Honorable Mention in Prose

Revelations in Sirens
by Scott Cave

       The sound of the dog barking just outside my window, like a cannon firing next to my ear, invading my thoughts, intruded on an otherwise peaceful day. I have gotten to the point of requiring silence to center myself, to bring some kind of peace to the inner demons that are fighting for dominance. Sudden noises are just a means to distract me from the monumental task. But there was a time, not long ago, when noise was the means in which all of life’s answers could be found. Even in dreams, on occasion, I find myself submersed in the symphony of a city only to be awakened to the slow, quiet cycles of small town life. In those moments, I can still remember from the dream the taste of smog and gasoline on my tongue, the sound of sirens and the blaring of the horn from the guy behind me eager to get to his nine to five job. I step out of my front door and I am greeted by the smell of green living things and the wind blowing through the leaves of trees; already the dream of the city is fading away. Country life has infected me with a need for peace and quiet, but still, the call of the city and the countless adventures in the surreal and strange cling to me. I am reminded of just how much I learned and who I became.

My trip into the weird started with the untimely announcement from my father that he was taking a job in California. So, in an effort to get there in a timely fashion we packed our small treasure trove of items into a faded pale blue van and began the longest, most interesting journey of my life.

The road was strangely numbing, allowing me to hold back the trepidation of moving to a new place and getting to know new people. I was no stranger to moving, there is always a new place to discover, but something about the sheer size of our destination left me rife with anxiety. The journey was mostly a blur, punctuated by the occasional vista or a glorious sunset. Even the transition into California does not stand out; a gas station surrounded by endless scrubland, dotted with a sign that said, “Welcome to California”, seemingly placed there like an afterthought. The moment I finally knew we had passed into California was the carving of the freeway through a mountain pass. On each side of the road, jutting defiantly from the mountain sides, giant wind turbines stood out in stark white contrast. The intensity of the wind screaming through this area was enough to send us weaving side to side in our lane, even the tractor trailers in all of their mightiness were forced to a slow drunken crawl. Just beyond the pass was a layer of brown and black dirty air. As disgusting as it was, there was a beauty to it. The setting sun seemed to set the very air on fire.

My first few months in Los Angeles became so anxiety ridden that even lapses in high school classroom attendance brought me no comfort. It was on one of these lapses that a girl made an appearance; Mari, Asian-American, smart, funny, and beautiful. She was the one who pushed me kicking and screaming into a true adolescent wonderland. All of Los Angeles became our playground; even the simplicity of catching a bus became an adventure.

We would spend hours riding the bus, and all the while she would point out a random place or we would get off the bus and do some exploring. The people that we encountered of every shape and size, of all ethnicities, traveled using public transportation. One of our favorite things to do was people watch. We would often try to guess where they came from or something about their lives. All the various shades of human emotion could be seen on our fellow travelers faces. On occasion our efforts went into forging conversations with unhappy fellow travelers, often times leading to mutual smiles and a parting that left them happier than when they started.

Frequently, after school, we would set out on a new path, some bus route we hadn’t taken yet, just to see where it went. Los Angeles always presented some place we hadn’t seen; all the little towns of other cultures standing beside one another inviting us in with sounds and sights became too much of a temptation, begging to be experienced. Our path more often than not, always lead to Venice Beach; every aspect of the world could be found there.

All along the boardwalk venders plied their trinkets to the tourist who always found their way there. Those who couldn’t afford a shop would throw a blanket down on the ground and sit back in their chairs, waiting for the next person to show interest in their wares. Then, of course, there was always Rasta man as the locals called him. We would always catch sight of him rollerblading up and down the board walk, his dreadlocks pumping with the sound of some tune he was playing on his electric guitar swinging from his shoulders. He was as permanent as a fixture as the tourist speaking in mysterious tongues that often piled in during the weekends.

Eventually, a time came when the hustle and bustle of it all began to grate on my father, not to mention the extraordinary expense of a small two-bedroom apartment. So, a year after my fateful arrival to L.A., we once again packed our belonging for a trip over the same set of mountains. Again, another sign confronts me, “Welcome to Lancaster”.

I found Lancaster easier to get acclimated to, after all that I had experienced in L.A., suburbia was a sweet cake walk. Of course, suburbia and I are old friends, so it was easy to find the rhythm and beat to move to. Even with a large city nearly at my doorstep, the call of the open desert was enough to inspire hours of entertainment. A few miles from town among endless dunes, just inside the air force base, a small marsh presented itself to us. Often late night camping trips with my rowdy bunch of drunken friends to the sound of croaking frogs and the occasional meteor shower we would talk about for weeks. My father and I once braved the deep desert. With our tent securely fastened to the ground we went and checked out the washes that dotted the landscape. The wind was extremely high that day; we quickly got very tired of scrubbing the dirt and dust off of our faces and trying to get the grit out of our eyes. So we plodded our way back to our campsite only to find a missing tent. I would like to think that the tent went looking for greener pastures. This picture is stuck in my head of a tent bouncing forever across the landscape.

I once met a guy who to my delight owned a horse. Often he would go out of town and ask me to exercise his horse. Bones, his horse and I, became good friends. My feet had a tendency to carry me to that cleft of the San Andreas Mountains where that boarding ranch sat; the smell of horses was an incredible aphrodisiac. Occasionally, well into the setting of the sun, we would tramp across the mountains in and around the ranch. These were some of the most peaceful times I had ever encountered. But one time, to my immense pleasure, we went camping far beyond the humdrum of modern city life. The swish of water in a canteen by firelight under an immense carpet of stars became perfect music to lull me to sleep.

The last few years of my stay in Lancaster found me working in a ranch/kennel; thirty acres, numerous dogs and a whole host of animals big and small, including my boss’s kids all vying for my attention and affection. Waking before the sun rose to drive the thirty minutes to work was often a hairy trip, it was often punctuated by the occasional dive bombing bird or miscellaneous deer running across the road. Although my days were filled with endless barking and the smell of dogs and their feces, there was a certain kind of peace I found working with my hands. The first thing I did when I would arrive at the ranch was spray down the kennel runs; fenced in, concreted areas on which the dogs ran and played. My arch nemesis, the hated septic system which was not designed to handle the amount of waste that was being put in there on a daily bases had to be dug up on occasion to make it work properly. It was my job to get down in the hole, an eight foot hole full of smelly feces and wet mud. To my boss’s husbands amusement I sunk down waste deep in that mess and he had to bring the back-hoe over to get me out of it.

One of the most rewarding aspects of my job was the birthing of puppies. It is an extraordinary thing to birth a handful of puppy, peel off the birth sack and breathe life into new life, only to watch its little legs struggle, as if working up the energy for that first independent gasp of air. One time, 3 litters were due all at the same time. I stayed up for those days, dragging myself between one puppy being born and another. It was exhausting, but the most unique experience I have ever known. There is nothing like trying to stay awake and clean enough to eat a sandwich with one hand and catching puppies with the other. When it was finally over with, I crawled into my car and drove the distance home with one eye open. I slept for about thirty-six hours.

The ranch and all that I had experienced in California chiseled and shaped me. It taught me so much of who I was and made me who I am. Those types of things cannot be bought or replicated.

Little did I know that very soon I would be staring at another, “Welcome to” sign. My father decided it was time to get closer to the family. So again, we piled our belongings into a U-haul and set off for another trip. This time my trip assailed me with the never ending hits of the Bible belt, even keeping up with the CD changer worked my fingers bloodlessly to the bone. Driving my own car, I had no time to enjoy the scenery, only to search for the next song that I hadn’t heard a thousand times already. Just outside of Oklahoma we stopped at a hotel for the night. This was the worst place I had ever seen. It was literally flea bitten, filthy carpets, dirty sheets and bed that hadn’t known a flat surface in years. Thankfully we were there only long enough to sleep a few hours then move along again.

I believe there is a purpose and reason for everything we encounter in life and that all the joys and trials that come into our lives are meant to turn us into something more than we are. But, upon arriving in Seminole and seeing the house we would live in, I was sorely disappointed, so much so that it shown through like some beacon in a very dark night. I had to wonder at what purpose this trial was meant to fulfill in my life. What would this beaten down, ragged, seemingly forgotten house; forgotten like the oil that once drove this town to grow from nothing, teach me?

My first encounter with the culture of the Bible belt and minimum wage blues was a job at Wrangler when it was still a vital part of Seminoles economy. An old country boy, Pog, crashed into my world. It was as if all the stereo-typing of country people existed in one person. Pog, despite his ninth grade education and his list of children by various women ran the length of my arm, was always quick to smile and joke about his predicament. He is a good sort, of that I had no doubt, but him growing up in the country made some parts of his life ugly. He introduced me to noodling, which at first I thought was some strange aspect of snipe hunting. I found out later that it involved reaching my hand into very small places along a river bank, letting the fish swallow my hand then wrestling it onto the shore all the while avoiding being drowned. He sure did get a kick out of me when I told him I went crappie fishing; bent over in spasms of laughter he said to me they are called croppy. One day, by mere chance, my journeys brought me through Maud, a speck of town, old and worn out by all appearances. Mentioning this to Pog, he told me of the old Klu Klux Klan that still hide there under their former shadows of hate. I think that was the day I decided to avoid Maud like the plague or if I have to, only see it as a blur from my car window if my passage ever took me there.

My second encounter with culture which was more like an impact falling from thirty thousand feet, involved a very hard to understand man and his angry wife. Working in, of all places, a convenience store, a man walked in and asked for something from behind the counter. The words he spoke to me sounded as though he was chewing on mud, so thick and screwed together. After five minutes of, “I’m sorry sir, I just can’t understand you”, he walked out from sheer impatience. Ten minutes later his wife came back in and began screaming at me, all because I couldn’t understand him. In retrospect, I suppose he may have felt that I was making fun of him, even though I could not honestly understand him.

Another thing that still amazes me to this day, I got a speeding. The next day I found my name in the paper along with others who had encountered police in any fashion. It amazes me that a speeding ticket gets a more widely circulation than the New York Post. I guess due to the size of the town and the idea that everyone knows everyone else; every ugly aspect of small towns get held up to magnifying glass by the residents to be judged. On the flip side, there is always someone willing to wave at you in passing, and if you search hard enough there can be found people of exceptional spirit and quality.

I have been back and forth a few times now and both the city and country has grown on me in more than a few ways. Sometimes the sounds of the city call me to adventure, it can be so overwhelming that my legs cramp in anticipation of seeing what is around the next bend, but my life in the country has taught me the slow casualness and the willingness to explore the human condition. Eventually I hope to leave this place behind, as much as I crave the city and as much as country life has warmed up to me, the place I need to be is between them, somewhere on the outskirts straddling them both. In ten years that’s where I can be found, on some out of the way road, sitting on my porch discussing the turning of the season with my significant other, always though within view of the nearest city. At least in that fashion, there upon that porch, the screeching of a siren can be heard which will wake me from my slumber to all the new revelations and adventure that await me.

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