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Drowning on Dry Land
Jan. 15th, 1998 12:00 amSt. George, Utah—a desert resort town a stone's throw from Arizona—is the last place I ever expected to find myself drowning. Likewise, I'm sure the last thing the patrons of the Valley Discount Book Center expected to see in their midst was a drowning man.
It happened, all the same.
It was 1993—Valentine's Day or thereabouts—and I was weekending in St. George with Roxie, the nineteen-year-old girl I'd been seeing awfully seriously for a year and a half. (That's not her real name, by the way, though it very possibly could have been. Insert your favorite disclaimer here and get used to the idea, because I'll be concealing more identities than just this one in the weeks and months ahead.) Valentine's Day falls exactly six months from my birthday—I'm the yang to love's yin, I guess—so I would have been precisely twenty-five and a half.
Roxie and I were in the middle of a long slow crawl through the local factory outlet mall. Somehow our conversation had turned to the subject of water and swimming, and I'd been explaining why it is that I go out of my way to avoid them both. As we turned into the Valley Discount Book Center (also a made-up name, but in this case it's only because I can't remember the real one), I was relating the story that you read yesterday, of how I took a little dip in the Firehole River and almost didn't come out again.
Now, I'd talked about the incident before this, but never in very much detail—never in detail at all, in fact. In retrospect, it's pretty clear that my conscious mind was avoiding the subject the way a hemophiliac avoids sharp objects. How do I know this? Because of what happened in that quiet little bookstore.
As we strolled down the aisles of books, Roxie and I, and as I told her how the water had closed over my head—well, there's no good way to put it except to say that the water closed over my head. I began to drown all over again, right there in the middle of the store.
It was a panic attack like none I had ever experienced. A dark fear gripped me, I turned cold, and I couldn't breathe. The closest thing to it I had ever felt was in gymnastics class one day at the age of ten when I slipped off the uneven parallel bars, landed flat on my back, and got the wind knocked out of me. On that occasion, it took about ten minutes for me to start breathing normally again—ten minutes of fearing that I might never be able to breathe again. This time, I didn't get my normal rhythm back for over two hours.
My flailing hands, reddening face, and gasping breaths clued Roxie in that something was wrong. She gently tried to calm me down and get me to breathe, but to no avail. She led me out of the store as the other patrons looked on in confusion and embarrassment—and did nothing, of course.
She helped me get settled in her black Trans Am (not her real car), then followed my mostly gestural directions as I guided her to my grandparents' house in the nearby town of Santa Clara. I hadn't told my grandparents that I was in the area (hey, my grandpa is a patriarch in the Mormon Church, and there I was shacked up in a little bed-and-breakfast around the corner from the Temple with a nubile young sexpot), but I couldn't breathe and I thought maybe having familiar people around me—and perhaps a blessing from my grandpa—would help.
Of course, they weren't home.
Next stop was a hospital emergency room near Dixie College. My health-insurance card got us seats in the waiting room, where I wheezed and gasped for an hour and half before I finally calmed down enough to breathe normally again. Ironically enough, that was about when a nurse was finally available to see me, and after a cursory checkup she dismissed me without even filling out a report. There was obviously nothing wrong with me any longer, so the hospital wouldn't even bother issuing me a bill.
Isn't the mind a marvelous and mysterious thing? On the one hand, it can wait years before fully confronting the knowledge that its brief candle was nearly snuffed out by a spring-fed river. On the other hand, it knows right when to stop acting up in order to avoid a hospital bill.
So which do you think scares me more—drowning, or my insurance company?
Crossposted from Memos from the Moon
It happened, all the same.
It was 1993—Valentine's Day or thereabouts—and I was weekending in St. George with Roxie, the nineteen-year-old girl I'd been seeing awfully seriously for a year and a half. (That's not her real name, by the way, though it very possibly could have been. Insert your favorite disclaimer here and get used to the idea, because I'll be concealing more identities than just this one in the weeks and months ahead.) Valentine's Day falls exactly six months from my birthday—I'm the yang to love's yin, I guess—so I would have been precisely twenty-five and a half.
Roxie and I were in the middle of a long slow crawl through the local factory outlet mall. Somehow our conversation had turned to the subject of water and swimming, and I'd been explaining why it is that I go out of my way to avoid them both. As we turned into the Valley Discount Book Center (also a made-up name, but in this case it's only because I can't remember the real one), I was relating the story that you read yesterday, of how I took a little dip in the Firehole River and almost didn't come out again.
Now, I'd talked about the incident before this, but never in very much detail—never in detail at all, in fact. In retrospect, it's pretty clear that my conscious mind was avoiding the subject the way a hemophiliac avoids sharp objects. How do I know this? Because of what happened in that quiet little bookstore.
As we strolled down the aisles of books, Roxie and I, and as I told her how the water had closed over my head—well, there's no good way to put it except to say that the water closed over my head. I began to drown all over again, right there in the middle of the store.
It was a panic attack like none I had ever experienced. A dark fear gripped me, I turned cold, and I couldn't breathe. The closest thing to it I had ever felt was in gymnastics class one day at the age of ten when I slipped off the uneven parallel bars, landed flat on my back, and got the wind knocked out of me. On that occasion, it took about ten minutes for me to start breathing normally again—ten minutes of fearing that I might never be able to breathe again. This time, I didn't get my normal rhythm back for over two hours.
My flailing hands, reddening face, and gasping breaths clued Roxie in that something was wrong. She gently tried to calm me down and get me to breathe, but to no avail. She led me out of the store as the other patrons looked on in confusion and embarrassment—and did nothing, of course.
She helped me get settled in her black Trans Am (not her real car), then followed my mostly gestural directions as I guided her to my grandparents' house in the nearby town of Santa Clara. I hadn't told my grandparents that I was in the area (hey, my grandpa is a patriarch in the Mormon Church, and there I was shacked up in a little bed-and-breakfast around the corner from the Temple with a nubile young sexpot), but I couldn't breathe and I thought maybe having familiar people around me—and perhaps a blessing from my grandpa—would help.
Of course, they weren't home.
Next stop was a hospital emergency room near Dixie College. My health-insurance card got us seats in the waiting room, where I wheezed and gasped for an hour and half before I finally calmed down enough to breathe normally again. Ironically enough, that was about when a nurse was finally available to see me, and after a cursory checkup she dismissed me without even filling out a report. There was obviously nothing wrong with me any longer, so the hospital wouldn't even bother issuing me a bill.
Isn't the mind a marvelous and mysterious thing? On the one hand, it can wait years before fully confronting the knowledge that its brief candle was nearly snuffed out by a spring-fed river. On the other hand, it knows right when to stop acting up in order to avoid a hospital bill.
So which do you think scares me more—drowning, or my insurance company?
Crossposted from Memos from the Moon
