12
Mine, mix, fill, place, tamp, wire, repeat.
She’d taken to delivering him coffee tentside. Shared the morning’s first fresh breath of nicotine and a night’s worth of dreams, hypnotically vivid dreams, like Miles had never dreamt before, it was as if having his head on the Earth was mainlining messages from the stars.
Nothing had really changed about their deal, platonically solid, though Miles was spinning with indecision. He was lost between the quickest best friend he’d ever made, who happened to be involved with the second, kinda, and this forbidden romance guided by the magic of the night sky, where he found himself savoring every drop of moonlit honey.
There hadn’t been any follow up palm readings, or allusion to what could have been, but there hadn’t been any stand-offs of awkward regret, either. Everything just felt easy, comfortable, Miles didn’t want to jeopardize the triangle of friends, so he tamped his temptation away as he built a dirt wall around his feelings.
The house was really getting up there, almost to his chin, and each bag seemed to get heavier as it slung progressively closer to Pleiades. Somedays the flow would hit just right and they’d get two rows done, the trio had found a rhythm of momentum as they seamlessly anticipated each other’s next move. They’d all mine in the morning, to mix and fill by brunch, a fireman’s line fed the bags up a wobbly ladder, and all three rotated shifts between the two tampers, as the other caught their breath. Cap made brunch.
They’d been walking on the wall as they completed it early on, but it had grown above a rational fear of heights, and a fear of falling, especially on the downhill face, so they straddled the perimeter as they scooted along the high rise. Cap did help plenty, but climbing wasn’t a strong suit of the hefty old-timer, if they just had a couple more sets of fresh arms, they could finish it up in a week.
“Just got a text...” announced Cap. And yes, phones worked way out there, musta been a tree disguised as a tower nearby. “...from these two fellas I talked to a while back, think they might swing by and lend us their fresh arms for a week or so. Giving them coordinates now.”
“Sweet,” ask and ye shall receive.
Miles always felt a tinge of anxiety whenever he had to meet somebody new, and they hadn’t seen an unfamiliar face in weeks, and he was rather enjoying the secluded nature of newly opened relationships, but it sure would be nice to have a little more help out there.
The new recruits fell off the grid midafternoon, ready to jump in, but the veterans were looking forward to a relaxed evening of fellowship and banter. Annie led a tour of the construction detail, and the urban sprawl of campsites, offering up a handful of vacant locations perfect for a week’s vacation in Captopia. Miles thought he saw her sweetie eyes fixate on the long blond hair of contestant number two.
Paul and Levi. Levi was the tall blond, Paul was short and stout with even shorter dark curls, the Hammock Brothers, they quickly became known as in the community’s personnel directory. Not actually related, any more than the rest of us anyway, they’d been traveling together for years, living as low impact as possible in their custom fabricated hammock-tent contraptions. They spent a good bit of time out in the big bad scary wilderness, but more often found themselves guerrilla camping in the outskirts of municipal guidelines. They’d occasionally get woken up and asked to relocate, but it was more likely that they’d be up and gone without a trace.
No one questions a hammock with the disdain of the homeless. In fact, it seems quite ordinary to spend a lazy afternoon swaying in the wind, in the same park whose benches have been bumproofed. Plus, a hammock keeps you high and dry, away from the wash up of the gutters, perhaps an affordable housing option for those caught up in a flooded market.
They traveled in a work van that was equipped to hang two hammocks in the back, just in case they ran into trouble, other than that, they only carried light packs and had a few extra essentials bungeed to the ceiling.
“Gotta keep it simple when we’re climbing fences,” explained Levi.
“And buildings,” Paul stepped it up. “We found this dope rooftop in Albuquerque a couple weeks ago, it was like we had our own private penthouse downtown.”
“Oh my gosh that sounds like so much fun,” Annie said a little too excitedly. Miles was jealous of her enthusiasm.
“It’s not all glitz and glamour though,” reassured Levi. “We’ve stayed in some pretty sketchy spots too. Never had much trouble, but enough to learn how to sleep on high alert.”
“That’s why I like it up in the trees,” Paul suggested. “Like way up there. Get so far up there that no one’ll ever notice you, or be able to get to you if they did, and then pull your pack up on a rope and you got everything you need.”
“Pack light,” Levi chanted.
“Pack light,” Paul seconded the mantra.
“Pack light,” Annie joined in. “Might have to try out one of your fancy hammocks sometime, though I do really adore sleeping on the ground.”
Miles wondered whose she had in mind.
“There’s really nothing like it,” Levi chimed. “It’s like you’re floating on a cloud as the wind takes you in her arms.”
“Oh goodness, I’m in,” enlisted Annie.
“Gotta have trees though,” cautioned Paul. “Or at least something to tie to. The last camp we stopped at didn’t have much to speak of, so we had to post up in the van.”
“Where was that?” asked Spaz.
“Over in Taos. There’s a camp trying to stop water extraction from the deep well aquifers on native land. They’re building one rig now, but plan on fourteen more, and instead of the standard fifty gallon flow, these are going to pump a thousand, every sixty seconds. There’s no way that’s not going to disrupt the underground water system, fossil water they call it, and once it’s gone it’s gone, and of course there’s not even been a proper ecological review or anything.”
“Of course not. So you guys are Water Protectors?” she gave a smile of familiarity unknown to any stranger.
“Yeah, I’d say so,” affirmed Paul. “I mean, we didn’t go to Standing Rock or anything, not like most of the activists in Taos, or like you all, I take it. But we’ve been living as lightly as possible for a long time, and in the last year or so we’ve been a part of a couple different camps.”
“Like where?” Spaz curiously interrogated.
“We started back east,” Levi began. “I’m from Virginia, where they’re putting in not one, but two big fat natural gas pipelines, two different routes of incineration, to and from the same places. It’s ridiculous.”
Paul added, “I’ve heard it’s so if one gets stopped, they’re still in business, or they can even link two partial constructions together.”
“One of ‘em’s almost done, the MVP, Mountain Valley Pipeline. There’s some treesits and other blockades in the last few sections of pipe not completed, they’ve got a pretty good handle on monitoring the carnage and reporting permit violations, but it’s like everywhere else, the government’s in with the energy corporations and it keeps getting pushed through, even after judges order it stopped.”
“They’re just trying to get it slammed in there before the push to defossilize puts them out of business. If they can finish it, then not only does the lawless contractor get a government subsidized paycheck, but now this shiny new pipe has to get used to return the investments of said government and their shareholders’ interests.”
“Yep, Water Protectors,” she decided.
Miles suddenly felt under qualified.