Fear Itself

Mom feared three things: heights, snakes, and drowning.  She instilled those fears in me at an early age.  Each summer evening, I walked behind Mom on the path to go get the cows from the pasture for milking. Being easily distracted, I would dawdle and mosey.  Up ahead, Mom marched along resolutely, chewing her half stick of Double Mint gum and stomping in her yellow flip-flops.

                “AHH!”  A piercing scream would rise from the path just beyond the corner.  “Jesus Christ, Pooch, snake!”

                By the time I jogged to catch up, Mom would be pointing with a shaking finger at a flicker of movement in the distant grass. The dust would still be lingering from the frantic motoring of her feet as she panicked in place.

                “It was a big one, too.  A big mean son of a bitch!  He stared right at me!”

                They were always huge, the size of a crocodile, with mean, beady eyes that stared at her in defiance.  Since I rarely, if ever, saw the snake in question, I cannot testify to the size.  As a small child, my imagination pictured something like the Python that “Jim” wrestled with on Sunday Night’s Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. 

I could understand Mom’s fright; many a Sunday night, I watched the man-killing snake almost take out “Jim”.  Sometimes, it seemed like “Jim” was a completely different person the next week.  Had he been eaten by the snake?  According to Mom, that is probably what happened.

                “You don’t see old Marlin Perkins getting out to wrassle them snakes, do you?  That’s because the slimy bastards would just as soon kill you as look at you.”

                If I came across a snake by myself, I would do exactly what Mom would do in the situation.  I would stop, jump, hop, and point.  The electricity of fear would shock my body.  Heart thumping, I would finally touch ground long enough to run away.  The rest of that day and the next, I would be nervous as I walked around the farm.  If you see one snake, Mom always said, there’s a thousand of those bastards around.

                Occasionally, Dad would bale up a nest of garter snakes.  Donna, loading bales didn’t seem to panic.  Even Tubby, bringing up the hay load, was calm. Halfway up to Jesus, Mom would be on top of the stack, fitting the bales into an intricate locking pattern.  Until I was old enough to throw them, I would roll the bales to Tubby, and he would throw them up to Mom on the haystack.  Despite three of us handling the bales, it was always Mom reaching for the twine strings who was greeted with the cheery red tongue of a tiny snake peeking out of the bale.

"Hi! I seem to be stuck here. Can you lend me a hand?" The poor snake would ask Mom in a friendly wave of its tongue.

                “Ahhh!  Snake!  Snake!”  Mom would scream. 

As Mom flung herself down the three-story-high haystack, she would begin to berate Tubby. It was always his fault; due to his failure to make sure each bale he tossed up the stack was snake-free and Mom-appropriate.

“That bale has a snake!  You threw up a fucking snake!  The damn thing could have killed me!  I could have had a heart attack!  You threw up a snake! You didn't check the bales. Your father probably baled up a whole nest of the bastards, and you didn't even look!”

                Mom would jump, slide, and scramble down the haystack, and once touching the ground, run several feet before stopping.  Then, with trembling hands and her tiny body still shaking with adrenaline, she would roll a homemade cigarette.  Her tremors would spill most of the tobacco on the ground.  Mom would lift a rolled-up tube of paper to her lips and light it. 

Sucking in the vapors of the few bits of tobacco that landed on her paper, Mom would look at us and say, “Tubby, you go up there, and you get that goddamn snake off my haystack!”

With a sigh, Tubby would ascend the haystack.  As the Chosen One, he knew his job was to make his mother feel safe and secure.  As a normal human being standing on hundreds of identical-looking haybales, he also knew he had no chance of identifying the “snake bale”.

                Tubby would lift a random bale and, with a mighty throw, toss it several feet away from the stack.  “I got it, Ma,” He would announce and climb back down.

                Her mangled hand-rolled cigarette of paper would be burnt to ash by then, and with a determined yank to pull up her pants, Mom would walk back.  She would then confidently climb back onto the haystack and return to the farm's version of Tetris. 

                “Did you find it?” I asked Tubby.

                “Hell no,” He would whisper back, “Poor thing is long gone; she scared it off with all that shrieking.”  

                While I was still initially frightened by their sudden appearance, snakes diminished in my catalog of fears as I grew older. From a distance, I could remain calm.  I would watch a chicken run past me with a tiny garter snake in her beak without panicking.  The rest of the flock would be chasing the lead chicken to encourage the hunter to share her bounty.  I would feel a pang of pity for the snake.  On the other hand, Mom would encourage the chicken.

                “Kill it!  Kill it!  Don’t drop it!  Just kill it!” Mom would scream at the lead chicken as the flock ran in circles.  “Don’t fight over it, it's going to get away!”  Mom yelled at the chickens from a safe distance across the farmyard.

Mom's fear of snakes seemed to grow each summer. It was almost as though the snakes would play with her, daring each other to slither across her path. The loudest scream was that of the winning snake. I could remain calm at a ten-foot distance and joined Dad in pooh-poohing Mom's irrational fear.

                One year, Greg and I decided to go on a trip to the Black Hills.  We had little to no money and no credit cards at a time when cell phones were far in the future. Greg's car rattled and coughed for 15 minutes after the key was removed, then, with an explosive backfire, fell silent. His car should never have left our yard. It certainly should not have been used on a road trip out of state.  We were young, stupid, and wanted to explore the world.  Driving the endless prairie roads, we saw a billboard advertising Reptile Gardens. 

                Since we were tourists, we felt obligated to stop at the tourist trap.  It was a beautiful summer day in South Dakota, and the tourist trap parking lot was full.  Parking at the back, we hiked to the entrance, not quite sure what we were going to see. As we stood in line to pay the fee, we finally heard Greg’s car cough, backfire, and shut off. The gunfire-like explosion caused the people around us to jump, the two of us suspiciously unfazed.

"That didn't sound good," was Greg's only comment.

           The first attraction was the snake handler.  A man wearing knee-high leather boots stood in the center of a sand ring.  As tourists, we stood outside a waist-high concrete fence, a deep ditch separating the center ring from us.  Holding a long stick with a bent metal rod on the end, the handler gave us a lecture on poisonous snakes while randomly picking up various species.  From a distance, I watched calmly, without the usual twinge of electrical fright at the sight of the snakes. I was far away, protected by a ditch and concrete.

                After the show, we walked to the arboretum.  I knew what that was; Greg and I had been to the Como Park Zoo and Arboretum in “the cities” several times.  At the entrance, the signs warned us to stay on the path to the exit, that the door was one-way only, not to touch the plants, not to walk off the path, and to respect the trees and reptiles.

                Reptiles?  I was a bit curious what reptiles would be in an Arboretum, but Greg had already pushed the door open and was dragging me along.  Two steps from the entrance, I realized I had made a big mistake.  The beautiful trees and plants in the glass dome were not the attraction.  They were merely background for the many species of snakes that inhabited the building. 

                “I can’t do this,” I told Greg.  “I can’t go through here.”

                “You’re already in, it’s too late now,” Greg told me as he grabbed my hand and pulled me forward.

                Wrapping my arms around Greg from behind, I hid my face in the back of his shirt.  I went limp in fear.  Greg shuffled forward as best he could, a draft horse pulling a very heavy and unyielding load.  Slowly, we stepped further into the hell that was the arboretum.

                A few steps forward, I dared to lift my face and peek under Greg’s armpit, looking for an exit sign.  I saw only a long winding dirt path ahead of us. In my peripheral vision, I saw a small tree snake on a branch, staring at us in curiosity. The snake was used to seeing humans; after all, this was his job, working the tourist trap. 

                The snake, however, had never seen a male human with a female human attached to his back.  The female human was being dragged along the path, while the poor four-legged male human shuffled as best he could.  The snake’s curiosity was obvious.

                I stopped, not releasing Greg, but planting my feet in the ground. With me limp, dead weight no longer, Greg stopped as well. The snake seemed amused.  I remembered Dad telling me, “They are more scared of you than you are of them,” when I would run from a snake. 

                The snake’s face was tiny; his little eyes fixed on my face.  His minuscule tongue flickered out of his mouth, and his mouth seemed to be grinning. Was the snake laughing at me?  I moved closer.  I kept one hand gripping the waistband of Greg’s jeans, just in case.

                Stepping to the side of the path, the snake and I were eye to eye.  I moved closer.  The snake didn’t flinch.  The only movement between the two of us was his flickering tongue. I held my breath.  He was a bright lime green color; I don’t know the snake's species.  The little snake was so small that I thought, “Aw, he’s just a little baby.”

                I cannot resist a baby of any species.  The power of the cuteness compelled me.  I reached out with a forefinger and touched the snake on top of its head. The snake ducked slightly under my finger but didn't move away. Contrary to what Mom had always warned me, the snake was not slimy.  Soft and cool, smooth and harmless.  The snake tolerated my touch for a few seconds, then slowly moved out of my reach.

                The walk through the arboretum took an extremely long time after that.  Not because Greg was dragging my entire weight behind him.  We were slow because I had to stop and touch and talk to each snake that I saw. 

                “Look at this little feller.  Isn’t he cute?” I would say to Greg, as yet another snake was forced to endure my finger's touch.

                “Pretty sure the sign said don’t touch.” Greg would remind me.

                “Oh, they don’t mind.  They are just babies; they need lovin’s, too.”

                By the time I left the reptile garden, my mother’s fear of snakes no longer had any power.  I had faced my fear and conquered it by immersion. Snakes as a pet still held no attraction for me. Why would I want a pet that didn't learn its name? A pet that considered me a food source, not a source of food, but food itself. But now, snakes and I can co-exist peacefully.

That left me with two inherited fears.  Drowning and heights.  Now, how could Mom claim a fear of heights when I witnessed her roofing a barn, standing on top of a haystack, and dangling from a ladder to paint the house?

               Mom was a flatlander. Raised in a state known for its rolling hills and prairies, she had a distinct fear of heights. Her fear was of elevated land—mountains (which I suspect she hadn't seen until I was thirty), and very high hills. Was it truly a fear of heights, or was it the awareness that, in our family, car brakes were unreliable and, at best, inconsistent?

                Or as Mom liked to say, “It's not the falling, it’s the stopping at the bottom that will get you.”

                At first, it appeared that I had escaped Mom’s fear of heights.  Sure, I had gotten a little anxious on the chairlift over the hill that passed as a ski mountain in Minnesota.  But that anxiety could also be attributed to being terrified of not getting out of the way fast enough when it was my turn.  Fun fact, I didn’t get off fast enough, I fell flat on my face instead.  I lay there as skiers yelled and cursed at me and jumped off the ski lift onto my back.

                It was on a trip to the Grand Canyon with Greg that the fear of heights, specifically land mass heights, reared its ugly head.  Going up the mountains didn’t seem too frightening; the incline seemed gradual, and I was able to adjust.  It was coming down the mountains that I went insane.

                “Thousands of people go down this road all the time,” I reassured Greg in a shrill, panic-stricken voice.

                “Yup,” Greg agreed calmly as he drove with confidence.

                I rolled up the window and put my arm across the glass to brace myself.

                “Why did you roll up the window?”

                “Because, when I am at the bottom of this mountain looking like a squashed fruit roll-up, I don’t want some stupid cop saying, ‘Well, she woulda made it if she had rolled up her window’!”  I shouted at Greg.

                “I don’t think that’s going to make any difference,” Greg said quietly.

                “Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna,” I answered.

                “Now what are you doing?”

                With my eyes closed tightly and pausing for just a moment, I said, “I’m not taking any chances.  Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.”

                By now, Greg was laughing at me.  I didn’t care that he was laughing; I was concentrating on getting in enough different religions, hoping that one would pay off.  As I whispered Amazing Grace, I kept my foot firmly planted on the imaginary brake on my floorboard.

                After an abbreviated Roman Catholic Mass ended, I returned to my mantra.  “A thousand people drive this road safely to work every day.  A thousand people drive this road safely to work every day.”

                The numbers were comforting and completely out of my imagination.  Somewhere, between my clenched butt cheeks, I had pulled a random number of commuters traveling the road out of Flagstaff daily. Then I saw the police lights, an ambulance, and two smashed cars at the edge of the road.

                “Nine hundred and ninety-nine people drive this road safely to work each day,” I muttered to myself through clenched teeth. 

                The numbers didn’t seem to be as comforting after what we had just passed on the road.  In fact, the numbers were falling, and not in my favor.

                “We are gonna die!” I yelled at Greg, my mouth inches from his ear.

                “We are not going to die.  But you are gonna die if you don’t quit screaming in my ear!”

                The trip down the mountain to flat land took approximately three months, two weeks, and six days.  I aged twenty years during that time.  I kept that car on the road and both of us safe by clenching my butt checks so tightly that some of the upholstery remains between them to this day.  Greg was ungrateful; my assistance was not even acknowledged.

                I was never so relieved in my life when the road flattened out, and we made it to Donna’s house.  There were flatlands and gentle hills from the bottom of the mountains to Donna’s home. I would have an entire week to worry about going back through the mountains to return home. With any luck, something catastrophic would happen to me, and I would have to live with Donna for the rest of my life.

                “You two have got to go see Old Tucson,” Donna told us as soon as we arrived at her house.

                Greg and Donna soon settled into discussing shortcuts and sights to see. I didn’t listen to their conversation. I planted myself on the couch and waited for the tremors from fear to subside.

  I knew that my older siblings resented my status as ‘the baby’, but I didn’t suspect how deep-seated and murderous that rage was within my sister. The next day, Greg and I set off for Old Tucson movie studios.  Donna had to go to work, so the two of us would explore alone. Soothingly, the road was flat as we drove west.  Then, without warning, Greg took a left turn onto a two-lane, pockmarked tar road. 

                “Where are you going?”  This was not the road written on the billboards. That road was still miles ahead. This road looked like it led to a deserted sheep pasture.

                “Donna told me a shortcut,” Greg announced with confidence.

                First, my sister and I are cursed with a genetic inability to tell right from left. She could easily have told Greg, “Turn left,” when she meant “turn right.” Second, my sister’s directions are always vague. “The dirt road. Past that funny-looking tree.” Third, being ‘the baby’ instilled in me a healthy suspicion of my siblings. I firmly believe that “you always hurt the ones you love” just because you know where they live.

                My suspicions were justified as soon as we drove past the teepee with the sign outside proclaiming, “Get your picture taken with Geronimo’s Great Grandson”.  A few feet from the teepee, the tar-covered potholes turned into a gravel road.  Ahead of us, the gravel road turned and twisted up a mountain.

                On the first steep incline curve, Greg moved the car closer to what would be considered the center of the road.  There were no markings, no real center, just parallel ruts in the gravel. I gasped in horror.

                “I am just going around this guy on the bicycle.”

                “I don’t care, shove him off, we’re gonna die anyway, we don’t have to worry about prison!”

                It was obvious that fear does not bring out my humanity.  In my own defense, the man was riding a bicycle up a mountain on a gravel road in the Arizona sun.  It would have been a mercy killing.  Or at least justified by evolution, to protect the species from reproduction of the stupid.

                The drive up the mountain was traumatic.  There were no guardrails, even on the steepest of curves.  The gravel ended with a drop-off on the side of the mountain, the bottom farther away as we drove.  I was looking down at the top of trees and bushes, the Joshua trees in the distance, looking smaller with each mile.  It was when the crew of the space shuttle waved at me that I realized we were at the top of the mountain.  I was still alive!

                My moment of celebration was cut short when I remembered what goes up must come down.  By nature, our descent would be fast, with even sharper curves.  Greg would be relying on the brakes in his old car.  Greg, who had grown up with cars that had brakes.  Greg, who had no experience with the sudden loss of brakes, would be driving us both to our death.  I would have peed myself, but between praying, shrieking, yelling at Greg, and mouth breathing in fear, I had no fluids left in my body.

                Pointed downhill to our doom, Greg kept a tight ten and two grip on the steering wheel.  Every time he tried to relax his grip or move his hands I shrieked, “Ten and two, keeps us alive, me and you!”

                I could see a settlement in the distance across the valley.  I wished I were there already; if I were, I would never leave. 

  “Do you think some nice people will let me live with them, so I don’t have to go back on this road?”  I asked Greg.

“Nobody is going to let you live with them forever just so you don’t have to drive up a mountain.” He answered meanly.

“I think they might.  If I ask nicely.” 

I was trying to plan my future.  If I thought about what I was going to do when I got to the bottom of the mountain, I didn’t have to face the fact that I was going to die.  Greg didn’t understand that I was hanging on by a thread of hope.  My only regret about living in the tiny desert settlement was that I would be unable to wreak revenge on my sister for her attempt on my life.  But that was okay, I would have a new family in that little trailer park.  Remember the billboards that proclaimed, " If you lived here, you would be home by now”?  That was my plan. 

I avoided looking out of the windows or the windshield as I turned and faced Greg.  As he drove us down the mountain, I explained my job options in the tiny town up ahead.  Of course, it would be something local.  Maybe babysitting, or I could open a daycare at one of the empty trailer houses.  I could bartend.  Heck, there was no limit to the menial jobs I could obtain that would not require me to be more than fifty feet from flat earth.

I was living in Reno when I witnessed the extent of my mother’s fear of mountains and highlands.   Despite her Scottish ancestry, Mom was more of a valley-lander than a highlander. Arriving in Reno, Mom was not pleased with her trip through the mountains.

Greg walked into the apartment with a familiar look of mixed exhaustion and disgust.  A look I recognized from our many trips together through the mountains. That look meant that it had been a rough trip.

Mom came in behind Greg, spry and alert, carrying her giant purse.  Looking at the two of them, I knew there were three stories to be told here: his, hers, and the truth.

“How was the trip?” 

I decided to get it over with as soon as possible, thereby reducing the amount of bitching to one long session and several small repeats during the visit.  Otherwise, the pressure would build up in both, and the entire week would be spent on accusations and complaints about the other.  

“We went through Utah, and I didn’t see a single Mormon!”  Mom started angrily.

“Mom…” I started to explain that, unlike the Amish, the Mormons don’t dress differently, they don’t pose for tourist pictures, and most importantly, she has a niece who is a member of the LDS faith, so she’s known as a “Mormon” for years.  I didn’t get the chance.  I should have known Mom would not allow reason to interfere when she was on a roll of bitching and complaining. 

“What the hell kind of country is this anyway?  A cow would starve to death out here!  We drove on mountains in Utah that were so goddamn high I saw heaven.  We looked down at the clouds and airplanes.  Look, look at my hand.  That is from gripping the seat belt so tight coming down the mountains because that asshole drives like he’s a raped ape!”

Mom held out her right hand.  Sure enough, there was a slight bruise between her thumb and forefinger of her right hand.  Greg made himself a cup of coffee and sat down, stretching out his legs to listen to what he knew would be a long speech from Mom. As he drank coffee, I could see him start to smile and then grin.  No matter how much she complained, Mom never failed to amuse him.

“I am just glad I kept all those ketchup and jelly packets in my purse every time we stopped to eat. If we crashed and he died, I could eat those for a while before I had to start cutting him up.”  Mom continued, proud of her foresight in always stocking her purse with condiments from roadside diners on the trip. 

I found it interesting that Mom assumed Greg would die in the crash, flying off the side of a mountain.  Would he be the only one killed?  Or had Mom thought of helping Greg along to his heavenly reward if help was not forthcoming? 

“Well,” I pointed out, “Greg would have starved at the bottom of the mountain with your skinny old carcass to eat on.”

“I can see why the Donner Party had to eat people out here.  There’s not even a decent bush to go pee behind in this country.  And there’s nothing to eat.  Even a mountain goat can’t cling to these mountains; they are straight up!  I’ve never been so scared of dying in my life.  I don’t even want to go home now. I’m staying here.  I’m not going back through those mountains again.  Why in the hell did you and Donna pick such godforsaken places to live? I’ll never figure that out.  I can see wanting to get away from ugly relatives, but did you have to go this damn far?”

(Mom never explained who the ugly relatives were; it was her general expression for whoever had angered her at the moment.  They were never named.  It was either “your father’s ugly relatives” or “my ugly relatives”, and nothing more would be said, no matter how much you asked.   Mom always blamed the “ugly relatives” for everything wrong in her life, and apparently, it was the “ugly relatives” that provided the incentive for Donna and me to move to warmer and mountainous locations.) 

Living in Reno, I learned to drive in the mountains, and being in control of the vehicle erased my fear. I no longer felt the irresistible urge to get out of the car and kiss the ground each time I survived a drive through the mountains.  

Mom never stopped complaining about riding through the mountains, and no one wanted to risk her attempts to drive the passes. Sometimes she mentioned what the mountain roads would be like with snow, to add to her nightmares. A few times, she mentioned that the mountains must be full of rattlesnakes, combining her terrors into one. 

Driving back and forth from Nevada to Minnesota, I think of Mom on the highest mountain passes.  She missed so much beauty, screaming at Greg for the entire drive.   Her fear of the high mountains was so great that Mom never saw a Mormon driving through the entire state of Utah. Having survived similar trips, I knew all that Mom saw was likely the back of her eyelids, clenched shut in fear.

My daughter, born in Reno, lived in the mountains until middle school, when we moved to Vegas. She has no concept of fear of heights or mountains.  She does get nervous on flatland; however, it gives her the heebie-jeebies when she looks around and sees the sky meet the ground. On our first driving trip to Minnesota, she sat in her booster seat at the back of the Jeep, unfazed by the winding mountain passes and steep descents.

In the prairie land, Lilly looked out the window and yelled, “Where are the mountains!” 

Not only is that fear conquered for the next generation, but it also appears to have been completely twisted around.  Lilly had to work on conquering her fear of tumbling off the earth, since there were no mountains around her to stop her fall.

One by one, I was counting off and conquering my inherited fears. Perhaps the most debilitating and resistant fear Mom instilled in me was of drowning. 

“You can drown in a teaspoon of water,” Mom warned me repeatedly.

Mom always knew somebody who knew somebody who had heard of a child drowning.  The circumstances changed and became more gruesome over time.  A toddler fell into a wash bucket. Someone was goofing around and tripped while playing, landing in a mud puddle and breathing in water. There was nothing anyone could do to save her.

“Once that water got in her lungs, she couldn’t get any air in, drowned in a mud puddle because she was goofing around.”

A reckless child, close to my age, went swimming after eating lunch, Mom told me. Despite being warned by her parents, “she snuck off after lunch and went to the river.  Her body was so busy trying to digest the food and swim at the same time that her muscles all cramped up.  She musta dropped like a rock.  They found her floating face up in the water.  Her parents were never the same again.”

Then there was the big one.  The one where Mom threw in her brother, Kenny.  “Kenny was always such a good swimmer.  He loved swimming; he swam like a fish. When they blew up that bridge in Korea, he was trapped in the cab of that crane.  Such a good swimmer, but he drowned.  I still have nightmares of him being trapped, the water coming into the cab, and he must have known he was going to drown.  He was a good swimmer, but the water got him anyway.” 

The lesson was that water was deadly, and even if I learned how to swim, the water could still get me.  Even the tiniest amount was a trap, waiting for me to be careless, to be “goofing around.” I must always be vigilant around water.

But being a kid, I loved water.  We would go to Bear Lake in the evenings, Donna, Tubby, and I.  I loved Bear Lake, especially when all my cousins were there.  Turn off the tar, a left turn at the Rinas driveway, across the river, past cousin Sonny’s place, the Genoch farm, follow the curve past Eddie Schmidt’s place, then up the hill past Uncle Lester's farm.  Stay on the gravel another mile or so, until you come to a T in the road.  A slight left and drive to the boat landing. No one had bathing suits; a pair of shorts and a shirt was the uniform.  I would happily splash around in the shallow water for hours.  Mindful of the danger, I never went into the water further than my knees. 

I would splash and sit in the water at the edge while everyone else swam and dived off the dock.  Cousin Kristy and her siblings had swimming lessons each summer. Her mom probably considered it a mini-vacation to drop off the kids, and the kids got hours to play in the lake. As a result, my cousins had no fear of the water.

I watched enviously as my cousins dogpaddled around the lake, into water almost chest high.  Bravely, they would put their faces into the water! Kristy could dog paddle and, even with her nose held closed, dunk her whole body in the water.

Mom finally let me take swimming lessons. I rode along with Kristy and her siblings for one day.  I failed and flunked out after one afternoon. I learned that swimming is not as easy or instinctual as it looks. According to the instructor, swimming required me to put my face into the water.  This was a definite no-no.  Mom had warned me about recklessness around water. 

I knew it would be when I had the hubris to put my head into the water that I would drown. I just couldn't do it. I could put my forehead in the water. I could put my chin in the water. It was the area in between that avoided the water. Unable to convince me that I could hold my breath underwater, the instructor decided that a dog paddle for safety would be the next best thing. 

Swimming, even dogpaddling, requires the ability to move your arms and your feet, both ends of your body, moving simultaneously with different assignments.  I learned quickly that I lack coordination.  If I remembered to paddle with my hands and arms, I would forget to kick with my feet.  I had to choose one or the other; I could not do both at once.  Holding onto the dock, I could kick.  Sitting on the bottom of the lake, with water up to my shoulders, I could paddle with my hands.  Pushing forward and trying to do both, I “sank like a rock”, just like Mom's stories had warned. 

As soon as water neared my nose, I would panic and flail until the instructor reached out and set me upright again.  The woman had the patience of a saint, rescuing me repeatedly as I sputtered and flailed, throwing my arms around in panic.  Not only was she patient, but she was also good at dodging and ducking.  

“Let’s start with floating,” the instructor suggested.

I was good with the idea of floating.  As Tubby had told me, “You will never drown, fat floats”.  

Floating would be my savior.  If I were ever in a shipwreck, all I had to do was know how to float until rescuers arrived.  Floating required me to have my face up and out of the water, my legs still, and my hands outstretched and unmoving.  It was lying in the water.  How hard could that be? 

Floating is a lot harder than it looks.  It requires a bond of trust between the instructor and the floater.  This skinny little teenager in a bathing suit, assuming the role of a Red Cross-trained swimming instructor, would have my life in her hands. I didn’t even know her name.  All I knew was that she had an official silver whistle on a cord around her neck, and she occasionally blew it and yelled at the bigger kids roughhousing on the dock.

In waist-high water, the instructor told me to sit down.   Piece of cake, so far, so good.  Floating involved sitting and then lying down.  What I didn’t realize was that there is a transition period between the two positions.

“Okay, lie back in the water and lift up your legs.  No, you must lift up your legs.  Both legs.  Okay, you can’t sit on your butt with your legs in the air and your hands on the sand.  You need to let go.  You have to lie down.  Quit grabbing my leg!”

The prepubescent child who called herself a swimming instructor was becoming more cranky and bossier by the minute. She was rushing me; surely, rushing me was not good for the process.  Who died and made her my instructor anyway?  What sort of education did she have?  Did she know that a person can drown in a teaspoon of water?

“Okay, lie back in my arms, and I will hold the top half of you up, and you can let go and bring your legs up on top of the water.   

I looked up at this tiny child with a whistle around her neck and wondered exactly how she was going to support my top half.  “You can’t lift me.” I scolded her.  The child's arms were the size of twigs. 

“You’re lighter in water.”  She told me bluntly.

Well, that was rude, I thought.  Am I supposed to trust this infant with my life?  Mom had encouraged my taking this swimming lesson, telling me, “You never know when you might need to know how to swim, it’s a good idea.”

I was stuck.  Having ridden along with my cousins to Spirit Lake, all the way in Menahga, for swimming lessons, I had no ride home.  I was stranded and abandoned.  I looked enviously at my cousins with their instructor, learning different swimming strokes and diving off the dock.  If they can do it, I can do it. 

“Relax, straighten out, trust me.”  The instructor encouraged me as I leaned back onto her outstretched, minuscule arms. I leaned back and carefully stretched my legs out.  Only my butt, safely buried in the sand, was anchoring me to life.

“Okay, now lift your butt up to the top of the water.”

This was getting serious.  This would be swimming.  Floating is a part of swimming, isn’t it?  If I could just learn to float, I would never have to worry about being in a shipwreck again. 

Living on a landlocked farm, where most of the year it was so cold I could literally walk on water, I was still obsessed with shipwrecks.  Mom had told me repeatedly the story of the Titanic, the ship sinking beneath their feet, the people falling into the cold Atlantic.  There were not enough lifeboats, and the people in the cheap section had no boats or life jackets.  If only they knew how to float, they might have survived.  If I learned to float, I would survive when the iceberg destroyed the ship. It was a given that I would be in the cheap section. 

“Now take a deep breath and relax.”  The instructor told me as she miraculously held the top half of my body above the water. 

I did as she told me, I took a deep breath.  Outstretched like a frozen Titanic passenger, I floated on the water.  I was swimming!  I had conquered water!  Soon, I would be swimming around the lake with my cousins, my head proudly above the water as I floated/swam by their side. 

“Okay, now relax, there you go.  I am letting go now.”

The instructor removed her arms from my shoulders.  Not only could I not coordinate my movements, but I also learned quickly that I was incapable of relaxing on the water.  As soon as I felt her arms move away, my body sank in panic.  My head went under the water first as my butt sank to the safety of the sand. Water cruelly filled my ears and nose as I flailed.

  Standing up, the water was only up to my knees. I gave the instructor a scathing look of betrayal and stomped back to the beach.  I would have pulled off the look of disdain and betrayal if my nose had not released a stream of snot and tears had not been running down my cheeks.  That was my first swimming lesson; the next would be over twenty years later. As Dad told me, “Every bad decision sounded like a good idea once.”

Still, water held a powerful attraction.  Summers were short, and most of the time was spent in the hayfields.  But there were those days when there was no hay to bale, and I was free to run wild with the cousins.  We would find a water hole or pond and spend the day splashing and enjoying the cool water until the mosquitoes forced us to go home.

After Tubby tried to drown me in his homemade boat, I avoided boats at all costs.  Grandma Brown had a pond behind the house, full of green slime algae and sheep manure, but a pond, nonetheless.  But it was the object that rested beside the pond that fascinated Kristy, Rocky, and me.   

There, in all its glory, was a dugout canoe.  Yes, a real dugout canoe made from a log!  Just like the Indians paddled in the movies and in our history books! This was possibly the very dugout canoe used by Daniel Boone as he escaped the Indians. 

 It was probably crafted by Kristy and Rocky’s fathers as children; the craftsmanship was a bit shady.   There we were, three amigos, bound by age, stupidity, and our made-up language. As elementary school students, we lacked common sense and thought a little excursion into the forbidden pond in a dugout canoe would be a perfect adventure.

Grandma Brown told us, “You kids stay out of that pond, it's nothing but mud.”  We looked up from our lunches of sandwiches and Kool-Aid and solemnly swore not to go into the mud.  Meanwhile, in our own secret language, we were making plans.  Technically, we were not going to go into the mud.  We were not going “into” the pond at all; our plan was to glide across it swiftly on our dugout canoe.  Like the fearless warriors we saw ourselves as, we would maneuver silently, barely a ripple in our wake.  Even Grandma Brown would be amazed at our skills.

We were confident.  Together, we were two first graders and one second grader, none of whom had ever actually paddled a canoe. I blame Rocky.  Kristy and I would have been content to sit in the shade of the oak tree and play with dolls all day, but Rocky was getting tired of playing with dolls.  Rocky was a boy, and even at that age, Kristy and I should have known boys were trouble.  We learned our lesson about trusting a boy that day, but neither one of us girls took it to heart. 

Uncle Lyle and Uncle Ernie had done a fair job in hollowing out the old rotten log to make a dugout.  The log was rotted enough to hollow out when they were children, and now we were standing in front of it.  The math didn’t seem to bother us. 

Another small detail we failed to notice was that the canoe's front and back were in their original state.  Meaning that there was no closed point at the front, and no closed point at the back.  The main object being no closed ends.  What we really had was a rotten piece of wood with a few inches of hacked-out center and no water resistance whatsoever.  The three of us didn’t see that, though. Rocky’s salesmanship was in full bloom as he pointed out the fun we were getting set to have.

“We gotta sit on our knees like the real Indians,” Rocky explained.

“I don’t think we should do this, we’re gonna get in trouble.”  Kristy was backing out quickly.  Maybe she was the wisest of us three.

“We don’t have paddles.” I pointed out the obvious. 

If Kristy was getting worried, I was getting worried.  Rocky and Kristy were Grandma Brown’s real grandchildren.  She couldn’t kill them; it was against the law or something.  I was just an adopted grandchild.  She could probably kill me.  If Grandma Brown didn’t kill me, Mom and Dad would kill me if she told them what I had done.  I was the oldest; I was supposed to be the responsible one.  Even Kristy’s parents, Lyle and Mary, would kill me.  No, not Lyle.  Lyle wouldn’t kill anyone.  But, oh, my cousin Mary, she was a blood relative.  She could really kill me dead.

“I got a stick, I will stand at the back and steer, we don’t need to paddle.  The pond’s not that big.  You guys go on and get in, and I will shove it off and then jump in.  Once it gets going, I can push with the stick to go, turn, and stop.

Somehow, Rocky convinced Kristy to get into the front of the dugout.  I followed, and Rocky stood at the back.  Bending over, Rocky shoved the canoe forward as hard as his little arms could push.  Rocky wasn’t a big child, but somehow, in his enthusiasm, he moved the dugout carrying Kristy and me a few inches into the muck.

“ICKY!”  Kristy started screaming as soon as Rocky jumped into the gondolier position. 

His stick, a rotten piece of deadwood, snapped in half in the thick mud. Rocky had to bend over to push off a few more inches from shore.  Meanwhile, Kristy was repeatedly screaming “icky” in a high-pitched tone.   I hated it when Kristy used baby talk words like “icky”.  I attributed it to her lack of education; her family didn’t use the good curse words like I was privileged to learn. 

We were maybe six or eight inches from shore as the dugout sank slowly into the muck.  In the front, the muck slowly oozed into the open end of the log.  Kristy was scrambling backward to get away from the “icky,” but I was pushing her forward to block the mud from reaching me.   In a situation like this, it was every man, woman, and child for themselves.

Behind me, the mud was swirling around Rocky’s ankles.  There was possibly an inch of water standing on top of the mud, and we had stirred it up. There was no possible way for the dugout canoe to move forward or float; the laws of physics were against us.  We were being beaten by something we hadn’t lived long enough to study.

“Abandon ship!”  Someone yelled.  Or was it just the three of us thinking the same thing at the same time?

The ship was sinking rapidly.  It was impossible to determine where the sides ended, and the mud began.   We must have looked like three stupid kids standing in the mud on the edge of a pond for no discernible reason.  It would have looked like that because that was what it was at the moment. 

Simultaneously, the three of us lifted our legs and stepped upward into the mud at the side of the boat.  Our legs sank to thigh level as the stench we had stirred up began to linger in the air.   Kristy started crying.  Rocky was laughing.  I was already planning on how I would run away from home before any adults found out what we had done. 

Kristy bent down to try to wipe the mud off her legs.  An impossible task because she was standing in mud up to her thighs and sinking rapidly.  All she managed to do was smear the mud around with her hands, effectively coating an inch or two of skin above the mud level.   

Generations of sheep manure, dead insects, stagnant water, and algae were threatening to suffocate us as we tried to make our way ashore.  Scenes from Dad’s favorite Western movies playing in my mind, I panicked.  We had found quicksand.  This is why quicksand is so dangerous.  We were going to be pulled down into the muck, never to be seen again.  Rocky, his stupid ideas, and his worthless stick paddle had led us to our doom.

We walked a few feet to the solid ground, the silence only broken by Kristy’s wails.  Rocky and I didn’t offer Kristy a hand to help her out of the suction of the mud.  Her hands were filthy!    Kristy waved her mud-covered hands around, crying in loud hiccups of “ICKY.”

We stood on the shore watching the mud claim the genuine Indian dugout canoe.  It would never be seen again.  At least until fall, when the mud would dry to a crust and release its’ treasure.  Now we had to do the hardest thing we had ever done so far in our young lives.  Go to the house and admit to Grandma Brown that we had been “in the pond”.

Grandma Brown was not happy with us.  There were a few muttered comments about “you kids”, but she didn’t seem surprised.  Thinking back, I realize that Grandma Brown had raised many children, including boys close in age, and now had many grandchildren.  We were not the first to try the dugout canoe, and I doubt we were the last.

After a gentle scolding, some soap, and a rinse with cold well water, we were nearly back to normal—almost. The lingering smells of sheep manure and decaying small animal carcasses still clung to us.  Grandma told us that generations of dead birds, chickens, squirrels, and whatever debris found nearby had been tossed into the mud. Located at the bottom of the hill behind the house, the pond had become a perfect catch-all to throw anything rotten away.  The slime of the decaying algae had given our skin a light greenish tint and added its own special perfume.

When our parents arrived to pick us up, the three of us appeared perfectly normal from a distance.  It was only when they came closer to tell us to get into the car that it became obvious that Rocky, Kristy, and I had done more than play with dolls all day.

“Oh, my God!  What is that awful smell?  What did you kids get into?”  One of the mothers, perhaps Cousin Jeannie, asked.

Dad, Ernie, and Lyle started laughing.  They knew from the odor exactly what we had done.  The dads also knew that we had already been punished by nature.  I learned that I was not only unsafe in the water or under the water, but also unsafe above the water.

Mom used the short drive home to lecture me on my foolishness.

“You kids could have been sucked into the mud and drowned.  That mud would have filled your lungs up, and you would have drowned.  What were you kids thinking?  You could have died out there playing around in the sheep shit.  Do you have any sense at all?”

I sat in the backseat in a cloud of black stench emanating at least two feet from my body.  Not only did I seem to have a stench that was not disappearing, but I had also been stupid enough to be “goofing around” and could have drowned.

“But Rocky said,” I whined.

“If Rocky jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?”

There was no point in arguing.  Mom had me pegged.  I was a follower and would jump off the bridge.  Mom knew it, and I knew it.  It was settled; I could trust no one when I was around water.  It was up to me to keep myself alive, to ignore the tantalizing lure of water and stay on dry land.  If I could drown in a teaspoon of water, it would only take probably half a teaspoon of mud to end my life.

I never lost my fear of water as I grew into adulthood.  I tried; I honestly gave it a good try.  I sat in a dunking booth at a company picnic.   How was I to know that the young schizophrenic, so horribly tortured by his inner voices, could throw a softball like a major league player?  My co-workers said it looked like a scene from Jaws when I came up out of that tank of water, sputtering and yelling.

Many years later, Greg thought it would be a good idea to rent a canoe and paddle to the island in the middle of Lake Itasca.  Looking for a loophole, I told the man at the rental desk that I couldn’t swim.  Coldly, he rented us a canoe anyway. 

Settled into the canoe, Greg refused to wear his lifejacket, so I put it over mine.  I was fine, sitting in the front of the canoe with two life jackets on as Greg paddled.   Until Greg stood up to hand me the paddle and switch places. The movement caused the canoe to list right and left in the lake.  As the canoe tilted dangerously, I developed an ability hitherto unknown.  Despite my inability to do math on a test paper, I could, with adrenaline, calculate in my head.

Greg is 6'2 “tall.  I am 5'10 "tall.  Add the five and six to make eleven, take the leftover ten and add his two, and that’s 12, another whole foot.  What are the odds we were in water deeper than twelve feet this close to the island?  The odds were low that we were more than twelve feet from shore. 

I did this calculation in my head, without pen and paper, without counting on my fingers.  This calculation was done while I was wearing two life jackets, screaming, “We are going to die,” and crawling on top of Greg’s shoulders.

Greg, who also could not swim, had no choice but to stand in the middle of the boat as I flung myself on top of him.  I love Greg, but in times like this, survival is the priority.  If I stood on the top of Greg’s head, I could keep my head above water until I was rescued.  If Greg drowned, well, he would have learned a lesson about not wearing his life jacket.

The boat rocked side to side as Greg tried to peel me off his body, screaming at me, “Sit down, sit down!”  My screams of “We are going to die!” at the same time drowned out his frantic pleas. 

Somehow, Greg managed to pry me off his shoulders and push me down to sit in the boat.  It wasn’t until hours later that I realized I had lost my Black Hills Gold ring sometime in the scuffle.  It was a small price to pay for my life.

My second swimming lesson was in Reno, Nevada.  We had just moved to Reno and were staying with the Bowling Ball’s mother and stepfather.  While the surrounding mountains were snow-capped in the distance, the valley was scorching hot in the summer sun. 

The apartment complex had a swimming pool, and I agreed to go with Bowling Ball to swim.  Of course, my swimming involved sitting at the shallow end of the pool, waist-high in water, and splashing around with the neighbor’s toddlers.  Bowling Ball swam a couple of laps and came over to me, bragging about his Red Cross lifeguard training in high school.  This was early in our marriage, when I was still optimistic and hopeful, believing everything that I was told.

“Come on, at least come to the five-foot mark,” Bowling Ball cajoled.

“No, that’s okay, I am good here. The water is nice and cool, and I’m having fun.  You go swim if you want.”

“Come on.  I’m right here. Don’t you trust me?”

Damn it. Here it was.  The moment of truth.  Do I trust this man who seemed so careless in the water? 

I stood up and slowly inched my way to the center of the pool, clinging to the side of the pool as I moved. 

“Okay, now let go of the side of the pool.”  The Bowling Ball instructed me.

Wearing my mother-in-law’s swimsuit, I felt brave.  I looked and felt swim-ish. Children and adolescents were swimming in deeper water than I was standing in, and here I was, an adult.  I took a few steps until I was standing in front of the Bowling Ball, who was wearing his swim trunks.  This man owned a pair of swim trunks.  He was Red Cross-trained as a lifeguard and instructor.  If he couldn’t keep me safe, then no one could. 

“Okay, now let go of me.” Bowling Ball instructed patiently. 

I considered prying my fingers from the indentations they made in his forearms.  Standing there, my head above water, looking good, feeling good, I felt brave.  What did Mom know anyway?  Looking around, I saw all the children whose parents didn’t tell them horror stories for entertainment.  

“I can’t do this!” I told him.

“Yes, you can.  Let go.”

I let go and stood bravely in front of Bowling Ball. My head was close to going underwater; I could feel the cold, icy clutch of imminent death lapping at my chin.

“Okay, now put your hands on the top of my shoulders and put your legs straight back.”  Bowling Ball instructed.

Trusting him, I let my legs float up behind me. Tentatively, I gave a few kicks, and my fingers dug further into his shoulders. 

“Okay, you got it.  Just keep kicking.”

I kept kicking.  This was no different than my first swimming lesson, gripping the wooden dock and kicking my feet.  I splashed and relaxed, anchored by my grip into the tendons of my husband's shoulders.

Then the betrayal happened.  Bowling Ball somehow managed to twist and escape my clutch on his shoulders.  This had been the plan all along: to get me kicking and then let go.  Ideally, I would miraculously and instinctively reach out my arms and swim.  Like a child learning to ride a bicycle, the time to let go had arrived.  Now he thought that instinct and momentum would take over, and I would swim.

That was Bowling Ball’s plan.  He had not counted on years of my mother’s horror stories terrorizing me.  He had not considered my willful instinct to survive above all odds.

As soon as I felt his shoulders slip away, I stopped paddling.  There was no way I was going to kick my legs to paddle and flop my arms around to skim effortlessly across the water.  What I was going to do was survive at all costs.  If Bowling Ball was 5’9” tall as he claimed, standing on top of his head would keep my head out of the water. 

My survival instinct kicked in as I did the math.  I wrapped my body around him as my legs, feet, and toes took over to keep me alive.  The Bowling Ball stood in the middle of the pool, in five feet of water, shocked by my panicked attack, and unable to move. 

I scurried up his body, my toes digging for traction in his wet skin.  Both big toes found a foothold in his swim trunks.  As I pushed upward to stay out of the water, my prehensile evolutionary monkey toes hooked his swim trunks on both sides of his body. A final push upward, and I was secure, my legs around his chest, as his swim trunks fell to his ankles. 

“Jesus Christ! You pulled off my fucking trunks!”  Bowling Ball screamed in my face.  No one heard his profanity; the crowd in the water and on the edge of the pool were deafened by my toneless scream of terror.  Every resident of the complex got a view of my husband’s naked backside or front, depending on their location.  

That concluded my second and final swimming lesson.  Lilly, who has no fear of snakes or heights, also has no fear of water.  As an infant, she would dive headfirst into her bathwater, her oxygen tubing serving as her scuba gear.  She has snorkeled, swam, and scuba dived all over the country. 

Watching her from shore, or the safety of the deck around the pool, I think of a conversation that I overheard as a child.

“Those ducks are terrible mothers.  They lay their eggs anywhere they feel like it, and when the eggs hatch, they just get off and go to the nearest waterhole.  Poor little things have to follow her; she doesn’t even look back to see if they are coming.  This year, I picked up the duck eggs and put them under my Banty hen.  She was getting all broody, and she’s a pretty good mama.”  Grandma Brown was telling Mom over a cup of coffee at our kitchen table.

I was nearby, probably reading or pretending to play, but actually eavesdropping.  Always listening, my little ears open to the latest gossip. The women always had the good gossip; the men’s conversations usually revolved around farming.  But gather a group of women around a kitchen table, make a pot of coffee, and put out the chocolate chip date bars, and the gossip would roll off their tongues.

“Well, she will raise them all right", Mom answered her.  But I always feel sorry for the hens.  As soon as those ducks find a waterhole, they jump right in and start swimming.  The poor hen is frantic, screaming at her babies that they are going to drown.  My ma used to put her duck eggs under a hen, too. I remember those poor hens going crazy, trying to call those babies back.  The ducks would just ignore her and swim all day until they were tired and wanted to sit under the hen.”

I remember thinking the story was funny at the time.  I imagined the poor chicken thinking she had hatched these odd-looking chickens and loving them just the same. Then, one day, her babies run away and go into water, somewhere the hen knows is dangerous for baby chickens.  The chicken can’t go in and get her babies, and her babies are having so much fun they won’t come back to her calls. The poor hen would run along the shore screaming of the danger.

I remembered that conversation from so many years ago, as I stood watching Lilly show me her dive, and when she tried out for the swimming team. I remembered it again when I saw the pictures of her on a building project in the water in Alabama, or when she described snorkeling in the Pacific Ocean off Catalina Island. 

I knew my baby was in danger.  I couldn’t go in to save my baby, although I probably would have tried if necessary.  My only option was to run around in circles, screaming “danger” to my little chick.   Instead, remembering how fear is passed downward, I kept my mouth shut and admitted I had raised a duckling. 

It is a tiny little break in the chain of generational trauma.  A child unafraid of heights, who has petted snakes with her mother, and who is at home on land or sea.  Lilly sometimes mentions going on a cruise, the three of us on vacation.  I mention things like norovirus, pirates, the cruise ship that had no working toilets, and the petri dish of diseases on a closed ship at sea.  What she didn’t know was that I have deep personal reasons never to set foot on a boat again.

Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” at his inaugural address.  As a wealthy man with a privileged upbringing, he must have had an incredibly boring childhood. Donna, Tubby, and I were wealthy in “character-building” experiences. As Mom would say, “We didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of”.  But we got stories to tell!