Spinning My Cacoon

Chapter 4

I sought out my own moments of quiet joy when the weather cooperated, which was often. The blue skies of the high desert are visible over ninety per cent of the time, and these skies were my skies. If I couldn’t find a friend in the neighborhood to play with, I’d head for my “forbidden land,” a fenced off area that protected the old V&T train’s railroad tracks through a swampy farm region. I had to cross highway 395 south through Minden to get there, and in the fifties there were transients who hid out in the area. Mom warned me not to go there because a “tramp” could get me.

            The V&T line was the Virginia and Truckee Railroad which was built to transport freight to and from Virginia City during the Comstock Lode. One branch went to Minden, and when the line closed in 1950, they barbed-wired the old track across the highway and behind my house.  It was my second paradise, my hidden garden like my Grandmother’s rose garden, but even better in some ways.

            With the sun hot on my bare arms, I’d grab a baseball cap and sneak over to climb under the barbed wire and saunter toward the old bridge. The sultry, fermented smell of the swamp with its cattails taller than me lent an air of jungle adventure to my lair. The warbling of the red-winged blackbirds and yodel of the meadow larks were my wild things in this enchanted land. Alone but not lonely was where I felt safest, happiest, and I found these nurturing surroundings my new sacred place. When I was alone, in worlds of my own making, I could escape that sense of anxiety that had its own life, and instead feel of one piece.

            As I was soaking up the atmosphere one July day, I heard a sudden crash, louder than an animal would make, and my mother’s words, “A tramp will get you!” burst in my brain. No two feet ever ran faster that day, and whatever it was, I outran it.  But I would go back.  This blue-sky-bird-song heaven was more precious than anything--my Great Mother--home away from home. 

            After school one day, I told my mom about my loose tooth.  This was as important to me at the time as learning to drive would be when I was sixteen.  Mom’s eyes opened wide, barely believing that her oldest could be making this life passage.  I opened my mouth for her to test the tooth.  It wiggled.  Every day or two she checked to see if it was still there.  Finally, when it was hanging by a thread, she began to obsess that I would swallow it, choke and die. She enlisted my dad to pluck the offending projection.  So, when he arrived home that evening, he convinced me to let him put a string around the thing and pull it out, “Don’t you want the tooth fairy to bring you money?” he coaxed.  Being naturally compliant, I opened up. Yank!  “Ooops!” The string pulled off the tooth, and blood began to run down my chin. That was it! I commenced my escape, dashing into the living room.  With my mom looking horrified, Dad, determined to get the job done, and headed after me. 

Now you have to understand something about my dad.  He is going to have his way.  When he got a new hunting dog, Duke, and spent months training him, then took him out on his first expedition. That dog was going to retrieve.  I know this because of a local news paper story.  Dad gunned down three ducks, and they landed in the water.  He commanded Duke to retrieve.  Duke looked at him and wagged his tail.  Dad, in wading boots, took the dog out into the water as far as he could, pointed Duke in the direction of the ducks and again gave the orders.  Duke headed back to shore as fast as he could.  Dad followed, stripped off his clothes, tied a rope to Duke’s collar, and began swimming out to the ducks, towing the dog.  When they arrived at the ducks, and Dad again issued the command, Duke got the idea and he obeyed.

So you can guess what happened with my tooth.  Our house was arranged so you could run a circuit through the living room, down the hall, into the wash room, then the kitchen and back through the living room.  With me tearing up the carpet and Dad fast on my heels, it wasn’t long before I was pinned under him in receipt of the command, “Open your mouth!”  Now when you’re a six year old, small at that, and someone that appears to be twenty feet tall is right in your face, you don’t argue.  Out came the tooth.  That was the last time anyone knew I had a wobbly denticle until I held it in my hand.

As I look back on that today, I realize how I dissociated from my body and like a ripe caterpillar, spun a cocoon of defenses, and moved in.  I withdrew into the worlds of literature and nature, and close friends, places of safety and silence, often places of aloneness but not loneliness.  The cocoon shut out all unpleasantness, but it shut out love too.  I became an orphan by virtue of my self-protective creation.  But I put a nice smile on my cocoon; along with some nice little tap shoes so I could dance to anybody’s tune when asked.  I even became an orphan to my own true self.  But the Creative Love which birthed me wasn’t finished with me yet.  And my parents, whom I’d suspected of being aliens, proved it to me that day.

And yet I was loved…loved by aliens.  On a cloudy winter morning, right in the middle of first grade, snow began falling.  They were the big flakes, as big as my little nose, and they piled up and up and up until by early afternoon there were six inches of snow on the ground.  Bus drivers were called to come and pick us up and take us home.    Any unfamiliar routine often provoked alarm in me, and when a teacher hustled me onto a bus I didn’t recognize, I wondered where I would be delivered.  Noticing my classmate, Leola, a farm child, in a front row seat, I assumed I would be taken out in the country and then what?  When you’re wearing a cocoon, you don’t ask questions.  You just try to solve your own problems with whatever know-how you can muster.

The bus approached the intersection which led to The Minden Dry Goods, and I snuck up to the driver and in my father’s best voice, commanded him. “Stop here. I have to get off now!”  He did.  Now when you’re wearing little white shoes and little white socks and a cotton dress and a light-weight coat, there’s a lot of bare leg exposed to all that cold snow.  The walk home was memorable, as my calves turned into bright blue icicles.  The pain was piercing.  It was four, very, very long blocks before I saw my mother peeking her head out the door and urging me inside.  Her remedy for numbness was to put me into cool water (not warm, but cool), but then what can you expect from aliens.  Nevertheless, she was there and she cared.  You just had to look for it a little harder sometimes.