Tag: Childhood

Snakes and Blood and Sticks

Terah Van Dusen4 Comments

You think my snake stories are over? Not just yet:

Arizona.

The mountains in California have rattlers but in Arizona the rattlers are in the mountains and down low and everywhere in between.

At my high school boyfriend Woody’s place we went looking for rattlers just for fun, cause it was like fishing in a stocked pond–they were always there.

And this was sad, but, they always got shot. We didn’t know any different. We didn’t know any environmentalists. Even my dad the Hare Krishna had that rattler under our porch killed; that’s just the way it was with rattlers [to us].

The fattest, longest one we killed just off the gravel driveway under a yucca and that big boy didn’t want to die you could see it in his eyes. But Woody had a younger brother and that’s how he (it wasn’t my idea) justified it. That and we were three towns from a hospital so we didn’t want anyone gettin bit.

We found a rattler in the tool shed and shot him too. Not me. Woody.

One night after dark I was heading over to his place for dinner and I parked my car and skipped up to the porch to ring the doorbell. Along the way I stepped over a long, thick stick and I thought that stick must be something Woody’s little brother picked up in the wash and then the motion light kicked on, I rang the doorbell, looked back at the stick and saw that it had the most intricate diamond-shaped pattern–it was a rattler.

Woody’s mother opened the door, I pointed at it, she screamed and the snake recoiled into the, by this time familiar to me, cow patty position.

Woody’s mother snatched a garden shovel out of thin air I guess and she pinned that giant snake to the gravel beneath it.

Someone handed her a rifle and she handed me the handle of the shovel, said Terah for god’s sake keep that thing pinned down.

She hefted the rifle up to her shoulder–closed one eye and met her target.

Oh I can’t do it she said and handed the rifle to Woody.

Agh I don’t want to do this I squealed and Woody’s mother rolled her eyes and grabbed the shovel keeping the snake pinned as Woody blew through the thing’s body in one clean shot.

I stood to the side shaking.

Snakes and Blood

Terah Van Dusen6 Comments

Five years later my dad and I find ourselves in the Siskiyou wilderness on a mini backpacking trip with a man named Rick who claimed to be our cousin (boy I hoped not) and his girlfriend whom I cannot recall the name of now, our goat Sugar, my first or second or third period, but I still didn’t know what the hell was going on, some beans, saltines, swimsuits and for the couple–a cardboard jar of rolling tobacco, which Sugar later ate, which didn’t end up well for anyone as you can imagine.

We were oh, two miles down the trail and six miles from where we were going. We each have our backpacks and my dad has a sauce pan tied to his. Sugar has a rope leash but its dragging on the ground cause he stays with us anyway.

I’m on my period so I’m not talking just sad just teenage just in between whimsical-childhood and dependent-on-everything-adulthood. There wasn’t too much of an in between for me (childhoodadulthood) but if there was–this was it. I still looked to my father for entertainment. I was at the age just before I would be stealing cigarettes from Rick and whatsherface. I’d tried cigarettes but not enough that I owned them yet. You know what I mean. That smallnarrowstage.

We were walking along over a strawberry-blond single-track trail of serpentine soil and I’m admiring the irises because its summer time again and I think I hear the creek and I hope it’s the creek and I’m so bloated and I’m going to secretly wash my crotch and thighs in the creek in a corner under a fallen log or behind a boulder. I’m going to go underwater and open my eyes cause that’s my favorite thing to do and oh I’m going to be clean and fresh.

I see my Dad smack himself in the face. Now granted my dad sometimes did funny things–smacking himself on the face wasn’t exactly one of them. Whack. He did it again.

“Bees!!!” He yells from the front of the line.

I too feel a small flying creature swoosh past my face, my ear, and we all start runnin’.

Run run run down the trail–the goat too.

Run run run until we finally outrun the bees and the two smokers are red in the face and panting.

Just as we stopped however Sugar leapt about a foot into the air on all fours–spooked by something just like a human would be–wide goat eyes and then we heard it: the steady movement of a rattle tail.

Run!!! Someone yells and we all start runnin’ again, Sugar in the lead.

Around a bend or two and we’re sure we’ve outrun the bees and the snake and we stumble into a large opening in the forest and see about four naked hippies sitting around a fire.

Bees, rattlers and now this?

My dad perks up as he naturally does with new people, especially hippies, and he gives them his warm smile which gets us an invite into the hippie circle.

We all sit down to catch our breath and I bleed my period blood onto a makeshift leaf pad in my shorts, having outrun a hundred bees and a rattlesnake but not my womanhood.

Snakes

Terah Van Dusen7 Comments

I’ve seen long fat ones and I’ve seen little ones.

Me and Jessica Philpott on the absolute hottest day of the summer–it feels like that in my memory anyway–a not-a-cloud-in-the-sky Rock Creek day. A boulders-are-so-hot-you-actually-need-shoes kind of day.

Jessica and me sitting in my dad’s little red Sprint–one of our early, decent cars–listening to Great White or Mike and the Mechanics or Tom Petty. I won’t back down. I stand my ground. Jessica said you should ask your dad if you can spend the night. (Despite my dad being an unconventional parent, he still always, up until my last day with him and Lisa on A street, insisted that I ask permission and that he knows where I am and who I’m with). I sang Okay and leapt out of the passenger’s seat (Jessica was the kind of friend who would get the front seat in my daddy’s car).

To paint a picture–the Sprint was parked in the dirt yard right in front of our cabin nearly in the garden. It wasn’t always parked there, and I don’t know what it was doing there on that day, maybe we’d been unloading seaweed from the trunk and dumping it in the garden like we sometimes did.

Anyways, so I jumped out of the car and with Jessica still in the passenger’s seat ran/skip/hopped onto the front porch which was raised up about four inches from the ground and as soon as my leading foot, my right foot landed I heard a thick rattle. I’d heard enough warnings in my life to know what it was and it was true boy howdy when I looked down right there under the porch was a fat silver rattler.

“Daddd!!” I hollered through the open cabin door, “Rattler!!”

I don’t know if my left foot even made it to the porch cause as soon as I saw that snake it was leading the way right back to that little red Sprint.

Snake! Rattler! I yelled to Jessica. Quick, on top of the car!

Sitting on the hood of the little red Sprint I said “Ohh noo I hope my dad doesn’t come out the front door!”

But my pa was quicker than that. He’d somehow detected sincerity in my voice as I’d hollered despite the many times I’d played jokes and cried wolf.

He leapt out the window of the cabin into the goose coop and hollered to us that he was going to get Fabian’s gun.

Jess and I looked at each other with horror, we hadn’t intended to get anything killed.

My dad returned with Fabian and his gun and more of the neighborhood of course.

My dad didn’t kill things. And if anyone was gonna kill anything with Fabian’s gun it was going to be Fabian. Of course.

The boys–John and Butch were so excited they were jumping up and down. Jess and I remained in our front row seats on the hood of the car.

The boys and men slowly approached the rattler under the porch.

I made a secret plea that the snake had found itself elsewhere.

The loud ramble of its rattler as the boys and men tip-toed near it told me it hadn’t.

Without a countdown or a warning Fabian fired his rifle and got the fat boy on his first shot.

Then he took the ol’ boy home and the William’s ate him for dinner.

Young Dreams

Terah Van Dusen4 Comments

My young dream was to be a performer or an athlete. I also said I wanted to be a writer. I know because I wrote all this down on a slip of paper that recently emerged while rifling through child-things at my great aunt’s house.

I also know it because I remember all the energy I used to put into performing. I wrote–short fictional stories–but not very often. I had too much movement in my body.
I’d acquired at least a little bit of skill and grace from the few years of ballet, jazz and acrobatics I took at the Dance Art Studio in Crescent City. And when I had an audience, boy-howdy I put on a show. My family called it “tumbling” but I’ve watched the home videos and what I was doing was acrobatic ballet: cart-wheel, round-off, pose, cart-wheel, round-off, pose.

I practically lived in a long-sleeve pink leotard and dreamed of owning sweats, leg warmers and new ballet shoes like the other girls. I’d carry it all in the “Twinkle Toes” ballet bag I saw on display at the Dance Art Studio. It cost thirty-five dollars. Which was even more money back in 1996.

I watched gymnastics on TV whenever I had the opportunity and thought for certain I was just a few lessons away from a double back layout and a spot on the floor at the Olympics.

Clearly I wasn’t, but once in acrobatics class when were learning back tucks (which is a back flip with no hands) my instructor was spotting me so I gave it my all. Seconds later when I was upright my teacher said “You just did it. I didn’t even touch you. You did it all on your own,” which drew the attention of the whole class, not because a back tuck hadn’t been done before, it had, but because I’d only been in acrobatics for a year or less (and just once a week)–the other girls had been going to the Dance Art Studio since infancy.

All I got from the girls was a long glance. No pat on the back.

In the upcoming months I would begin to wonder why my crotch smelt funny as we stretched and get self-conscious over my dirty socks.

I stopped going to dance, which no one in my family protested or gently encouraged me otherwise. I’ve always been able to do as I please. Just as I please.

I cut my hair and half-heartedly took up basketball, poetry and boys.

I’m kicking myself now because I was darn good. I’d nearly nailed my back hand spring with no spotter, I had a stage smile and good balance. And now I know that crotches just smell funny sometimes. Especially after excercise.

I could’ve really been something.

Miracle Boy

Terah Van Dusen4 Comments

This piece I wrote in Lidia Yuknavitch’s writer’s workshop. The prompt was: write about the “peak” of an event, from someone else’s perspective. The narrator in this piece is my aunt Dorothy, the year was 1970, and if you don’t know by now–Robby is my father and a major character in my memoir.

                           “Where’s Robby?” I heard mom’s voice. She turned around and looked directly at me.
                            Her drunken gaze was unusually fixed, “Where’s Robby?”
                           I couldn’t respond before she said it again, “Where’s Robby?”
                           I looked out at the water and there was just a woman and a toddler sitting in the shallow water on the shore, a scuba diver gearing up and an older man in a bucket hat rowing a boat. The last I’d seen Robby he was swimming over by the big rock pile people liked to jump off of. But he wasn’t there anymore.
                          “I dunno where he is!” I told her, annoyed. She acted like I was the goddamn second mom. I was the oldest but I was only fourteen. If she thought I was gonna go looking for Robby she was wrong. She was the mom and she needed to remember it.
                           Mom started panicking and walking up and down the riverbank. She was asking other families if they’d seen her little boy, he was wearing a mask, she told them.
                           “Was he wearing a snorkel?”
                           “No.”
                           “No, we haven’t seen him. Not since earlier, not since lunch.”

                        Fifteen minutes went by. Fifteen minutes.
                        I watched mom look. She searched the parking lot. Robby wasn’t a parking lot kind of boy. She scanned the bushes, the tree trunks, the fields, she scanned the opposite side of the river—the wild side. No Robby. I started to get a sicky feeling in my stomach. Marie didn’t know what was going on. Robby’d gone missing before, but this just felt different, ya know? Mom felt it too. She was yelling Robby, Robby! I started yelling too. Robbbbbbyyyyyy!
                       Mom approached the scuba diver who was a few feet from the shore. She waved her arms and he wattled over on his flippers through the shallow green water. “Can you look for my son? In the water?” She asked him.

                          Ten minutes went by. Ten minutes. I saw the flick of a blue flipper make a splash on the calm surface of the water and then I saw the scuba diver’s head followed by my brother Robby’s head in front of him. He was carrying my brother Robby and he’d brought him up from way down in the water. Robby’s head was limp at the neck and there was a mask around his head still, it looked like it was weighing him down. It was my daddy’s mask. The first thing I thought was: Robby’s dead.

Big Blue Bin Blues

Terah Van Dusen6 Comments

*This is a scene I gleaned from my memoir. I’ll deposit it in my Memoir section later. For now I just wanted to share it with you.

Our quiet, peaceful life as we had known it was done for. Lisa had a large family and we moved in with them up in Lacey, Washington. I don’t remember the names of most the people in the house, except for Michael Hamm. Michael was Lisa’s twenty-something nephew. He gave me cigarettes, otherwise I found him a fool.
We lived in the Hamm’s backyard in a fifth-wheel trailer. I had only my big blue bin and a diary where I chronologized how miserable I was living in Washington with the evil step-mother and her self-righteous family. I slept out on the couch in the front part of the trailer. I would sleep, cry, complain about wanting to go back to California, and on a good day, I did so while sun-bathing on a blanket out on the lawn. It was the summertime and I had virtually nothing else to do but mope around. I couldn’t tell you what my dad and Lisa were up to. As usual I was left to my own devices. There was a wall between Lisa and I. And there was a rope around both my dad’s neck and her wrist. As far as Lisa was concerned I was a disposable child, that had already been made clear. Kids, who needs ’em anyway?
The Hamm’s were very religious. Pentecostal. They went to church at least twice a week. I didn’t want to be involved. Since curtal and temples and dancing in the streets of San Francisco with the Hare Krishnas, religion hadn’t done a thing for me. But I was forced to ride along with my dad and Lisa to church. When we got there I would stay in the car and smoke any refries Lisa had left in the ashtray. Once, the church folk caught wind that I was out in the car and the pastor sent several of their perkiest teenage girls to coax me out. I could’ve punched them all in the face for knocking on the window and waking me up from my sleep. They didn’t understand. I didn’t budge. Seeing their sprightly faces and the way they all clutched on to each other like a bunch of co-dependent idiots reinforced the fact that the inside of that church was the last place I wanted to be. They didn’t understand.
I would sometimes take walks from the fifth-wheel behind the Hamm’s house to a nearby shopping center to use the payphone. I had a calling card that I used to make calls to David and we would talk about what was going on with me and what was going on with him. He told me he’d gone to a party and met a girl named Kristy. Why would he tell me that? I knew her vaguely – she was a cute Mexican girl a grade below me in school. I didn’t wallow over it. I knew David loved me. I knew he loved me and only me. Because that’s what he told me. Repeatedly. Men would do this in my life. Men would lie.

Rise Part II

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A sun-kissed bedroom of my own
was what I desired most as a child.
Dad and I went and looked at this place once,
it was buried behind so much tamarisk brush
that I’d never had a good look at it
but o was it a beauty
and right next door it was

It was a place made for a dad and his little girl
one bedroom custom-made for a girl,
for me,
a loft with a low ceiling and
a small bed with a pale yellow quilt and
an eggshell desk under a sun roof
and too a square window looking east
toward the sunrise.

Out the window I could see the cabin where
we lived.
The cabin where I didn’t have my own bedroom
and never would because out front there was a pond and
out back there was a fence and a chicken coop ( no room
to expand)

I sent a smile down to my dad from the loft,
it said,
Pleeeaaaasssse Dad?
He, I noticed was scoping out the french doors, smiling

We never moved to the loft.
In my memory shall remain the flirty essence of
the place and what a woman-girl I felt like inside of it.
A bunch of dudes live there now, I see ’em when I visit dad.

Rise Part I

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I don’t exactly count the ways
I love summer
It’s been raining and I love that.
It’s been cold and I don’t mind.
It’s warm today and I don’t care.
I think I’ll just stay inside.

I did have a moment today however,
a summer moment.
I sat at my yellow desk between the hour
of seven and eight and was delighted to notice
how the coffee inside my red and pink heart mug
failed to get cold at all. At all, for one full hour
the coffee and cream and sweet remained warm

I watched the sun shining upon it
and I looked to the sun and it brought me back to
another bedroom I had once.
I had that bedroom for just five minutes but I had
it and there was no one else there but me.
And my dreams.
That bedroom too had a window
looking east.