Geiger Counter

Horse  shoes   “He rose and turned toward the lights of town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship’s light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.” --Cormac McCarthy, ‘Blood Meridian’   The farrier wore thick leather chaps and had thick leathery skin. His hands were calloused, the geography of his forearms a cluster of bulges through which hypogean rivers of blood coursed.    When I saw him working, either at our farm or the stables where I played and later mucked stalls, I was always pleasantly immersed in the sounds, sights and smells of a job that requires exquisite tenderness (enough to calm a horse) and brute strength (to melt and bend metal). There was cleaning and cutting and filing (of the hoof) and smashing and hammering (of the shoe). There were blood, and fire, and sweat; the holy trinity of ingredients.  Human shoes are soft, stylish, synthetic statements that have little apparent connection to the earth. But on their feet, the horses wore thick metal banged into hippocrepiform and not too far removed from the streams of iron ore that ran through the rocks over which they have cantered for millions of years. Recent reports in the Washington Post suggest that many of our modern shoes are made by Uyghurs, Turkic Muslims who are essentially held prisoner and forced to labor in what must be dark, claustrophobic industrial prisons 11,000 miles from the people who will wear the sneakers they crank out. That’s what adult life feels like; a series of revelations and reports that show we are part of a complicated and contradictory web of depressing systems. There is never any solution presented; only the sad implication that you, merely by existing in your time and place, are part of “the problem.”  Watching the farrier work was the opposite of that. There stood a man draped in leather, the tanned hide of a beast, leaning against a living, breathing horse, one of its four legs held aloft and wedged between his two legs, clipping and hammering, strong and tough and calm, the horse often lulled almost to sleep by the rhythmic working of the man pressed up against it. There is great comfort in knowing you are in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, and so the horse, the descendent of our ancient prey, was comforted, standing next to a roaring molten forge and a black, worn anvil. I remember the man holding the rustic nails in his teeth before he drove them, one by one, into the hoof.  Horseshoes have historically been made of iron or its later cousin, steel, and people long believed they were lucky and could ward off evil spirits. (That’s why there are little, pink marshmallow horseshoes in Lucky Charms cereal.) In the old days, farriers often drove seven nails into each foot when affixing the shoes, opting for a lucky number to hold a lucky item in place.  Last night, on YouTube, I stumbled across a video of a farrier working. It was labelled as ASMR, which stands for autonomous sensory meridian response. Basically, ASMR videos are clips that feature sites and (more importantly) sounds that are supposed to trigger a tingly, relaxed feeling in their audience. It’s one of those things that, just to describe it, makes you feel like you are living in some kind of absurdist novel, but it is what it is, and ASMR is apparently a massively popular form of entertainment(?), and millions of people each day spend some of their time tuning in to see and hear people tapping on empty plastic water bottles or whispering into microphones. I have no idea whether it’s wonderful or terrible, but I do know it’s weird, which is not necessarily condemnation or praise.  In any case, I played the video of the farrier for my wife and daughter, who asked a lot of questions and listened as, during each step, I said, “I remember this...” I felt slightly Amish, as if I sat down my daughter and forced her to view GoPro footage of someone making wax candles by hand. “This is how we used to make candles when I was a child.”  Or like if I stumbled upon a livestream of someone dying of typhoid, and made the family gather round the iPhone to see it. “This is how everyone died when I was young!” But there was something atavistic and soothing about it. I remember the farrier, whose name was Dan. He had an Australian shepherd that went everywhere with him and would lounge around nearby while he worked, and who even the toughest farm dogs never messed with because he was fabled to be as hard and grizzled as his owner. “Dan,” whose name was short, with the same timbre and cadence of a hammer striking an anvil. A man who I never saw drink, but who I just assumed would win any drinking contest he chose to enter. I think I remember it fondly for two reasons. One, it happened long ago, in my childhood. All things in the past, even the most horrific, are things we have survived, which is why the past takes on a pleasing hue and resonance, despite its many travesties. But also because it is the opposite in so many ways of the disconcerting world we find ourselves in now. I sit here, wearing shoes made by an enslaved stranger 11,000 miles away, apparently part of a system so complex and so vast that it can’t be good and can never be fixed. And I envy the horse, who spent its entire life walking the earth in elemental shoes, rendered from stone and made right there, just for her, by someone who knew what he was doing, into whose eyes she could so easily gaze.