Driving past the massive redwood peanut carving meant that we were halfway to Eureka, California. The redwood peanut was also a marker of the town where my mother, Moonbeam, lived. Every other weekend, Dad drove me to Orick for our mandatory visit. Mandatory just meant that the law was involved. The law being involved was practically a law of the universe for people like us.
But the law had little to do with why we were driving past the redwood peanut that day. Except that after my scheduled ear surgery, I was mandated to remain with Moonbeam in Orick–in civilization–until my eardrums fully recovered. It would likely take the rest of summer. My earaches had become regular enough that a physician recommended I get tubes put in to help drain out all the gunk. I would also be getting my tonsils and adenoids removed. The plan was that after leaving the hospital in Eureka–the same hospital where I’d been born nine years earlier–Dad would drop me off at Moonbeam’s before heading back upriver to our home off grid. It would be the longest I’d ever stayed with Moonbeam, my stepdad, and my two younger brothers. I stared out the window as we drove past the huge redwood peanut, anticipating the story I knew was coming.
“That peanut,” Dad began, “was trucked all the way to the White House in Washington D.C. as a gift for President Jimmy Carter. But because Carter was an environmentalist, he shipped it back. He saw it as an insult. Here Carter was, trying to save the redwoods—or what was left of them—and some loggers from Orick send him a redwood tree carved into peanut! What a joke. I mean, can you imagine?”
I didn’t say anything in response. Didn’t need to. Sometimes Dad talked to keep himself awake while driving. Despite that it wasn’t nighttime, I knew Dad was probably tired. He’d worked at the road department all week, helped get my belongings together for the trip, then driven from near the border of Oregon in a car we’d borrowed from a friend of his. I didn’t really know why we were in the car, and not in Dad’s pick-up truck. Maybe the truck got a flat tire or needed a repair. Or maybe driving the car had been mandated. For whatever reason, I was riding in the backseat: precious cargo.
The car smelled horrible and was making my stomach turn. I never got car sickness on windy roads, but I suddenly felt queasy. It was as if invisible cigar smoke was emanating from the maroon velvet seats. Dad didn’t smoke, but whoever owned the car sure did. I was getting nauseous. I tried to lie down, the seat belt digging into my waist. I didn’t know what was worse: watching the tops of the redwood trees zoom by out the window, green morphing to white given all the movement, or closing my eyes. Both felt impossible. The pain in my ears faded to the background as my nausea took centerstage. I heard Dad mumble something about the time. My ear surgery was scheduled to start in one hour, so we’d be cutting it close. I gripped the car seat with one hand and held my other hand to my forehead, trying to remain steady. One more hour to go, and then the hard part would begin.
Naturally, I didn’t remember a thing from my first visit to Humboldt General Hospital–the day I’d been born there. This time though, I’d remember every detail. Starting with how enraged Dad was when I finally puked as he whipped the car into the parking lot.
“Couldn’t you have at least waited until I parked?” Dad yelled at me, swinging my door open.
Dad rarely yelled and never hit me, but in that moment, he looked like he wanted to rip my head off. Now that I am a parent myself, I know the look. It was stress. It was fear of failure. It had little to do with me. Fucking up created shame. Dad couldn’t win. We were late and I’d puked in the car he’d borrowed. This would all make him look bad. It would take time that we just didn’t have. Dad quickly shook out the floor mat, tossing the vomit into some nearby bushes, and then we raced into the hospital.
Before long, the hospital staff were preparing me for surgery. Dad may or may not have told them about the vomiting. It was all happening so quickly. They said I wouldn’t feel a thing during the operation, no pain and no nausea, because they planned on putting me to sleep. I was intrigued, then confused. Instead of reading me a bedtime story, a nurse placed a large, rubber mask over my mouth and nose. Because I’d never worn anything like the mask, I was frightened—and then I was out.
I remember a few details from right before they put the mask on. After being wheeled into the room, they positioned me with my feet pointed toward the door we’d entered through. There were three people: one doctor and two nurses. They were all wearing masks too, but a different kind.
Then things changed. The doctor began counting back from ten. By the time he got to four, I did indeed fall asleep. But I also rose up out of my body. Suddenly, my feet were no longer pointing at the door from which we’d entered, but my back was. And instead of laying horizontally, I was standing vertically. I was technically floating and there were two of me: the “me me” and the “hospital bed me.”
Me me observed the doctor and one nurse performing the operation, and a second nurse standing off to my right.
I woke up as I was being wheeled down a short hallway. Never mind that I was getting too old for stuffed animals, I was downright giddy when someone handed me a small teddy bear wearing a white t-shirt with the name of the hospital printed on it. Maybe they’d known they almost killed me back there, and the teddy bear was my consolation prize. I didn’t care. The deal was made even sweeter when I was given a popsicle in the recovery room. I was instructed to eat lots of popsicles in the days to come. Maybe it will be okay after all, I thought.
Driving back to Orick, I sat in the backseat again. I told Dad about the strange occurrence when they’d “put me out” at the hospital.
“Hey, that’ll happen,” Dad said reassuringly, looking at me in the rearview mirror.
Dad was nonchalant. He knew his stuff. This was child’s play. Dad was the one who had spent weeks on the other side after a drowning accident when he was a kid. They’d dubbed him Miracle Boy in the local newspaper. After the accident, our family felt Dad got touched by an angel, because from then on, he was so different. Not just his voice, which had been scarred in the accident, but his whole way-of-being. He was spiritual and special. What I’d experienced was only a blip. I didn’t get so much as a glimpse of heaven. It was practically nothing. I needed to focus on my future, on getting better, on summer.
Today I understand why I didn’t go to the great beyond. Had things ended differently that day, Dad would never have forgiven himself for how he’d left things, for yelling at me like he had in the parking lot. We drove past the redwood peanut again and I sighed audibly.
“You’ll be back home before you know it,” Dad said, empathetically.
I wasn’t entirely sure if Dad meant our cabin by the river, or our home up in the sky.
TERAH RACHELLE VAN DUSEN 