THIS IS NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE

When you go to the booth to sign up for the part of Wits’ End/Pissed Beyond Belief, they also sneak in a form on which you agree to Uncontainable Wonderments. It’s one of those gotcha moments, one of those sneaky lil fine print situations where you must “check box to indicate that you understand you will not be allowed to moan around unless you also effuse as if beauty will split your chest whenever that happens.” Assholes.

At that point you’ve stood in line for so long you check the stupid box because your form is void without it and you didn’t bring enough cheese sticks to troubleshoot this shit right at the cusp of dinner, not on a humid, cicada-glowing, and otherwise siren-song beautiful day in your short and shortening life.

You slide both forms into the slot, your name scrawled at the base of each, and feel the vines tightening around you, as if in some fairytale where the woods-as-malevolent-body take over completely for some portion of the script, but it all turns out well enough, right? you are careful to try and recall, as you pick your way home through the hot dusk, the gravel that made it into your shoe at noon now suddenly screaming by your left pinky toe’s slim & tender nail.

Now you’re fully human, for worse and better.

*

I’ve recently stopped spitting like a caught cat with gut-hollowing envy at the families whose children keep their clothes on, use the playground safely, are generally persuadable, don’t wear felted fur creations on their heads as an excuse for hair.

Now instead I am concerned for most of these placid, doe-eyed children, milling around inside still-white shoes: if they can be so easily corralled now, before life has taken any giant, steaming dumps on them, what chance do they have of tearing through the hydraulic lines with their incisors when the trash compactor comes for their sweet, ripe pumpkin heads?

I want to give them caffeine and partly dulled machetes, a map to the wilderness with only a few places named in nearly-illegible script; I want to hand them firecrackers and chocolate, terrible jokes and truly dangerous language, send them upstream alone armed with sadness and love and precipitous hunger.

*

Yesterday, because the world is absurd and our luck is hardly utterable, after morning preschool I took the children to a 13,000 year-old gorge through 400 million-year-old rock, dragging our red fold-a-wagon filled with extra underwear and figs, my puffin-adorned notebook and some chalk, a terrycloth towel fragment and one hotly contested yellow sandbox-claw, to see a 215-foot waterfall whose mist would make a cheerio-sized fossil from the Devonian era glint just enough for our eyes to catch it, mid-tantrum, despite.

Within twelve minutes of exiting the car like cereal from a dropped box, both children were mostly naked, running far too fast over slippery streambed and leaping off of miniature waterfalls made by ancient earthquake fault lines. I was dragging the shock-less wagon over the rippled rock which, I explained to my kids self-congratulatorily, used to be [as I recalled from that college field trip during which I somehow managed not to have an anxiety attack even though it was shockingly clear that 23 students were absolutely not going to make it back to the vans and campus before lab time was up, and couldn’t the instructor see that? —Yes, reader, she could, and by this she was entirely unbothered] the floor of a slow, warm, shallow sea.

“We” worked on the concept of sedimentary rock for sixteen seconds, the content of which “conversation” may or may not have traveled from my feral creatures’ ear canals to their brains; I vaguely hoped that their passion for mud will buy them some interest in the basic geology of their home playing field. It all remains, as most things, to be seen.

What was clear, however: one child had a rash on its leg from the constant wearing of wet and muddy clothing; one had low blood-sugar and was starting to bite and hit, but had taken a predictable and immovable set against the figs, the psychology of which would require witchcraft to untwist; both were making injured pterodactyl noises that would have made me carefully consider calling the cops if I were someone walking by; several fights about who was winning in the race to find jewelweed pods to pinch-and-explode had me considering just whacking them over the heads with the long weed-stalks I had been carefully selecting for their pinching pleasure.

Also, this: when we got to the Big Falls, at the half-way point of the stream-hike, I was waylaid by a tourist in such a fashion (the sudden and total activation of my desperate need for adult conversation) that Child B wandered off, as he is wont to do, and when I extracted myself from the South Carolina wanderer who desired detailed information on what it’s like to see the falls in each season, I saw around the bend, across the bridge, my second-child-by-four-minutes being patted on the head and stroked on the face by a stranger in a park ranger uniform. A second figure in uniform also bent over him, both of them looking deeply concerned and speaking many words I could not hear.

In this moment, I began hustling in earnest. I was shocked and outraged that people were touching my child without his or my consent— the audacity!—until I realized what he looked like.

He was wearing nothing but mud, bug-bites, and girls’ swim-bottoms with hand-sewn tucks in the sides and butt so that they won’t fall down (these are the only swim gear he will wear); his hair was standing up in back like a rooster-tail in a cone of burry tangles (standard); one of his eyes was swollen shut from a bug-bite he got the day before (he won’t let me put cream on it— “It’ll heal on its own, mama. Give it time”); he was dragging a fistful of weeds taller and neater than himself for no apparent reason; he saw no need to refer in his conversation with these friendly people to his mother or sister, who were less than 200 yards away, but temporarily out of sight.

I approached, loudly reassuring the park staff that this child was with us, and strode forward with the rattling wagon, shit falling out the back of it. It wasn’t actually that hard to see, I had to admit, why these good citizens were a bit hesitant to accept my claim to the Dickensian Gorge Waif, who was so clearly and obviously in need of their help.

As I followed the waif’s line of sight, it also became clear that the reason he hadn’t said anything about the nearby-ness of his family to these kindly (if overly touchy) strangers was that he was lusting after the John Deere gator they had just parked and left fifty yards behind, and the longer he retained their attention and concern, the longer he had to sidle closer and closer to the green and gold vehicle.

I decided to let vectors vector, and just smiled and continued past, knowing my son would follow, since I was the one moving towards the gator, and the rangers seemed to be headed, ultimately, the opposite way. As we moved on, the rangers looked like they were watching a loved one leave for another country at the airport gate, unsure whether they’d ever see him again. I hope your eye gets better, buddy, one of them called after us, sort of wistfully, and gave my son a slow & tender wave.

*

Kid B rejoined us as expected, and so we continued our Tuesday: the limp, the carry, the drag; the persuasion, the coercion, the excitement. There was the curiosity, and the abrasion, of moving together into known and unknown terrain, each nested inside the other, flickering.

And, I am contractually required to tell you, there was the tremendous and unbearable sweetness of moving through the light together, inside that deep and ancient gorge.