I went camping last weekend, though up to the moment we got there, I had no idea where we were going. Steve’s sister planned the whole thing and my plan was to let Memorial Day in-law weekend just wash over me while I floated through in passive bliss.
I dropped my dose of Lyrica down another 50 mg the day we left and got my period to boot. Double cherry on the headache cake. I was just a passenger with a nasty migraine, paying little attention.
Until we rounded the bend to the campsite, revealing a spectacular view of the Berwick Nuclear Power plant.
That sort of set the stage for feeling like I was on another planet, what with the trucks and American flags and campers that have that have dirty trailer park look to them. There was an eerie permanence to a lot of these sites. Full-on wood porches, satellite dishes, lights, those little cloth flags you stick in the ground with pictures of random shit like a bear in overalls.
We made our way to a lovely trio of sites right on the creek, I mean crick, though it was damn hard to hear the flowing water over the Slayer blasting through the campsite.
Folks were there to party for serious real loud all day and all night, all weekend.
98% of the people smoked from teens on up. The women had lank, slicked pony tails tied with a scrunchies straight at the back of their heads or feathered bangs the likes of which I have not seen since high school. Beer guts everywhere. Anti-government t-shirts. A blow-up TV screen. Grandmothers my age.
I found Stephen all crossed arms and sullen outside the camp store one day and I finally got it out of him that he was really upset kids were smoking. He’d seen them buying cigarettes at the little campground store. Turns out they were candy cigarettes, but he was still feeling pretty self righteous about the whole thing anyway.
Speaking of self-righteous, there I was feeling uncomfortable and superior and a judgmental elitist all at once .
On a macro level, this place grossed me out. I really wanted to go all David Cross and just destroy it with my witty, scathing commentary. To do the Fox News thing and keep it uncomplicated. Redneck nightmare pure and simple.
Problem was that people were, one one one, really nice. Loud, annoying, drunk, but also friendly despite my Obama bumper sticker. Willing to take my proffered Schaefer, turn down the music for a while and offer me a shot of tequila.
Ultimately I was more bothered by my own discomfort. I would have, I realized, felt equally out of place in the Hamptons that weekend, except in place of feeling good about myself I’d be feeling poorly groomed, fat and broke.
Picture, if you will, me in Steve’s pajama bottoms, all saggy crotch and pooling fabric at the bottom, and one of his old tee shirts. All my jammies were still dirty from the hospital. No makeup. Hair- just bad. I ordered Steve into the car. I wasn’t even polite or asking anyone’s opinion. I didn’t bother to change and just threw on my coat and boots (untied and no socks) and got in the car.
We drove to the local fire department and there were two trees left, but no stands and nobody to take the money, so we hauled ass to Home Depot and got the demo tree, which somebody had to unscrew with a drill.
Do you want it wrapped?
No, I don’t want it wrapped! Just toss that shit in the mini-van.
Ornaments. I had like 5 ornaments that students had given me over the years, so Steve and I marched inside Home Depot and bought lights and a 101 piece set of Martha Stewart ornaments.
The whole thing did not feel festive enough all of sudden, so I went to town with cinnamon pine cones and balls of pine boughs with red and gold ribbons all over them and silver squiggly things you put in a vase. I can see now how people go nuts with this Christmas thing. It’s like plastic surgery. You get a little and then you can’t stop.
We were stoked to be getting home and were so queasy and tired. Then we remembered.
Stockings.
We had nothing for stockings because his parents and sister usually fill them. While I would love to receive stocking stuffers from Home Depot, not so much for the kids. What was still open and a minute away? Wal-Mart, of course.
So there we were in pajamas in Walmart, which if you have been at the right time of day you know can reveal some characters that give you pause. That was me. I was that person. Scuffing through Walmart, glassy eyed and searching wildly for stocking stuffers.
We snuck into the 10 item line with way more than that, but there was no way I was waiting an hour behind some lunatic with two cartfuls of pepsi and frozen appetizers.
The movie was ending and we booked it home to try to get the tree up in time. Just as the last pine cone went into the bowl and lights on the tree were plugged in, the kids and my mom walked in.
Oooh. They were seriously excited and I was, too. The house suddenly smelled like cinnamon and pine and the tree was glowing softly. We lay on the floor while they tore into the ornaments and hung pretty much every one on the tree. It was beautiful. We saved Christmas.
I felt a little sad, too. I’d resisted the onslaught of Christmas my whole life.
When the decorating was done, I asked Esme if she knew the story of Christmas, she said, “It’s when the oil lasted for eight days and it was only supposed to last one!” Oy. That’s my girl.
Looks pretty good, right? How did this happen? How did I wind up with a freakin Christmas tree literally outshining the little Chanukah banner that I rescued from the garbage pile on clean up day at the synagogue- dwarfing our menorah setup on the windowsill?
As I was nearing the end of my hospital stay, my doctor asked me if there would be any stress during my holiday. After I stopped laughing, I let him know that this was a distinct possibility. So, he ordered me to stay put, and I speedily made a plan to send Steve and the kids to his sister’s while I stayed home.
I am touched to note that when I got home from the hospital and friends found this out, there were many kind offers for me to join Christmas celebrations.
So sweet, but what many do not understand is that being alone on Christmas and, say, taking in a movie and grabbing Chinese is pretty much how I always did things until I started dating Steve.
I grew up a Jew in a very un-Jewish place, so we’d go to the one Chinese restaurant in my town and see the 6 other Jewish families we knew. We’d smile and wave and then hone in on the moo shu.
The prospect of Christmas alone was rather soothing. But, nooooooooo.
December 20th Stephen got a fairly mild stomach virus. Done by the 22nd. No problem.
December 22nd I get really, really ill and my dear husband follows suit. It was a long night. I’ll spare you the details.
December 23 we are still in bad shape. Why do kids get sick for like 2 seconds and adults get their asses kicked? Maybe if I was a raw-food-eating-vitamin-popping-water-swilling saint, things would be different. But I am not, and neither is Steve, so we suffered mightily.
It occurred to us somewhere in the darkening afternoon that maybe nobody should be off to Baltimore the next day to infect the rest of the family. Esme overheard this conversation and began sobbing about how Christmas was supposed to have a tree and lights and stockings and blah blah blah.
We needed a break at the is point, or maybe I did because my husband slept all day while the kids jumped on me and fought constantly as I lay on the couch. I called my mom and asked her take them to TIntin.
After they left I thought, “Rest!” Which was immediately replaced by “Fuck! I have to drag my ass out of the house and get a Christmas tree.” Which, you should know, I swore I would never do.
To be continued…
To my surprise, any sense of self-pity at being stuck here for a week has been subsumed by a sense of gratefulness. There are people here who are really sick in totally different ways, or really old, or both. They have cancer or have undergone major surgery or, in the case of my roomate from the first half of the week, have RSD.
No, I’d never heard of it either, but catch this. She is a Queens cop who was helping out some young officers. She chased down this huge guy and pulled him out of a car. Doing this irreparably damaged the nerves in her hand and wrist.
She has lost use of her left hand. It is small and delicate, the fingers curled into the beginning or end of some unfinished gesture. There is a fine coat of black hair along the back where the nerves have overstimulated the hair growth.
She is a hoot with her thick Queens accent and tough talk, but she also has a sweetness and vulnerability to her. Unremitting pain and the loss of what makes you feel whole— hand, career, lover- can do that do you.
Every day they take her upstairs and hook her up to Ketamine, Special K on the street. A narcotics cop pumped full of Special K for 8 hours a day to try to fix a hand destroyed on a narcotics bust. That’s irony, right?
The last time I was here my roomate was a bodyguard to the stars. Big, wierdly beautiful butch lesbian who had just come out of major spinal cord surgery. Totally addicted to pain medication. Now, her I envied just a teeny bit, because even though she was seriously messed up and had at least a year of recovery, there was an end in sight for her. Something to point to and cut and fix. How fucked is it to envy someone in that situation?
Overall, though, I can still make it too the loo on my own and feed myself and I am not faced with a degenerative disease right at this moment, so it’s all good. And so is the morning light that creeps down the hallway each day. That’s good, too.
I am reaching the middle of my 7th day here in 8B 23. I am receiving regular infusions of DHE to try and break this nasty, persistent migraine. Amidst and between the bouts of grogginess, I have had an impossible amount of time on my hands. I have not felt focused enough to do much reading or writing, which is what I imagined I would do with all this time. I refused my dose of Benadryl this morning and voila! I feel restless and edgy, but at least now I can type without seeing double.
What have I done in those long hours? What the hell have I been thinking about?
First of all, TV and lots of it. Ugh, I actually feel dirty by the end of the day from all of it, and yes, I have been showering and putting on clean undies every day. I have made a few pleasant discoveries among the dregs. Thank you, BBC America. The Graham Norton Show is hilarious and so is Gordon Ramsey. I had never watched anything of his but the awful commercials for his shows. But he looks so young and sweet in the old episodes and he is not as psychotic as in his current incarnation. While I don’t think he needs to be so rude, I completely respect his work ethic and insistence on quality. Ooh! Ooh! Tabitha, too! Love her. They are my soul mates, those two.
Can I make a show like this, but for teachers? How hilarious and awesome would that be????? I’d be like, “Are you f#*!ng kidding me? You handed out the construction paper before giving directions? Before counting that you had enough scissors for everyone? Bloody hell!”
Bryan Eggenschwiler
Coming home has certainly been a double edged sword.
In Indiana I got out of the car in what must be the skankiest rest stop in the lower 48, only to be hit with a wall of humidity.
The closer I got to home, the worse my neck hurt. The worse my headaches got.
Is it the humidity, the storms, the crazy barometric pressure rollercoaster that is the East Coast?
Is it the mountain of unopened mail? Is it rooms to clean, a garden to weed, birthdays to plan, TV to watch, life to face?
Maybe it’s coming home to face being on Disability and it’s depressing implications. If I stay on road forever…
Is it all all of it? None of it?
I am happy to see my pals, though. And I do love the way my little living room looks all strewn with pink streamers and bedecked with a Barbie cake.
Project 2011/12: get a handle, if possible, on how to live my life without being miserable and in pain every second.
Aunt Audrey and Uncle Lefty are a hoot. I feel happy for Aunty Audrey because I think she feels she’s lived in the just the right eras. Her sense of thrift and the way she holds on to things fits with her view that technology has corrupted social mores. What a memory! She will tell a story from her early teens as if it happened yesterday. Uncle Lefty, nicknamed in his baseball-playing days, is quiet, but punctuates whatever is happening, or perhaps just what he’s thinking, with a deep, growly chuckle.
We are in the home stretch, having left Chicago a day earlier than intended. The kids are just dying to get home and were begging that we leave as soon as possible. There’s been a powerful tension for them between wanting to continue the adventure and wanting to go home. I could stay on the road for considerably longer, not because I don’t miss folks. I do, but I already miss the simplicity of getting up each morning and seeing something amazing, then going to bed and doing all over again the next day. And there’s the no mail to sort through. No bathrooms to clean. No weeding.
I will miss the shudder of joy at crawling into my sleeping back with Huck Finn and the insomniac nights watching the big Wyoming sky at 2 a.m. I will miss seeing wild animals at a stone’s throw and building campfires with the kids. The chance meetings and strange neighbors. The wide, endless space. How good my hair looked without humidity.
I won’t miss sharing a bathroom with strangers, though I can’t say it bothered me much. I won’t miss running out of food and going to McDonalds, which did happen a few times on this trip. I kept it as minimal as possible, but you do have to eat out sometimes, and mostly the food on this trip majorly sucked. It’ll be a while before I cross paths with a french fry again. Some notable culinary exceptions were the Mexi-Bus in West Yellowstone and Garrett Chicago Mix- crisp, buttery, cheese and crackly caramel popcorn tossed together in a wax paper bag.
This trip was kind of like New Year’s in that I found myself making little resolutions along the way. Aunt Audrey’s amazing collection of kitsch and vintage toys made me want to save more things. Hiking and seeing Steve train made me want to exercise more, and outside, too. Seeing how much my in-laws love the kids, and how much the kids love them, made me vow to write to them more. Send photos and such. Seeing Lynn J. sew a shawl for Kaya with Esme, and also spending a month with the ugliest brown curtains in tarnation, made me vow to dust off my sewing machine and try again to learn how to use it. I want to help Stephen get more exercise. After weeks of insomnia he slept like a baby on camping nights. I also want to make a jell-o mold. A layered one with bits suspended inside. There’s more, but you get the idea.
I am looking forward to seeing my wonderful friends, and my mom, and the Hudson, and a movie.
The Badlands was short and sweet. Our meander through was tinged with sadness because Esme and Stephen had to say goodbye to their Papa and Abuelita there. No skinned knee or sharp words could make them cry like that. It was deep and hiccuping and sweet.
Those pioneers and Indians were serious badasses, by the way. That is some strikingly harsh land. They called the failed settler claims “starvation claims.” I’d last about and hour out there, but I’d die happy looking at those rocks.
