ON THE LEVEL

APRIL 17, 2021 – Yesterday, as my wife and I headed out of town for the Red Cabin, she read aloud from her newsfeed. This fueled an intense discussion about The Trial and The Latest Shooting. We speculated about reaction to next week’s verdict in The Trial. Will Minneapolis—the central part of which is already boarded up—burst into flames?

For many miles we dissected The Latest Shooting. Why did the cop intervene when her trainee and another officer seemed to have Daunte under control? Had he been stopped, as the police claim, for expired tabs—and how expired were they?—or for an errant air-freshener, as the mother claims? Or was the stop initially for the tabs but upon seeing the air-freshener, the cops mentioned that to Daunte first (who then relayed it to his mother)?

If the cop honestly thought she’d pulled her taser—what cranial short-circuit caused her to pull her gun? Assuming the taser/gun mix-up occurred in a nanosecond, how does “reckless disregard” enter the picture? What’s the difference between The Latest Shooting and where a person leaps in front of a squad car and the driver jams on the brakes—only to miss and hit the accelerator? “Reckless disregard” for wearing shoes one size too large? Jail time and death threats anyway as punishment for the sins of our forefathers?

Or should our placards read, “TASERS ONLY; NO GUNS FOR COPS!”—in a country of 300 million guns, many of them in very nasty hands? Or should traffic cops ignore arrest warrants against Blacks—including Blacks who are half white? Why, in the first place, are such people “Black,” not “white”?

Is the cop being sacrificed to let the rest of us off the hook for allowing a runaway gun culture that leads every cop to worry—right or wrong, racist or not—that a Black person is armed? (Ignore for the moment, whites in pick-ups sporting Confederate flags and Qanon stickers.)

The miles flew by. Eventually we arrived at our Shangri-La, far from the madding crowd.

After unloading the car, I donned waders, gathered tools, and tackled the perennial spring project: dock installation. I re-arranged and leveled by sight, stones along the shore where one end of the wooden frame would rest. I then twisted a set of pipes into the lake-bed 12 feet out, and rested the lake end of the frame across a 4 x 4 beam laid upon the pipe brackets. In the “moment of truth,” I set a level across each end of the frame and along its length. With two thin shims, on all sides the bubble landed exactly between the lines.

Contrary to the woes of the world, something under my control was miraculously “on the level.” Just then a bald eagle dropped from its perch in a pine above me and flew majestically out over the quiet waters—itself “on the level” as it headed for the reclining sun. For a precious moment, all seemed right with the world.

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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson