Something that embodies me
While this piece came before I leaned into writing with intimacy, it does well to show me as I am, or was, for what it is.
The sweet sizzle of raw Emergen-C.
Throughout my more formative years I would spend all but some sparse days of each summer at camps, or on hikes, or volunteering myself to be cheap (or more often free) labor. As I got older and started attending the same programs or volunteering at the same horse camp, I would find my summers filled with the dry arid air of the eastern Washington desert. And for this tale, we’ll be focusing on that place; the horse camp some four-hour drive away, that I would spend seven years trekking to each summer.
Now, I have quite a many story that could be told about my times at this camp; the countless run-ins with rattlesnakes, the leech lodged pond where I became the host to many friends that I did not invite onto my sanctity, the countless actual friendships that were crafted oh so deliciously, both short and long lived, my ‘grandmother’ and ‘mothers’ away from home who still hold their special places in my heart. The stories of a boy so entranced with the gaze that had captured him in the eyes of the girls he shared that space with, galloping on horses along the burr lined ridges that contained the essences of life and death hand in hand in its craggily bosom. And, the aspects that relate to this situation; the countless hikes through a seemingly endless sea of sand, red dirt, and lack of water.
To start this journey, there first needs to be context for the bag that always accompanied me. A bag which has lived longer than I, whose beautiful rich purple and blue entwined threads have long since faded to a lavender who like me spent too much time being drowned by sun and the sky that surrounds such in the cloudless desert. This bag which has been patched, disassembled and reassembled, and sewn anew more times than the number of threads held within it, was right there with me on this trek too.
While the reasoning for this trip does elude me now, I do remember the hours spent in the back of the old ford pickup through roads which were more akin to spots of desert ground that were unadorned with the brush normally encrusted there. I can still taste the sensation of just how much my ass hurt from sitting on the wheel well, dancing with the potential of death by draping myself over the edge, being caressed by the sweet gust that would weave itself through each strand of hair on my body, like it discovering the body of a lover.
I remember each thing contained in my bag; the water bottle that, with its Nalgene yellow shell, could be made from liquid vessel to light bearer with the click of a button on its lid that I had adopted from my father. A sandwich contained by Ziplock, most certainly beaten and battered from gallivanting in that truck bed. The hunting knife who had accompanied me as many times as the bag which contained it, which had been adorned in a plethora of carvings, squirrel and frog guts, knicks from sharpening’s gone wrong, and dirt so intwined it had become a part of the metal itself. And most importantly, an assortment of Emergen-Cs of various flavors.
We arrived from our rugged truck bridled journey nowhere near our actual destination. We had some five miles of hiking through a field of burrs and coarse dry grass who would put blackberry bushes to shame with their bristled glory. With everywhere the eye could see being just flat desert, even a mirage of shade was implausible. While we brought extra water in the truck, all we carried on this ‘hike’ was whatever bottle we brought. And as you can imagine, this didn’t last all that long.
At our first break I mixed the beauteous manmade sand of flavor, salt, and sugar that was held in these little pouches labeled Emergen-C into my water, and I so graciously shared some with my peers who treated these like cigarettes in a prison. Before we had reached our destination, which was some person’s farm who was letting us come and pick berries, most of us had run out of water, myself included.
Feeling like a frog who hopped too far from the pond they were born in, unsure of which way was which and dried out to a shrivel. In this desperate state of being willing to lick the sweat off the brow of the girls who had been holding onto me for fear of falling off the truck.
It struck me.
The pouches.
Those sacks of gravelly energy.
Formed to be thy namesake.
Emergen-C.
With newfound fervor I threw my pack to the ground and like a starving beast finding some disregarded corpse, I tore into it searching for that Ziplock. With less sense left in me than that starving beast, I propelled each item in my way to the unknown until my digging came to fruition. This sack of sacks was finally in hand. Grabbing the bright orange and yellow teemed pouch I, as carefully as I could so as not to spill any of this delicacy, tore the barrier barring it from me. And as meticulously as if I was eating caviar dredged in gold, slowly, mercifully positioned the pouch above my mouth and poured.
As each grain touched my tongue and mixed with my saliva to dissolve like cotton candy meeting water, so did my past grievances dissolve into nothingness. With an explosion of flavor, replicating that of a fresh juicy orange, mixed with the succulent nutrition known as salt and sugar, my energy was reborn like a phoenix from its demise. Tasting like how I would imagine Aphrodite’s saliva being poured from her mouth to mine, the aphrodisiac of life had been brought back to me.
Like a caveman discovering fire I shared my revelation with my peers and faster than the rays of sun traveling from its body to ours each packet disappeared.
Fueling us, we gamboled off to our destination and back, never forgetting that sweet sizzling sensation of Emergen-C in our desperate emergency.