Word Furrows from Emily

baneful
intangible
impaction
dental practitioner
implore
doss down
duck down

i’m my number one subject, and i often implore myself not to revisit my “younger days”, but of course when you write about yourself you’re gonna be going back there despite your best efforts. for example, when i was young i could sleep anywhere - go on a road trip with friends/too poor to get a hotel or even rent a campsite/crawl into the back seat of my 1968 dodge dart and doss down for the night. that’s right, pulled right over on the side of the freeway, the sound of heavy heavy trucking inches from my fragile flesh-covered skeleton.often i feel an intangible aura of protection around me when it comes to such things. when i’m on an airplane, the intangible is often god, to whom i pray. when i visit a dental practitioner, i’m not sure what it is, i just know that i have mighty fine teeth. i have no fear of an impending impaction or root canal, it just won’t happen.

actually when i was younger i used to get sick a lot. i think it was illness caused by nerves, by the startling adjustment of leaving home and being left to make my own decisions. i called them my decisions on the surface, but they were often loaded with guilt from parents and probably cranky nuns from way back, so they were never really mine.

take for example a trip i made to big bend national park in texas back in january 1980. for the first time in my college history i didn’t spend my entire christmas break with family like i always did. i actually left early. plus, i had to tell my mother that i was going camping with my boyfriend way down in texas. that would mean admitting to her that my boyfriend and i actually slept together, though it could never be said so directly or out loud. the decision to make this trip tortured me, okay, i made the decision but what was the point. i wasn’t free and clear.

anyway, due to the weight of guilt and my baneful existence, i became extremely ill the minute i reached the college town in indiana where my camping road trip would begin. it started with a horrible rash. i thought it was my wool shirt, a pendleton bought at a thrift shop. i thought i caught something from the second-hand cloth. so i never wore it again.

then i felt feverish and weak.

when we got to big bend, i forced myself to go hiking with boyfriend, so as not to ruin his trip. i really just wanted to stay wrapped in my duck down sleeping bag, instead of walking on the denuded trails.

i was so relieved when he and his buddies decided to eat some peyote and spend an entire day tripping, leaving me off the hook to sleep guilt-free and alone in the tent.

it’s funny how many details of big bend national park i remember, the getting there and the returning, i don’t like to write about it too much. so many odd things happened, and i still feel sick to remember them.

we were driving late at night back to indiana, i think we were in texas or oklahoma at the time. the road was dark, not a major highway - no lights anywhere but the headlights of my boyfriend’s jeep. then a giant owl crossed the road in front of us and we could do nothing. we hit the owl.

my boyfriend pulled over.

we got out of the jeep and walked to the owl’s dead body. it was the largest bird i had ever seen up close. my boyfriend pulled the wings apart to see the span of them. my boyfriend felt bad, he wanted to take the owl’s body into the jeep, he didn’t want to just leave it there by the side of the road. i told him to leave it.

so we did, and drove away.