By Edward H. Garcia
We see them all the time around Callender Lake — a young couple, often with a couple of kids “helping out” clearing a newly-acquired lot. They’ll come on weekends for a few months, working on their land and probably dreaming of what they’ll do when they finally build their place. Sometimes it’s an older couple or a man and his teenaged son. One sign that they are really serious about clearing and building is the acquisition of a culvert. There are all kinds of culverts, but the current fashion seems to be for long, bright-silver corrugated metal tubes. They say to the casual passerby, “We’re in this for the long haul. We’re willing to invest a couple of hundred dollars on this bad boy because we’re going to build.”
Sadly, a culvert sometimes tells a different tale, a sadder one. As my wife and I walk around our community — and I’m guessing that it’s true all across East Texas — we see all sorts of culverts that are overgrown or clotted with silt providing entrance to overgrown lots where whatever clearing was ever done is now reclaimed by briars, sumacs, cedars, and poison ivy. The culverts are no longer bright-silver. Many are relics of an earlier era when ceramic or concrete culverts were in vogue. This one says, “Thirty or forty years ago, someone had great plans for this lot, but something must have happened because they never came back.”
We can imagine but probably never know what happened. One culvert might betoken a divorce or an unexpected death. Another might be a clue to a financial reversal — the expected bank loan didn’t come through. Perhaps it was just too hard to get away from the city and not that much fun to clear land in the middle of the summer. Or a wife or husband or teenagers rebelled at coming to the country. Whatever the real story, as we walk by abandoned culverts, we know, with the poet Robert Burns, that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.
All these sad culverts got me to thinking about the “culverts” in all our lives — the evidence that we once had great plans that somehow didn’t work out. Maybe it’s an incomplete college transcript or a stack of travel books for a vacation that never happened. Or something much more heartbreaking—a trousseau that never left the cedar chest or a nursery that never sheltered a baby. In a cardboard box in a storage building, I have a number of journals which are barely begun. Each time I bought one, it seemed like a good idea, but evidently it wasn’t.
So what are we to think about our culverts — our unrealized dreams? They are a melancholy sight whether we walk past them or we find them in musty storage boxes. But I think of another poet, John Keats, who wrote with the certainty that he would not live long enough to fulfill his dreams. He knew he was dying of tuberculosis as his mother and brother had died before him. More than most of us, he was aware of the inevitable death of beauty — that perfect rose will die by stages, and the fact that it must die is an essential ingredient of its beauty. Keats tells us to revel in the melancholy we will inevitably feel — to taste the whole of it, to crush it like a grape against our palate and savor it. Keats’ prescription is not easy to follow. I would rather not think about my disappointed ambitions, however trivial or momentous, but there they are—the abandoned culverts.
We can dare to hope that someday we might return to those culverts for a new beginning. Until that day we can savor the delicious, pungent truth about best laid plans.
