The Myth of Wile E

Probably the Biggest Snowball in the World for About a Week

Maybe now that I've described the toilet, it wouldn't be such a bad time to describe the rest of the place. Maybe after you've seen the toilet, which is surely the least scenic of all the sights in my home, you'll be inclined to look more kindly upon the other points of interest.

First, though, I want to state, just in case you're prone to judge, that I can't really help the fact that my toilet gets so filmy. Every flat surface and every convex bulge of my home is covered with a sort of film. Probably the concave crevices are filmy too, but I can't see into them without a flashlight, so they're the least of my concerns. This film comes from the coal-burning power plant four miles away that spews thick smoke day and night.

The other reason for the filminess, at least during the winter, is that my only source of heat is my wood-burning stove. I've never quite gotten the hang of using it without getting soot all over everything.

I live at the bottom of a hill, in a somewhat rhomboidal single-wide mobile home with green aluminum siding (that almost matches the toilet). The green aluminum façade harmoniously blends into the surrounding wooded environment, as if Frank Lloyd Wright himself designed my mobile home. The only problem-and I don't know if this would have occurred to Frank Lloyd Wright-is that unsuspecting forest animals have been known to walk right into my house as if it weren't there. I don't mean they come in for a visit; I mean they walk right bam! into the side of my house. They lie there, slumped near the wall for a little while, stunned and embarrassed. Then they move on. Who knows if they ever figure out what happened. One year a drunk hunter walked smack into my house the same way. He lay on the ground for two days, passed out. I didn't know who you were supposed to call about such things: 9-1-1? The Department of Fish and Game? But regardless, I didn't have a phone. So I took the bullets out of his gun, put a blanket on him, and left him there. Eventually he got up on his own and wandered away, and afterward I read in the paper that he thought he'd been abducted by aliens, causing him to "lose time." He later moved to Roswell, New Mexico, to await the aliens' return.

My single-wide was not always a rhombus, you know. Nor was it always at the bottom of the hill. Once it had been at the top of the hill, with a decent view of the power plant and environs. At least, that's what I've been told. I've been told that during a freak blizzard, the mobile home blew right off its foundation and rolled down the side of the hill, picking up snow the whole way down. By the time it reached the bottom it was nothing but a huge snowball that resembled the Epcot Center dome. It was probably the biggest snowball in the world for about a week, but by the time anyone thought of calling Guinness it was too late because the snow had started to melt. So now we'll never know; I may have come this close to living in an official tourist attraction. (Not that I was living in it yet.)

While up at the top of the hill, the mobile home had been occupied by a couple of old radicals. Their family had always been in the radicalism business. Depending on the generation, they'd been whiskey rebels, abolitionists, suffragists, prohibitionists, bootleggers, hippies, yippies-you name it. At the end of this chain of free radicals were these two unassuming elderly people who were opposed to logging, trapping, and the aforementioned coal-burning power plant. By day, they'd stroll through the woods, springing animal traps and inserting sad-eyed teddy bears into the metal jaws. By night, they'd try to figure out how to sabotage the power plant that ruined their view of the valley and all. Nothing had quite worked.

Fortunately, the old radicals weren't home during the fateful blizzard. They'd been staying with some friends at a commune in Taos, New Mexico. When they returned home, you can imagine their dismay at finding a giant snowball at the bottom of the hill atop which their home used to be. So they called the insurance company (yes, I too thought it was strange that they had insurance; it just goes to show you can't make sweeping generalizations about people on the basis of their political leanings). The insurance adjuster had to wait until the snowball melted before assessing the damage. Finally, he concluded that the mobile home was not a total loss; he believed that the rhombus could be hammered and pulled back into a proper rectangle with a few heavy mallets and a toilet plunger. He gave the couple a check to cover this procedure, but wouldn't authorize paying for the crane that would be needed to hoist the mobile home back up the hill. Apparently the couple was insured against structural damage to the home, but being atheists they had declined to purchase "Acts of God" coverage. The insurance adjuster, upon consulting with a number of priests and rabbis, had concluded that it was none other than God Himself who had knocked the mobile home off the hill. Therefore, if the old couple wanted their home moved back to the top, well, they were going to have to make their appeal to Whomever had movethed it in the first place.