I kind of find planks romantic, in that I don’t really understand where they come from, and this lends them an air of mystery.  Whenever I see one, I try to smell it, because I am hoping that it smells of fresh cut pine and mountainous regions.  I picture rough-hewn brawny men getting up super early and walking around in the woods, smoking and drinking coffee and making homophobic jokes, and it is very cold, but they are sweating because they are working hard, and the trees are very high overhead, and there are flying squirrels in the trees, and also innumerable motes of sawdust that catch in random beams of sunlight, and the men chop down trees and eat huge sandwiches and chill out, and on their breaks they whittle or just strip down naked to swim in ice-cold streams, and they lovingly shape each plank by hand, stripping the tree down into manageable form, and they are like pagan gods, shaping the world out of nothingness, creating water and hills and earth and insects, and I guess that this is kind of a pornographic fantasy, but there is no sex, just a lot of wielding, which is always pretty hot.

That's what I'm talking about.

Then one of the men loads all the planks up into a very large truck, and drives it down the mountain, and the other men have all these supplies they want him to get, like skin mags from the sixties and chewing gum and PBR and duct tape.  And then they make jokes about bringing up some girls from town, but they don’t necessarily mean it, but in their minds a whole bunch of girls that look like small town girls in seventies movies, meaning impossibly long legged and vaguely southern, but above all lean and careless and tomboyesque, in halter tops and shorts and knee socks and sneakers, are going to clamber into the back of the truck, and ride all the way back up the mountain, giggling and smoking grass in the back, and when they get there everybody is going to crack a beer and go skinny-dipping in the mountain streams again, and maybe there will be a bonfire, and I think this is the last time that working class white culture seemed cool, because it was all about being good-looking in nature and not caring and building your own house, and maybe you had a chicken-scratch garden*, but mostly you just ran around and ate baloney sandwiches and everybody was real good at diving, you know – the swimming hole vibe – like the kids in horror movies, but without the horror, and planks of wood seem very tied to this to me, for some reason.

*note: this does not mean in any way that any of these kids are hippies.  They are people from the seventies, not hippies.

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