Rust Laden Nails

By: Daniel E. Kramer

Leakage, spilling into the moving child’s foot. Iron, from a hundred years ago, hand forged and hardened, square, still sharp. In at an angle, like a stinging wasp, like an inferno of icy hotness. When you run barefoot these things happen. 

This didn’t use to happen before, but in these modern times, it does. This didn’t use to happen when there were just sticks and branches, not back then, and not like this. After the industrial revolution, after the time of metal, nowadays there is lots of it around. 

Oh, beware, barefooted children, sandal wearers, those with poor eyesight, and those who move too quickly to notice. Moving before you think, stirring before you know what lurks underfoot can be dangerous.

One went into my hand once, back around the age of seven, a touch of sharp twisted metal cracking the skin. I had run too fast through the old barn, had not paid enough attention, but paid more than enough for the price. Tetanus shot first, x-ray second, stitches third. This is the usual processes. You can play, but you must pay. It is the lesson, sharp and burning, and it was seared into my youthful mind and reckless spirit. 

Days later there will be more to come. There is always more of this to go around. Heal, grow, forget, move on, and repeat. 

This is life on the farm for a young boy or girl. This is hard lessons learned, amid a forgiving regenerative mass of cells that is the human body; the flesh.

I watched my first son step too quickly last week, barefoot as always like a warrior brave, and in an instant, the nail had gone in and through and back out. He squirmed, and tears welled up. Just like when my second son pierced his thumb with a fish hook, and when my daughter rammed a rose thorn into her big toe. A sliced thumb on a band saw, my father's shattered heal when the ladder fell, my mother’s ruptured disc when rammed by a sheep, some broken ribs from that one steer whose back was in a corner. Torn ligaments from the hay bale slipping, blisters and bruises from the digging, sprained fingers and toes, the hammering physical labor of the living. 

We keep the eyes always closed enough to avoid splinters and dust, fragments and shards, but open enough to not crush our thumbs with the sledgehammer. The lips and skin burned and chapped by the sun and heat. Then the dust, ever present, infused with immortal bacteria and fungus, spores from the Pleistocene, thousand-year-old killers. The silica particles, the soil permeated by farm chemicals. The aspirated pollen, lungs that clean themselves, but for how long?

Here on the farm, the world is more deadly, here on the ground that produces life there must be a price in return, for you can’t get something for nothing. The price of the wine you drink from the pretty bottle at leisure comes from somewhere, the cutlets of beef, the asparagus, rice, fruits, flavors, smells, and sustenance; it all has a price to bare.  

But the pain can be fun, in a peculiar way. Not when it happens, and not if it kills you on the spot, but after it passes, when it becomes a thing of folklore. Each and every event leading to legendary statements as in, “Remember the time the dog shattered your tibia, Elliott?  What a perfect spiral fracture that was.” 

Therein lies the intrinsic value. The perfect and beautiful importance of pain, the significance of the reckoning, the event that could have been far worse but it’s okay because you survived. Dirty wounds are a thing of beauty when they create grit. Nothing less, nothing more. In the wound there is something special yet to be delivered if you only go walking, waiting, looking; barefoot, and without gloves. 

Something of a lesson could be yours for the taking if you only give it a chance. Meeting one's destiny with such a happening seems idiotic to the outsider, but at the moment when it happens, you know that you are definitively a mortal. At that moment, you are free of the illusion of false and indulgent foreverness. It is here that one no longer needs to conform to the ego’s delusions of invincibility. It is here where the flesh and spirit meet for a reckoning.