An early work-in-progress dedicated to helping,
circuitously, precipitate the Great Mobilisation
Dare to be wise!
Kant
Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20240706
Fuse Lit : Heard once, playing on a KūitiTe Kūiti. The Te deliberately dropped in this rendering to avoid the grammatically clumsy: a The—te being reo Māori: the fish-shop radio, circa late 1950s, despite the earliest album recording date listed being 1964, with no earlier, single catalogued—much less Light the Fuse itself. Pictured, co-songwriter Dorsey Burnette. image The Rockabilly Years | album Motown Records
Light the fuse, step back,
we heard the straw boss say
We’ve got to save the lives
of a hundred men today
Dorsey Burnette – Joe Osborne
Given Hutch’s deterioration, it risks seeming a cruel question. Judging he’ll welcome being asked, Cimino enquires of his old primary school friend—and author of a round forty published books:
Hutch, are you currently writing?
His eyes light up. Laboriously, walking-frame aided he retrieves a single sheet of paper, then watches his friend as he begins to read. Several precious conversations are running in parallel—Hutch had named the occasion the Winstone Road Reunion, for the subPuketāpapa, Makaurau (Mount Roskill, Auckland)urbanPuketāpapa, Makaurau (Mount Roskill, Auckland) house they’d shared in their late teens. This is the first time in 59 years the four have been face-to-face, and Jane is introduced to Hutch’s lifelong soulmate Jenny, the two hitting it off instantly. Meanwhile:
If you’re not going to read that…
Silently beseeching the patience of Hutch’s enduring best friend ‘Russ’, Cimino insists,
No, no, Hutch—I’m enjoying it!
Resuming, Cimino thrills at reading renewed proof of the power of Hutch’s prose. Cimino, again, is vividly reminded of the first time he’d heard his friend’s writing narrated, on public-broadcast radio, and again is instantly transported back to his Kūiti childhood.
In the mid-1960s scene his current solitary page so sublimely describes, Hutch is phoned by his friend Skerman and summoned to the town’s record store to listen to a just-released single. The artistry with which he describes how—in those 2:45 minutes—his musical axis is seismically altered, underscores why he has a bookshelf of titles to his credit.
Cimino is ebullient. Hutch says, of the passion for music he and Skerman had shared for a lifetime:
Pete would phone me every couple of weeks, and we’d talk about music for a good hour.
In that moment, the room is achingly bereft. Pete Skerman’s death two years ago had knocked the stuffing out of each of them. At Skerman’s send-off, they’d vowed to confound geography and catch up again in Hamilton “sooner than later”— facilitated by the fixed-wing connection Kūiti expatriate Russell Young maintains with his home in Blenheim, and a serviceable car kept at the aerodrome of his birthplace. Forty-eight hours after the funeral, Cimino—never a fast thinker— had experienced an epiphany. A long-harboured notion of ordering some of his previous 17-year’s Great Mobilisation writing into online-book format had suddenly assumed a semi-coherent structure. A speculative novel, Cimino had judged, would be liberating and his preposterous best shot at helping—impossibly circuitously—provoke the Climate Polycrisis Megamobilisation. It would be dedicated to “Sku”, whose limitless charisma, ability, and humour had imbued and improved the lives of legions lucky enough to claim him as a close friend. A month of manic writing ensued, only to be overwhelmed by two tumultuous years, and a different moonshot. Then, with the—probably, final—poignant visit of his long-since Californian, little big-sister, the Skerman dedication could be deferred no longer.
Six weeks on, Cimino phones Hutch to tell him that the page he’d had the honour of previewing has gifted him his own opening chapter—uploaded this bitterly cold, azure winter’s morning. Serendipitously, Cimino had only recently revisited his own Kūiti musical revelation: Pre-teen, as he’d stood transfixed at the rear bumper of the family car, parked at the doorway of the not the no-relation-Coles fish shop, but the other of the town’s two, spellbound by the heroic ballad ringing out from the fish-shop radioalternatively, of course, a gramophone—Kūiti is known have had its American-record buffs. Record players then, in New Zealand, were known for the eponymous British company, Gramophone. For 66 years he’d carried the tune and lyrics of its call-to-action chorus in his head without ever hearing it again, much less encounter another soul who had. Wonderfully, only a few days earlier while citing it to his sister as one of two pieces of music to serially elude him online, Cimino had suddenly located it—revealing, in the process, the straw /store mondegreen that had sabotaged his search.
One heartwarming hour later, Cimino farewells Hutch with:
Light the fuse, step back!
Winstone Road Reunion
Graham Hutchin’s title for the reunion of his mid-1960s house-mates Cimino Cole, Russell Young, and Jane Watts née Cole, hosted by he and his wife, Jenny, at their Hamilton residence on the occasion of Jane’s 2024 six-week visit from Hollywood, California. Winstone Road was the address of the PuketāpapaPuketāpapa, Makaurau (Mount Roskill, Auckland) house, rented from Cimino’s employers—two-men-and-a-boy carpenter/builders of low-rise houses and apartments. Cimino had long since forgotten the property’s address, although could have navigated there at a pinch.
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Straw boss Having misheard straw boss as store boss—an entirely understandable mondegreen given the saturation airplay Tennessee Ernie Ford’s version of Sixteen Tonswritten and first recorded by Merle Travis, 1946 was receiving in 1955—Cimino’s quest to obtain evidence of the existence of the song Light the Fuse , heard just that one time in his childhood, eluded a subsequent quarter-century of sporadic search-engine deployment. Although the actual term store boss is not used in Sixteen Tons, his two-plus-two-equals-store likely came from the last word of the last line of the song’s four-times-repeated chorus:
I owe my soul to the company store.
Surely, a mining company store had a store boss.
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Straw dynamite , although it is unlikely Cimino had ever heard the term:
Paleine or Straw Dynamite is a mixture of nitrocellulose, made from straw with nitroglycerine; it is manufactured in Sardinia and Belgium.
A Handbook on Modern Explosives: A Practical Treatise on the Manufacture and Use of Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Nitro-Glycerine, and Other Explosive Compounds, Including Collodion-Cotton Manuel Eissler mining engineer, 1897 p. 69
Setting for a spectacularly abortive black-powder blasting exercise, implicating multiple generations of its males, was the family’s next hometown. Background music of the episode was the crescendo-crashing Rapsody in Blue , emanating from the ultra-acoustically bright Waiwera mineral pools kiosk—the signature Bill Chick extensive glazing of which survived the incident.
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Disclosure The author of this novel modello is no longer the secretary of Mahurangi Action Incorporated or the Mahurangi Coastal Path Trust. The content published here, however, is that of the editorially independent, independently funded Mahurangi Magazine.
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