There were very few rules when I was a kid and most of them made no
sense. I was told that I couldn’t shave the cat or drive the car, climb the
willow tree or spit on old Mrs. Peterson. I felt like my life was nothing but
a collection of rules, but when dad told me not to step on the rocks, I
knew that my life had reached its lowest point.
We were going on a walk through the woods and the air had that
echoing quality of fall when he laid down just one more arbitrary rule, as I
saw it. I had no idea what inspired him but just to spite him and his
rules, old Mrs. Peterson and her complaints, I began to jump with one
foot and then the other, making sure that each step was on a rock or a
pebble. Once I couldn't jump far enough and I had to leap sideways to
land in some gravel.
I made it to the tarmac without incident and when we drove home I got
into the house by staying on the pavement instead of cutting across the
grass by where we parked the car. Our floor was tiled so I could avoid
soft surfaces and I could make a running leap to my bed from the hard
wood floor in the hall. When I got up in the morning I continued, which I
suppose showed a kind of resolve. I leapt from my bed, made it through
the bathroom and hall and kitchen and was soon walking down the
linoleum floor of the school. My first true test came up a recess. Normally
I would be tossing other boys across the grass in our mock battles. We
would imitate corporate leaders or politicians by fighting, and we kept the
lawn people busy where we would tear up the turf. That was over for me
now, and I watched the others from the safety of the gravel. They called
to me and said I was a pansy for not joining them, but I changed the
terms of the conflict. I said it was much more dangerous to land on
gravel and for the next two weeks we fought on the rocks and gravel of
the parking lot. When boys came in with pebbles embedded in open
wounds and tears in their skin where once were grass stains, the fighting
came to a stop and a teacher was assigned to the parking lot to prevent
further problems.
Although at school I could manage what dad called my professional life, I
was having more conflicts at home than I ever had. I stood on the drive
and rejected my dad’s order to help with the flower bed, I wouldn't help
mom move a bureau in her carpeted bedroom and when my sister Louise
took my favourite sports shirt into the back yard and used it to wipe
bacon grease off her face, I could only stand by helplessly. I refused to
go into the model store to pick out my favourite airplane with my dad
and so, as a punishment for my stubbornness, I got nothing for my
birthday.
When I was taken to the psychiatrist who was listed on my father’s
insurance I refused to enter his office. He worked out of his home and
the turf walkway in front of his office door was narrow and dangerous.
Perhaps because I had become more committed to disobeying this
particular rule more than I had ever been, I began to realize, or some
said invent, some of the dangers associated with soft ground. Everyone
has been on the outlook for quicksand after they have seen the bad guy
in movies getting caught in such firm seeming quaking dirt. There they
would slowly sink and then die, leaving only one hand clasping and
unclasping above the dirt. Likewise, I had been warned about the shifting
sand of gravel pits. For a while the news carried stories about the loads
of grain delivered back to the elevators with children in the trucks. They’d
ride for fun in the soft grain, but when the truck arrived at the elevator
the fatal load would have shifted and the kids would be dead.
Perhaps I took these more commonplace worries and injected them into
the vacuum of common sense that was my new avoidance of soft
surfaces. I gave a report on the health dangers of carpeting and had a
poster presentation in the science fair about soil types and mudslides. My
teachers fancied that I would become a soil engineer or a hydrologist, but
I knew better. Wherever I ended up working, it would not be outside,
where soft ground and loosely aligned rock mixed together until they
reached the shifting tectonic plates that we all pretended were so stable.
I knew that the tectonics slid over molten magma where forces beyond
human imagination shifted liquid iron and nickel. When another probe
was sent to Mars I was happy for a brief moment until my research on
the fluctuating internet suggested that we were going to Mars to search
of life. That most solid planet in my imagination was changed to melting
ice and underground aquifers.
By this point I had been to psychologist after counsellor and they had
tried to reason with me, but the facts were on my side. The news
contributed the case in Timmons where a sinkhole had opened up under
a parking lot and swallowed seventeen school buses along with the
derelicts who liked to sleep in them on cold nights. A mine had collapsed
in Springhill, Nova Scotia and in western Canada the hope slide buried an
entire town under rubble. Winnipeg sits on seventy feet of topsoil and a
semi fell through the city streets four years ago. Once a mother and her
kids in a minivan went through a similar sinkhole. People complained that
the city had stopped drilling the poorer neighbourhoods and now no one
was sure that there was still stable mud beneath the concrete.
I had many a therapist doing hours of research on the internet and then
later in academic journals trying to find stability in the flux that was soil
and shifting rock. One woman who was new to therapy left her job and
went back to university to study soil science. She was my favourite
therapist and we’d investigate the internet together. Like me, she was
angry when a seemingly good link was dead, and for every story I told
her about Atlantis or Pompeii she would volunteer Eldfell on Iceland and
the mud flats along the lower Ganges.
I went on like that for many years. Since I had fallen into a habit of
walking only on firm surfaces it affected my life in ways that I would never
have predicted. I even worked at a paving company for a few years,
coming after the machines had laid down the underlay and first coat. My
job was to drive the roller, which made sure the surface was firm and
smooth. I never forgot what I was sealing under the soft asphalt, but it
at least was a job that I could support intellectually. I drove truck in the
inner city and even worked as a tow trick driver, although that fell
through when it became apparent that there were places where I would
not go. They wanted me to pull a truck from the chewed up dirt of a
construction site and I refused. The loss of that contract meant my
company got rid of me and I drove semis for a while. Semis are too
heavy to leave the paved highways and even the dirt lots were easily
avoided.
I eventually drifted to the taxi company where I work now. I dispatch the
fleet and take care of their communication hardware. I work in a building
that used to house a meat packing plant so the floors are four feet thick.
I drive a solid Impala home and live in an inner city neighbourhood where
only a few trees struggle through rings of dirt circled by bricks.
I am not entirely stuck in my ways though. When the kids wanted to go
sailing I convinced them that we could iceboat and wind board instead,
thus keeping them safe on solid ground and saving on the cost of
equipment. When we went on vacation to the mountains I colluded with
my wife Emily’s fantasy that the mountains were solid platforms safe
enough to hold our weight, although I knew they were wearing away
even as we walked. John junior is studying to be a stone mason and
Emily will become, against my express wishes, a stewardess. Her life is
her own and she will do what she wants. She’s always been headstrong,
but the idea of all that empty air under the plane makes me shudder and
I’d hoped that I’d passed some of that on to her.
We’ve decided to take a cottage on Hopewell rocks and to pave the yard.
I’ve convinced Emily that cremation is better than a coffin, although we
were in agreement on a stone marker.
sense. I was told that I couldn’t shave the cat or drive the car, climb the
willow tree or spit on old Mrs. Peterson. I felt like my life was nothing but
a collection of rules, but when dad told me not to step on the rocks, I
knew that my life had reached its lowest point.
We were going on a walk through the woods and the air had that
echoing quality of fall when he laid down just one more arbitrary rule, as I
saw it. I had no idea what inspired him but just to spite him and his
rules, old Mrs. Peterson and her complaints, I began to jump with one
foot and then the other, making sure that each step was on a rock or a
pebble. Once I couldn't jump far enough and I had to leap sideways to
land in some gravel.
I made it to the tarmac without incident and when we drove home I got
into the house by staying on the pavement instead of cutting across the
grass by where we parked the car. Our floor was tiled so I could avoid
soft surfaces and I could make a running leap to my bed from the hard
wood floor in the hall. When I got up in the morning I continued, which I
suppose showed a kind of resolve. I leapt from my bed, made it through
the bathroom and hall and kitchen and was soon walking down the
linoleum floor of the school. My first true test came up a recess. Normally
I would be tossing other boys across the grass in our mock battles. We
would imitate corporate leaders or politicians by fighting, and we kept the
lawn people busy where we would tear up the turf. That was over for me
now, and I watched the others from the safety of the gravel. They called
to me and said I was a pansy for not joining them, but I changed the
terms of the conflict. I said it was much more dangerous to land on
gravel and for the next two weeks we fought on the rocks and gravel of
the parking lot. When boys came in with pebbles embedded in open
wounds and tears in their skin where once were grass stains, the fighting
came to a stop and a teacher was assigned to the parking lot to prevent
further problems.
Although at school I could manage what dad called my professional life, I
was having more conflicts at home than I ever had. I stood on the drive
and rejected my dad’s order to help with the flower bed, I wouldn't help
mom move a bureau in her carpeted bedroom and when my sister Louise
took my favourite sports shirt into the back yard and used it to wipe
bacon grease off her face, I could only stand by helplessly. I refused to
go into the model store to pick out my favourite airplane with my dad
and so, as a punishment for my stubbornness, I got nothing for my
birthday.
When I was taken to the psychiatrist who was listed on my father’s
insurance I refused to enter his office. He worked out of his home and
the turf walkway in front of his office door was narrow and dangerous.
Perhaps because I had become more committed to disobeying this
particular rule more than I had ever been, I began to realize, or some
said invent, some of the dangers associated with soft ground. Everyone
has been on the outlook for quicksand after they have seen the bad guy
in movies getting caught in such firm seeming quaking dirt. There they
would slowly sink and then die, leaving only one hand clasping and
unclasping above the dirt. Likewise, I had been warned about the shifting
sand of gravel pits. For a while the news carried stories about the loads
of grain delivered back to the elevators with children in the trucks. They’d
ride for fun in the soft grain, but when the truck arrived at the elevator
the fatal load would have shifted and the kids would be dead.
Perhaps I took these more commonplace worries and injected them into
the vacuum of common sense that was my new avoidance of soft
surfaces. I gave a report on the health dangers of carpeting and had a
poster presentation in the science fair about soil types and mudslides. My
teachers fancied that I would become a soil engineer or a hydrologist, but
I knew better. Wherever I ended up working, it would not be outside,
where soft ground and loosely aligned rock mixed together until they
reached the shifting tectonic plates that we all pretended were so stable.
I knew that the tectonics slid over molten magma where forces beyond
human imagination shifted liquid iron and nickel. When another probe
was sent to Mars I was happy for a brief moment until my research on
the fluctuating internet suggested that we were going to Mars to search
of life. That most solid planet in my imagination was changed to melting
ice and underground aquifers.
By this point I had been to psychologist after counsellor and they had
tried to reason with me, but the facts were on my side. The news
contributed the case in Timmons where a sinkhole had opened up under
a parking lot and swallowed seventeen school buses along with the
derelicts who liked to sleep in them on cold nights. A mine had collapsed
in Springhill, Nova Scotia and in western Canada the hope slide buried an
entire town under rubble. Winnipeg sits on seventy feet of topsoil and a
semi fell through the city streets four years ago. Once a mother and her
kids in a minivan went through a similar sinkhole. People complained that
the city had stopped drilling the poorer neighbourhoods and now no one
was sure that there was still stable mud beneath the concrete.
I had many a therapist doing hours of research on the internet and then
later in academic journals trying to find stability in the flux that was soil
and shifting rock. One woman who was new to therapy left her job and
went back to university to study soil science. She was my favourite
therapist and we’d investigate the internet together. Like me, she was
angry when a seemingly good link was dead, and for every story I told
her about Atlantis or Pompeii she would volunteer Eldfell on Iceland and
the mud flats along the lower Ganges.
I went on like that for many years. Since I had fallen into a habit of
walking only on firm surfaces it affected my life in ways that I would never
have predicted. I even worked at a paving company for a few years,
coming after the machines had laid down the underlay and first coat. My
job was to drive the roller, which made sure the surface was firm and
smooth. I never forgot what I was sealing under the soft asphalt, but it
at least was a job that I could support intellectually. I drove truck in the
inner city and even worked as a tow trick driver, although that fell
through when it became apparent that there were places where I would
not go. They wanted me to pull a truck from the chewed up dirt of a
construction site and I refused. The loss of that contract meant my
company got rid of me and I drove semis for a while. Semis are too
heavy to leave the paved highways and even the dirt lots were easily
avoided.
I eventually drifted to the taxi company where I work now. I dispatch the
fleet and take care of their communication hardware. I work in a building
that used to house a meat packing plant so the floors are four feet thick.
I drive a solid Impala home and live in an inner city neighbourhood where
only a few trees struggle through rings of dirt circled by bricks.
I am not entirely stuck in my ways though. When the kids wanted to go
sailing I convinced them that we could iceboat and wind board instead,
thus keeping them safe on solid ground and saving on the cost of
equipment. When we went on vacation to the mountains I colluded with
my wife Emily’s fantasy that the mountains were solid platforms safe
enough to hold our weight, although I knew they were wearing away
even as we walked. John junior is studying to be a stone mason and
Emily will become, against my express wishes, a stewardess. Her life is
her own and she will do what she wants. She’s always been headstrong,
but the idea of all that empty air under the plane makes me shudder and
I’d hoped that I’d passed some of that on to her.
We’ve decided to take a cottage on Hopewell rocks and to pave the yard.
I’ve convinced Emily that cremation is better than a coffin, although we
were in agreement on a stone marker.
r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal fall08.winter09 fiction
don't step on the rocks by barry pomeroy
don't step on the rocks by barry pomeroy