August of 1972 I was eleven, sitting cross-legged on the screened-in porch of my grandparents’ mountain cabin. I spent a month every summer on Elk Mountain and mostly I hated it. The forest was dense and quiet save bird calls and howls during ink dark nights. A handful of people lived there, and I was related to most of them.
I always arrived with good intentions. I liked my cousins. They accepted me whole-heartedly, included me in their everyday life. I tried my best to be one of them, a real mountain girl. I pierced worms on the end of hooks and my own finger many times, gutted trout in Elk Creek, shot BBs at cans, climbed impossibly high trees. It never worked. Home for me was suburbia four hours south and that’s where I wanted to be.
That summer day my cousin Eric and I were playing Monopoly with seventy percent of the pieces missing. Eric had lost interest. Me too. “Let’s walk to the lower garden and look for the beaver,” he suggested. I agreed even though I was not a fan of the narrow, shaded, three-mile path to our grandfather’s lower garden next to a beaver dam. Talk about desolate. I reminded Eric that beavers were hard to spot, but he ignored me.
Here I should mention that black bears were plentiful in that region of northern Pennsylvania. Countless times one would lumber across the front yard of the cabin, a stone’s throw away from anyone sitting on the porch. Occasionally the bear would stop, swing its head our way, sniff and move on. The bears weren’t interested in us. They wanted some wild blackberries, a stomach full of our grandfather’s sweetcorn, a cold drink from the nearby creek.
Halfway to the lower garden Eric stopped suddenly, pointed into the woods, whispered bear. He dropped to his knees and laid face down on the dirt path. I copied him because I trusted him. He knew what he was doing, although I had a few thoughts. Why face down? Would we be less threatening to a bear that way? Were we playing dead? I knew not to run from a bear, but I’d never had to follow that rule in real life. Being this close to a bear with no porch and no screen was new territory for me. I wished we’d both had more patience with our Monopoly game.
Eric and I remained still as stones as the bear snapped tree branches, swished through brush nearby. Eventually, these sounds grew faint. The bear was moving away from us, which slowed my galloping heart somewhat, but I was all for staying down on the ground as long as necessary. No need to take chances, even though the dirt path was damp following recent rain, and my mouth was rapidly sinking into it.
I pressed my lips firmly together, worried that my face down position would make it easy to accidentally ingest an earthworm. No worm slithered by, but eventually some wet soil did seep into my mouth. It was either swallow or choke. The dirt tasted like a bitter cup of tea. Not horrible. When the woods grew silent and stayed that way, Eric sat up.
“He’s long gone,” he said quietly.
“Are you sure? Let’s run back to the cabin,” I whispered.
“No way. Bears don’t own these woods. We keep going.”
We rinsed our mouths in the creek and continued onward, me weak-kneed, him chatty. Incidentally, we didn’t see the beaver that day.
August of 2023 I am sixty-two lying face up this time on an operating table, minutes away from undergoing open heart surgery. The term the hospital uses to describe the room where I find myself, an “operating arena,” is apt. The space is vast. It is also cold as a meat locker and teeming with people. Before I arrived here, I was in an intake room where a nurse started an IV and gave me something “to help me relax.” Kind of ridiculous. Should a person really be relaxed about open heart surgery? A young man sits next to me, part of the anesthesiology team. He is wearing glasses with black frames like the ones Elvis Costello wears.
“Are you feeling drowsy, Ginny?” he asks.
“Not really.”
Voices in the room are discussing pizza, thin crust or thick, if they like to eat it cold, what toppings are best and in what combination. There is a mention of black olives and onions, sausage and green peppers.
“What do you like on your pizza?” I ask my companion.
“I like pepperoni even though I know it’s not good for me,” he answers. “Usually, I just order plain.”
“When I was growing up there was a place in my hometown called DeAngelis that served pizza with the sauce on top,” I tell him. “That was the best pizza I ever ate.”
“I’ve never tried that. Sauce on top? Interesting. I am going to give you some more medicine to relax you, Ginny. You aren’t feeling sleepy at all?”
“Do I sound sleepy?” This makes him laugh. He disappears, returns, fiddles with my IV, and sits back down.
I continue. “I can pretty much eat any kind of pizza even frozen pizza. Ellio’s, Tombstone, pizza from the cafeteria when I was in college.” He sighs. I know he doesn’t want to have a conversation with me especially about pizza, but I’m wired. I can’t stop myself.
“Is pizza one of your favorite foods?” He asks and I give him a lot of credit. He’s really hanging in there, playing along.
“Definitely,” I say. “Although, here’s another question for you. Have you ever tasted dirt?”
His face swings overtop of mine. He nods. I imagine he is smiling behind his mask. He has pale blue eyes.
“Now we’re getting somewhere. Close your eyes, Ginny.”
INSTANT NOODLES 