Dream Catcher: A Memoir (29 page)

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. It was also put forth to me that babies left too long in urine-soaked diapers do, in actuality, experience severe blistering and burns on the genitals and down the legs.

I
N
D
ECEMBER OF
’63, I had my eighth birthday. All I can say is, winter birthdays in New Hampshire are really crummy. Viola’s is May 11 and there were picnics and games in the field. In December, the few kids whose parents were able to make it up the steep road in the snow played in our garage. It was heated, sort of, but it was no one’s idea of a picnic. I don’t remember who came, except Viola of course, and the rest of the kids did not notice when I slipped away. I sat at the top of the stairs to my father’s garage apartment, and after a while, Viola came and sat with me. I was feeling sick and strange.

Viola went and got my mother, and the next thing I knew I was in a hospital bed in Windsor, Vermont, and told I had bubbles in my ears. I was there for several days, including my real birthday. I vaguely remember opening a present on my hospital bed, but that is all. I specifically remember no pain, but rather a feeling of unreality, as in the dreams I had that mimicked reality and went on forever without escape, like the TV show
The Prisoner.
I would have done much better with a proper explanation; it would have grounded me, feverish and all, in a world of biology like the ponds I loved. Bubbles in my ears; I floated away until, I suppose, they faded into iridescence and popped.

I don’t remember coming home from the hospital. It is hard in the best of times to get a firm grip on the earth in the midst of northern December snow and its perpetual twilight of grays and whites and electric
lights turned on shortly after lunch and school beginning and ending in darkness. My mind scattered in dry snowflakes; puffs of air blew the light powder across the hard crust of ice that formed over the packed snow several feet deep on the lawn. Someone may have shown up at school and sat in my seat; perhaps my shadow played in the faded-winter-light recess. Under aging banks of fluorescent lights, the fragments of dancing, twitching glare make my brain feel as if it’s skittering even now.

Hibernation. I lay in a liminal state, like a fish in the mud at the bottom of a frozen pond, through the long months of January and February and into March. Then, the world beyond my eyes became a speck of blue frozen light in the distance of a long, long tunnel. Gradually I became aware of a certain dampness. I was awakened by smells of wet wool and deep brown mud.

As the snow melted, I felt an acute sense of urgency, for where there is life, as opposed to suspended animation, there is the specter of death. “However innumerable beings are, I vow to save them.” Each spring, Viola and I took up our glass jars and did battle with the grim reaper, that harvester of stranded worms on pavement, fallen birds, caterpillars crossing the road, and frog eggs foolishly laid in drying puddles.

My mother was wonderfully helpful with our rescue missions. She gave us old shoe boxes to make houses for our worms and let us dig up from her garden some dark, rich earth that, for some reason, smelled like coffee grounds. When we brought home a cocoon some boy had broken off a tree, she showed us how to make a home for it. We took an old honey jar, poked holes in the top for air, put green blotter paper on the bottom, dampened it, and put in the stick and cocoon. When we were finished, Viola and I decided to walk up the hill to see what was doing in our secret pond this year. It was now our pond, not Day’s pond. Mr. Day, the farmer down the road, had died and somebody had threatened to build a trailer park on the land. My father mortgaged everything we owned and bought it, so we now owned over 450 acres. A walk to the pond was not a casual stroll, but a half-hour climb. We had discovered the pond the previous year while following the trail of an apparition. It first appeared as we walked up the hill, mist rising from the patches of snow under the shade of the juniper bushes, which were always the last
to melt. There, in the mist, stood a thick white horse, matted and muddy, and next to him a small brown donkey. They stood still, frozen against the sharp-smelling spruce trees and deep green pines, the only sound the droplets of melting snow dripping off the ends of the pine needles as the sun warmed the numbed, cold bark. I wasn’t sure whether the two beasts were real. I looked and could see that Viola saw them too, so we were either both dreaming or both awake. Steam rose from the nostrils of the donkey, and I let out my breath in response, automatically, like catching a yawn, unaware I’d been holding it. If they had walked slowly off a cliff, I’m not sure I’d have awakened. Following them, we stumbled across the secret pond where they stopped to drink.

This year we didn’t see the horse and donkey, but I doubt they could have taken a clear drink from the pond this late in the spring. The pond water was way below last year’s level, so low in fact that it seemed to be less liquid than alive, teeming with wriggling life. It was too full of things even to wade in. (And we weren’t squeamish girls. Behind Viola’s house we had swum happily in the forbidden stream reputed to be full of bloodsuckers.) Masses and masses of frog eggs, clear jelly with tiny black dots, were engaged in a life-or-death race against the receding water as they clung to the weeds near the bank. In one tangle of weeds we spotted some exposed, greenish masses with fat red dots that we’d never seen before. We took some of each and put them in our jars, taking care not to tear apart the jelly mass. In another jar, we caught seven newts and brought them home.

I got to keep the eggs and the newts at my house, I think, because my mother didn’t mind; Viola’s was a bit more squeamish. We set up an aquarium with water and some stones in case the newts needed to get out and turn into red salamanders later. They survived for several months until one morning I came downstairs and saw a dead newt floating at the surface of the water. The next morning, another. The following morning I got up earlier than usual and caught the murderer red-handed. One of my newts, the skinniest one in the tank, had gone mental. He had his back legs wrapped around the neck of a bigger newt and was slowly strangling him to death. I tried, but I could not pry his legs off the other one’s neck. Even flicking his head rather sharply with my fingers didn’t do it. Squeezing that slimy flesh to the mushing point
was something I was incapable of doing. Finally I held his head out of the water for what seemed like hours and he let go. The other newt was staggering—if you can believe a newt can stagger—but alive. I netted the remaining newts, put them in a jar, and carried them back up the hill to release them into the pond. I kept “Killer” in a tank by himself rather than release the Cornish strangler into the wild. He lived an unconscionably long life.

T
HE SUMMER OF
1963 marked the worst year of a seven-year drought. Wells were running dry, ponds drying up. One day, I went to pick some wild watercress from a nearby brook where it always grew this time of year. The brook had dried to a trickle of mud. So I decided I’d better go see how the other brook, farther into the forest in the same direction, was faring. I jumped across the mud and crawled under the barbed-wire fence that separated the woods from the field. There was a lot of old, rusty barbed-wire fencing from previous farms on our property. I have a scar on my calf and many tetanus shots to show for it.

After a few minutes I came to the spot where another brook flows into a little pond that always dries up late in the summer. This spring it was already close to dry. I saw masses of doomed pollywogs. They’d never grow legs before the pond dried up. I had my trusty jar and I knew where there was water in another part of the forest. One little jar and thousands, millions of pollywogs wriggling black and shiny in half-inch pockets of water that would be gone for certain in, at most, a week or two. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, I dashed back and forth, filling my jar with them and running, sweating, dizzy, ten minutes each way, over and over, back and forth from the dying pond to a swampy area where three brooks met. Finally, I dropped to the ground. I couldn’t go on. I lay there with the impending deaths of thousands on my conscience.

I passed out flat on the pine needles and slept for I don’t know how long. When I awoke, cool and rested, I got up and walked beyond the pond, resolutely not looking at it, and up to the edge of a twenty-five-foot drop of sheer granite where, some twenty thousand years ago, the last great glacier had passed by, laughing at the presumption of rock to
be substantial. A brook ran along the narrow valley at the bottom of the cliff, and on the other side, the land rose steeply up again, trees growing between large boulders tossed by the glacier.

In the valley at the base of the slope were two old stone wells and some rock arrangements that were clearly human-made. These thrilled me. My mother had said that the wells were probably from colonial times or maybe even from the Indians. Colonial times and Indians and cavemen and dinosaurs and Jonny Quest intermingled freely in my mind. Whenever I went to that place in the woods, I felt as though I were entering a lost valley. I skirted around the cliff and went down into the valley along the brook that flowed through it. I climbed up the slope on the other side and sat in the great lap of an old birch tree, just where it divided into three strong trees, and from my perch, looked down at the old wells. I imagined I was one of those half-ape, half-human women I’d seen in the Museum of Natural History. My imagination was such that, after a short time, all vestiges of my former life faded from consciousness. Gone was my house, the road, my sneakers, my pink skin, my name; I became a wild, hairy ape-woman. I lived by the cliff for protection. My heart began to pound as I thought of marauders. Then, I heard them coming.

I chose a high point and waited, muscles taut, poised to hurl down a rain of rocks upon their heads. My eyes surveyed the area for possible escape routes in case there were too many of the enemy. I saw them coming over the far ledge. My bowels turned to ice; there were at least twenty heading straight for our wells. I picked up my club and ran noiselessly, just the sound of my pulse and the wind in my ears, fleeing for my life down the path of an old stream bed through the woods. I reached the swampy area where they would lose the scent of my trail and plunged in, weeds whipping my face and making little cuts on my legs. I didn’t feel the stinging until after my flight.

I spotted our well-house
²
and came abruptly to a halt. I was entering forbidden territory. I crept up to the window, daring myself to look in. The thought never occurred to me that the well-house was forbidden
for my own safety. I thought, or more than half-thought, that someone had been murdered and was floating around in there, which was why we couldn’t use the well anymore and the water was rusty-colored and bad. I did not peek in. My club was powerless against bloated corpses.

Beyond the well lay an old logging trail that led to the road. As I emerged into the dappled sunlight of the dirt road, familiar plants, and birches, I metamorphosized back into girl—hairy body became pink, uncovered breasts flattened, matted hair became messy braids, and I thought about a bologna sandwich with mustard.