The things that you see and hear as a small child seem to leave indelible marks on the interior surfaces of your tiny but rapidly developing brain. There are certain images from my early years on the planet that are forever seared into my psyche. They include a somewhat random collection of mostly fond, often hilarious memories, that I am still carrying around. Fortunately, as a child I did not bear witness to anything truly terrible, just the normal day to day life of growing up in the rural parts of Pennsylvania.
Of course the term "normal" is a relative concept heavily influenced by where you live and with whom you share an abode. If you wander beyond the comfortable familiarity of your home turf, you will discover that this is true. Things that once seemed 100% normal can quickly turn into anything but before a live audience. Unfortunately, you probably won't discover this phenomenon until you happen to nonchalantly mention "normal" stuff to other people who hail from other places. At some point while you are explaining something which you feel is wholly unremarkable, you will notice something odd. The polite listening faces of your acquaintances will unexpectedly morph into "oh my god, how horrifying" faces right before your eyes. In that moment, you will abruptly come to the realization that your normal is absolutely NOT the same as theirs. In fact, sometimes the only way you could feel more different would be if you were an alien being from another planet.
Unfortunately, the only way to discover that your normal might be atypical is by recounting stories from your past until you hit on one that completely weirds people out. There is no avoiding these situations as you probably won't even realize that your tale is on a one way track to wackytown until it is far too late. Accounts of your prior life won't seem at all strange to you, but the instant feedback from your conversational partners will quickly inform you otherwise. If you are extremely in tune to the facial expressions of your listeners, you might be able to swiftly take corrective action. I won't say that this is totally impossible, but it's highly unlikely. In most cases, the startling awareness that you are starting to appear abnormal has an extremely rapid and irreversible onset. Awkward...sometimes cool...but mostly awkward.
There was a time when I might have hesitated to share certain things with others for fear of being perceived as a strange ranger. These days, I feel much more comfortable sharing my unique version of weird with the world. Obviously, since not only am I sharing these stories with my nearest and dearest, I am proudly broadcasting my wackiness out into the Interwebs. If we were all alike, life would certainly be a tremendous bore. Besides, connecting with people who love you in spite of or even because of your unique perception of reality is truly the bees knees. Not to mention, trying to constantly conceal anything that the rest of the world might find a bit strange is exhausting and stressful and not at all recommended. Unless your goal is to try to fit in at a middle school lunch table, it's best to come clean with your own brand of crazy. Sure, it might raise a few eyebrows, but in the end, people usually feel compelled to share their own shocking excerpts of weirdness. Trust me, there will always be someone in the room whose upbringing was way more bizarre than yours. Finding out these juicy tidbits is usually worth the risk of putting yourself out there in the first place. So, without further ado, here is the latest installment of totally normal for me but probably bizarre to you. Feel free to one up me your own historically accurate but totally weird tale from the past.
I grew up a hop, skip, and a jump down the road from one of the largest swamps in the entire state of Pennsylvania. Now, I'll be the first to admit that when you compare this particular bit of bog to other swampy areas of the globe, it's probably pretty puny. In fact, I'm not exactly sure how the highest point on the map between Pittsburgh and Erie can have so many stinking swamps, but the place is absolutely riddled with them. They range in size from small stink puddles to miles and miles of marshy misery. There even happened to be a fairly sizeable swamp directly behind my house on the property of my neighbor. I had no idea how large that swamp actually was until decades later when the magic of Google maps brought this fact to my attention. I mean it was no secret that it existed, I was simply unaware of its exact scale.
This is probably for the best as I am to this day fairly terrified of swamps. If I had grasped how large the local marsh scene actually was, I may have never left the house again. In fact, if I ever found myself on one of those survival shows where the participants have to traverse a swamp in order to be rescued, it would probably be the lowest rated episode ever made. I would just lay myself down on the last remaining patch of dry ground and patiently wait there to die. To me, this would be better than having to dip even my smallest pinkie toe into a quarter inch of swamp water. No drama. No crying. No wrestling wild alligators. No being bitten by venomous lizards. For me, calmly waiting to expire while lounging on the comfortable safety of dry land would be the most reasonable strategy. A much more preferable end than the possibility of smothering in inescapable quicksand, drowning in vile green swill or being shredded to bits by a bunch of ornery swamp monsters.
Even as a child, I felt this way. I would sometimes find myself on an exciting woodland adventure with the neighbor kids, who unlike me had no fear of swamps or swampy things. Perhaps, my hesitation was simply a genetic holdover from my mom's exclusively urban upbringing. Despite being born and raised on the rural parts of the map, I just wasn't THAT country. In fact, there was nothing that ground my good times in the wilderness to a screeching halt faster than catching the slightest whiff of putrid swamp stink. Anytime the normally solid forest floor started to feel a little squishy under my feet, I immediately hightailed it to higher ground. Ciao, you kids go on ahead, I'm full up on exploring for the day! So what, if it was just a giant smelly mud puddle chock full of polliwogs, I wasn't willing to take any unnecessary chances.
Despite my avoidance of all marshy matters, I still had occasional brushes with scenes from the swamp. Every once in a while, my dad would get tangled up in the storied swamp on the neighbor's back forty. It usually involved trying to track down one of those elusive monster bucks during deer season. Truth be told, my pop wasn't all that jazzed about wading through swamp water either. Those savvy deer must have known his weakness, as anytime he caught a glimpse of a buck that deserved his own magazine cover shoot, the first thing it did was make a beeline for the swamp.
In this type of scenario, Dad had learned to hold his fire the hard way. After all, in the hunting world, there wasn't a much more unpleasant task than hacking through putrid pools of semi-frozen stinkwater in order to retrieve wounded wildlife. (Truth in disclosure: There are actually way more disgusting things to deal with as a sportsman. However, this is not that kind of blog, so I am going to gloss right over them. The numerous variety of stomach turning possibilities that someone who regularly pursues wild game might encounter can easily be googled.). It was practically a guarantee that any trophy buck who had taken fire would drag himself deep into the bowels of the swamp. No one could deny that this was a valiant attempt to avoid becoming venison. In swampland, pursuing the biggest buck on the planet requires you to keep one eye on the target while simultaneously concentrating on where to place your pigs. If focus is lost, even for a second, you risk losing sight of the prize buck altogether or getting soundly whacked in the mug with frozen brambles. A nasty face scrape comes in second to the unpleasant encore of snow and ice slithering down the inside of your blaze orange coat collar. Equally treacherous, if you actively try to avoid taking an ice coated limb to the snoot, you are definitely going to end up waist deep in a subzero section of swamp swill.
A hardcore hunter, my father was not. He was more than happy to hunker down in a snow bank, snacking on an assortment of beef jerkey bits and high calorie candy. His snack supply was securely stashed in a paper poke in the pocket of his Woolrich. Rather than swashbuckle through swamps, he preferred to stay warm and dry, patiently waiting for trophy bucks to come to him. Great in theory but not so productive in practice. I can count on one hand the number of dead deer bodies my dad dragged home after a successful hunt. It's not that he wasn't a great hunter, I personally believe that he just didn't always choose to look very hard. Of course, being hardcore Bambi boosters from way back, none of us back at the ranch were exactly disappointed to see him stroll out of the woods empty handed. Chalk one up for the deer, one for the swamp, zero for poor dad. Oh well, there was always next year. If nothing else, my father was persistent.
Besides my dad and me, the rest of the family also made every effort to avoid unnecessary contact with the local swamp. Despite our best efforts, occasionally, the swamp came to us. Every once in a while, a slimy creature from those deep dark waters would make a wrong turn and end up in our backyard. More often than not, that mysterious green creature actually belonged to us. She also held on very tightly to the slim hope of being welcomed back into our residence, knowing full well that she was in deep trouble. The trusty family dog happened to be completely untrustworthy when left to her own devices. Despite being a gunshot wound survivor, she could not turn away from the lure of a quick stroll in the forest. Her strong resemblance to a fox made it all the more risky. Unfortunately, her primal need to scour the wild in search of something rotten to roll in outweighed her fear of being accidentally aimed at with live ammo. If she couldn't find a carcass to throw herself on top of, she would settle for second best...a romp through the swamp. She occasionally slinked back home sporting a fancy new perfume. A bit of rancid cologne discretely dabbed behind her two fuzzy ears, and by dabbed I mean swabbed in stinky chartreuse swamp water from the top of her head to the tip of her tail. Despite having obviously been recently engulfed in mire, she wholeheartedly maintained her innocence. The reeking remnants of her little outdoor adventure, steadfastly streaked through her formerly fluffy fur, were a fairly obvious tell.
On this sort of occasion, my older brother and I would always try to trick each other into taking on the foul task of hosing off the hound in our laundry tub. For some unknown reason, my sister was perpetually excused from this unpleasant chore. While it's true that she washed an awful lot of dishes back in the day, there is no amount of slime coated cookware that equals one muck covered swamp mutt. The remaining two siblings in the gross out grooming pool resorted to a variety of tactics to determine which lucky winner would get to clean off our crusty canine. Our elimination techniques included rock, paper, scissors, leg wrestling, and drawing straws. Desperate times sometimes called for straight up bribery. Finally, unable to tolerate the rotten stench for even one second longer, we would give up trying to pawn the disgusting task off on the other. In hindsight, I'm not sure why we wasted time engaged in such fruitless pursuits in the first place. Our efforts to win the day were hindered by the fact that we were competing with each other while simultaneously jumping up and down, holding our noses and gagging. Since we always ended up working as a team anyway, we should have stopped torturing ourselves much sooner and gotten down to business. Scrubbing stinky swamp water off the disgusting dog was preferable to washing off remnants of fresh roadkill, but only by the slightest of margins. No matter how many bottles of sweet smelling fruit flavored shampoo we doused that dog in, the faint smell of swamp swill still lingered on her furry flanks for weeks.
Although the nearby swamp that our dog frequented was by no means tiny, it was a mere speck on the map compared to the massive swath of marshland that could be found a few miles to the north. My dad worked in a town that happened to be located just on the other side of this gargantuan parcel of gelatinous green goo. In order to get to and from his place of business, dear old dad was required to cross "The Swamp" twice a day. Despite being the most enormous tract of swampland in the state, it had no other name. (This just in...in reality, it has two different names, Geneva Swamp or Conneaut Marsh, but I never personally heard either of them actually used by anyone I knew. In fact, I only recently discovered these unfamiliar titles when doing a bit of research for this story. I guarantee that many of my local readers are currently saying to themselves, "Who new it had a name?") The fact remains that if you live in this particular region and you say THE swamp, there will never be any question as to which particular one you might be referring.
There were two bridges that traversed this mysterious marsh. One was the interstate which was built on special pilons driven 200 feet down into the bedrock. Rumor has it that they are special floating piles because they could not find any firm ground at the bottom of the swamp. This is only partially true. The true bottom of the swamp covered in peat and quicksand was unable to support the weight of the bridge so they just had to dig down deeper into the Earth to get the job done. During the process, the sneaky swamp swallowed numerous pieces of colossal construction equipment, including an entire train and the tracks that it was resting on. It also coughed up a few mastodon bones that had been hiding out in pockets of peat for a few billion years.
The second of the two bridges was built approximately three inches above the surface of the swamp. I have never before or since crossed any bridge that was so close to the body of water it straddled. Any lower and it could be classified a tunnel. Since we lived on the same stretch of road as the low bridge, it was the usual route that my dad took to work. It didn't happen very often, but this beast of a swamp would occasionally flood. The lower road would be closed, rendered completely invisible by neon green water. Not surprising given its meager elevation. In fact, I would not be shocked to learn that this swamp covering span of highway was actually constructed below sea level. In case of unexpected deluge, my dad would simply hop on the nearby ramp to the interstate and safely cross the swamp via the much higher flood resistant "floating" bridge instead.
Sadly, every single time that this bit of roadway was underwater, tragedy ensued. Before the road could be officially shut down, some yahoo in a motorized vehicle that was not seaworthy would attempt to ford the flooded bridge. He or she would meet an unpleasant demise in one of two ways. The first awful scenario involved driving headlong into the swamp since in these conditions the water covered roadway beneath the floodwaters frequently went AWOL. The second tragic tale left a stranded motorist in a rapidly flooding vehicle. Attempting an escape on foot, the driver would be tragically swept away into the deep dark swamp usually never to be seen or heard from again. These cheerful little tales of caution occasionally reached our dinner table and thus my young impressionable ears. Their purpose was not to terrify us, although admittedly they did a pretty good job of that. Instead, these tales of woe were meant to drive home the potentially life saving lesson to never, ever drive into standing water. Unfortunately, this well meaning admonition was served up with a heaping side dish of fodder good for years of professional therapy and a few recurring nightmares. Don't worry though, if the route to my therapist's office happens to be washed out in a freak rainstorm, I promise to always find a safe and sensible detour.
Now you know how this particular bit of marsh gave birth to my lifelong fear of swamps. It doesn't help that it stretches across the landscape as far as the eye can see, twelve miles long and a mile across. Every single time that I have to cross it, I kind of hold my breath. I say kind of as both bridges are super long and if I actually tried to hold my breath for that long, I would certainly pass out. Increasing the risk of accidentally slingshotting my unconscious self into the swamp in the process would be the exact opposite of my intention. Fortunately, living 500 miles away from THE swamp prevents me from having to do this with any kind of regularity. Still, flying off the road into this king sized, lily pad coated killer remains at the tippy top of my worst way to leave the planet list.
Despite my overwhelming worries, if for some reason I needed to travel north, there was no avoiding crossing at least one of the two swamp bridges. Taking a lengthy detour around the marsh was not a viable option as it would be far too time consuming to accomplish in less than three days. Complicating matters, for a decade or so of my life, my brother also happened to live on the other side. A lesser woman might have simply waited for him to relocate, but not me. Despite my deep-seated fear of being unceremoniously swallowed up by the swamp, I still managed to will myself to visit him on a fairly regular basis. To be clear, it isn't merely the concern of being drowned or more likely suffocated by pond scum that bothers me. I am more afraid of the creepy band of critters that call the swamp their home. In fact, I would not be at all surprised to learn that real, live dinosaurs still currently roam the interior portions of this swamp. How exactly did I learn about the scary creatures that silently lurk below the olive colored surface of slime streaked swamp water? Well, it all began with a small bowl of mysterious soup. Tune in tomorrow to find out more...
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