My Private Emida

I wanted to re-post this because it is my most personal writing to date. I will be rolling out some intense stuff soon so I wanted to prepare my readers.

My Private Emida

I attended a Seventh Day Adventist private school in Takoma Park growing up. Before I was to graduate to the Takoma Park Academy, I toured another private academy called the Shenandoah Valley Academy. It was a somewhat more elite establishment in the Shenandoah Valley. It was certainly a more pastoral setting with horse stables and a brook with magnificent dorm rooms. I had a very strong urge to go there. I loved piano music and there seemed to be someone playing the piano in the lobby of every dorm room. I almost agreed to go but I wanted to stay in the city near my family. My parents were experiencing problems in their marriage and I wanted to see them work their problems out.

After graduation my father got his girlfriend pregnant and that pretty much tore it for my mother, she packed up the kids and moved to her mother’s farm in St. Maries, Idaho. St. Maries was a depressed logging town where many were on government assistance, my family included.

My mother and my grandmother never got along so a few months later we moved to a small logging outpost on the top of Mt. Baldy called Emida. Emida was the site of a massive old growth clear cut happening thereby creating  jobs supporting the logging population.

To get to school we took the bus. On the first day, when the bus driver saw me he joked with his whisky breath, “how did this little black kid get up here?” This was the first time I realized I had racial characteristics from my Mexican fathers side, but it would not be the last time I would be made aware of this fact.

My brother and I would catch the bus at six in the morning to go down the mountain roads for an hour and a half to get to school. The bus would be traveling at a forty-five degree angle most of the time with no seatbelts so the kids would take blankets and lay on the floor because the floor of the bus was the most comfortable place to sleep.

As I would lie on the floor I would listen to the engine of the great bus. There was something calming about the bus’s mighty roaring engine, it kept us safe from flying off the breathtaking cliffs as there were no guardrails on the roads.

Compared to their own French Canadian stock I was considered a dark skinned person. I fought almost every day in Junior High School as a representative of La Rasa.

My mother tried to intervene with the Principal to punish the boys who were particularly brutal one day. The Principal took me into his office, closed the door and punched me hard in the stomach. While I spat out bile he said, “Now that you know how that can really feel, let’s start.”  He then proceeded to show me how to throw and take a punch.

When I got home I practiced with my brother Julian outside until the night came and we had to go inside because of the threat of wolves.

Sometimes after school Julian and I would explore the stadium-like Mt. Baldy clear cut. The bowl was a mile in diameter and in the center it was as quiet as a cathedral, but on the perimeter you could feel the vibration of life in the air.

There were a million generations of crickets that had been living and dying before I was reflected on their bulbous eyes. Chipmunks cocked their heads and summarily inspected me for nuts. Tree slugs with their tentacle eyes lazily dropped down for a look.

I felt as damaged as the mile long open wound of the clear cut but these fellows were just going about their business as usual until my brother and I dropped in and then after a brief pause they returned back to their work.

One day at the clear cut we found a pinecone that was bigger than any football. I had my brother go long and I threw a Hail Mary pass and he caught it. We both jumped up and down in celebration and then I ran after him and in the course of our football game we ran out to the far edge of the perimeter.

After some tussling I noticed that it was getting dark. Julian and I got up and decided it was time to start back and then we heard a distant lone howl in the distance and we started walking faster. Then five minutes later we heard about three simultaneous howls and the howls were a little closer.

We got out of the clear-cut and got onto the trail. We started to run as fast as we could because it was now dark. The wolves had picked up our scent and were forming a pack quickly. Only when they had enough members would they strike. My brother was a little faster than I but we were both running faster than we ever had before.

We ran and it seemed like we had been running forever when I started to feel their presence, I looked back and they were less than two hundred feet away. I saw pairs of red eyes glowing in the dark loping up and down and around the eyes were the huge beastlike shadows of their bodies. Dissolution was present.

I tripped and fell on my face. I admit I had a moment of weakness when I thought Thank God, it is finally over.  I will die being ripped and torn asunder but at least in an honest way by my life itself. A split second later I felt my brother pull me to my feet and we started running again.

Many years later, when I was toasting my brother at his wedding, I told this story for the first time ever and the crowd cheered. While the crowd was cheering I looked into my brothers eyes and he looked into mine and I realized that after all these years, we are still on that trail running for our lives in the improbable wild splendor of Emida, Idaho.

Tags: creative writing, personal revelations