In the end he understood what mom and dad wanted, the nineties really made sense. He remembered the big fractal print gracing the wall in his Anchorage Steller Senior High School classroom.
After he came back from Faludja he returned to his barnyard existence - being proud of his chaos theory teenage years. Everything finally made sense. You could read the patterns everywhere, sand dunes sloped inside the smooth wood pieces. The grain of the wood matched the desert grain. That is the moment when he realized how the fresh, humid, moist air of the primeval redwood forest responded to the blistering hot air of Iraq. With his gloved hands he could feel the weight of the chainsaw. It was an exact weight-match for his polished gun(in the desert nothing stands shiny for long).
He was always counting the rings while he was cutting deep inside the trunk. They all where counting the years, the limbs lost and time he was supposed to stay unmoved, chained to the bed in white cloth so he could recover completely(the doc said) from those body-munching car-bombs. It was exhilaratingly easy to chip away every other splinter from his army days. With his gloved hands he felt he could shake hands again with other neighboring people. Lubricating his thoughts with motor oil he could communicate again with birds, deer and all the other natural forms. Along with the other seismologists, probability theorists, chemists, metallurgists and physiologists he felt he could find unsuspected regularities in chaotic behavior, overseas campaigns, Westpoint scholarships and long and poisonous speeches. Killed deer, prairie dog boroughs, underground tunnels in Vietnam, the deserts of Mesopotamia and the dunes of Mars. He was on a mission for the Red planet where humans splintered like bleeding wood. Cutting wood for the chilling valleys of Mars.
Theodore Roosevelt celebrated the great figure of the woodsman, the man who cut the west out of the western front of the forest. Civilization was stepping in again with its mighty chainsaw, sawing away at the wild and lost places of the world. The East was always bad, you had to fight it and go deeper to the west to find the hidden divisions of Los Alamos going beyond linear truths. In the end there where special bureaucracies who could handle everything associated with chaos and complexity. Entire blitzkriegs or military campaigns where emulating the behavior and nightly doings of sneaky Desert Foxes or ravaging Desert Storms. The Chainsaw Massacre would follow the raising body count and the faceless storm-troopers. The metal stopped eating trough the wood and the flakes settled down on the rising dunes.
One that could secure oil from distant places and that could heat up distant shores. Basked in its wisdom you could survive long atomic winters in front of crackling fires and charred wooden chairs. The geometric regularities of the old frontier home followed the etchings inside the barracks on the outskirts of Baghdad.
In the end every chaos theorist needs an accomplice, a ground zero to his particle physics.
