CHAPTER FIVE
A friend: What’s the song that spoke most to you as a child?
Me: “I’m So Afraid” by Fleetwood Mac.
THERE WAS a lot to fear where we lived, and while all of us kids were afraid of bears and storms, each of us had specific things we worried about. Megan and the boys were afraid of the dark. Jamie was afraid of wolves. And I was afraid of burning to death in my bed.
My fear emerged as a result of Jamie’s interest in science.
As a teenager Jamie became obsessed with fantasy, but during his preteen years when we first moved to the cannery the only books he was interested in were scientific ones. “Don’t give me anything that isn’t true. I want fact books,” he insisted to Mom.
Jamie, regrettably, misused his wide-ranging collection of scientific facts.
Like the night Jamie, Megan, and I were playing in the back bedroom by the glow of the kerosene Coleman lantern hanging from the ceiling with a round soot spot above it. Megan was subject to night terrors and had to have the light on all night, though when everyone was in bed my parents turned it down to a mellow glimmer. The long, eight-paned window that faced the forest was black with night, reflecting back an image of the room with us in it.
To stop Robin and Chris from bothering us older kids, they were restricted to one walled-off corner of the large room. Because Mom was softhearted and she didn’t want them to feel left out, she had Dad not panel the wall to their room so they could look out on us older kids as we played.
The unintended result was that the boys looked like they were zoo animals in a wooden cage or enclosure. They loved to scamper up the framework of the open walls and perch at the space at the top, peering down at us, heckling and jeering at us, and throwing their toys at us, like feral monkeys.
This particular night Jamie, Megan, and I were playing Jamie’s own special version of poker in which the rules—forever after immortalized as “Jamie Rules”—were complicated and subject to change without notice. And, let it be noted, always resulted in him winning. Years later I saw the original Star Trek episode “A Piece of the Action” and recognized Captain Kirk’s “Fizz-bin” as Jamie’s version of poker.
As Jamie was explaining to me why I couldn’t make the exact same discard he’d made moments earlier (a spade could never be discarded when a club was turned up, unless a heart had been discarded three turns previously; or if it was a Friday night), he paused and stared at me without blinking.
I shifted uneasily, dreading the appearance of one of his disturbing smiles.
The smile didn’t appear. Instead, his stare became more and more clinical. I did not find this a reassuring development.
“Interesting,” he said. “Did you know that the way some people store fat on their body can be evidence of a lethal combination of chemicals in the stomach? Hold out your arm.”
Warily, I looked at my arm.
He picked it up, squeezing it experimentally. “Uh-huh. That’s what I thought. You have the thick-skinned subcutaneous fat layer profile of the type of person who is scientifically most likely to suffer from spontaneous human combustion.”
I looked at Megan. She stared back at me wide eyed. She looked glad that she didn’t have a thick-skinned subcutaneous fat layer profile.
“What, you ask, is spontaneous human combustion?” he continued in a professorial tone as he shuffled the cards. “It begins with a steady increase in temperature due to self-heating reactions caused by chemical processes in the stomach, followed by thermal runaway. This self-heating accelerates to higher and higher temperatures until finally… auto-ignition.” He dropped the cards and shoved his hands widely apart, miming a conflagration. He added sound effects of a fire burning.
I knew it was better not to understand what he was talking about. I always regretted asking him to explain. “You haven’t dealt out yet. Mom’s going to tell us to go to bed pretty soon.”
He picked the deck back up and dealt the cards out with slow deliberation as he kept his eyes fixed on me. “That means you ignite and burn hotter than a furnace. People who spontaneously combust burn so hot that there’s nothing left of them but their hands and feet. The furniture they’re on barely smolders, but the person burns up completely.”
I pictured Megan waking up one morning, in the bottom bunk we shared, with my hands and feet lying beside her. At least she’d barely be singed.
“What can I do about it?” I picked up my cards, trying to keep it casual. Fear was like blood in the water to Jamie.
He consulted his science books. After a while, as I waited with outward composure, he slapped the book shut. “Nothing. There’s nothing that can be done. You’re one of the rare subsets of humans born with the body type that leads to spontaneous combustion. Science has no cure.” He stared at me for another long, clinically interested moment, then shrugged. “So, how many cards do you want?”
I lay in bed that night, staring at the glowing lantern and the shadows in the corners of the room, listening to the even breathing of my brothers and sister. The window, so close to the woods, always unnerved me at night. It seemed an unnecessary, open invitation to every bear in Alaska to come in and enjoy a midnight snack.
Many a night I’d lie there and hear a deliberate, crunching sound, like footsteps in hardened snow, and I’d try to convince myself that it was my heartbeat, not a bear prowling around, sniffing out its next meal.
That night I heard the rhythmic sound go faster and faster. It was my heartbeat all right, and it was laboring so fast and hard that it seemed to shake me in the bunk next to Megan. Was this the first sign of spontaneous combustion? Sweat popped out on my brow and
I went rigidly still. There was no question now: I was getting hotter.
And hotter.
The more I thought about it and tried not to get hotter, the more heated my body became.
I stared in fascinated horror at the flame burning at the end of the wick in the lantern. My subcutaneous fat layer would make me burn like that wick. I’d char to crusty blackness right next to Megan as she slept obliviously.
Why me? What had I done to deserve a subcutaneous fat layer? Tears leaked out of my eyes as the heat built upward, right into a ball in my throat.
The silence of the house, of the wilderness outside, turned an indifferent eye toward my sufferings as the furnace inside heated to the point of inescapable ignition. I think I passed out from terror.
The next morning Jamie leaned down from the top bunk to do an inspection.
“Oh. You’re still here. I thought you might have spontaneously combusted and I wanted to make a record of it. For science.” He considered. “Oh, well, there’s always tonight.”
He smiled. That smile.
• • •
I was about four or five when my parents took us three older kids—the babies not being born yet—to the theater to watch The Wilderness Family (as it was originally titled when it was released in 1975), during the height of the Back to the Land Movement.
It’s the story of a family that leaves smoggy Los Angeles to homestead remote mountain territory beside an alpine lake, reachable by floatplane. There’s the dad, Skip, a denim-clad construction worker who can’t hammer a nail in to save his life; Pat, a long-haired, too-glamorous-for-my-gingham-skirt former beauty pageant runner-up as the mother; Jenny, the earnest, asthmatic blonde girl who needs to escape the smog to survive and should have won an Oscar for her performance; and Toby, the giggling little boy who gets into generic mischief and has to be surreptitiously elbowed to remember his lines.
The movie is low budget, with endless images of innocent wilderness play set to saccharine songs and back-to-back montages of DIY cabin building