Home, clean, sweet smelling home.
"Oh, I love our home!" cried Keith impulsively as we came through the door, wrinkled, weary and unspeakably dirty. How I love our home too. And lemon scented bleach, Oil of Olay body wash and brand new tooth brushes. The best part of camping is when it's over.
Now I sit here listening to Vivaldi's Concerto for Oboe and Violin while outside a cool wind whips through the trees and in the basement, a load of whites is churned in bleachy bubbles.
We stopped for breakfast at Denny's before we got here. I was wearing clothes that I had slept in for the last two nights and my hair was the kind of wild that can only be created by the wind repeatedly combing on layers of grease and dust. It was the kind of hair that people buy in drug stores around Halloween, to compliment their costumes. Trying to get it back into an elastic was like wrestling with a live animal.
The coffee was worth it though.
I left that park feeling profoundly grateful for my own life, for what I've been able to make of it. On Friday night I was struck by the sight of a very large young woman driving aimlessly around on a four wheeler, wearing blue patterned PJ pants.
Maybe it was the wind in the trees, or the constant low growl of all the vehicles from the woods, or the RVs across the pond from us, with laundry hanging out or the way her eyes met mine once-her eyes were flat with a kind of inert hostility.
Whatever it was, I felt like that young woman captured something inherent about that community; a quiet and simmering despair.
Keith got chummy with some of the guys there and learned that they grew their own marijuana and used meth. That explains how every one we met there were missing teeth, their mouths sunk in. That and/or poor dental care.
But what must it be to live that kind of life, to be born into it, stuck, stuck like at the bottom of a scummy pond, weighed down. So close knit it suffocates, no where to go, nothing to do but get drunk, get high, ride around. Decades of it, generations of it.
How does a person lift themselves out of it? How far away to they have to go, or would they carry that depression, that feeling of being worth so little, right around with them, in the marrow of their bones, the source of a constantly unfolding degradation no matter where they went?
I don't know that girl, but I know depression when I see it, knowing it so well myself. I'm certain she would hate me for pitying her, I think that's part of the message her eyes were giving me- stay away and don't you pity me. But I don't know if it was pity I was feeling so much as horror for her, horror at the realization that it's all real, people really do live like that.
