Virginia: Part 1

The Feral Child

Friend

1—The Child

It was a day much like today—hot, sticky, heavy, wet—when I turned off a gravel two-lane onto a narrow rutted path and saw a child running through a wild field in a yellow dress, looking like a daffodil tumbling by on the wind. Knobby knees flying, yellow dress flapping, arms beating the air like a baby bird practicing flight, she bounded through the black-eyed Susans and the Queen Anne’s lace toward what passed for a road, waving at me.

I slowed the truck and rolled down the passenger window to ask her where her mama was.

2—The Bad Idea

I'd spent the day careening down the interstate, hightailing it away from the latest bad idea and toward the coordinates of a remote campsite I'd found last minute, desperate for a cheap out-of-the-way place to land for a couple of days. Somewhere in the Alleghenies, I sat in the truck on the southbound shoulder of I-81, waiting out a thunderstorm that had set off flash floods in the valley below, checking my bank account to see if I had enough to cover two nights plus fees and still have something left over for gas to get there. From where I sat in rain so heavy I couldn't see anything but green, the campsite I found online—10 bucks a night for a bucolic setting well off the grid—sounded just fucking fine. No water, no sewer, but it had a hookup for electric, the photos were pretty, the listing said there was a river nearby and a truck stop a few miles up the road that charged $9 for a shower—cheaper and darker than it’d be at a light-flooded interstate Pilot or Flying J or Love's. I pulled the emergency cash out of the console, booked as many nights as would empty my bank account but not overdraw it, put the truck in gear, pushed the tow, and headed down the mountain, Tramp Scamp sashaying like a goddamn showgirl, in high wind and driving green rain.

3—The Way There

The Alleghenies eased themselves down into foothills, the foothills became winding roads lined with houses that didn’t look like the houses built these days—they were small and mostly abandoned, as were the towns. Towns like that, most times, there's a faded sign for a restaurant that's closed, sometimes a couple of storefronts, also closed, a porch with a rail with what's left of some paint and maybe a rocking chair that got left behind. The houses stood close together, lined up right against the road, staring like dusty children at the cars as they drove by.

I started the day in upstate New York, cut across a corner of Pennsylvania like a dog-eared page, skirted the eastern edge of West Virginia—one of the most beautiful and surely one of the strangest places I've ever been—and drove through the Blue Ridge Mountains, passing Shenandoah National Park on the way, which I'd hiked with my beloved friend Bean in spring. By early evening, I'd outrun the storm, hit the wet summer heat, and was burrowing down through the heart of Virginia itself.

The bad idea called, then called again. The number came up on the truck's bluetooth screen, and I hit decline both times. I wondered, not for the first time, how people younger than me—who didn't grow up reading paper maps, many of whom can't actually read maps or orient themselves on the road without GPS—escape. How do they locate the silence. How do they pull the cover of distance up over themselves like a sheet. How do they wrap themselves in the world of their thoughts, the sanctity and quietude of their private lives. Do they even know what that's like, I wondered. Do they know who they are without the thrumming electronic thread tied to their finger, without the virtual umbilicus that tethers them to the peopled world.

When they escape, I wondered, where do they go? Do they flee themselves the way I flee the world? If so, can they ever get home?

The third time the phone rang, I blocked the number and turned off my phone. I didn't need GPS, I didn't need a map; the sun was to my right, I was still headed south, I could feel the pull of where I was going in the front of my skull. It's just not that hard to find your way.

Who knows? A small child may come bounding through the tall grass and latch herself to your passenger door, stick her tow head in the window and say, What took you so long? I was waiting for you.

4—The Ditch

The little girl in the yellow dress was small, elfin, she danced and hopped as much as walked or ran up ahead of the truck, showing me the way to my campsite: an unmarked, steep-sided ditch that ran alongside the road. She pointed to a telephone pole, shouted something into the wind, and ran off again. Her hair, bleached nearly white with sun, bobbed just above the rippling surface of the overgrown field, growing smaller until she was swallowed up by weeds or woods.

I finally saw it—a decrepit trailer tucked into the edge of the treeline, hidden by brambles and the shadows cast by twisted live oaks hung with Spanish moss. The trailer was old and not restored, probably about the vintage of the trailers that were always parked in makeshift sheds outside the ramshackle houses on the outskirts of the northern California towns where I grew up. It wasn't leveled right, I could see from where I sat. Whoever lived there had to be walking up and down the narrow center of their home at a sharp tilt. Downhill to the kitchen, bent and leaning uphill back to the fold-out bed.

I hopped out to get a look at the pitch of the road and the angle of the ditch and figure how I was going to get the Scamp situated such that I could hook her up to the electrical box that was buried at least a foot deep into a massive blackberry bramble at the base of the telephone pole, then climbed back in. I pulled forward, backed up, maneuvered, twisted the wheel and the camper and the truck and my neck this way and that, stood up with one foot on the gas and one on the brake, leaned my whole body out the car window to try and get a look at where the hell I was going, and finally muttered fuck it, threw the truck in reverse, revved it, and went flying backwards all dukes-of-hazzard-like over the ditch, hitting it just right so the camper bounced once and stuck the landing with all the grace of Beau Hazzard slithering in through the window of that goddamn car.

I grabbed my work gloves off the dash, pulled them on, and waded through the weeds in my Daisy Dukes to wrestle a Biblical blackberry bush.

If whoever lived in the trailer needed 10 bucks a night that bad, they sure as shit didn't need me to bitch.

5—The Turn

I've been thinking lately about patterns of migration. No particular reason, except for metaphor—it’s easiest to explain why I live on the road by borrowing the language of the natural world. Take birds, I say. Or I say, Seasons—I follow the seasons. I tell people, I chase the changing leaves south; I follow the slow seep of spring. I say, See, animals will always move in patterns of expanding freedom. They’ll always migrate away from anything like captivity, pull away from hemming in, resist containment and its effects.

And I gesture vaguely—at myself, around myself. And I wait till they change the subject, or tell themselves a story that they like better, about how it is not really what it is, I am not really who I am; really it is more like their life, really I am more like them. And I struggle not to borrow the metaphors that seem most salient, most crucial, most apt.

I try not to say, See, a trapped animal will just chew off its leg.

I quell the urge to explain, When there's weather, you know? Earthquake, typhoon, tsunami, flood? Animals, they sense it, they know. Horses, cattle, buffalo. They'll start breaking out, if they're in captivity.

Rhinos, hippos, elephants, giraffes. Panthers and cheetahs. Snow leopards, bears.

They’ll start moving long before it hits. They’ll head for higher ground.

I can picture it—I can feel it, almost.

Their eyes flicker up; they hold still. Their ears rotate forward, then out to the side, searching for the source of a sound so much softer, so much deeper, than these low-fi human ears can hear.

An Arctic wolf, tracking toward the snow-hushed woods, pauses for just a split second, then changes course, arcing northward, loping across the ice.

The thunder of ice breaking as it melts rumbles up from below. Could you count the seconds from the sound of thunder to the instant when a crack shoots through the ice?

The wolf breaks into a run.

6—The Squatter

Out of nowhere, a tiny voice: "That's poison oak."

I looked down at where I stood, up to my waist in the overgrown ditch. The child popped out from who knows where and pointed at the bramble where the electrical box was hidden away. "And those are blackberries."

"The blackberries I knew," I said, craning my neck to look at the back of my legs and the better part of my ass, all of which had spent the past forty minutes good and deep in the weeds. "Didn't know that was poison oak."

"How could you not know that," she asked, rolling her eyes.

"Good question," I said. "Never had it before."

"Oh," she said. "You might be impune."

"Immune?"

"Yeah. Where you don't get it. You ever get poison ivy?"

I have never had poison ivy.

"Well," she said, with a dramatic wave, "either you're impune, or you've never even gone outside."

"Or I'm magic," I said.

Her eyes widened.

I shrugged. "You never know.” I marched through the poison oak to get at the blackberry bramble.  

She crouched next to me, nodding sagely. "You really never know."

We squatted there, looking through the fierce tangle of thorns.

"Are there snakes?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said.

"See any?"

"Nah."

I got down on my stomach, lifted the low branches, and slithered under them, thorns catching at the skin of my shoulders and back.

"You're gonna get cut up," she said.

"I don't bleed," I replied.

"How come?"

"Lizard," I said. "See the yellow cord? Hand it to me, would you?"

The hard patter of paws on packed dust, the snaking sound of something pulled through grasses. She fed the 30 amp cord under the bramble to me, I flipped the breaker a couple of times, and the Scamp was hooked up.

I scooted back out and plunked down on my butt in the dust. She plunked down next to me. She looked at me, put her knees akimbo, like mine; she looked at me again, put her elbows on her knees. We sat leaning like that, dirty, hair tangled, covered in weeds.

"Where's your mama?" I finally asked.

"She's crying," she said, unconcerned, picking a scab on her knee.

I nodded. "Maybe we go check on her in a little."

"Maybe," she said. She got the scab off and itched her leg. "I'm feral," she said.

"Good word," I said. I lifted my face to the slight breeze stirring the Queen Anne's lace. "Me too."

A screen door slammed. I turned toward the sound.

A young woman with drug store dyed red hair stormed out of the trailer and across the field, hollering, wearing nothing but a black lace slip, the kind you can only get at Goodwill.

From the other direction, a man's voice rang out like a shot. You know the sound. It had the little girl on her feet almost faster than me, but not quite. I swept her up and ran for the camper as she wriggled like an eel and screamed, He better leave my mom alone! Tell him he's gonna have to deal with me!

I stuffed her in the Scamp, shut the door, and turned to find myself between a barely-dressed girl of maybe 25, face muddied with mascara streaks, and a red-faced man crouched and pounding the dust with his fist, screaming, This is mine, you hear? Mine!

I watched him trace a line in the dust with the forefinger of his left hand, a pistol in his right.

He lifted his face, head shaking with rage, and saw me standing there, between him and the girl in the slip.

He rose slowly, stiffly, to his feet. He looked me up and down. He turned his head and spat.

Then he asked me, Who the fuck are you?

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See you back here next week for Part 2.