Little Adventures

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Surreal

I spent eight years going to the Immaculate Conception Catholic school here in Clarion, but I remember almost nothing of that time, just a few peculiar moments. I remember sitting in class feeling hot and drowsy on a spring afternoon, and gazing out at the fine day I was missing, and hearing the nun drone on and on about Henry Hudson. I remember the day that some kid brought fireworks that looked like shiny metallic marbles, and how he spilled them and I stepped on one, how it exploded, and how Sister Sylvester collared me and hauled me away. I remember racing down the hill at Rankin's Grove on my sled and smashing into a pine tree and lying there on my back, looking up through the branches waiting for the pain to hit. During each of these early experiences, I was amazed that I seemed to be in my body, and yet outside of it at the same time. I did not know if these were normal feelings, but for some reason these "out-of-body" experiences were fascinating.

 I would now describe those early experiences as being surreal… having the intense irrational reality of a dream. For a long time I thought that such surreal experiences could occur only for a few seconds, but I was wrong. Early one spring morning, when I was seventeen or eighteen, I entered a Boy Scout canoe race that was to start at Tionesta, proceed down through Oil City, and end up at Franklin. That day was surreal from the very start. As Ron Miller and I paddled out into the Allegheny, clouds were gathering in the west, and just ten minutes after the start we found ourselves in a snowstorm in the middle of the swiftly running river. It was early in the morning and the sun, still low in the eastern sky, continued to shine right in under the storm clouds. It was spooky, but we had our life vests and were both experienced Scouts, so we continued racing down the eerie, silent river toward Franklin. At Oil City, we were tripped up by a strong current swirling around a bridge abutment, and it a blink we upset into the dark, cold water. The life preservers did their jobs, and with great effort and some help from another canoe, we were able to hauled our craft to shore. Soaked to the skin, we shivered off into the snowstorm in search of warmth and a telephone. We split up then, and my partner had better luck than I. He ended up in an Islay's restaurant, where he was made much of and fed cocoa and sandwiches with hot pie for dessert. I missed all that. Looking like death warmed over, I wandered into the 5 & 10 cent store. There they listened to my tale and let me use their phone to call my parents. Afterward, they lent me in some dry but very large coveralls and led me downstairs to their warm boiler room, lit by a single dim bulb dangling from the ceiling. I sat there for an hour, as if in a dream, until my mom came and whisked me back to reality. As we left, I thought with a smile that this, anyway, was a day that I would not soon forget.

As the years passed, I came to look out for and to try to savor these surreal moments. They came most frequently when I was sick, hurt or in trouble, but I also found that, sometimes, it was enough to be tired… especially at sunset in romantic surroundings. In 1992, at the end of a long day of driving, we parked the car and walked a long mile, deep into the German forest, to visit the Externsteine. Pam was not all that eager and kept mumbling about how we were taking an awful long walk just to see a big rock, but a deal is a deal, and the Externsteine was one of my choices, and so we walked on. The Externsteine is a group of five, 100 foot high, weathered limestone pillars which have been considered sacred by men since the stone age. They were even thought by some to be the pivot point of the universe. Sort of a German Stonehenge, but older. I was very interested in seeing for myself this relic of dim, dark days long past. I did. We stepped free of the forest, into a huge clearing, and I saw it there before me, backlit by the dusty setting sun. There were dozens of other people about, and Pam and Pete were with me, but some detached part of me was there alone, seeing the stones as people thousand years ago might have seen them. I climbed up a ancient staircase to the top, gazed out on the dimly lit forest and felt strangely at home.

So last fall, there I am, raking leaves by myself in the front yard. A breeze is blowing and more leaves are falling as I rake, but I don't really mind. The day is superb and the crisp, dry leaves chatter at me as I rake them into large piles. Then some last piece seems to fall into place, and I stop and lean against the rake and stare about me in wonder at the utterly perfect afternoon. And I wonder if, when I get very old, searching for such quiet moments might make an interesting way to spend the time before my last surreal experience… the one that we all will share.