...rabbit rabbit...

...the ballad of footeastman [part eight]...

CansaFis Foote

Feb 23, 2024

…"Rabbit rabbit" is a superstition found in Britain and North America wherein a person says or repeats the words "rabbit", "rabbits" and/or "white rabbits" aloud upon waking on the first day of a month, to ensure good luck for the rest of it…

…this is part 8 of a 9 part story I am telling about my relationship with my ladyfriend Sarina….this is the wedding issue…previous published articles in this series can be found here…all photos live from the week of wedding…

PART ONE – https://cansafis.substack.com/p/hungry-like-the-wolf

PART TWO – https://cansafis.substack.com/p/bad-paradise

PART THREE – https://cansafis.substack.com/p/alien-love-forms

PART FOUR – https://cansafis.substack.com/p/and-she-was

PART FIVE – https://cansafis.substack.com/p/home-is-where-the-art-is

PART SIX – https://cansafis.substack.com/p/minnesota

PART SIX PART TWO – https://cansafis.substack.com/p/sidney

PART SEVEN – https://cansafis.substack.com/p/fully-engaged

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-13:46

“Alice: "How long is forever?"

White Rabbit: "Sometimes, just one second.”

-Lewis Carroll-

Brrrp, brrrp, prrrsh, grrp-chup-chup, brrrp, prrrsh, drrrk.

1296 miles into this journey, with 3 days of rest in a rocky lot next to an 1800’s era nurses quarters we rented to sleep in, our car was near dead. I turned the key in the ignition and nothing. I whipped my wrist circular, certain the car would start. Ten turns and a bemused grimace later, the car zonked zombie. A half-dead engine burped to life, ready to go nowhere fast, very slowly.

It was the morning of my wedding, deep on the border of western Nebraska in Fort Robinson State Park and I was putt-putting my dusty black 2014 Honda CRV down the 25mph freeway to the closest gas station I could find. Our chariot had taken us from Oakland to Reno, from Reno to Winnemucca, from Winnemucca to Salt Lake City to Park City to Fort Collins to Loveland to Scott’s Bluff to Fort Rob all just to die as the sun rised (rose, risened?) on our wedding day.

Car labor on a weekend is a luxury few cities provide, yet here I was, in a town, population of 997, looking for a fix. Crawford, Nebraska, the closest town to the Fort, is a beautiful slice of simple roadside Americana. Its tiny stature belies the fact that the town is big enough to contain two drive-up burger-shack ice-cream huts, a “rock, bone and gem” store, a honey shop and a local farmer’s market hidden next to a disc golf course next to a bmx course next to a rodeo. It also has no fewer than three car shops, none of whom perform weekend services, or any services that might take less than a week’s time.

One of the overlooked failures of the modern educational system is the lack of instruction on anything useful.

I don’t know how cars work, or how houses are built but I know how to feign a fever to get an extra nap hour on a school nurse’s couch. I don’t know how cars work, but there I was across the street from Staab’s Drive-In ready to do performative theater for the gods. I don’t know how cars work, but I chewed a toothpick seriously, kicked the tires with a face of concern, then popped open the hood like I was looking for a misplaced carburetor hose compressor detached from the plug computer next to the dual axle bi-widget drip socket. I don’t know how cars work but for a moment I convinced myself I did, if only for the hope that my pretense would get the car back up and working.

The rabbit winked at me.

He sat peacefully on the engine, his tail tucked warmly on the purr-coughing-purr-coughing rusted red metal of the barely running engine. The rabbit winked at me then jumped down to the street, bounding behind the gas station, behind the ice cream stand, down the grasslands off to wherever rabbits go after they destroy a gigantic machine.

I know nothing about how cars work but I know how they don’t work. Cars don’t work when a rabbit decides they don’t. A century of innovation, a machine made of 30,000 pieces, and all it took to render my Honda into dying metal & wheels was a winking country rabbit nesting for a night.

I am an incredibly lucky man.

I was lucky to be out here in Nebraska, lazy fields of gusting grasslands surrounded by wrinkled plateaus made of cactus and triceratops bones. I was lucky to have two dogs flanking me, along the sandy pine tree strewn hills of the spirit-filled wilderness. I was lucky to have found a companion who enjoyed fourteen years of hanging out enough to want to attempt fourteen, forty and hopefully four hundred and forty four more years with me. And that day I was lucky that a rabbit decided to eat out my engine on the day I’d be wed.

Six days earlier, before he had found home in my car’s hooded bedding, the rabbit had found me alone for a sunrise staring at longhorns praying to the god of their fields. I had been awakened by a symphony of seven coyotes beckoning Sidney, my cattle dog, to come feast with them. She licked my face awake, took a crap on the floor of our cabin, and my phone erupted to 27 messages of work terror hidden across the country in my home state of California.

Western Nebraska wifi is a remote worker who will never go back into the office, and all my feeble attempts at doing business while cabin-camping there were limited to the brief moments where a lonely satellite spoke skyguage just enough to give my phone a bar and a drink. The land wanted me living in this space, not working.

We had decided to get married here for the space. Space enough for any amount of people. Space enough to see sky, stars, stoops, and steers. Sharing in that seeing by being bare in sight’s share.

We were to be seen amongst these sights. As nights dimpled days, friends and family found and folded us, sheets in the wind drying on a string caught between two metal poles. The dream of this day was to have a week to watch it build, and a lifetime to live its effects. And our lucky rabbit had just chewed us a couple extra days.

Time doesn’t stop. It won’t hold or pose for pictures. It doesn’t remember or forget. We spent as much time that day as time could spend on us. Nothing wasted, nothing taken.

We had planned just enough to ensure things happened as they should, when they should happen, how they should happen. All the tiny teeth of the rabbit had done was take our time and make it more more. What a gift it had given us.

One thousand two hundred and ninety-six miles we’d traveled to have one kiss. To dance in a buffalo barrack and toss cornhole while a lightning storm serenaded the far country horizon. To play in a pool, and trot a birthday morning on spiky silt, hoofing a young horse’s back up the steep shred of Fort forest. We shared songs and stories and held one hundred and sixty-four hands. We saw love and love saw us.

The rabbit had bore us witness. He had prepared his home for us. I don’t know how many holes he had hid in before he decided his best nest was a 2014 dusty black Honda CRV from West Oakland. But in reflection I remember his wink as an acknowledgement of his blessing.

The wires wound in engine blocks are made of soy. We had brought to Nebraska not a car, but a box of warmed rabbit treats. Marriage is about sharing. Sharing time. Sharing space. The rabbit gave us both. That and a $550 dollar bill paid out to a Crawford salvage shop with seven hundred lifeless wrecks in its lot.

When I think about my wedding day I’ll remember mostly my bride Sarina, my bride Champagne, her beauty, and our happiness. Then I’ll remember our family, our friends, my dogs at my feet in a tuxedo and flower crown. I’ll remember the night capping on a halo of stormy orange fury in the distance, not eating enough dinner, and dancers delighting in the silent disco hitting their headphones.

And then I’ll remember that a rabbit ate my engine. And that might be just about the luckiest thing that could ever happen to a man.

That, and getting married.