Agony, Ecstasy, & Bears

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in 1957 after my 8th birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]


[Above: Your government doesn't want you to encourage this sort of behavior.]

By now I'd been driven back and forth across the country four times, three that I could remember. This trip, east to west, was to take a mostly northerly route, since we were traveling in late July and early August.

A side effect of the constant sexual abuse made the first half of the trip hideous. By now I had a phobia of detectable bowel movements. I needed to do my business stealthily. But how do you do it stealthily in a cheap motel with flimsy walls and both parents in the only other room?

In one week I got backed up like Kennedy International Thanksgiving Eve. My Mother noticed the lack of BM activity (being very alert to such things) and was starting to talk about trying to remember where in all our bags she had packed the enema apparatus.

At the same time, she let up on the sexual abuse, no doubt for the same reason I let up on the bowel movements. She didn't want anything she did to be heard. It spoiled her fun to keep me quiet during a rape. The whole point is to force a reaction. The more extreme the reaction, the more power the rapist feels he/she has. If she couldn't make me cry or scream for fear that my Father would intervene, why bother?

It was a full ten days before we arrived at Guy & Zenobia's house in Springfield. As usual we were put up there.

You may remember that Zenobia was my Mother's best friend and Guy and Zenobia were so attached to us I called them Uncle and Aunt. Their house was big enough that I could feel I had enough privacy, if only I wasn't now so backed up that I was almost terminally constipated.

Fortunately we were there long enough for me to work it out myself without having to beg for an artificial assist. Three days after our arrival I had two weeks worth of bowel movement. I felt lighter by the equivalent of a bowling ball.

The rest of the trip veered north to take us through the South Dakota Badlands, Wyoming, Yellowstone, and Idaho. I still had the BM problem but was saved again at Yellowstone when we rented a cabin with a detached outhouse.

My first memorable trip east to west 2 years earlier had made me aware of the beauty of the Southwest and exposed me to Navajo and Hopi art. This trip I fell in love with the Western Plains and the Rockies.

At Yellowstone we were surrounded by bears all the time. Back then the rangers went to much less trouble than they do now to keep people from feeding the bears. Consequently bears swarmed all the cars lined up at the entrances. You had to drive through at a stop and go crawl as cars in front of you stopped to toss food out to attract bears. Everybody had to have a picture of a bear leaning over their car, begging for more. It was both disgusting and thrilling. Too bad it was wrong.

Road Trip I

The Summer of 1955 was fairly eventful. The first big event was a trip by car across the country to Seattle and back. My father somehow arranged a month's vacation to start mid-June, right after Kindergarten ended. The four of us, my parents, Koko, and I, went in a new family car, a two-door dark blue DeSoto.

One item that was carried unpacked, accompanying me and Koko in the back, was a jigsaw puzzle map of the United States. My parents told me the itinerary. West to Springfield, Illinois, as fast as possible on major highways and turnpikes. Then a more leisurely pace, taking Route 66 to California and the West Coast highway north. Route 66 would pass through my mother's home town Strafford, and then take us into Springfield, Missouri, where we would visit my Mother's best friend Zenobia, and her husband Guy.


I set up the jigsaw puzzle map with all the states in except the ones we would pass through. Then as we entered each new state, I inserted that state's piece. That made it easy to fix in my mind where we'd been along the way.

On the fast leg of the trip there was little to see except when we pulled into a town to get gas. I never smelled so much gasoline and creosote as I did on that trip. It seemed like the whole country reeked of it. In those days it was more common to use creosote laden logs rather than concrete to edge parking lots. Gas was so cheap and people thought so little of the hazard its fumes posed that no one was careful not to spill it at the pump. And of course it was all full service so the spilled gas wasn't paid for by the guy who spilled it. To this day whenever I smell gas or creosote I think of that trip.

Speaking of noxious fumes, the most vivid single memory I have before we reached St. Louis was of a tire fire a few hundred yards from the highway near Akron. It made me wonder if Akron was named to sound like acrid.

I also remember several stops at Howard Johnson's. I was a finicky eater, usually refusing to eat anything at a restaurant but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Then, in a Howard Johnson's, they got me to try the Howard Johnson's specialty, the breaded fried clams. I loved them. So my parents would stop at Howard Johnson's wherever they could.

I learned to sit directly behind my Father. If I sat behind my Mother he would look over his shoulder occasionally at me and if I was doing anything at all besides nothing he would yell, "What's going on back there? What are you doing?" If I sat behind him he would have to take my Mother's word for it that I wasn't getting into trouble.

We stayed with Guy and Zenobia for a couple of days. They were a wonderful pair.

He had been in the Navy when they married, probably right after WWII. So they'd been married close to ten years by then. Guy became an engineer for International Harvester. They'd tried to have children and failed for so long they'd given up. So now they had a clever Border Collie for a son.

They were fun loving but never mean-spirited. Zenobia wasn't interested in glamor the way my Mother was. They both had insatiable curiosities which showed in the fact that they had a bedroom-size room in the house devoted to nothing else but storing their back issues of National Geographic.

I started calling them Aunt Zenobia and Uncle Guy on this visit, and continued to think of them as family as long as they lived.

Whenever I've found good people like them, who can live so happily and gracefully, I've tried to figure out how they do it. In the case of Guy and Zenobia I'd credit wisdom, intelligence, humility, and each other.

[Above right: My Mother and Zenobia together in Missouri, in an undated photo.]

Values

One of my favorite sandboxes is the sandbox of Values. I like to play with ideas about what Values are, how people get them and what they really do for people. I like to try out new Values and go around and share them with people and see how they react. Then, I throw the made up Values away and see if anyone notices.

People are nuts about Values. Some more than others. I think I may get a third of all my insights about bad Value formation from one guy I know. He's a friend of mine, if by friend you mean person you care about, as opposed to person you want to spend more than 5 minutes a day with. I will call him Guy.

Guy is the poster child for Worn Values. His Values are all put on. Not consciously and one at a time as a game the way I described doing above, but unconsciously and all of them. Every last one of his Values is put on and he doesn't know it.

I've realized this at least since 1997. That was the year I grew my current beard. Guy reacted to my beard-growing by telling me that 1) beards show an unhealthy desire to withdraw from human company by wearing a kind of hairy mask, and 2) men who wear beards are unattractive to women, and 3) it's wrong to wear beards, and 4) "Damn it, Wes, shave that thing off!"


As for 1), Guy lives alone and at that time hadn't had a visitor in 10 years. As for 2) Guy told me about the same time that he'd had an affair with one woman in his life that lasted 2 years, long before. And that at that time he hadn't had a visitor for 10 years. If that wasn't enough to convince me that his beard Value was just put on, he disposed of 3) by growing a beard of his own a few years later, once he'd got use to mine. And of course he has no memory now of ever having said 4). Having put on a new beard-Value, to the effect that beards are OK, Guy now says he could never have said anything like that.

Which tells you what's wrong with unconsciously put on Values. If you put them on playfully you're in control. You don't identify with the Value. Guy thinks he IS the Values he has. But they aren't his.

All the best Values are organic. Invented Values like ideologies usually result in disasters when they're adopted wholesale. Guy's Values aren't ideological Values, they're organic, and I appreciate that. But they aren't organic to him. They're organic to his parents and their parents and masses of other unconscious human agar.


I like to be around people whose Values are as organic to themselves as their own skins. When they identify themselves with their Values, it means something.