15. Badlands
The summer she is twelve they drive west. She stretches out on her stomach on the cabover bed of the truck camper and stares out the big front window. The avocado green upholstery is scratchy, synthetic, with a chemically smell. Little translucent filaments of it poke into the skin of her belly.
The camper lumbers out of the parking lot and merges onto the interstate. The vibration of the truck picking up speed moves through her body. As the road begins to slip away under them, faster and faster, she turns over her daydreams to select one.
They would live in a treehouse, in the mountains, by a stream. They would have two horses; three dogs; three cats, one an Abyssinian like a miniature mountain lion, one white, one black as night. Michael’s dark hair would fall over his forehead. His arms would be smooth and brown. The tree would grow right up through their house. A little waterfall would cascade below them, bright with moving flecks of light, swathed in moss and green ferns. They would catch fish in the stream and cook them over an open fire. They would have a garden with strawberries and cucumbers, mulberries and plums.
The camper speeds through a cloud of gnats. They smash on the glass, sticking there like tiny stars. Larger bugsplats dot the window. Off to the left is a large greenish lopsided starburst, a supernova left by an iridescent dragonfly back in Iowa. A fragment of translucent wing clings to the glass for almost a hundred miles, quivering madly in the rush of air.
When they cross into South Dakota the land stretches out wider, windswept, strange to her eastern eyes. She has never seen a sky so immense. A strange feeling swells inside her. Where she comes from you can’t leave a patch of dirt untended for more than a few months before it begins inexorably reforesting itself, weeds then locusts then leggy pines. That vacant lot by Crestwood Liquors is almost a jungle. Here is different. An ancient vastness; persistent, calm, watchful.
They saw pronghorns bounding across the prairie. If the camper swerved suddenly to avoid a bounding pronghorn, it could tip and roll off the highway and into a ditch. Or it could roll and roll before stopping. It would be on its side, the back door would be jammed, she would have to break a window to escape. Her mother and father would be trapped in the truck cab. Smoke would curl from under the crazily angled hood. In moments the truck would catch fire and then explode. She would start to run away, before the shattering glass and flames; then she would realize her parents were still trapped inside. There would be only a moment to make her decision. She would run back, climb up the underside of the truck, and she would get Mom out, she would yank open the door and grab her arms around Mom and pull her out, then she would get her down, supporting her because Mom would be hurt, cut, bleeding, and she would hold Mom tightly and run with her to safety. She would sit Mom down gently and tell her to stay there. Then, as she turned to go back, the truck would explode. Dad was inside it. They couldn’t get him in time. It would just be the two of them. Alone, together, in this vast land.
Or she wouldn’t get Mom either and the truck would explode. She would be orphaned. Alone, completely alone, in this vast land. Hours would pass, no help would come. She would have to learn to live off the land. She would find plants you could suck the juice from, small sour plants you could eat, little eggs in nests hidden in the dry grass. She would collect rainwater in hollow rocks and drink it with her tongue like a cat. She would unravel the edge of her jeans and use the thread to make tiny snares to catch lizards and then rub two sticks together to make a fire and roast them crunchy and eat them bones and all. The stars would talk to her. Billions of stars in the clean air. She would lie quietly under them and wait for the sun to rise. In the dawn light the pronghorns would come, their noses sniffing delicately, they would take a step, then another step, they would walk right up and sniff her. She wouldn’t move while they sniffed. The pronghorns would grow to trust her, she was so quiet. They would lead her to a river, bounding ahead then stopping to look back at her with their dark brown eyes. Here. Come here, they would say with their eyes. She understood them. Very few humans understood their language, but she was one who did. Thunderclouds would sweep across the horizon, trailing rain in a silken fringe. The wind would kick up and darkness would blow across the land. She would find a rock formation, a cave, and shelter there. Dust-colored chipmunks and grasshoppers and tiny birds would join her there, they would huddle together to wait out the storm. The chipmunks would come to her and let her pet them with one finger, gently. She would make them a fire for warmth and they would slowly creep toward it, feeling the wonderful warmness that they had always been afraid of but now, because they trusted her, they felt safe.
When they got to the Badlands the camper lumbered into the National Park Service campground. After slowly circling like a dog before it lies down to sleep, it settled in space B-47, near a water spigot, with a view out over the unearthly rock formations. They glowed in the late sunlight, fire-colored, dark clouds massing behind them, deep blue and night-colored, shadows stretching out on the land like cats. By the picnic table was a chipmunk hole, and little Badlands chipmunks scuttled out to seize crumbs of hamburger bun in their wiry little hands. They were smaller than the chipmunks back East, grayer, dust-colored. They sat there eating, tiny haunches all crouched up very cute, tiny hands rotating the piece of bread, munching lightning quick.
This place changed her. The marvels she had seen in postcards, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, the Tetons, couldn’t touch her; she couldn’t see them behind the film of their pre-sold images. But this place, so unexpected, was alive, and her life changed shape at the sight of it.
They drove across the prairie and over the mountains and down the Oregon coast, down through California, and then east through the great southern deserts, Mojave, Sonoran, Chihuahuan. Outside of Yuma the sky broke open and darkness and lightning poured down on the parched land. After the rain the odor of ozone rose from the desert, rich, sultry, electrifying. A double rainbow arched over the vastness.
She was never the same after this. All the clutter of ordinary life, people, work, obligations, arguments, personalities, clothes, houses, stores, schools, clocks, calendars: they were random, petty, superfluous, like the clutter of trash and broken glass and bottle caps in the vacant lot by Crestwood Liquors. Small, like a drawer full of tossed-in junk, empty jars, opened mail, paper clips, broken pencils, pencil shavings, dust. It was all clutter, distraction.
Underneath it all, she now knew––this land, this sky.
The plum tree in Franny’s back yard is covered in plums. Small, purple-red, sour, dusted with white. We sit under the tree, escaping the heat of the day, Franny picking plums and eating them one after another. Ruby red juice dribbles down her chin, reddens her fingers.
I have not had a piece of fresh fruit in three years.
Doctors’ orders.
Suddenly, as if for the first time in my life, I am acutely aware of my complete freedom, in this moment, to make a choice.
A feeling rises in my heart, my throat, rising, swelling, cresting like a wave. As a child I have no words for this feeling, but now, as an adult with a reasonably good command of the English language, I can tell you that it’s perfectly expressed in the phrase, “fuck this shit.”
FUCK THIS SHIT.
I eat the plum.
I eat the plum.
It is DELICIOUS.
And so the desire to be a wasting girl began to release me, just a little bit, and the desire to be well, to be free, to live began to take hold. Both desires were still present, mind you; both very much alive, battling it out on the contested field of my body.
But a new combatant had appeared on the horizon. If wasting away did not bring the solace that I longed for, the other option, alluring to children everywhere, stepped onto the field: to be an orphan. A runaway. A lone figure on the land. I would orphan myself, and be well. I would escape my cage, I would run away from home, I would live alone, I would adopt myself out to the world. The mockingbird singing outside my window at night was my mother’s voice singing; the rhythm of cicadas in the warm air were her warm arms, rocking me. The beam of light that passed between the maple trees at dawn and illuminated the green grass was my mother’s gaze, her smile of delight. The flesh of the plum in my mouth; the juice on my chin, were kisses. The taste of the plum on my tongue was love; my heart was stung with the sweetness.
My mother was the world, the whole world. Not just this small country, lush, verdant, rain-watered. My mother was also this vastness, this bleakness, luminous, electrifying.
My mother was alive.