One
year for Halloween my mom took our family to the woods to spend the night at
our cabin in Cascade, Idaho. She did not do this for Halloween
spirit or to evoke some sort of “spookiness” for the holiday season. She took
us up there mostly to avoid the tricker-treaters that would pester our home
from the hours of seven to eleven. For reasons that were unknown to me, my
mother did not believe in Halloween.
From
the ages of eight to twelve I was deprived of this fabulous childhood ritual. I
harbored a small, but well kept, bitterness in my heart for this deprivation,
which is why perhaps my first experience with the cabin in Cascade was less
than positive.
It
was cold. It was late October and summer had long since curled up and died.
Miles away my friends were painted with white faces and whigged with long black
hair, stuffing fistfuls of delicious sugar into their plastic pumpkin buckets.
That year, Rachel Hirst had dressed up as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and her
sister Hailey dressed up as a witch. My mother would never in a million years
allow me to dress up as a witch. I could, however, dress up as Jesus, should I
so choose, or perhaps some other character from the bible. Even as a child, I
couldn’t even begin to explain the absurdity of her suggestion. Oh really mom?
Really? I thought to myself, What do you want me to do? Run around in a
bathrobe and pray for people? My mother was otherwise pretty good at being the
“cool mom” except for when it came to this. In this area she had failed
horrifically. She became much like the “other” Christian parents, the ones who
didn’t allow their children to watch power rangers or wear two-piece swimsuits.
Still, as an eight
year old, I had no choice but to follow orders, pack a small overnight bag, and
pile into the burgundy suburban along with my four other siblings. We waved
good-bye to the city of Boise, wrapped in orange and black laughter, and drove
steadily up the mountain road.
When
we passed into Cascade, the town was empty. All the summer travelers had long
since returned to the city and the town was left vacant with nothing but the
400 locals to keep it intact. I could never quite put my finger on the silence
of that place, but I knew that it smothered me, crawled up and over my bones,
seeping in through the car windows and choking me until all I could think of to
do was hold my sister’s hand tighter and tighter.
When we arrived at
the cabin the air was sharp and cold, bending around us like the witch my
mother refused to let me imitate. The corners of the wood floors were littered
with mouse feces and I shuttered at the thought of discovering thousands of
spiders underneath my bed. My dad instantly began moving about, flipping light
switches, and sprinkling rat poison all over the dark crevasses of wood. Imagine
putting that stuff in your mouth, I thought to myself.
This was the way
my mind worked. Every time I saw ugly, I wanted to know what it tasted like.
The plan was to
camp out in the fire lit living room and watch movies until we fell asleep. My
mom had promised to buy us as much candy as we wanted but the endless supply of
fun sized snicker bars could not make up for the Halloween I was shut out from.
I couldn’t seem to shake the stillness that surrounded me, the feeling that we
were isolated, in the mountains, with nothing but our father’s hunting stories
to keep us company. One by one my family members fell asleep until I was left
alone, staring up at the brown chipped ceiling and feeling certain that at any
moment an axe murderer would bust through the back door, slaughtering us all
and using our blood as a ritual on this darkest of Halloween nights. What a
terrible way to go, I thought to myself.
I was certain that witches lived in
these woods. I was certain that the pine trees hosted demons inside them, and
that Satan himself was climbing among the branches. It was in this forsaken
wilderness, in this eerie small town silence, that my dad was no longer the
strongest man on earth, and I was no longer a student at Joplin Elementary, and
my name wasn’t even Brenda anymore. It was at eight years old that I was
confronted with this giant looming question of my human existence and why I was
so absolutely terrified of being alone.
For years after
that night, I hated going to the cabin. I would agree to go only if I could be
assured that a large group of warm, well-humored people would accompany me. I
used the sound of their booming laughter, and the warmth of their fingertips,
to balm the shaking unanswerable question of my lonesomeness.
As I grew older, I
could never understand why Wordsworth or Keats, some of the greatest writers of
our English Literature books, had such a fascination with these woods, with
“nature,” with the great mystery that surrounds us. Why would you want to spend
your time in that?
I tried it once.
The summer after my 20th birthday I resolved to spend one night
alone in the cabin. I had brought my guitar and note books full of empty pages
just waiting to catch all of the art that would roll out. I had never taken the
time to hold still long enough to see what kinds of things I would find in my
lonesomeness. Perhaps I would find God, or the cure for aids, or a new
mathematical dimension, or a moment of pure self-actualization. But every time
I looked life directly in the eye, she would stare back at me without blinking
and I would become absolutely paralyzed. It was in these pointed moments of
time when I could hold all of my humanity in just two hands. Looking down on
it, I couldn’t help but wonder, apart from being a daughter, a friend, a
student, or a sister, who was I, really? Who were any of us? And then I felt a
twinge run up my spine, a dark and wholesome spirit that moved over me, like I
had fallen into the rabbit hole a thousand times over again. My soul shivered,
turning in the wake of its own shadow.
I lasted about two
hours, before I packed up all my shit and drove right back down the winding
road. I made it home, just after nightfall and fell into the arms of my warm
family carpet and the sound of our blaring television. When my dad asked me why
I had returned home so soon, I simply told him, “I missed you guys.” And then
he shook his head, laughing gently until all of his chuckles laced themselves around
me, in a glow that left me in a terribly comforted mood.
