11 minute read
TOURIST TRAPPED by Ellen Notbohm
TOURIST TRAPPED by Ellen Notbohm
Kay knows this much: some families go on vacation to places like Disneyland or Hawaii. Or at least some place warm that had fun stuff like beaches to play on all day and maybe horses to ride. She’d heard it about all through her childhood and on into the goulash of adolescence, where she now simmers. Some families, but not her family. Her father has to be constantly moving. The concept of lolling by the shore in a low-slung chair with a good book, a cold drink, and a tube of Coppertone, or bobbing gently atop a pool or lake on an air mattress is, by his own admission, beyond his comprehension.
No, they have to drive three, four, five hours to get to wherever it is they’re going. They’ll check into a motel—the closest their mother will get to camping—where Kay and her younger brother will look longingly at the swimming pool. As soon as the suitcases are parked in the room, it’ll be back into the middle-of-nowhere-brown Chevy station wagon for a side trip. Another hour up a mountain to some lake. It won’t be a lake for swimming. It’ll be a lake for looking at, photographing and maybe picnicking next to. The bottom will be all sharp rocks; if Kay wants to go in, she’ll have to wear her dime-store thongs (twenty years later her children will call them flip-flops) and hope she doesn’t stumble and slice open a knee or toe.
She has a new swimsuit this year of the first moon landing. Blue gingham and eyelet, her first two-piece. Not a bikini; her mother isn’t ready for that. The two-piece is girlish-pretty and modest, Kay’s belly button barely peeking from the bottoms. But no one will know that because there won’t be anyone else at the lake to see it. Who cares anyway; she always hated her belly button, an outie in a world of innies.
Too many people are reluctant to call themselves tourists, her father says. If you’re going someplace you’ve never seen, why wouldn’t you make the most of it? Be a tourist! Kay finds this mantra exasperating, because he never wants to go to see what most people would call tourist attractions. The beach, the zoo, the ballpark, the amusement park, the tandem bikes, the funky old movie theaters. Because if you can do it at home, he decrees, we don’t do it on vacation.
That’s why they’re sloshing through a creek trudging up a mountain getting eaten by mosquitoes instead of down in town savoring an ice cream cone (“You can get that at home”) and trawling their toes in the lovely fountain in the city park (“You can do that at home”), or looking around for other kids who might want to toss a Frisbee, play mini-golf, listen to music on their transistor radios and talk about Three Dog Night and The Bee Gees, or just loll in the sun. (“You can do that at home”).
No, there’s a rare formation two miles up this creek and they’re going to see it. Her father is a forester whose work takes him into the remote timberlands of the American west. This kind of expedition is as intoxicating to him as it is suffocating to her. Eddie’s Eddy. An unusually large natural and powerful whirlpool said to have swallowed one of the first explorers in the region. Technically, that’s not possible, her father explained as they tramped up the path festooned with thimbleberries. The creek isn’t deep enough, but Eddie—Edward Sebastian Tetloff—might have fallen in, then exhausted himself trying to get out. He could have drowned and been carried downstream, who knows?
Who wants to know, Kay thinks. I care as much about Eddie as he cares about me.
And there it is, Eddie’s Eddy. Whoopy-doo. Swirling water. Throw a stick in and see what happens. She’s fifteen, too old for that. And she’s too young to feel this old, this bored. Her father says, you’ll have something unique to write about when your teacher assigns that inevitable—he draws the word out faux-sardonically—three-paragraph personal essay.
Kay flicks a look at her mother, three paces ahead and appearing, as always, not to hear these exchanges. No fool, her mother. She’s a happy hiker with no more use for teen fun than her husband, but thanks to him, she need never vocalize it.
Yes, Kay says to her father, slapping a mosquito large enough to saddle up and ride down the mountain and staring at Eddie’s Eddy until her eyes lose focus. I got nibbled to death while hiking to a giant perpetual-motion toilet.
Her father laughs. You know, I like that, he says. Very descriptive. Evocative! He takes photos, tries to get her to stand in the frame. First he asks nicely, then less so as she backs off in obstinance. Was that a swear word under his breath? He turns his face away, puts the camera away, moves away. She’s disappointed him. She almost feels badly. The wall between her boredom and his delight in the setting quivers like an irate mirage, except it’s real.
Her brother, tired of throwing sticks in the water, has found a small snake. Tail pinched between his fingers, it flails strenuously, cutting silent slashes through air that hums with the heat. Her brother gives the snake two quick twirls before slinging it into the eddy at the very same moment his parents leap to stop him. "Hey, don’t!" Too late. Their summer vacation has cost an innocent creature its life.
*
The swirl of years has brought her to Room 506 of the Providence Hospital cancer ward, where her father lies in a kind of limbo. Kay is now as old as he was at Eddie’s Eddy. A wall chart instructs patients to Rate Your Pain on a scale of one to ten. Zero means no pain at all and ten means “the worst pain you have ever felt.” Rating the patient’s pain, the family is told, compressing it a digit, would assist doctors in knowing if treatments were working.
It's a short, brutal trip for Kay, from a place of tenacious hope to the understanding that treatment for her father meant palliative, not curative. For a few surreal weeks he hovers in that room, an acutely generic waystation that grants nothing to his uniqueness or that of any other person who had or would die there. He confesses to Kay that he finds the wall chart baffling. His pain is constantly shape-shifting, his ability to articulate it ephemeral.
At least it’s a private room. He won’t face his final and most profound journey in the presence of a stranger. She offers the universe a ragged prayer of gratitude for that.
The room has a wheel-in shower. In the early fog of denial—surely her dad would pull through again—she thought the shower was nifty. Then reality bore in and made it clear that he would never use that shower though it was but a few feet from where he lay. The day the physical therapist got him to stand and take the few steps to the foot of his bed, she naively hoped it might be the start of a rally but instead those were the last steps of his life. He collapsed back into bed, his face etched in a moonscape of silent agony, and never got out again. Rate your pain came the drumbeat from the wall chart. It seemed a mockery.
The window of Room 506 overlooks a courtyard. She’s downsized her dreams for her father. If only she could get him into a wheelchair long enough to take him outside, into some real air, the kind that felt and smelled like leaves and breeze and sun. Wouldn’t that mean something to him? So many of her memories of him are outdoors. How could she not have mined the trove of his knowledge and lore? He could identify every tree in a three-state region, not to mention birds, fish, geologic formations, local history, native legends. When her children want to know the name of the rocks, plants, and creatures on their hikes, her ability to answer is embarrassingly limited. The day her sons first said "Grandpa would know", she knew it would become their refrain, her lifelong penance. Her grief at the impending loss of him cuts deeper than she could have imagined, saturated in regret for what might have been. What she once could not make room in her life for, all the while there for the taking, is something she will now forever lament. Now the other side of that windowpane is as remote to her father as those old-growth forests. So she sits on the wide window sill each day, from dawn until her mother comes for the afternoon-evening vigil, and looks at the inaccessible outside world for him.
When her father dies in Room 506, she has to pass the pain chart when she leaves him for the last time. Where, she wonders, would “numb” register? Less than one, or more than ten? In time she learns that her dad’s pain will settle in her at three, forever: “Pain is noticeable and distracting, however, you can get used to it and adapt.” No treatment would change that.
*
It happened a few years later, and she didn’t question it. She stopped listening to the radio in her car. Instead she’s learned to listen to herself think. It’s such a revelation, years wasted hanging on someone else’s thoughts and creations, as if they had more validity than her own.
Now the car drones along at a cruise-controlled sixty-five miles per hour through a part of the state that has little radio reception anyway. Her husband would punch up a playlist on his phone if it were up to him, but he respects her preference.
The cruise control has to come off as the road narrows and snakes its way deeper into the forested mountains. This is a snaking road if there ever was one, her husband says. It’s a wonder some bureaucrat hasn’t managed to name it—Snake Road! Do you s’pose there are snakes around here?
Yes, she says quietly. There are snakes around here.
Theirs is the only car at the trailhead. Her husband is, as their sons had been at five years old, stopping to examine every flower, every fern and every fungus growing sideways out of a tree.
The sight of Eddie’s Eddy wrings her. It is as she left it forty years ago, and as it will be forty years from now, and forty years after that and after that again. The water, rushing into infinity in its perfect concentric helix, isn’t the only sound in the forest, but it’s the underlying motif to which the birds, the chipmunks, and the dragonflies sing. They sing to its constancy, and to the sylvan comfort found in that constancy.
This is wondrous, says her husband. You’re so lucky. Your father took you to places like this. I never got any farther than the vacant lot in the neighborhood and some scrub BLM land at the edge of town. This was right here in our own state all along and I never knew it. People just don’t know what’s in their own backyards.
She smiles at him. You’re such a tourist.
He beams back. Wouldn’t your dad be proud?
Into the eddy she throws a stick bearing a thought for a little snake dead forty years, and the offering of a belatedly grateful heart for a father who wanted to give her a world unseen by most, that she might write about things of great and simple beauty and wonder that would quietly outlast them all.
