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Playing with Titles Careless Out of the House Abstract>> We tend to think of Nature as the great provider. She gives us all our comforts and ease. But that's only in the safe haven of our home, our cocoon. Orientation>> Get out of the house and see what happens. I only rediscovered this when I was 40 or so, after having spent nearly 15 years in the security of academic life. I had lost my sense of raw nature. But she reared her cold hand to me once again on the Big Piney River in central Arkansas. Susan and I decided to go fishing one early Spring morning day. We loaded up packed the truck, bought fishing licenses and off we drove North into the cool foothills of the Ozarks, drove out of that safe haven, the ivy tower, the University, off the security of the Interstate onto dirt roads and down into the deep sandstone ridge. Our breath puffed out in cold, blue clouds under the deep shadows of the pines as we pitched the tent and threw the bags in. We bantered back and forth. I bragged and stomped about the fish I'd catch, and Susan smacked her lips, promising to "fry 'em up crispy" like she did the little fiddlers we usually bought from Brookshires. And we went to bed anticipating the morning only to have the cold creep down the bluffs on top of us. Cold sank down the mountainsides until it filled every crevice of our canyon bottom. It crept into our camp, filled up the tent, and began to nibble at our toes through the light cotton sleeping bags. We put on extra socks, and it insisted on getting in with them. We rubbed our feet against one another. We combined our body heats. We tossed and turned trying to evict the nibbling insect of frostbite. We got up and tried to build a fire, going out into the woods for squaw wood only to find out again the wood supply sparse and damp. Finally, after soaking the wood in coal oil, a little blaze roasted our toes, our backsides, and our fronts as we danced around the heat and looked at the amazing spray of stars till dawn.Ironically, instead of depressing our spirits and making us cautious, the specter of two frozen corpses waiting in the woods for the Summer campers to find us reinvigorated us. After all, we had conquered nature. I should have known I was in trouble though when I couldn't remember how to tie the fishhook or thread the worm. But no. Onward I went, down the steep path to that favorite place I remembered my Dad taking me so many years ago. My poles stuck out and caught on the undergrowth which crept onto the little traveled path. I'd stop and untangle the lines and drop my tackle and spill the worms and move on only to get tangled again. I was a clutz; I'd forgotten how to even move in the woods. All that childhood skill lost. When I got to the bottom of the path and came around the bend, I was huffing and puffing to beat all. I remember Dad and I had caught a mess of brim over on the other side in that deep pool built up behind the towhead of the island. I was filled with the glow of forgetful anticipation. I immediately stepped into the narrowed channel separating me from the island. Complication>> Only ankle deep, the water tugged up around my calves, cold as the ice from which it came, and tried to pull my feet off the algae slick rocks. Another step and it was nearly to my knees with an energy that should have told me, but my attention was over there, in my childhood memories, in anticipation of Susan's fried fish. One more tiny step, slipping my feet along the edge of the slippery rock and off my feet I went, throwing poles and tackle and worms to the water, and I washed down with them, bouncing off rocks, struggling to regain my footing, and finally helpless in the rapids below, just trying to keep my head up and my feet out. I grew numb with the freezing water and the roar of the noise and the constant effort to orient myself. The river had me in its hand and did what it would, sweeping me in a long arc to the cliff-face some 200 yards down and on the opposite bank, and there I clung, gripping the cracks and crevices and trying to creep down river like a cockroach. I had made it to the other side, just not in the way I intended. Resolution>> It must have been an hour later that I finally crawled up the bank on the opposite side from where I started and stared exhausted and empty at the river. Only then I remembered Dad growling at me, "That river will get you." Coda>> But in my comfortable life, in the security of the city which tries to protect you from these dangers, in the books in which I lived all the callous reality of the natural world, all the immediacy of "tooth and claw," had faded away into stirrings of vague memory and the fantasies of literature. Here once again, I relearned the lessons of childhood: When you leave the house, be careful. Now this is not to say that you shouldn't leave the house, that you shouldn't adventure out, that you shouldn't go to India or Big Bend National Park, only to say you should remember that when you're out of the house, you are out of the house, out of the zone of security set up around you. All of the world is not your home. And I did now remember this, and looked at the river with renewed caution. I looked over to the other side and up the cliff and could see the smoke trailing above the trees where Susan had built a fire in camp not even a football field away, and wondered how I was going to get back across and home again. 1031 words To See a Revision of this essay, click here.
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