from the comfort of the fire – the wood cut myself with a two-stroke chain saw - to play young again and hit the snowmobile trails.  I forgot to put on the snow pants for some reason, and with temperatures near zero, my legs froze so badly that I could barely stand.  The gloves had been damp from shoveling earlier, and my fingers froze as well.  On our jaunt we took a short-cut across a lake, breaking our own trail, and almost stalled out in slush several times, the snow wet either from weather cracks, or, who knows?, from nearby open water craftily hidden by drifts and ice.  When I returned – alive - to the living room and the fire, my thin sweatpants and thick nylon jacket smelled of the two-stroke my son was driving, as he was ahead of me, as he is ahead of me all the time now.  As with the other oldsters who ride with the two-strokes, I felt both relief and a sense of satisfaction.  I had had my adventure and could relax because an important part of my life had been fulfilled. 
 
So it is that two-stroke oil smells of adventures both big and small, of life not in an office or factory, but “out there,” out where Man does not control and where anything can happen.  Bears might jump out from behind trees, whales might rise from the sea, and God himself might show his face in a sunset at the edge of the horizon where only a two-stroke can take you. 
 
The smell of the distant horizon; if napalm smells like victory, so the smoke from two-stroke oil smells like our final accomplishment, a victory wrought from daily struggles that drift upward from the smallness of ourselves to the open sky.  Tough and rugged to the touch, these struggles, but then soft and light as a blue whiff that fades into relief, satisfaction, and then the silent depths of infinity.    
 
 
 

​It gets like this every year, the gray and cold of winter finally seeping into the very bones by February so that everything is touched.  It was just so recently, a spate of freezing rain falling on hardened snow, when I noticed the smallish gray -and -white birds fighting with the chickadees at the bird feeders.  “Juncos” I remembered as if it were a revelation: juncos, as my mom had told me in another February decades ago.  I don’t know how she knew the name of this common and unspectacular winter bird, and maybe she didn’t either, but I do, this name plucked from someone older than I that was plucked from someone older still, a winter knowledge maybe going back to the Civil War or the Revolution, or whenever my mother’s ancestors began speaking English.  So I now have this bird, gray and white as winter itself, and its name a remnant, sunk into my memory like frozen footprints in a lake. 
 
February; how the sun begins to show warmth again towards the middle of the month, and how I, age ten, lay on a brick retaining wall in its slight warmth suffering from what I now know was a concussion, the nausea and headache smoothed into dim dream on that wall as if nothing mattered, not even time.  It passed and the apple tree in back bloomed again as sweet as ever, May for youth more joyful at times than Christmas.  School’s dismissal would be spring’s final and greatest gift, lending back more seemingly endless time until it wasn’t, when the slow decent into school and gray and cold would begin again. 
 
We all know that the natural world runs in cycles, or more precisely, spirals, returning almost to where it was before again and again, but slightly changed.  So the Jurassic era gyrates into the ice ages with timeless patience until it is no longer and then near its opposite; and so the societies of man, nature seeped to their bones, roll out one set of beliefs, then another until they approach their opposites, all while basking beneath the same sun.  So the way of nature, so the works of German Idealism in the 19th century, all so clear in this but for one thing: to exactly where does the spiral bring us?  If it is nearly to our opposite, then when?  And if nothing ever stays the same, then where and when does it go from there?   
 
We don’t think this way much anymore, things changing so fast it seems like broken times or the End Times themselves, but they did have large thoughts not long ago. The “theys” include Aldous Huxley, George Orwell (aka Eric Blair) and Arthur C. Clarke, all British, all affected by one or two of the great wars, but each different in his vision of the future. 
 
Huxley is best known for his Brave New World, where there is One World ruled by a humanistic elite.  Reproduction is controlled by the state, where the majority of babies are purposely made mentally deficient so that they will be content doing the menial tasks that society needs.  It is a soft totalitarian state, one genuinely interested in the welfare of the people, where social issues are discussed by the Alpha ruling class as aristocrats of the past might have discussed Plato or St Augustine.  They mean well.  The results are subtly hideous. 
 
We all know Orwell, a student of Huxley while at Eton College.  After his youthful upper-class adulation of Marxism, he became deeply disillusioned and angered at the failure of communist Russia to live up to its ideals, as it swiftly became a harsh totalitarian state after the Revolution.  Humanitarianism – good intentions - for the dystopia in his book were merely black-is-white covers for total control of the populace by some god-like ruling elite.  It is the nightmare of the modern dictatorships, seen from North Korea to Russia to China to Cuba to Vietnam to Venezuela.  It is what the citizens of the “free” world fear most, as those in control continually cover up corrupt laws and behaviors with euphemistic labels and spin.  It is hideous right out loud, right in our faces, power exposed in the raw.
 
Then there is Arthur Clarke, born a generation after the former two, and to a middle-class family to whom Oxford was beyond his reach.  He wrote spectacular science fiction, including 2001, a Space Odyssey, and Childhood’s End, both dealing with the evolution of Man into something far greater than what we are now.  In his view, the marvels of technology will not lead to the dead-end of a hyper-controlled and surveilled state, but rather will help connect us with each other until we reach a critical mass of collective intelligence and evolve into undreamed-of possibilities.  His ideas were taken from the French Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who hypothesized that Man was on the cusp of reaching the Omega Point, this same “critical mass.”  He conceptualized a “noosphere” that surrounded the earth in a subtle form, something like a human-centered Gaia, to which we were being steered by God towards a final victory of enlightenment here on earth – and then, perhaps, to well beyond earth, into the stars and the infinite.  
 
Of the latter, we take note – only Teilhard placed God directly in the formula, even though all of the above foresaw a dialectical movement towards some sort of end game.  For the darker two, Huxley and Orwell, that end game was driven by Man’s will to power, manifested by domination over his fellow man.  For the lighter two, Teilhard and Clarke, they saw a development directed by something else, either by God or the unnamed hidden hand of intelligent design.  In comparing both sets, we can conclude that if history is controlled by humans as we know them, it will end in some form of oppressive dystopia; and if by an outer force, then towards far greater heights and wonders, if not heaven itself. 
 
What is happening now in the cutting-edge Western world?  Many people from both conservative and liberal camps believe we are nearing an Omega Point, where history as we know it will come to, if not a conclusion, then to some sort of ideological resting point.  What we in the religious sector generally see is a movement away from the greater outside forces or force – God for most of us – towards a purely human-driven agenda.  Most, then, would probably agree with Huxley and Orwell that this movement will end in misery for the “masses,” as the elite use technology for a more perfect domination.  Ultimately, it does not matter whether this movement is propelled by well-intentioned liberals or by dark, hate-filled Antifa types.  Humans without humility - humans who do not bow to a greater power - are destined to crush each other either from spite or from a sense of internal superiority.  This drive to power began with the first revolt in the Garden of Eden, and it continues to this day for all those who put themselves at the center, religious or not. 
 
So it is that we must first believe that we are being led by something beyond us.  In the era of FDR, we were treated to a kindly paternalism that, among many other things, exposed the great unwashed to classical music on federally-funded NPR and even on cartoon shows, all meant to bring us closer to the level of our educated masters, and to think more like them.  This was our Brave New World.  Now it seems the carrot is being taken away and that we are being given the stick.  Raw power is radiating from Washington and from the economic and social elite, as discursive venues are being censored and troops are being readied behind razor wire around the Capital.  This looks bad; it is meant to look bad; and that is good.  It allows us to see where this new humanism is taking us as it shifts from a ‘soft care’ government to one of forceful control.  We can now clearly see how it will end, and that we must avoid this end by withdrawing our belief that government is our ultimate ruler and protector.  Without that belief in government, and with an eye towards something far greater, the coercive power of the State will break apart and wash away.
 
Like a river.  A river runs through the town nearest us, but its movement is now unseen, its surface layered in ice, wintered to the bone.  But we know that time will pull it through the spiral, the days warming until the hidden currents suddenly shatter the softening ice and carry it away in shrinking shards towards the sea.  By this we know that currents are always running through everything whether we see them or not, taking the cold and ice, as well as all our monuments and best-laid plans, with them sooner or later. 
 
Opposites may come on slowly, but often rapidly disappear, all part of the twisting spiral of universal laws.  As humans, the most we are required to do is to have faith in the natural flows and the intelligence that directs it.  The currents will have their way regardless, but faith is the like the warming sun of spring – the more it shines, the quicker the river is freed from ice.