ʃ Explorations ʅ
Much like “Discoveries,” this chapter is a collection of anecdotes rather than the telling of one specific tale, but in this section the stories focus more on curiosity-driven risk-taking than on any actual injury that might result. I realize that by putting this chapter second I might be irritating some readers, since that places the causes after their effects, but I prefer this order because it reflects how kids tend to learn to tell these stories: they start by comparing wounds and scars and only later move on to recounting the details about how they got hurt.
Many of these stories, then, will end with some type of discovery other than an injury. But I like that too; after all, if all exploration tales ended in pain then an enticing element of suspense would be lost. Yes, they would still vary by injury type, but that becomes predictable per experiment; that is to say, a story about lighting an aerosol spray is far more likely to end in a mangled hand than a damaged foot (although I am sure that there are exceptions). So some stories are worth telling because they make just the risk of disaster interesting, or because there is a chance of finding gold (or some other treasure) at the end of the rainbow (and not a broken crown).
That means there’s no simplistic moral in this chapter, but it does bring me to think about how someone can be both smart and dumb enough to do something risky. Various kinds of research suggest that the people who know the most about a subject are the ones who say that they still have a lot to learn; in contrast, a person who merely brags about their expertise is a time bomb with the display burned out; they know how to do something (to some degree) but they don’t have the tempering that comes from learning when not to.
And thank goodness for that, or we’d have missed out on some great discoveries.
I’m not thinking just of those scientists who guinea-pigged themselves deliberately, such as Pritchard, Salk, Forssmann, and loads of others. I have in mind those people such as Curie, Scheele, Reichelt, and Davy, who did not truly understand the risks they were taking because, at least in part, they were pioneers, so their explorations had yet to expose those risks in the first place. And, of course, even people who do know about the dangers can also sprint afoul of an accident now and again, such as Valier, Duesenberg, Daghlian, and Bullock. Think of this as a continuum (or an even higher-dimensional space) where someone like Karel Soucek falls somewhere in the middle: he understood a good deal about the associated dangers (and in fact his shock-absorbing barrel was designed explicitly as a risk reducer), but not thoroughly enough to account for the details that led to his fatal accident. Like a watch that eventually stops working in increasingly deep water, nothing is truly foolproof, just fool resistant.
It is easy to understand why this incautious behavior is particularly common among medical doctors, not to mention quasi-medical practitioners: your body is a handy laboratory because it is always with you (and yes, because it usually has hands), and it can take time to get permission to use human test subjects. This leaves aside any speculation about hubris in the medical profession, but it does make me wonder how many doctors and other scientists and inventors (much less stunt professionals) started out as thrillseeking children.
Jeff and I used to work at a museum whose curator had acquired a nice collection of quack medical devices, such as “violet ray” and ozone machines, which brings up yet another fuzzy category of persons, where any number of otherwise generally reputable, well-intended doctors (setting aside unmitigated quacks) have introduced devices or drugs into their practice that were later recognized as inhumane, ill conceived (aka hare brained), and harmful. Among the more infamous of such tools and techniques are the likes of: prefrontal lobotomy, thalidomide, bloodletting, twilight sleep, exorcism, eugenics, trepanning, electroshock therapy, and mutilative practices that I don’t want to specify further in a book that is intended as light entertainment.
The thing is, any tool can be abused, and the more powerful that tool is, the greater the potential for harm; similarly though, you’d think that the right kind of creative mind could always come up with some beneficial use for any tool, no matter how aptly discredited it might be by historical experience. The problem is that the appropriate context might be vanishingly rare.
In that sense, thrillseeking children hunt the wild context.
And how do they do that? Well...
The most definitively schematic verbs (with postponed argument) are: be, do, know, and go. Exploration is the pursuit of “ought not” (0’). You do what you’re not supposed to do, to go where you’re not supposed to go, to know what you’re not supposed to know, ultimately to be who you’re not supposed to be. (Perhaps not always in that order.)
Let me show you what I mean.
You know that your child is a thrillseeker if they have a compromised desire to follow a recipe. If you leave them unattended with a simple request that they make soup, and they end up adding a little bit (or maybe a lotta bit) of everything from the spice rack, a handful of odds and ends from the kitchen junk drawer, a hearty infusion of alcohol, and a paper towel twisted into a fuse, all the while glancing sidelong at the crème brûlée torch, then you’d better get yourself ready for a long (and scorched) road ahead.
A chemistry set brings a risk-taking youngster to destroy as much as create. Of course, there is an advantage to this: your child will learn to deal with their destructive tendencies from a very early age, so they’ll have a better chance of surviving such adventures if they grow older.
Yes, it’s meager protection, but it’s all they’ve got.
For example, the instructions in my chemistry set said to put iodine on a potato and watch it turn black (ostensibly because it’s somehow important to know how to identify the presence of starch in one’s food... like if you’re ever stranded in the wilderness with nothing but a bottle of iodine and you’re trying to distinguish tubers from aardvark poop).
The thing is, the instructions weren’t very useful because I already knew an exciting way to turn the potato black: light it. Which of course worked a lot better after I sprinkled it with an unlabelled liquid from the tool chest.
I survived; live and learn.
See how that works?
As mentioned in “Safety First,” there was a lath house in our backyard. It was filled with a curious array of chemicals left by the previous owner (a WWII Brigadier General), everything from very complex pesticides to all of the elemental ingredients needed to make gun powder. While you might be amazed at some of the strange effects that a pesticide mixture can have on an otherwise perfectly healthy plant, I will save you some time here: it does not tend to help it burn very well in the long run.
I recommend not getting this sort of stuff on your fingers. If it doesn’t stain you to look like a demented mime or just melt you outright, it’s bound to stink until the skin wears off, which actually doesn’t take all that long when it comes to some of the more caustic stuff.
And never, ever, get (mixed or otherwise) pesticides on your clothes. Not unless you want to get caught.
One of the thrillseeking child’s greatest adventures is trying to find the recipe for gun powder, followed shortly by the quest for potassium nitrate. Jeff and I were fortunate in that once we tracked down the formula, all of the ingredients were right there in the lath house.
I’m not going to give the formula here because I want to follow the tradition that used to frustrate me so much as a kid, where writers would leave all these little clues, but would never get right down to it, like the matter of proportions, or how to put the stuff under pressure if you ever did get it mixed (even if you did have a pipe roller and a rock polisher).
Now, I didn’t have to walk to school in the snow (or ride a pig like my dad), but I am still codger enough to grump about how much easier life is for today’s kids, bemoaning the lack of the same sorts of challenges as I had to face. I remember well how difficult it was to finally track down a copy of Henley’s Formulas, where now you can just look it up on the internet. I can be coy when writing about making simple, entertaining bombs and so on, but there’s really no point: it is disturbingly easy to just go online and wade hip deep in video tutorials on the subject. Things were a lot different back in the olden days when we carbonized dead vegetation into coal.
Bullets don’t need a gun to be dangerous. Please, please, please don’t be stupid enough to test the following: if you throw something like a 30-06 cartridge into a fire it is the lighter brass casing and not the heavier bullet that will fly away (sometimes as shrapnel). Yay physics!
You can also toss in a tiny rocket made with some foil and a paper match. Those that land upright in the campfire will launch the foil payload just fine, and the rest will still fizz nicely. They can fly four or more yards, so watch out for dry grass on the periphery. And while I hate to waste food, sometimes (since you’re cooking over the campfire anyway) it is important to find out just how badly you can burn a hotdog and still eat it.
Aside from obvious fuels and accelerants (i.e., gasoline, alcohol, solvents, and the like) that can instantly turn “a fun fire” into “a funeral pyre,” here are some suggestions about other items not to throw onto the blaze just to see what will happen (because that might be death), namely: sealed containers where pressure is a risk (e.g., aerosol cans, batteries, lighters, and even cans of food), sedimentary rock (which is actually a sealed container due to embedded air or water), pre-1953 vintage clothing, celluloid film, and handfuls of powders (like sawdust, spices, creamer, sugar, and so on).
On a related topic, it doesn’t take long to figure out that you can light the spray coming out of an aerosol can. WD-40 makes the torch of choice because they have that nice little red tube that melts back towards the can, giving you some sort of a chance to ditch the thing before it blows your hand off.
If you get an empty Cool Whip container and mix together a bunch of stuff that you find in the kitchen and laundry room, it can in fact bubble over profusely to permanently kill a rather large patch of lawn (which is all the worse trouble if you conduct your experiment in the front yard where your parents know the neighbors can see the damage); furthermore, if you happen to include the wrong combination of cleaners in your trials, the fumes can profusely and permanently kill you as well (which, when it comes right down to it, is just about as bad in the front yard as in the back). I bring up this additional note about potential death because it speaks to strategy: if you are getting in trouble for killing the lawn, you might try pointing out that at least you did not die from chlorine gas exposure. (I’m not saying that this has a good chance of working, but at that point you’d have little to lose by giving it a shot.)
Speaking of which, towards the end of fifth grade I volunteered to help clean out the community pool before it opened for the summer season. They cast chlorine powder on the damp walls and floor, and I was supposed to use a push broom to scrub everything down towards the swamp of off-brown sludge in the deep end (where most of the rats seemed to be dead). My mom was upset when I got home not only because it ate holes in my clothes and seriously irritated my lungs and eyes and skin, but because her mom had blamed a miscarriage on exposure to chlorine during a pool cleaning. (I wasn’t pregnant at the time, so her concern was through the more general association of “chlorine = bad.”)
Similarly, when I was working at the zoo (early on in high school), my boss handed me a coffee can full of chlorine powder so I could cast a few handfuls into the moat surrounding Monkey Island (which housed capuchins). You want to keep the handfuls small and low so the wind doesn’t carry any powder out to the monkeys themselves. The thing is, my first duty every morning was to hose out the cages, so my pantlegs were still damp, and as I had to circle the moat to throw in the powder I was occasionally downwind. Once again I ended up bleaching patches onto my pants that turned into holes.
Chlorine is just plain nasty stuff.
*These were a few of my favorite things. (Try evicting that earworm.)
If you pound on cement (and sometimes asphalt) with a common hammer you can make some nice sparks. Some patches seem to work better than others, and you can end up wasting most of an afternoon tearing up the street at the end of your parents’ driveway before finding a really good spot.
One common way that kids figure this out is by hitting (or rather missing) caps on the sidewalk. (If you hit a whole roll at once you can make your ears ring.) Jeff and I discovered this when we were keeping ourselves occupied out behind my mom’s interior design shop.
My uncle Ben was sitting on an empty propane tank, one of those huge ones shaped like a giant suppository.
No problem. Perfectly safe.
Well, except for the fact that while it was entirely empty of liquid fuel, it was still full of fumes.
Plus he was inside of a quonset hut.
Welding the tank.
So, yeah, problem after all, not even vaguely resembling safe.
I don’t want to give you the wrong impression, so I should mention that sitting on a propane tank while welding it is a bad idea even if you do so outside of a quonset hut. It’s just that a quonset hut has a metal roof and a cement floor which (if you do it outside instead) you won’t be slammed into in turn when the tank explodes.
He lived and learned.
Every year Jeff and I would attend “UOP Days” at the University of the Pacific. The best part was the exhibition by the chemistry graduate students. While it’s fun to see a quick-frozen rose shatter, the best part is the lighting of hydrogen balloons (obligatorily followed at the end by one really huge balloon that turns out to only be filled with helium). That was actually one of the reasons that I ended up going to UOP, but finding out that their actual chemistry classes were so much more mundane was one of the reasons that I transferred after my first year. (Stupid false advertising.)
In my late teens, I came across a roll of magnesium ribbon, a brown glass jar with several small chunks of potassium in some sort of light oil (probably kerosene), and a few other element samples like a little vial of red phosphorus and a vial of mercury.
We only had an electric range at home, so instead I would hold a piece of the ribbon in a pair of pliers and light it off of the water heater pilot. It flares a gorgeous, glaringly bright white color. I once put a burning piece in a little bed of red phosphorus. That was a mistake: it smelled like spoiled garlic. For a looong time.
When I got to college I put a piece of the potassium metal in a Styrofoam cup half full of water so some folks could watch it burn and fizz and spin around, and it hadn’t occurred to me that its heat would stick it to the cup. When it melted through the side a little stream of water shot it out onto the dorm’s hall carpet. That spurt gave it enough water to keep it burning, so naturally I stepped on it. I was not happy to find that it stuck to my shoe and kept burning. I learned that if I have a piece of hot metal eating its way through my shoe, I don’t waste time on such rational thoughts as that it will stop when the water runs out. (Just think of what that teaches you about interpersonal relationships.)
I was in the garage, building a battery-powered, plastic model of a motorcycle engine when I thought, “Hey, I should hook this up to house current.” (I was ten.) I got a spare plug with some zip cord out of the drawer (probably left over from an old toaster or lamp or something) and wired it to the terminals, then leaned over the metal workbench and plugged it in. Nothing too exciting happened at that point. The small motor inside of it quickly ground back and forth a few times with a “er-er-er-er-er-er” noise, a couple of the small lightbulbs blew/fused (representing spark plugs), and it partly melted. I unplugged it (unimpressed), went into the house, and told Jeff to absolutely leave it alone.
Not long after, it so happened that my mom was seated in the living room in just such a way that she saw the flash from the explosion reflected off of the Airstream trailer that was in the backyard. The light had shone out through the garage’s backdoor window and bounced into the house through the dining room window. When she got out there, Jeff was sitting up against the cabinets across the garage from the workbenches. As evidenced by the shard pattern that I saw later, I think that the explosion was from a “spark plug” igniting the model-glue-and-molten-plastic fumes that got trapped in the piston chambers when I originally plugged it in. I think that what probably threw Jeff was touching the metal workbench.
Hey, I told him to leave it alone.
(Thank you Robert Fulghum for the gift to our language of the word “zish.” I have used it far more often in my life than jumper cables.)
There are only two kinds of missile weapons that can get you into trouble: those that use chemical propulsion, and those that don’t. I’ve already talked a lot about that in “The Cannon.”
One time we straightened out a wire hanger, tied it to a nylon fishing line, and shot it with a bow over a set of power lines. By pulling on the nylon we made the hanger melt by bridging two of the lines. I’ve since been told that you can electrocute yourself if instead of a nylon line you use wet string. So don’t.
We played a game with a group of kids (when we were kids) where we would shoot an arrow straight up and then play chicken about diving into the bushes. Of course, when it didn’t come straight down, being in the bushes didn’t save my friend from getting stuck in the butt. (By the arrow, smartass.)
Sorry to disappoint, but I was never very interested in guns, and except for some toys (like cap guns, disc shooters, and so on) we had none around the house. Maybe Jeff had a BB gun, because I used one to shoot at power line insulators in our backyard. I stopped when I saw a big black chunk come off. I did some pistol target practice for a short while in college because my roommate Greg was captain of the Hot Shots, but it didn’t keep my interest. I’ve fired other types of weapons now and again, but my point is that it was never really part of my particular type of thrillseeking.
Maybe for some reason it sunk in that guns were serious business, whereas the rest was fair game for fun. I mean, I made the cannon because of the family story about my uncle Ben. I used the chemistry set because it was given to me. The pesticides, cleaners, spices, and so forth were right there to be used. Wiring the motor model to house current was simply a logical extension of its intended design. And what other purpose does a giant toothpick sculpture have if not to be burned? (No, I haven’t been to Wicker Man.) In contrast, my gun exposure was severely limited. I wasn’t raised in a family of hunters, tweakers, snipers, skeet shooters, officers, posers, survivalists, gangsters, biathletes, or other types of gun users, so there were no funny stories about family members blowing their brains out, making guns, or being shot (like those idiots who use their waistband as a holster). There was no story similar to the one where my grandfather had peeked around the corner of the house and gotten nailed between the eyes with an arrow shot by his brother.
But really, the explanation is probably a lot more simple: given the havoc that Jeff and I wrought with such innocuous items as cherry tomatoes, my folks probably knew better than to have anything seriously gunlike around the house, or to romanticize them in any way.
I would definitely say that was for the best.
Tens of thousands of people go to the Emergency Room every year due to golf-related injuries; in fact, the USGA is trying to put limits on the maximum flight of golf balls because the farther they go, the harder they are to control, and the more people get hurt.
When I was a kid, golf balls had a tough outer layer that you could cut through to get to the layer that was like wound rubberbands. Under that was a hollow black rubber ball. Inside that ball was nothing special, no ammonia, no toxic gas, no compressed anything unusual. (So go ahead and throw it in a fire.) But that rubber ball bounced really well.
I was taking a walk one night and found a golf ball. For some reason, I thought I’d see how high I could bounce it. It arced waaay up, then landed exactly so as to get caught under the police cruiser that pulled up to the intersection kittycorner from me, loudly ricocheting a million times underneath it. The officer was not entirely pleased.
In fact, people in general usually aren’t very happy when you hit their car with something.
Jeff and I climbed the loquat tree in our front yard with a bowlful of scrapings from out of the freezer. The idea was to make snowballs to pitch into the street. We lived in a relatively high-traffic area in the neighborhood, but we were throwing them well out in front of the cars so we wouldn’t actually hit anything.
Until of course I accidentally splattered one right on the hood ornament (and thus across the hood and windshield) and the car screeched to a halt.
My mom later said that all she heard was the front door slamming twice in quick succession, and then shortly thereafter the doorbell. Turns out that the driver was an aide in my classroom who recognized me (and knew my mom).
It turned out that hiding under the bed was not enough to save either of us.
Speaking of “under the bed,” I used to shoplift a lot when I was a kid, up until I was starting to become a young adult. It wasn’t anything I really needed; it was more for the thrill. My mom once found a stash of books under the bed (one of which was the Star Fleet Technical Manual) and explained that the while the bookstore chain was so big that it wouldn’t be significantly hurt, the people who worked there would get in trouble when it came time to do inventory. I stopped shoplifting then because I understood that real people would get in trouble. I had just never stopped to think about it before.
I think that there’s likely all sorts of stuff that I might not have done, had I only had certain things explained to me in the right way beforehand. That said, it’s simply not possible for parents to anticipate as much stuff as their thrillseeking child is prone to get into, so they can only explain just so much before suffering a lapse of imagination.
And, come to think of it, there are also all sorts of things that I have agreed to do once they were explained well.
So what it all comes down to is that achieving the truly lovely goal of a “meeting of the minds” is obstructed by “common sense” being neither.
I talked a bit about this topic at the end of the last chapter. Fairly early on, most kids learn a lot about how dangerous playground equipment is, as it demands to burn, slice, tear, poke, and break any body that has the misfortune to toddle in its direction.
As a risk-taking child, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
One of the great things that you can do on a swing is see if you can make it actually go up and over. I’ve never seen any kid actually do this, and the science (and “Mythbusters”) is against it, but there are always rumors. I do recall swinging high enough to end up with a rather jarring return plummet. Another trick is to swing as far out as you can and let yourself fly off, and if you can roll back for a layout gainer (without neck breakage), so much the better.
The idea here is to push as hard as you can, with your partner cushioning their landing as little as possible, so you can get some air between your butt and the seat at the top of your ascent. If you’re not bruising your tailbone when you come down, you’re not trying hard enough. And don’t forget the joy of falling off when you’re on the bottom (preferably without getting slammed under the chin) to bring your partner down with a crash. If you abandon your post by rolling off backwards, their weight can help flip you over onto your feet.
It’s unusually easy to get thrown forward and hit your face on the board or pole, often chipping your teeth. I never managed it myself, but I’ve known others who mastered that skill. What’s odd is the instinct to hold onto the handlebars even as you’re headed into the faceplant.
There’s also a game where a kid who is alone on the seesaw makes it difficult for their partner to get on. If the first kid times things just right (and the other one just wrong), getting hit under the chin with forty-to-eighty pounds of seesaw seat (effectively) can cause severe bell ringing (and even unconsciousness, tongue severing, and tooth crunching). It’s nasty business.
Monkey bars are pretty safe unless you try to walk along the top, stepping from one rung to the next. Simply falling off to the side and breaking a bone is pretty common, but what’s much worse is slipping and straddling a bar. Just think about it: it’s like someone hitting you in the crotch with a metal bar that weighs as much as you do. On top of which (so to speak), you’re in no condition to get down at that point in any sort of controlled fashion. And yes, some kids do go for the slip-crunch-fall combo.
Zip lines weren’t playground equipment when I was a kid. Like monkey bars, this is another “hang on or drop” toy, but I’ve seen kids get a push from someone (or someones) so that they can really get up some speed, and when they hit the bumper at the end they hang on until their feet swing way up, then they let go and fall on their back or head.
I’ve seen any number of kids fall on these things, and heard a lot more stories beyond that. This is a good piece of equipment for actually breaking bones. One kid was sitting in a car-shaped structure while I was on crossing guard duty (sixth grade), and I turned just in time to see him slipping down butt first, folded in half, and hitting the back of his head on a succession of metal rungs. I hopped the fence into the playground, thinking that he had completely brained himself, but he was able to crawl out of the wreckage and stagger to the nurse’s office (with a little support from another student).
This rapid-fire smack to the back of the skull is a relatively unusual sort of injury. My dad came home from work one day with his head wrapped in a bandage turban. He had leaned back too far in an office chair and cracked his crown down a set of filing cabinet handles.
The asphalt surface of some playgrounds is no picnic either. Who wants to fall on a conglomerate of tar and sharp rocks? Speaking of which, if you run backwards on the playground, you can in fact trip and concuss yourself.
Sand is good around the equipment as it soaks up the blood. Which reminds me, have you ever been digging in a sandbox and found cat poop? Anymore, though, it seems like cat poop would be a blessing, considering that a few years ago I was walking barefoot through a sandbox at a local park and found a syringe, very fortunately (and uncharacteristically) before it stabbed me.
When you think about it, it seems like some kids are growing up with more exposure to bark on the playground that on actual trees. I don’t know why we called it “tanbark,” but the kids’ folk etymology was that it was because it turned your skin reddish if you rubbed it, at least when the stuff was made out of redwood. The thing is, I grew up in California, and actual tanbark there is made from certain kinds of oak, not redwood. So I don’t know. It’s just another way that the education system screws up kids for life, teaching them the wrong words for things.
When I was about five, my dad put together some planks and very short sawhorses to make a cool thing that we could run along and bounce. I recall hearing that he got locked in the lumberyard with the dogs when he went to get the boards.
When we were older, my parents got some old tires for us to play with in the backyard, which was pretty cool, and one of the things that you could do was stack them up and stand in the tower. Just as a little advice I will say that if the stack is going to fall over, it is best if it is falling in the way that your spine normally bends. And unless you want to pay for a mosquito breeder’s license, don’t let the tires sit around full of standing water.
It’s not the toys so much that are unsafe, but rather the interesting new uses to which thrillseeking children can put them that provide the danger.
If you imagine a giant hot-water bottle with a loop handle, inflated with air to form a sphere, then you pretty much have a good idea of what these toys look like. The idea was to sit on them, hold onto the handle, and bounce along. Problem number one was that if you bounced up the inclined driveway, you were as likely as not to be thrown onto your back if you were lucky, and onto your head if you were not. Problem number two was that by grabbing onto these handles (sometimes there were a couple of tubes instead of one loop), you could provide yourself with a formidable weapon. Two kids (um, possibly brothers) thus armed could pretty well bludgeon themselves silly before anyone realized that they weren’t playing anymore.
Jeff used to really hate being chased around the house by my ventriloquist dummy. (It wasn’t animated, I was holding onto it.) I don’t blame him. That thing gave me the creeps. I hated to open the closet. (Throw it on the fire... if you’re willing to risk the nightmare of being chased by a possessed incendiary doll.)
I remember lying on the floor next to his bed and waking him by reaching up with the doll and poking him in the shoulder. That was a really mean trick that I can guarantee I will never try again, because I never want another doll like that in the house. Evar.
I dropped down from hanging on a clothing rod and my foot landed on a diecast car. When I lifted my foot in pain the car came up along with it, because the sign on the milk truck had cut into my foot.
Speaking of toy cars, my mom used a brown Artex fabric paint pen to mark the top of each of our cars with either a ‘T’ or a ‘J’. Some enterprising youth (aka ‘J’) got hold of that pen and put curls on the bottom of some of those ‘T’s.
These are not hard to find if you remember to spell the name the right way. A Wizzzer is a gyroscopic top that you spin by grabbing the bulbous end and quickly dragging the hard rubber (maybe nylon) wheel-tip along the floor. You can either just let it spin on the floor on the metal nib that sticks out of the tip, or you can balance it on a string with a little accessory that sticks into a hole in the top’s top. You can also stack them, have an arena battle in a bowl, or use a trick stand to balance it with the axis of spin perpendicular to the floor. You can also stick a pencil nub in the end and let it draw while it is spinning upside-down. They used to make some models shaped like soda cans. The risk here is fourfold: 1) knuckles grating on the ground (where the driveway is a common culprit); 2) hair being grabbed (sometimes deliberate, but also accidental when a kid just wants to spin it on their head); 3) friction burns from holding the rubber tip against someone’s skin (pretty much always deliberate); and 4) destroying the surface of the floor or furniture or whatever it is you’re revving it on.
We had a helicopter whose rotor was driven by a coil that went to a motor housed in a battery-powered remote. I haven’t been able to find one of those to figure out what that toy might more commonly be called. While the spinning rotor would give it lift, the idea was still to swing it around in a circle so it would occasionally hit someone in the head or face.
This one is simple: thrillseeking children prefer games that involve the threat of injury.
This was a great game which combined all of the best aspects of hunting your friends through alleys and backyards, plus clubbing them to make them “it,” which provided some additional motivation not to be found; I mean, you can hide for hours in a doghouse in the backyard of a complete stranger if the alternative is getting whomped on with sticks and bats. The problem was that, according to the rules, the only way to get the hunters off your back was to climb this one really high fence at school. (It was against the rules to keep it guarded.) That gate was at the main school entrance, and there was only a very narrow clearance between the top of that gate and the hallway ceiling. The sooner you got there the better, because if you waited too long, the whole neighborhood had been caught and they were all out looking for you.
We played this game with a teenager from next door who would babysit us every now and again. The idea was that Jeff and I were supposed to pummel the piss out of him in an attempt to drag him to the ground.
Ah, what a game.
My dad used to chase us around the house while making this particularly bizarre face. The sheer terror of being caught was great.
Jeff insists that this wasn’t really a game.
Digging big holes in the backyard was just a fun thing to do in and of itself, but it became a game when, for example, we tore up the whole place while tracing gopher holes. We shot water down them to make the paths easier to follow, and the ground easier to tear up. As the whole back half of the yard turned into a mud pit, that naturally turned into a very sloppy war. It was great fun until my mom came out and let us know that we paid for water, then turned around and went inside.
Aargh. Guilt, guilt, and more guilt. It’s not the risk of physical injury that you have to worry about sometimes.
My mom’s dad used to advise me to only use the right tool for the job. As rules go, that one is pretty good, but it turned out to be a much righter tool for his life than for mine.
You see, he collected an amazing variety of tools from which to choose, and he was also working on jobs (such as high steel) that made the “right” tools readily available on the jobsite when he needed them. (If you’re building a skyscraper and your pneumatic hammer breaks down, it’s not like you’re going to hunt around for an alternative or “wrong” tool to secure the remaining rivets; you’re just going to find a different riveter. Or if the compressor is shot, you’re not going to run over to the park and swipe the blower from a bouncy castle.) He pursued a life that was symbiotic with conventional tool-job relationships, and the “right tool” rule served him well. The thing is, I’ve also been told about how many accidents (particularly head injuries) he survived, so maybe that rule was the only way that he could get at least some control over the situation. All that said, sometimes he went ahead and made the tool that he needed. All I really know is that by the time I knew him, he was very particular about the right-tool rule.
Now I should also tell you a bit about my dad’s dad (who wrote the Prologue), the one who had a machine shop, a patent for an alternative carburetor, and a house that he built on his own. His rule was, “Get a lot while you’re young.” (Real estate, you goon. He also used to turn his upper plate upside-down. Comedy gold, I tell you. Unfortunately, he passed away when I was just a kid. I wrote a dong about his “Colorful Language.”) My dad tells a story about driving him around to show off a car despite a known bug, namely: if you took a corner at high speed, the distributor cap could pop off, politely causing you to roll to a stop so you could more easily get out and hook it back up. When my dad went to re-cap, he saw that the graphite pin in the center (where the coil wire meets the rotor) had fallen out somewhere back along the road. That little carbon part is not something that you’re likely to be able to see if you retrace the path along which you coasted. But his dad just walked up and down the shoulder a bit, found a discarded flashlight battery, whittled down a replacement pin from the graphite rod that was inside, and off they went. (The right tool for that job would have been the penknife.)
My mom’s mom (I should continue) didn’t give me tool advice as such. Don’t get me wrong, she was also mechanically savvy, but (a) she knew she could leave that sort of thing to her particular husband, and (b) her style was more along the lines of wandering up while I was washing the dishes after school and saying (casually, of course, as if the topic were apropos of nothing at all), “You know, I remember back when I worked as a dishwasher. One day the owner of the restaurant complimented me for also washing the backs of the plates. I told him, ‘Of course, the backs get dirty too.’” And then she would wander off again, getting ready to start the vacuum just as soon as I was done drying the dishes (having made sure to wash the backs just in case she checked... which was all the more annoying because I had been washing the backs already). And no matter how I varied the room vacuuming pattern, I was somehow always done just in time to keep her from starting to fold the laundry. Now, in her mind, she was not only saving my mom from having to do those chores when she got home from work (noble), but also keeping me from growing up to be the lazy-assed bastard that I so longed to be (no bull).
So I still do my fair share of the dishes. And laundry. And so on. As it should be. (As my inner dilettante has someone roll in his grave for him.)
I never got to know my dad’s mom because she passed away while he was in college; however, I know that she was a tailor who owned and operated a dress shop, so she must have been tool-and-design inclined as well. I know that she eloped with my grandfather against her mother’s protests, which culminated in an old-fashioned, peasant Italian uppercut when her mom finally met the interloper. In my family, that story is entitled, “POW! (you son-in-law).” And I know that she used to cook eggplant, but only because I hear that my grampa would daringly rescue my father by sneaking it off of his plate. So I don’t know what sort of tool-use advice she might have given me, but I can appreciate her ruggéd individuality.
In light of all of this, I can only think that my parents got caught in the post-Depression white-collar drift. They are handy/crafty and do make stuff, they are definitely design-inclined, and my dad accuses my mom of chronically having multiple home-changing projects in play (which is true), but it’s not like we owned a construction company or anything. (Albeit my dad’s vision at one point was a family-owned-and-operated Postal Instant Press.) But whatever it was, it played into Jeff and I having a home repair business (for a while, at least).
Anyway, in contrast to the stability of the right-tool rule, “broad adaptation” is a definitive part of childhood exploration, including experimenting with the tool itself to figure out what it could or should be for. You can’t always tell just by looking at it, but guessing is a whole lot easier when you are familiar with whatever it is that the tool is supposed to be used on. For example, lots of medical instruments (and torture implements) look fairly mysterious until you know what the insides of a body are like.
In my current job as an Assistive Technology Pro, I usually find myself having to improvise because (a) much of my work is itinerant (away from my shop), (b) folks don’t tend to tell me everything that they need me to do before I get all the way into the classroom, and (c) I don’t want to haul around a whole trunkful (and then backful) of tools and materials. It almost always works out great, but every now and again I experience regret, and have no one to blame but myself. And to think, it only took me a few short decades to figure out that this is the perfect job for me: tinkerer.
So let’s talk about a few specific tools.
The plug on the microphone for my student’s assistive FM system needed to be replaced quickly. I ran out to a local electronics store and picked up the materials, but I didn’t happen to have my tools with me, and I was too lazy to drive the 2.5 miles to my workshop. (For those of you who prefer kilometers, that’s 2.5 miles.) So I was sitting in my car in the school parking lot, using a box cutter out of my roadside repair kit to strip some wires, when I was startled by a soccer ball bouncing off my windshield right in front of my face. I had sliced open my left thumb from the right corner of the nail to the joint, so I held the gash closed with pressure from my left middle and ring fingers while folding a stack of tissues to use as a bandage, then I wrapped the thumb and held it in my closed fist and drove myself to Urgent Care. One of the worst parts about a laceration is when the wound gets cleaned out, because it gets treated rather roughly, and to prepare for getting stitches you get shots in the wound. And while I am okay during the emergency itself, as soon as I have a chance to relax and imagine what’s going on (usually because I’m lounging around the waiting room), my BII phobia kicks in and I have to try not to pass out. That makes getting stitches kind of tricky.
(There’s another box cutter story that I put in the previous chapter because it is one of the few good examples I have of a thigh wound.)
This section on tools would feel peculiarly empty without at least a brief mention of the hammer, universal finger-masher that it is. And I’ve talked previously about hammers in regard to what body part got hurt (such as when my grandfather’s teeth got crunched, or Jeff clawed me in the head). But other than using it to make sparks and detonate caps, it just didn’t seem to be a go-to tool for experimentation when I was a kid. I was a taker-aparter, not a crusher-opener.
Is a zipper a tool? Well, (a) it keeps your clothes closed, and (b) it hospitalizes several men every day. (Hopefully not the same several men.) I am not making up that frequency. I’ve heard a few guys tell stories about this grisly event, and unlike just about every other injury in this book this is the only one where I think that they might be too embarrassed to have me reveal their names. In each case, these guys were little kids when it happened, so they were still getting the hang of it (so to speak), and they were rescued by a parent who simply got the kid calm (-er, anyway) and then suddenly yanked the zipper back down again. So it disturbs me to hear not only that there are grown men who manage to get themselves stuck (because they’re in too much of a hurry, or what?), but that they can only remedy the situation by resorting to a PRF (Professional Release Facility). Which means that there are some even greater number of grown men who do this to themselves and, because they take care of it on their own, don’t get counted in the statistics. I have no idea whether anyone has ever managed to injure themselves like this with a button fly.
And I fervently hope and pray that I have not tempted Fate just by writing about it.
One common kitchen tool injury is grating a knuckle or two, but one of the very most popular is slicing yourself when preparing foods (if of course you don’t count burning yourself on blisteringly hot tools such as the range burner, oven rack, broiler pan, wok, waffle iron, pot lid, and so on).
My friend Mark was in the kitchen preparing himself a snack, and he had no sooner skeptically responded to my warning by saying, “Bagel slicer? Who needs a bagel slicer?” than he lacerated himself. We briefly discussed whether or not that counted as irony, got him cleaned up, figured that the cut probably could use a couple of stitches, and drove him over to Urgent Care. While we were sitting there (and I was getting all relaxed and therefore woozy), a guy who had fallen through a plate glass window was dragged in by a couple of his friends. He was reasonably well blood covered, so I leaned over to Mark, sotto voce, “If you go back there now, the doctor is going to take one look at your cut and say, ‘You big baby!’” He agreed and we split to go buy a “hold the cut edges together” type of bandage. To this day, having survived the ordeal, he ritually spits on any notion of using a bagel slicer (or other bagel holder tool).
And given that dinnerware counts as tools, we should take into account all of the injuries that occur when washing dishes; for example, twice I’ve cut myself by trying to wash the inside of (what turned out to be) a flimsy glass, and I know someone who managed the same thing as the end result of being fascinated by how the glass deformed when he squeezed it. There are industrial versions of this sort of injury, of course, such as when my dad cut his hand while washing scientific glassware for a petroleum company.
And then there are the stories I hear (and wish I hadn’t) about garbage disposal injuries. Just as a general rule, you’d think that people should know enough not to use their eminently shred-able hands to unstick any whirling set of specifically sharp things. They should know that unsticking a stuck something will make it start, usually with the unsticker still in the way... at least for a moment.
And of course there’s the time that I absentmindedly almost electrocuted myself while fixing a motor on a mixer. But I must admit that’s a lot different than getting hurt while using a tool for something much more like its intended purpose, such as the more-than-one person who has cut their tongue by licking the beaters while they’re still on the machine... and turning.
Jeff and I constituted a two-person animal search-and-rescue team, constantly “followed” home by all manner of strays. There were a number of birds, lots of dogs (but not cats so much), at least one raccoon, and a Tupperware container (thank you Earl Tupper) in which we had rounded up some baby Sonora scorpions. (When we got back from our trip and my dad found out we had these, he tipped them onto the driveway to stomp them, informing us that the smaller ones are the deadliest.) To this day, when life just so happens to work out that I’m helping to rescue a stray that meandered across my path, I feel like it’s a sign that my life is on the right track.
You get lots of minor cuts and scrapes and so on when you’re working with animals, and there’s the occasional more serious accident, but only very rarely has an animal deliberately hurt me, and even in those couple of cases the wound was not really significant. That’s my safety record even after having worked with wild and exotic animals.
That aspect of my place in the world is important to me, and I don’t want it to change. Part of that desire comes from wanting to preserve the comforting sense of cultural continuity: I come from a line of animal lovers and breeders and trainers. As in palm reading, however, that line is only sometimes conventional and stable, forming a deep crease. (My mom was raised in her folks’ Cocker kennel. They won many awards, and one of their dogs made the cover of Life. The magazine, not the cereal.) At other times that line is unusual and changing, but it still helps to make a pattern, like an ‘M’ or a star or something. (My dad’s dad had a carnival tent featuring, “The World’s Biggest Alligator here today.” My mom tells a story about having to change my diapers in it, with the heat and the flies, presumably from the prominent reptile.) Growing up, I assumed that I would be a veterinarian. I watched all the right shows, read all the right books, met (not all) the right folks, and attended (two of) the right schools, only to learn when I was a sophomore that (a) my peculiar relationship with chemistry was going to get in the way, and (b) my BII phobia was not tempering even with continued exposure to vet surgery.
So, yeah, having a way with animals is a big deal to me, and I don’t have a whole lot of stories about my own personal injuries because this is an area of “mysterious sympathy” for me.
Jeff was skindiving when a sea lion poked its head out from the kelp. You know how you hold out your hand for a dog to sniff? Well, he did exactly that, purely out of family reflex, and the sea lion bumped his hand with his nose, as if sniffing. Now, why a sea lion would seem to sniff underwater, I don’t know. Maybe it also has family reflexes. Then again, maybe it was looking for fish. Anyway, when Jeff related the story about the reflex to another diver, the guy just responded, “Yeah, I know,” while holding up his three-fingered hand. It’s evidently not uncommon for folks to get bitten severely while treating seals and sea lions like domestic pets.
Which means that there are very likely all sorts of stories out there about people being wounded by sealife. Sure, I occasionally come across that material in the media (e.g., bit by a shark, stung by a jellyfish, jabbed by a rockfish, broken by an orca, and so on), but I don’t hang out with the kind of crowd that would tend to tell me those stories in person, so I have nothing to retell here.
Once I got locked in an enclosure with a lion (because it seems that sometimes volunteers don’t get added to the safety head count):
Lion: Wandering over with intent nonchalance, occasionally flehming, “Are you foe, friend, or food?"
Me: I rub his ears and scratch his tummy.
Lion: “Oh... wow. What was I saying? Nevermind.”
A lion’s mane (in particular) has a yellowish-orange oil in it that I find unpleasant (maybe just because I’m not a lioness), but there’s no way to keep it off of your fingers if you’re going to be petting them. And I don’t know if lions in the wild have that same oil, or just the ones that live in close quarters and don’t get bathed. It might be the remains of scent marking.
By the way, while lion cubs look all soft, their fur is rough. (The same goes for tiger cubs and so on.)
This is probably a good place to mention that I have a love-hate relationship with zoos, circuses, carnivals, and other animal venues. As Baba Dioum said (in 1968 to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature), “In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.” So, in light of that particular philosophy, when a facility treats its charges as kindly as possible under the circumstances, then I can rationalize the immediate need while still wanting to decrease the necessity itself.
One time I was playfully wrestling with a couple of tigers. (Big cats are my favorite.) One was lying across my body, and suddenly the other rolled over clockwise while wrapped around my right foot. They weighed over 500 pounds apiece, and I was still probably only about 140 (and, crucially, not a big ol’ tiger), so it was my ankle meat that gave way. I made a noise (first with my ankle, and then with my mouth), the tiger was contrite, and even though that was decades ago, my foot still sticks out a bit to the side.
Just in case you’re curious, tiger piss smells a lot lot lot lot (lot) like ammonia.
Just in case you’re also wondering, the worst kind of dung to deal with (IMHO) is bear. That smell can nauseate me like no other. I strongly prefer not to work with bears because while they can be trained, they can’t be tamed; that is to say, they can’t be trained to like people; however, I found out that they do like tiny breath mints.
Polar bears are huge and frighteningly fast. I was working with a guy who was hosing down a cage and playing a game with the bear. He would hold the nozzle up to the chain-link, and the bear would rush the fence and put its dinner-plate-sized paw up there, spraying water everywhere. The bear wandered off, seeming to tire of this game, so the guy actually put the nozzle into the cage just a bit. One white blur later and the bear was hauling the hose into the cage paw-over-paw, with such force that it broke off at the spigot. That, as they say, was the end of that.
The cages at this zoo (almost 40 years ago) used to be cinder block and chain-link with a cement walkway running along in front, plus a waist-high pipe guardrail (curved at the top to aim away from the cage) beyond that to keep the public back. The polar bear’s cage was at the end of one row, next to one of the gates that led into the back. I was standing on the guardrail, holding onto the back gate, and the polar bear would stand up with its back to the cage fence to get some scratching. I was doing this to demonstrate to a school tour just how tall the bear was. I was facing the cage (so as not to take my eyes off of the bear while I was touching it), and I heard from behind me, “Son... son...,” and it was in fact my dad. Now, my folks never visited me at the zoo, until of course I was doing something that looked dangerous to them. I climbed down, and he continued, “Son, I have clearly been a failure as a father. I taught you to take a jacket so you won’t get cold. I taught you to pee before you go. But I forgot to teach you not to pet the polar bears.” All I could say was, “Alright Dad, I get it, very funny,” but that’s never enough to stop the sarcasm (as my own children have learned, much to their dismay... “Tradition!” sings Tevye, and I shake my manly shimmy).
I was showing a group of kids around the zoo, and the black leopard was resting its paw on the back of my hand (because it could get its paw through the cage and it enjoyed a bit of company). This was a former pet, and quite tame. A flash photo startled it, however, and it extended its claws, jabbing me in the Hegu point. It just wriggled its claw loose and took off back into the cage. So that was just an accident.
One of my co-workers had a scar just about the length of his forearm. The gates in the backs of the cages were made of chain-link and pipe, and they would open and close with pulleys rolling on a wall-mounted frame. He went to slide a door open to let the cats out into the front, which requires grabbing a handle near the edge of the fence by the cinderblock wall, and a leopard (not the black tame one) got its paw and foreleg around that edge. Injury ensued. They ended up welding in another pipe to close the gap.
I was standing next to this same guy one day, out in the public area, when he suddenly started tearing off; naturally, I ran off after him. He had seen a young man with his coat sleeve wrapped around his arm, flipping the rest of the jacket at the leopard cage. Just as the leopard snagged the coat and started to reel the boy in over the guardrail, he got his arms around his waist. I grabbed on to act as another anchor, and we were able to hold the boy long enough that he could get his arm loose. But the coat was a goner. Better that than his throat.
Looking back, I’ve never had a problem with (non-human) apes or monkeys, which, all things considered, is probably just as well because monkeys can cause some really nasty wounds, and apes can just out-and-out maim and kill the heck out of you.
My first monkey memory is from when I was about 6, seeing an organ grinder’s capuchin at Knott’s Berry Farm run over and grab pennies out of Jeff’s pocket. The monkey had astutely observed that this is where Jeff kept getting them. After that, I only had sporadic monkey contact until I started working at the zoo. (Dang. Now I’m intrigued by the notion of sporadic monkeys.)
There was a blonde gibbon named Maxine who engaged in self-abusive behavior (biting her arm and pulling/peeling back the skin), but she quickly calmed down whenever she clung to me, grabbing onto my sheepskin jacket. Now, if I began to talk with someone, she would start in with the characteristic gibbonous whooping, but otherwise she was just quiet, looking around at people wandering by. The thing is, we got Maxine from a famous national zoo (where in comparison, Micke’s Grove was the smallest accredited American zoo at the time), and their people insisted that she must have started biting herself during the train trip. Months after I left, I read a recently-published book that talked about life in that big zoo, and it happened to mention a blonde gibbon who would bite her arm. Same name, same gibbon. So this famous zoo had gifted us with a psychologically disturbed ape whom they didn’t want to take care of anymore, then lied about her being healthy when she left their care. And there was nothing to be done about it except to be glad that she was now with people who wanted her.
So, let’s move on to bigger primates.
People don’t seem to realize how big a chimpanzee tends to be. An adult male might be well over five feet tall, and weigh in at around 150 pounds. And while the comparison isn’t straightforward, it’s not wrong to say in a general way that a chimpanzee is around four times as strong as a human. So this is not like some bonobo on BJ and the Bear, where someone is carrying a little ape on their hip; this is an animal that could, in contrast, easily carry you on their hip. So, if you happen to see one cozy up to a fence and evert its lips through the chain-link, don’t put your finger in its mouth. And, funny you should happen to bring it up, but yes, I did in fact work with someone who did precisely that. And yes, it was right after I told him not to. His stupidity prize was getting the flesh stripped off the end of his finger, mostly because he got startled and yanked his hand back. If he’d have been patient, that particular chimp would very probably have just let go.
Okay, I admit that I am in no position (yoga plow) to be judgmental about stupidity. That same chimp would rest with his back against the fence to get it scratched. If I scratched him up by his shoulder, you’d see his fingers slowly start to reach over from the front. And if I moved over to scratch his side, his fingers would pull back from his shoulder and start reaching around that side. Maybe he was just trying to touch my fingers, I don’t know, but I didn’t want to risk getting my hand caught in what might be a few hundred pounds’ worth of grip strength.
I’ll talk a lot more about apes in a later chapter, but I’d like to take a minute to address the physicality of some of their communication. Sometimes you’ll see a little gorilla romping around a patient silverback, and if that little one gets too pesty, the adult will grandly and fluidly bowl them over. It’s not aggressive, but it is very authoritative and physical, representing a clear meaning (i.e., “all-done patience”). I see that same kind of physicality in the early stages of communication development, and that can occur with a delay (i.e., at later ages) for some of the students with whom I work. It takes experience (both general and individual) to understand when such a person’s overhand swat bears (a) an actual aggressive intent to hurt you, and when instead (b) they are trying to communicate some other meaning in an energetic physical mode. You want to communicate with that person using a physical modality that they have some hope of understanding, while not having your gestures be misinterpreted as aggression by other observers, especially when some of them are other students who have compromised cognition. (So if you find yourself in that situation, best of luck.) Keep in mind that these are areas in which I have some amount of actual expertise, so I’m not just pulling these opinions out of my ear. Not in this paragraph, anyway.
As I stepped into a large turtle enclosure to rake it out, my footfall collapsed a tunnel. That unexpected drop threw me off balance, and each further step collapsed even more ground. Behind me, a plague of rats were shaking off sandy soil and running away. No big surprise, I suppose, that the place had turned into a rat warren, given that the soil was easy to dig in, dry, warm, often got showered in vegetables, and last but not least, was inhabited by rodent-oblivious turtles instead of musophagic predators. That was a real mess to get straightened out.
And there’s nothing quite like reaching into a covered tub of bird food only to have a rat suddenly run up your arm, leap off your shoulder, and scuttle down a drain. Unless of course it’s two rats.
I used to have a rat skull in my collection, and the dried brain would rattle around inside. I found it by the railroad tracks in Escalon on the way up to visit my mom’s folks in Sonora. There were a number of rat skeletons scattered around, and someone told me that it was probably due to poisons sprayed around the tracks to keep the weeds down and such. So, probably not part of an alien conspiracy, although that would be a great place for them to hide the mutilated bodies. (Although, when you think about it, maybe that’s why trains have cowcatchers, which, in case you’re curious, are called pilots. So, the plot thickens, much like my waistline.)
As I mentioned, we lived in a city with a number of excellent creeks, so that gave us good exposure to all of that sort of wildlife: guppies, catfish, crayfish, bluegills, frogs (tadpoles), turtles, and so on. When the creeks would start to run dry, pools would remain behind to make catching these much easier (urban tide-pooling), although you did have to watch out for fish hooks, glass shards, jagged metal bits, and other garbage in the mud. (My folks more than got their money’s worth out of those tetanus boosters.) And while catfish have a hollow dorsal ray that can stick you pretty good (and in some species is venomous, although rarely deadly), and it’s no fun to be pinched by a crayfish or bitten by a turtle, for the most part these animals are all harmless. Other than the seasnake, California has no venomous water snakes, so that was never a threat either.
This means that all of my stories along these lines are relatively bland, such as catching a couple of buckets’ worth of tadpoles with Carl (who has known me since kindergarten), only to have them all die in his garage (likely because the oxygen ran out). Or there’s the one about watching my grampa slam a catfish’s head onto a nail sticking up from a two-by-four so he could prep it out in the garage. Or finding a crayfish that had a ball of eggs held under its tail. Or using marine adhesive to help a turtle with a cracked shell. (I’ve heard that you can also use denture adhesive similarly, which maybe has something to do with one brand being called Seabond.) In answer to your question, yes, frogs sometimes do pee on you when you’re holding them. I also remember cottonmouths in North Carolina, leopard frogs in Waterloo, and increasing numbers of nutria in various locations. So the explorations here did not result in entertaining injury, but played well to satisfying curiosity.
Despite auspicious beginnings (i.e., the diaper-changing thing in my grampa’s alligator tent), I haven’t had a whole lot to do with reptiles. I’ve found loads of them, such as skinks when moving a woodpile, or bluebellies and garter snakes all over the place, but there’s no real story there.
One exception was when I was playing with a yellow lab, hiding down on all fours and romping through some really high, dry grass. I charged through to a rustling sound in front of me and surprised a rattlesnake. It wasn’t coiled, so I didn’t get a particularly nasty bite, just a small nick on my collarbone. I still have a rattle from a snake that my grampa killed up in Sonora, where they’re fairly common, but mostly what I saw up there were just kingsnakes.
In college a few of us drove up to Lake Berryessa just for a day out, stopping at a part of Putah Creek where the water was running fairly low. One of the guys (from Hawai’i) asked what to do if he saw a snake. I said, “Well, just say something significant, like, “Snake! Snake!” So he immediately said, “Snake! Snake!” I rewarded his eager rendition with, “Yes, perfect, just like that.” “NO!” he said, pointing at a scaly wriggler with repeated vigor, “SNAKE! SNAKE!” Which I naturally thought was hilarious. (I don’t use that word very often; the whippersnappers seem to be using it as a synonym for “funny.” It’s a natural process of word inflation.) I forget which person I handed the snake to, but I remember they got cloaca-ed. We took it home, bought a mouse to feed it, but it wasn’t interested in eating, so we released the snake in a remote place and gave the mouse to a young woman who accepted it as a pet. We named it “Artos” (NT Greek) because (a) he looked like a little loaf of bread, and (b) it sounded like the name of a m(o)usketeer. Unfortunately, I think that Artos might have died of ear mites (which is evidently not an uncommon problem among mice sold for food).
When I was only about three-to-four years old, we lived in an area of new construction with a large field behind our house. (I could climb over the fence into the field, but not get back because the rails were all on the inside.) The problem was that the work was chasing so-called vermin into the house, and the traps that my parents set were catching big spiders as often as mice. I saw one such spider on the front porch, and I recall it looking pretty big to a kid my size.
I’d play at part of the construction site down the street with some other kids and throw small grasshoppers into the black widow webs just to watch them come out. When I was about eight, I watched my grampa torch some black widows that were living under the back stairs at their Sonora house. Skip ahead to my early twenties, and I was disturbed to find that my bare feet had chased a black widow out of the toespace under a bathroom cabinet in my friends’ Tustin townhouse (so I squashed it with a plunger and then went out to their garage to subject a few more to traumatic compression with a big ol’ trash can). And then about a decade ago, in Creswell, I experienced the thrill of finding a few when (with my bare fingers) I lifted the iron cover off of the sump pit in my basement. And of course we found a few more as we (cautiously) pulled stuff out of that basement to move house.
I know that some spider bites are extremely nasty (like that of the brown recluse), but I have only met one person who was healing up from that sort of necrotizing damage. I’ve only ever had smaller spider bites (from poking around in attics and crawlspaces and such), and those are bad enough as it is. And I can’t remember a single time that I was happy to find out that I had crushed a spider on my pillow with my face.
Bee and wasp stings are a very common source of stories (particularly when associated with allergies), and they seem to be most amusing to the unstung observers, especially if the victim got stung in the butt or something. (I do not envy naturists in this regard.) Myself, I’ve been lucky in that I’ve only been bee stung a couple of times or so, once by barefoot stepping in the park, and once when my grampa swatted one on my head.
San Diego was the first place I lived where cockroaches were an issue. I put down a sticky box trap, but in the morning I couldn’t stand the sound of scrabbling inside. I felt too bad for them being stuck and just waiting to die, so I stopped using it. I caught a big one in the kitchen and released it, then caught another the next day likewise, and on the third day I painted a green stripe on it just to see if it was the same one that kept coming back. It was. Then one day, when a pot holder fell behind the stove, I found out that there was no floor behind it; the holder just dropped through a big rectangular gap straight down into the crawlspace. I think that’s where the snake must have come from. So I ended up covering that hole just for good measure, and the roach (and snake) problem pretty much went away.
In my life, I haven’t had nearly as much to do with birds as with other types of animals; nevertheless, I was able to dredge up some material, but nothing really from childhood.
In high school, my friend Howard and I were walking out to the football field to practice some swashbuckling. (We had been taking fencing classes at the community college, partly in relation to our interest in the local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism.) I was telling him about my family’s odd relationship with animals, getting a somewhat skeptical response (which was not so unusual, considering what a liar I used to be), when a cockatiel suddenly decided to land on me. That’s just how my life goes (which people also don’t believe, at least not until they live with me for a while).
At the zoo I learned that when I went to clean the owl cage, I should open the door, wait a moment while the owls tried to poop-bomb me, and then step in and clean the cage. (Again, I am telling you these stories not for their universal, timeless, thrill-a-minute value, but because they inform our experience of interpersonal relationships as we get older. You might be an owl, or maybe you will find yourself dating one.)
The juvenile vultures at the Raptor Rehabilitation Center would stand on my feet, riding leg lifts up and down while pulling on my shoelaces. Then there was the time that I backed into an empty cage only to hear an unexpected barn owl SCREEEECH behind me; it turns out that the whole “blood running cold” thing is not just a figure of speech. There was a lot more cage cleaning, of course, including the leftover yolk that came out of the (dead) chicks that were used as feed. That’s when I realized that the yolk is what the embryo feeds on during development, and what it likely continues to use after hatching, at least in part until it runs out. I wasn’t able to eat eggs for a long time after that.
So, where does this supply of chicks come from? Well, one Halloween (1981) I drove a pickup out to an egg farm to receive a load of them. The farm only needs a few roosters, you see, so the sexers toss the male chicks into big garbage cans. As the cans fill up, the chicks on the bottom suffocate, then they tip that can upside-down into another one to suffocate the rest. I took the cans and poured them into the back of the truck on flats, covered (and weighted down) with panels of dry ice. The Sacramento Zoo would store them in their freezer in exchange for part of the load. The thing is, five of the chicks revived on the way out to the zoo. I didn’t know what else to do with them, so I put them in the glove compartment with some gloves (what else) to keep them warm and out from under foot. When I got back to the Center, the director told me that they were my problem, so I tucked them into my sweatshirt and walked them back to my off-campus dorm. People were happy to get them with their Halloween candy; after all, in an ag/vet college town, folks have lots of animals in general plus atypical pets (e.g., three-legged dogs, pigs in wheelchairs, and so on). I kept one chick for a short while (named Macbeth, just in case he turned out to be a Lady), but he died of what I suspect was brain damage. (Mine, if not his, despite my most conscientious efforts.)
For what it’s worth, my favorite birds are corvids. The black ones.
I don’t think this counts as irony, but I don’t really have any good literal fish stories (other than the catfish mentioned above). For me, all pet fish are just an experiment to see how long they’ll live with regular care.
Writing about all of my dog stories is just too daunting a task to face, and I’m sure it would get boring for you, so like a deranged colorist I’ll just hit some highlights.
For a long time we had a Shepherd-Lab mix named Scooter, and while I do have stories about him, none of them really involve thrillseeking (except for the one that makes up much of the next chapter). The rather general exception might be our getting him to chase us around and play serious tug-of-war with our clothes (not a parent-pleasing activity), where there were inside and outside versions of this game. The way that our house was set up, you could run laps that went: kitchen, entry hall, living room, dining room, then kitchen again. The kitchen had a slick linoleum floor that Scooter did not often try to run across because of the futile clickety-clacking. (It seems like vet hospitals are set up in this same way to help prevent escapes.) So we could get him to chase us, and then when he would reverse direction at one end of the kitchen (to run back and catch us coming out the other end), we would reverse direction in the kitchen to avoid being caught. The excitement came in with “sacrificing the brother.” When reversing directions in the kitchen, the one in front became the one in back, and if the one in front slowed down just enough, sometimes Scooter could be enticed to actually try to make the kitchen run, grabbing onto the pantleg of the hinder brother and taking him down. The outside version was in the backyard, which had a front part (lawn) separated from a back part (usually dirt, sometimes vegetable garden, and in one instance a mud pit) by a wall of ivy growing over a long wooden fence. For whatever reason, Scooter preferred to tear back and forth along the lawn rather than tend to go around the ends, and we could never be quite sure whether he’d have followed us or be waiting for us to corner. So again, sacrificing the brother was a crucial tactic.
Ranger was a very intimidating German Shepherd who would guard the zoo grounds at night. Having worked there for only a couple of weekends, I didn’t know that they even had a dog, much less one on patrol. So, one morning when I showed up before anyone else did and (naturally) climbed the gate to start working, I was absolutely not expecting to see a vicious dog charging at me. Maybe it was because I didn’t try to escape, but we just ended up playing for a while, then he followed me around while I started hosing down waste. When a coworker finally arrived to unlock the gate (and Ranger tore over to bark savagely at him), he seemed puzzled (and perhaps disappointed) that I wasn’t in the “bitten trespasser” category, and was somewhat annoyed that I was equally puzzled by his puzzlement. You know, sometimes I see a driver performing a particularly reckless maneuver and think to myself that they have probably never been in a serious enough accident to truly understand what that feels like. The car buffers them from so much of the sensation of the road that they aren’t getting the feedback needed to trigger more cautious behavior. Some people have said similar things to me about how I have led a sheltered life by not having been occasionally torn to bloody bits by an animal.
My dad eventually settled in to being resigned to the number of animals that would follow us home, but I think that he didn’t entirely believe that we weren’t dragging them. Then he came home from work one day and said, “Boys, could you give me a hand out here?” He had seen a Vizsla cavorting in traffic, so he stopped the car to let the dog climb in. We gave him just the right amount of shit for having been a doubter.
It just happens.
We didn’t have cats when I was growing up, and in fact we didn’t have any permanent mammal pets until I was about ten years old (other than a red-haired guinea pig named Fluffy). I think that we weren’t “not getting a cat” so much as we were “waiting to get a dog,” which I think was dependent on such things as our settling into a house where we knew we were going to stay for a while, and Jeff and I becoming more help than hindrance with a pet (especially considering how much work the two of us already represented for our parents).
Which means that I don’t have very many cat stories. Yes, there are now plenty of videos posted of a cat taking ill-considered risks, but the stories that I hear from people either tend to be ho-hum (which I have read costs extra), or they fall into the “animal abuse” category. Those are very disturbing to hear when kids are telling them at school, and ill treatment of animals is a big red flag for children and societies. You know that’s a line that I’m never going to cross; I’m never going to put an animal at risk out of curiosity or for other thrillseeking pursuits (I don’t even allow animals in the car without a carrier or harness), and I don’t like stories where animals get hurt. (I clearly have no problem with stories of human animals getting hurt when it’s their own damn fault.) So, because I didn’t grow up around a cat, I have little experience with the predicaments that they get themselves into without human help, but I’ll give you what little I’ve got.
I was living with a woman whose cat (Sidney, a Ragdoll mix) refused to have her kittens unless she could have them directly into my hands (first-time mother). If I started to walk away from the box, she would get agitated and try to follow me, but if I came and sat by the box and then put my hands out, she would lay back and start to deliver. This was the same cat whom I mentioned in the previous chapter in regards to crotch injuries.
There was also that one time that my family came home and, upon investigating a pitiful mewing, we found Pesto (a Burmese so-named by Camrin due to his pestiness) dangling by his collar behind the fridge, where he had slid after jumping up on top from the counter (as evidenced by scattered top-of-the-fridge stuff).
And I think that’s it. You’ll just have to rely on internet videos, stand-up comedy routines, syndicated comic strips, and greeting cards for your cat fix.
The main problem with thrillseeking in vehicles is not the speed itself, but rather the sudden lack of it; the more you achieve, the greater the impact at the loss. There are all sorts of childhood stories around such events as stopping a runaway bike by crashing into a fence or a parked car, braking a downhill skate against a sign pole, skateboard separation splats, and then of course the numerous sledding and skiing injuries where I find it difficult to understand why someone wouldn’t rather ditch into the snow than run into a tree. There’s probably a very good reason for that choice, but, as a non-skier myself, I have no idea what it is. (By the way, a ski lift counts as a vehicle for the purposes of “falling off” stories.) I suppose that part of the reason is that few people crash either severely enough to anticipate the real risks, or often enough (other than stunt or racing professionals, or maybe roller derby athletes) to be in a position to train their reflexes to try for the less traumatic deceleration options.
Some of those stories can be entertaining because the victims don’t get hurt too badly, and it is fun to hear them recreate their panic and excitement; however, as they start to get past childhood, people tend to move on to more powerful vehicles, whether engine-powered (e.g., motorcycles, cars, planes, rockets, boats, trains, jetpacks, and so on) or not (i.e., hang gliders, parachutes, hot-air balloons, bobsleds, and wingsuits). In that sense, vehicles such as ATVs and mini-bikes are like adolescent gateway drugs. As in all other pursuits, the most dangerous part of the learning curve is when a driver knows enough to feel competent and comfortable (and so lets their guard down to rely somewhat on automaticity), but has yet to understand how much they have left to learn. If they’re lucky (or atypically attentive), they’ll Nietszche through before their hobby gets all Darwin on their ass.
I’m not fond of most driving-for-thrills-sake stories because (unlike tales about skating injuries and so on) high-risk driving can hurt people beyond the actual idiot behind the wheel. Thinking more about that revealed a rule that I didn’t know I had, which is that my tolerance (and even pursuit) of thrillseeking is very (Oliver Wendell) Holmesian, in that I don’t think it’s right for me to endanger other people’s noses (respective and collective) with my risky arm swinging. Yes, there were plenty of times when I put other people at risk, but that was because I was too stupid to accurately take their well-being into account in my risk assessment, not because I was too self-centered to care what happened to them at all. A good vehicular example of that is related in the story entitled, “The Bridge of His Nose.”
In any event, when you do lose control of your vehicle you tend to aim where you’re looking, which is why so many crashes tend to end up against a feature in the landscape rather than careering off into some relatively safe flat place. So if you find yourself going off the road (it is to be hoped rather than out over a cliff or something), drag your eyes away from the tree (or utility pole, fire hydrant, farmer’s market, house, pedestrian, armadillo, and so on) and stare at some relatively blank area of the field or sidewalk or whatever.
And don’t take your hands off the tiller. Too many of these stories deal with a kid arcing heavily into the ground after releasing the handlebars and hitting a rock (pole, mime, pothole, marmot, crack in the sidewalk, root, piece of cheese... you name it). And it gets no better with advancing driver age. The exception might be when you’re flying off of your bike anyway, and you let go so that it doesn’t land on you.
Here’s one that wasn’t my fault, at least not as a driver. We had driven out to an oak grove to load the back of a dump truck with some branches that had fallen off in a big storm, then climbed up into the bed for the drive back to the zoo. (We were going to put the branches into the primate cages to give them something more to do.) The notion was that we wouldn’t fall out of the truck bed because we were standing in among the branches. A problem arose because the tailgate was down, which meant that we would probably be swept out onto the road (or maybe only be impaled by fragments) as the massive oncoming truck clipped the branches that were hanging over into its lane. Rather than either of the trucks slowing down, the drivers just blew their horns at each other, which of course added to the frenzied air as we tried to wrestle the branches high enough that they wouldn’t get smacked. Just in time we got them propped up enough to clear, but not by much.
Sometimes the need for speed is accomplished au naturel. Well, sans vehicle anyway. My grandparents’ house in Sonora was built on a slope, and out by the road the quartz-studded red clay was exposed. It felt great to run down that hill as fast as you could go (or, as Jeff prefers to call it, “balls out,” which is one of those figurative phrases that does not bear up well to literal scrutiny, at least not in terms of uncomfortable mental imagery). The idea was to fling your feet out in front of you as fast as you could in a desperate attempt not to fall, because if you did, then gravity would obligingly shred your knees and elbows along the quartz. (So yeah, any actual “balls out"-ness would have exceeded even my childhood assessments of risk.)
Of course, there are also non-speed vehicle stories, such as when my grandmother drove me out to the zoo early one morning through the thick tule fog (where visibility quickly swirls from nothing to a few hundred feet and then back again). I sat on the hood of her sedan to snoop out oncoming traffic so she could make a (relatively) safe left-hand turn across 8 Mile Road (without sliding me onto the asphalt). She knew about cars, having been one of the first women in California to own a (non-residential) garage, but my grandfather had done most of the driving over the years, so I suspect that she might have been operating with outdated sensibilities about contemporary car performance and so on, and I was not yet old enough to legally drive, so I didn’t know enough to protest. Even had I known better, I wouldn’t have been inclined to turn down a fun ride like that.
As a kid, if I were eating at a friend’s house I’d take whatever they offered me, no matter if it were lotus root, gefilte fish, blood sausage, tripe, tongue, or canned tomato soup made with some milk in it. (Such a strange food custom.) I ate raccoon that my mom prepared (with rice) from a carcass given to her by the dad of my friend Bertram (of the aforementioned lotus root and tomato soup). My college roommates persuaded me to eat foods that were well outside of my cultural ken, such as thousand year egg (which I actually enjoyed in a “once or twice in a lifetime” kind of a way), pickled duck’s feet (which appeals to my inner periosteum stripper), and chicken gizzards and hearts (which proved to be a good TV-watching snack). They even got me to try the occasional delicacy that was not poultry based, such as boiled spleen, but I had to stop in dismay as the first bite decayed in my mouth. And of course I’ve eaten all sorts of other unfamiliar dishes at restaurants, and picked up various odd treats at local “ethnic” markets, but I never know how authentic any of that really is. So I like to take some risks with foods, but I definitely have limits.
For example, I balk at foods like eggplant (and any other representatives of the corpse food group), crustaceans in the shell (as the crunching exoskeleton gives me sympathy pains), and molluscs (for both of those reasons). The only time that I can remember actually gagging while eating was when a bite of cheese cutlet turned out to be eggplant parmesan, which would have more honestly and mercifully been advertised as, “rotten zombie snot glob with rind and seeds.” Some folks have tried strenuously to convince me that eggplant is delicious if properly prepared (although why their emotional investment in my conversion, I have no idea), but I have strong reservations about the whole “properly prepared” thing. Their assertion is no doubt true, but as my friend Dave says, that preparation (in our case) would have to involve one part eggplant per billion parts ice cream. And yes, I enjoy other types of squash, so this is not some form of cucurbitophobia rearing its unattractive head.
And the only context in which I would ever eat balut is if that were the only way to save the life of a loved one.
When you add up all of that sort of experience, it still means that I haven’t tried hardly anything at all in the wide world of foods, not given all of the ingredients and dishes that I see listed in the weird food blogs. Which means that while I have eaten some things that are not part of my cultural core, I’m really not a “put just anything in my mouth” risk taker.
That said, growing up I was always mildly hacking familiar recipes, such as adding instant potato flakes and cheese to ramen (which melts into a mass that has admirable “shovel factor”), spicing up cinnamon-sugar sandwiches with mustard, or layering marshmallows and sliced cheese on pb&j. I haven’t made some of my childhood recipes in ages (which is just as well), but curry tuna sandwiches are still a favorite. And so far, no matter how far I’ve gone with a recipe, I have yet to barf myself with any of my creations.
When college vacations rolled around, my friend Doug liked to celebrate (in part) by getting a couple dozen mixed donuts. One time we were making our selections, and the exchange with the counter operator went like this:
Me: “...plus two of the chocolate old fashioned, and what kind are those?"
Donut Guy: “Chur.”
Me: “What?"
Donut Guy: “CHURRR.”
Me: “Okaaay... we’ll take two.”
Which made perfect sense to me since it fit my explorative Life Philosophy (and it wasn’t like I was going to make any further headway with my miserable Spanish anyway), but it struck Doug as fit-of-giggles funny. But, I mean, what was the risk? At worst all that would happen is that we would find out that we were not fond of “chur.” (It turned out that chur was a perfectly good thing to put on a donut.)
In looking back, the guy might have been trying to say sugar. I don’t know if that’s true, but it does make me wonder where the word “churro” comes from. It might be related to the Spanish use of the word “churro” to mean “coarse,” because the outside of the pastry is rough. There is also some opportunity for folk etymology here since “churro” is a colloquialism for “attractive.”
When my dad was a young man, he and his best friend Jim were taking a long bus trip back east to do some stock car racing. His advice based on that experience is as follows: if you have potato salad remaining as part of the packed food towards the end of your journey, wait until it is light enough to see it before you eat it, just in case it needs a shave.
To the degree that not everyone knows this (as proven by the fact that this story exists), I think that it is important to mention it one more time here: do not eat rhubarb leaves. They are poison (oxalic acid). My brother’s friend once made up a couple of great salads from some greens that he found in our fridge and brought one out to Jeff so they could have lunch by the community pool. Fortunately, this guy was the type of person who tended not to put stuff back, so my mom noticed the rhubarb on the counter when she got home and was able to get them both to the hospital. In case you don’t know what rhubarb looks like, imagine very big celery with red stalks and deep green leaves. In case you do know what rhubarb looks like, imagine being immensely rich and happy. (You might as well have some sort of reward for being so smart.)
The thing is, there are all sorts of interesting fruits and vegetables out there, and it’s fun to be spontaneously adventurous, but it pays to do at least a little bit of homework. Even the common potato can be plotting against you: never eat any part that has turned green, even if you cook it. (You can eat the rest after you’ve removed the green parts.) If you plan to use red kidney beans or lima beans that are raw, read up well on them first, because just a few can kill you (and not just from the lima bean flavor). I’ve heard that raw quince can be toxic, but I don’t know about that for sure.
Thoroughly poking around your environment is one of the purest forms of exploration, and a vital part of thrillseeking. There are all sorts of trouble that you can get into just by being where you’re not supposed to be (without getting all existential and “Meaning of Life"-y about Being where you’re not supposed to Be). As described at the top of this chapter, you go where you’re not supposed to go so you can learn something that you wouldn’t otherwise have had the opportunity to know.
I have always wanted to go one step further than I am allowed (and from there take just one more), and in fact “not being allowed” is often the very thing that makes me want to go that far in the first place. I’ve taken jobs just to find out what was behind the “Employees Only” door, and computer game cheats that let you walk through walls into weird development areas and so on are my absolute favorite. I love tours that are run behind the scenes of anywhere, which is true of enough other people that Disneyland can charge a premium for a simple walk through their utilidors. But that is not enough for me: even if I’m touring a place that is already fascinating at the allowed level of access, what I really want to see is in the closets, cupboards, utility panels, and all of those other mundane-but-hidden places. I wouldn’t have stolen Fizzy Lifting Drinks (even if they are amazing) or sold off my gobstopper, but I definitely would have wanted to see what was down the Oompa Loompa tunnels across the chocolate river in the candy garden. I would want to see what Wonka kept in his desk, particularly his junk drawer.
It can be hard figuring out where to put climbing stories. There are ones about climbing a tree and getting stuck (or otherwise being afraid to come down), but then there’s often another part about falling (especially if the branch breaks) and getting bludgeoned, broken, speared, and the like. Rock-climbing stories are similar, but unlike trees they don’t tend to be built like natural ladders, so I’ve heard many more tree stories about a kid who worked themselves incrementally way up out of their league than I have rock stories of a child finding themselves partway up Half Dome (or halfway up Part Dome). The greater likelihood with that kind of story is that they will be partway up or down a cliff (where the rocks are like natural stairs, or they started at the top and slipped), often with a tide coming in.
Climbing fences is different in a couple of important ways. First of all, if you’re climbing a tree, you’re usually just trying to get to another part of that tree (unless you’re trying to get onto a balcony or something); in contrast, if you’re climbing a fence, it’s usually not to look around from the top of that fence. (The Great Wall of China might be an exception.) You climb it to get to a place on the other side. Second of all, fence climbing can lead to body parts, clothing, and/or fashion accessories getting hooked on the chain-link at the top (which is bad enough if you get stuck, and more thoroughly bad if you don’t realize it before you try to jump down), and it only gets worse if the fence is topped with spikes, spike strips, or various types of pokey and slashy wires. And then electrified.
But one of the fun things I used to do as a kid was climb onto the roof of the house and jump off onto the lawn. That lasted until I got heavy enough that gravity created a kicked-in-the-groin feeling upon impact. And exposure to that kind of activity can lead to parachuting, which is in a whole other category of risk taking.
As kids we also used to climb onto the roof at school, mostly just to poke around, but sometimes we would find sports equipment and other interesting stuff up there. You wanted to make sure not to trip because the roof was covered in tetrahedral gravel that would embed itself in your elbows. Once I climbed up there so I could jump down between two portables and get an errant basketball, only it hadn’t occurred to me that I was going that route precisely because the ends of that space had been fenced with a grille to keep us kids out of there, and once inside I wasn’t able to get back out. I’m still in there to this day.
I’m going to take a lateral step here and talk about playing hookey, since we’re on the topic of school and being where you’re not supposed to be. I took off from school right after recess with Ricky for no reason other than mutual bad influence. A couple of sixth-grade yard duty helpers tried to stop us, but I don’t think that they really had their hearts in it. We went over to the creek and park, then headed to my house to just sort of hang around and talk about the feeling of freedom. Then I noticed that I had lost my glasses, and the feeling of being in trouble set in, not because of cutting, but because of the cost to replace them. Fortunately, my retired fourth-grade teacher lived in a house that backed onto the creek and she saw us goofing around, so she knew whose glasses she found on her walk and returned them to the school with a note. Similarly, a friend told me about his mom asking him for a school project that he had lost along the way while cutting. Generally speaking, my advice is not to leave a trail of evidence.
Going anyplace where you are massively insignificant can end up being a bad idea, but admittedly you only have just so much control over this situation; in other words, while you can’t help being somewhere in the universe, swimming out into the ocean is a choice. There are predators many times your size with vastly greater numbers of immensely sharper teeth, sharp rocks to get crushed against, poisonous fish to step on, and rip tides. So that whole “thinking twice” thing might serve you well here.
Then again, you can also get in trouble in a regular old pool. Before I had learned how to swim, I was bobbing along where the shallows suddenly sloped into the deep end, and I found myself having to push up from the bottom over and over just to breathe while at the same time trying gargle out a cry for help while waving my arms about. If only it were easier for the poolside crowd to differentiate earnest drowning (remember him?) from a desperate bid for attention. And this was at a family gathering, so the adults were more interested in talking with each other than watching out for the kids in the pool. Fortunately, my mom noticed my plight and was able to haul me out.
Sometimes being where you’re not supposed to be is not just a matter of where, but when.
I had done some filming with some friends in an old oak grove for a high school project, and had dropped back by the following weekend to pick up some of the props that we had left behind. It wasn’t threatening to rain or anything, but I slowly found myself struggling painfully and very muzzily to sit up from lying flat on my back, with no reliable memory of what I had been doing just before that. I’m not sure exactly what happened next, but I have a vague memory of having to roll onto my front to push myself up. The problem is that I don’t know if that’s really what I did, or if that memory was just my brain making up plausible stuff for me as I tried to make sense out of what happened in the days to come. It’s like my memory of the flash, where I don’t know if my brain is just adding that for my benefit.
I’ve since read descriptions by people who have been hit by lightning, but none of it really matches what I felt. Mostly, I just don’t remember as much as they do about it. I wasn’t in immense pain (but I stung all over), and I wasn’t running around all amped up and terrified (or lying there burned, broken, or paralyzed, which is good because I was far away from people). I was just trying to shake the fuzzy mental feeling (which I hate), trying to pull myself together and figure out if I needed help. I don’t know how long it took me to collect myself, but it was probably not even a full hour of ramping up to function reasonably well and have some real thoughts about what happened. I do remember trying to figure out if there were going to be a storm (there wasn’t), and looking at a metal-tipped wooden prop spear and wondering if I had picked it up and been struck. But I couldn’t have been hit that directly, or I’d have been horribly injured or dead. And while I hadn’t been under a tree, there were plenty around, so maybe I just got a peripheral zish. Some of them had been previously blasted, but I wasn’t going to be able to recognize fresh damage even if I got closer, and I certainly wasn’t going to walk over there and risk getting s’mored.
So maybe there is another explanation (like a very strange seizure or something), but I’m pretty sure that I conducted some amount of zappage. Good thing I wasn’t out there waving Occam’s Razor over my head.
Stockton is built on a delta, so there are sloughs and levees woven in with the roads, which translates into lots of bridges. When I was in the six-to-eight range (and Jeff two-and-a-half years younger), “under the bridge” was a good place to play when the water was low in Mosher Slough, and there was a really good bridge on the way to (or from) Loch Lomond Park. The downside, of course, was that you could get stuck in the mud (which would be bad if they released a bunch of water while you couldn’t get out), or you could lose track of time in the perpetual twilight. My mom once herded Jeff home with a shingle-paddling (well, he was scrambling, and she would catch up every couple of strides with a whack) because he hadn’t noticed it getting dark beyond the freaking-out-with-worry curfew, which was made all the worse because it’s hard to hear your name being called when you’re under the bridge.
Fivemile Slough runs along the north side of Swenson Park, having emerged from under Alexandria Place through a pipe. We lived just down the street from mid-fourth grade on, and when we were playing in the creek we would sometimes just crawl through that pipe. Swenson Park had a golf course, which was another place we weren’t supposed to be, but we could climb the fence or wade around the end that projected into the creek and spend an afternoon whacking a few balls around.
I’m no longer fond of crawling through sewers, under houses, into attics, and that sort of thing. It was different when I was much younger, smaller, and stupider. Now if I have to climb around in a tight space, I worry about getting stuck, slimed, bitten, and all sorts of other stuff that I would rather not get.
When a teacher in one of Camrin’s high school classes asked each student to volunteer a distinguishing personal characteristic, Camrin offered up having visited the sewers of six different mythical worlds. (That counts as being where you’re not supposed to be.)
Mysticism is another type of poking around (no matter my audience’s personal perspective on its realness). You’re developing a fairly direct, personal relationship with one or more supernatural entities, and that can be associated with a sense of what exists behind The Veil that hangs between us and them.
I used to be a card reader, but I gave it up because I came to believe that it is a talent that people should learn to develop for their own benefit, which they are far less likely to do if I let them rely on me for that function. I don’t think that I should be standing between them and that direct experience.
There are two common explanations for why card reading works (as well as other systems like it):
Supernatural: In this version, there are supernatural entities (let’s say “spirits”) who use the cards to give us answers to our questions. If you were to attend a truly supernatural reading, and if that reading were influenced by a spirit who actually had your best interests at heart (which is prey to the same sort of dynamics as learning to trust natural entities), then the reader would be able to give you an answer to your question that was clearly applicable to your problem (where you would have to determine whether or not you trusted the reader as well). But there should be no good reason that the spirit couldn’t either communicate more directly with you through your own cards, or through other divinatory items, or just through some sort of feelings (i.e., thoughts, emotions, or other sensations).
Natural: Our way of thinking/feeling about things becomes limited by various types of learned helplessness. We can believe that we’re looking all the way past the horizon, when in fact all we’re seeing is the lip of the bowl from the bottom. We lose sight of the fact that there is a world outside of the bowl, and the only way for us to get over the edge is to add energy to our system and really shake things up until we fly up over the lip. But because we’re suffering from the helpless limitation, we’re not likely to be able to see what we need to do to accomplish that energizing. We need an outside source of inspiration. We need a chaotic story generation machine, something that will present a tale that is random while still remaining a story; that is to say, it doesn’t matter what character plays a particular role, but there do need to be characters and roles, at least to begin with, when you’re learning to use these systems. Cards (as just one example) create stories by proposing certain familiar roles (such as a Personal Strength, or a Landmark that shows when to make a decision, and so on) and filling them with iconic characters (such as Balance, Change, or Struggle). A card system with suits based on schematic verbs such as be, do, go, and know, has a designed ability to cover a broad range of meanings. That helps the system to wander far and wide when creating the story that will help to break you out of your rut, while still remaining meaningful in our world. It would take a whole additional book to explain that well (which I have started and abandoned a few times over a couple of decades), but this short explanation gives you some idea of how this all works. But the thought that I would like to leave you with is this: if a system can be created to work with cards, then why not with just about everything in the world around you? Think of what it would be like to be able to simply look at your environment when you wanted to find a fresh perspective on a problem, and have it tell you a story to inspire you to new approaches. That is why I stopped reading cards for people: I did not want to get in the way of their learning how to be inspired by reading the world.
There is a third, much less common explanation for how this all works, and it is represented by an emergent property of the other two, where we use our natural talents to read the world, but we also enjoy the influence of personal supernatural relationships. But that really would require its own book, and, as I have said, this is it for me. No more book writing.
Being where you’re (not) supposed to be, then, is a matter of belief.
I don’t have much left over for this very general topic, since the vast majority of these stories have already been categorized according to some specific component, like injury or tool type; in other words, you can still be exploring even though you’re not using a tool, and no one is getting hurt.
Jeff and I used to fight all the time. I remember my dad telling us (when I was about eight) that we weren’t in as much trouble as normal because we didn’t fight until after lunch. I think that morning was Jeff’s birthday party, so we had probably just been too busy to notice.
And while we fought a lot at home, Mr. Brown (the elementary school principal) told my mom that Jeff and I were going through school back-to-back. I didn’t get into many fights, but when I did it was (to my memory, anyway) almost always because Jeff would pester someone older and bigger than himself, and then they’d come looking for me. I remember watching Jeff laughing like a maniac as “Bumpy Butt” Bumpus chased him around the playground for giving him a wet willy (not the British variety).
Here’s the type of thing that Jeff would do. My mom hired Mark (a UOP grad student in math) to occupy Jeff’s time one summer, with the notion of keeping the two of us out of each other’s hair. I just happened to be around one afternoon as Jeff was telling Mark that he was demonstrating a trick combination lock. Mark stood there as Jeff locked Mark’s two front belt loops together, and even though Jeff immediately took off laughing, Mark actually took a couple of seconds to see if he could figure out how to unlock the trick lock. I thought that was pretty funny, I mean, who thinks of locking someone’s pants shut? Sheer genius.
Another thing that you shouldn’t be doing is just following someone else’s orders without thinking.
We were milling around the waiting room, having dropped off our various cars, when the service person stepped in and said, “You can all go meet the driver outside, and the Courtesy Van will drop you off.”
So we all wandered outside. The van was parked at the curb, but when I tried to open the sliding door it was locked, as was the passenger door. I could have waited for the driver, but it was easy enough to walk around to the driver side, find the door unlocked, then crawl in and open the sliding door from the inside. The remaining half-a-dozen people climbed inside while I walked around the van to get in at the side door. But just as I was stepping up, I took a closer look at all of the stuff strewn about (like the hash pipes and so on) and said, “You know, I think this is just somebody’s van.”
If I had only kept my mouth shut, I could have pretended that I needed to go back inside and get something, and then watched through the shop window for the van’s owner to show up.
Now you know what I mean by saying that exploration is the pursuit of “ought not.”
You are well familiar at this point with people doing what they’re not supposed to do, to go where they’re not supposed to go, to be where they’re not supposed to be, ultimately to know what they’re not supposed to know.
Case in point: your understanding of interpersonal relationships has grown meaningfully over the course of this chapter... because you weren’t supposed to be paying attention to that.
The chapters that follow all represent practical applications of this knowledge, but if the stories are as diverting as they’re intended to be, then you’ll forget about that, too, as you go along, and learn some more.
You’re now prepared to do what you need to do to go there.
That said, I find thoughts of J. H. Kellogg intruding unbidden as an example of a variably-mitigated quack. And you might as well look up Ralstonism when you have a chance, since we’ll be talking about Purina when we get to the section about animals. (It’s a strange, massively-interconnected world.)
By the way, “quack” comes from “quacksalver,” which is an obsolete Dutch term (“kwaksalver,” a salve hawker) that is said to come from Middle Dutch “kwaken” (to croak or brag) and of course from “salve” (ointment).
You probably know that touching something acidic will burn (as you expose nerves to the air), but if you touch something very basic (as in “the opposite of acidic”) and it feels slippery, that’s your skin melting into soap (give or take).
Don’t get me wrong, I have a deep, abiding fondness for internet connectivity and content. I just think that it’s a very powerful tool.
That was in Rio Vista, where my life changed forever when I was introduced to the Monte Cristo sandwich. The best that I have found so far is at the Blue Bayou Restaurant at Disneyland.
I know only two stories about his building the house (other than that he even did the wrought iron work). In one, my grampa was carrying a sheet of drywall through a narrow passage and the prevailing wind caught it and got him stuck against the house. (He was not a big man.) My dad was laughing too hard at his predicament to be of any help. (Again: if you find yourself in a situation where you need help, comically frustrated swearing will only incapacitate your potential saviors.) In the other, he was trying to grade the lot by dragging some sort of lumber contraption chained up behind a truck, with my mom (pregnant with me) sitting on it to add weight. That was not the right tool for grading the yard. Fortunately, however, it was the right tool for eliciting enough sympathy from the neighbor who saw what was going on that he offered the loan of actual grading equipment.
While you can get some great graphite rods out of the cells that are inside of a lantern battery (just in case you need to stir molten lead or other metals), you will not (contrary to the YouTube videos) find a bunch of AA batteries in there. Some batteries, however, can be hacked (like the A23) if you just happen to need the kind of cells that are inside.
A visiting linguistics professor was having us list the qualities of a typical elephant (during a lecture on radial categorization), and I inadvertently triggered a spit-take when she asked what I meant by “retromingent.” Must have been something about the phrase, “They piss backwards.” (Camels, hippos, raccoons, and other members of the cat family beyond the lion share this trait. Well, they don’t “share” it as such, in the sense that they each have their own copy.) The point is that you don’t want to stand close to the fence if the lion is backing up to you.
And “flehming” is just where an animal (generally hooved animals and cat family members) pulls its upper lip over its teeth to get more air to the chemoreceptive area on the roof of its mouth (i.e., its Jacobson’s or vomeronasal organ). You’ll see this “flehmen response” more strongly with pheromones than with other odors.
Now, the most dangerous dung is probably that of the raccoon. It’s infested with particularly nasty parasites, most notably roundworms. You want to steer clear of a raccoon midden, then, so be careful about sitting at the base of a tree in the forest. Larvae can remain viable in moist soil for years.
To close out this topic, I’ll just mention that a hippo will twitch its tail at high speed to spray its poop out all over the place. It’s like that flecked spraypaint that men can allegedly use to disguise a bald spot, except of course that it’s green and comes out of a hippo’s butt. (Sounds like a kid’s riddle, “What’s green and comes out of a hippo’s butt.” Now you know. Thank goodness you read this book.)
Yes, there is such a thing as “monkey chow.” Actually, there are all sorts of chows from Purina Mills aside from those for pets and farm animals (albeit sometimes by a slightly different name than “chow”), including several types for wildlife (deer, game fish, game bird), and all of the Mazuri products (e.g., bear, guinea pig, camel, crocodile, shark, gel diets for marine mammals, you name it... they even have Cricket Chow and Earthworm Chow). And since Land O’Lakes now owns them both, you can not only get butter for your kids, but Kid Milk Replacer for your kids.
This is the same porch where I told my first joke. The punchline was “geranium” (no doubt because they were sitting in a pot on that very porch), and I thought it was hilarious. (Actually hilarious, though, not just “funny-hilarious.”) My mom, peering down at me from the doorway, was my only audience.
The school playground across the street was where my dad taught us to ride our bikes, which worked great except for minor details such as cruising off into the jungle gym, or hitting the end of the handlebar on a volleyball poll, where he would have to run under the nets to keep up.
I kept the head in an opaque garbage bag in the garage freezer for a long time, intending to prepare the skull for display, but I could never make myself do it. I never even managed to open the bag and look at it.
“Rotten zombie snot glob” is another one of those trochaic trimeters. They pop up all over the place, but some are clearly more noticeable than others.
I needed a couple of years’ worth of “foreign” language study for college, so I decided to pack it into intensive summer courses at UC Berkeley. I figured that Spanish was likely to be most useful, plus I had my fill of French (originally choosing that language in seventh grade because that’s where the girls would be, plus I had already honed my accent at the four feet of the Master, Pepé Le Pew). Only here is how things went when I got to the Spanish classroom:
Me: “Is this Spanish?"
Classmate: “No, it’s Arabic.”
Me: “Okaaay... sounds good.”
I’m a sucker for a new orthography. I ended up taking Arabic for two summers. Wandering over to this “wrong” room was a crucial node that led to life-altering, fulfilling events that I would have otherwise missed. That’s one big reason that I tend to be open to these specific sorts of spontaneous decisions, albeit not others.
It might not be apparent, but I have always been a concerned rule follower. As a very little kid, I wouldn’t step out of the car onto the blacktop because I had been told not to step into the street, and the parking lot was made out of the same stuff. And when it was nap time in kindergarten, I would lie rigidly and stare at the ceiling. (That kind of thing got me sent to the school psych very early on. This was when I was just identified as a “Weird Little Kid,” well before they had systems in place to help spectrumy children. That particular psych became the Superintendent for the district by the time I was in high school.) When I got a bit older I often would shoplift little things, and I mention elsewhere that I stopped only when I had it explained to me that it would hurt other people when it came time for them to do inventory. But that was just shifting the focus from a lower-priority permissive guideline (namely that it was okay to take stuff) to a higher-priority restrictive rule (which is not to hurt innocent people). Stealing the drinks would have been hurting a known ally, and that’s definitely against the rules.