Elephant trampoline

It's my colon, and I'll write if I want to

I wasn’t going to write about this, I swear I wasn’t. NOTHING is more boring or more elderly than someone writing about an operation or a medical procedure.

But it’s Friday and I'm a little short of ideas, so. . . 

There wasn’t a lot of evidence I had anything wrong with my colon, except vague symptoms. I don’t even want to call them symptoms, because that word implies there is some sort of evidence of disease, and how do we know we have the disease if we haven't had the tests yet?

It’s something proven backwards, like menopause. “When did you go through menopause?” a (younger) friend of mine recently asked me.

“Uh. . . “

I had no idea what to say. What exactly does it mean to “go through menopause”, since “menopause” is so vaguely defined?

You can only conclude that your menses have permanently ceased if you have had no menstrual periods for one year. Does that mean you are “going through menopause” during that year? Or has menopause already ceased  (since, whether you know it nor not, you're done with periods forever)?  

How do you know, anyway? They could start again at any moment. Or not. 

And what about the five to ten years of turbulence before that permanent cessation that marks the “end” of menopause, or at least of your fertile years? (And by the way, a woman my age is always described as “menopausal”, no matter how many years have elapsed since that elusive "last" period). What about the hot flashes, the mood surges, the rollercoaster of missed and erratic periods, the the the -

I'm a little off-topic here. I am now well past all that, but now new “symptoms” (or thingamabobs, things that bother me at least a little bit) are emerging. Things that seem to be happening in my belly, or should I say lower down, in my gut.

Isn’t that kind of where we all live? I’ve heard there is more serotonin in your gut than in your brain. I have also heard the theory that there is a second brain in the gut, a sensor or reactive network of nerve endings that is so responsive, it practically has the capacity to think.

Does it also make decisions? Such as: "OK, your time is up"?

I’ve also heard all the theories about unresolved this and unrequited that. I suppose it’s got credence. My life, at least professionally,  has pretty much been an exercise in frustration. Though I know I have talent as a writer, I have had barely any recognition, and no money. This is not supposed to matter, by the way, because I am an “artist” who doesn’t need such things. And wanting it is crass and egotistical.

Meantime, every other talented person I know in every other field is accomplishing rings around me, and making good money, and I’m not supposed to mind!

I suppose this might cause some turmoil somewhere, in my brain at least, but in my gut? Maybe.

Some call this “the revenge of the unlived life”. I have never been able to place my work with anyone/anywhere where it can fulfill its potential, or what I think is its potential.  I doubt if I have enough time left to do so. It’s not a question of “gee, I want to be a writer” or writing one chapter of something and ditching it, or getting one rejection (boohoo into my pillow, get drunk, and quit). I'm not a chipper, folks. I'm serious, and I have been for my whole life.

What this has to do with getting a camera shoved up my bunghole is mysterious, but it might relate somehow. Or not. It fascinated and repelled me, the idea of this sewer snake, this Roto Rooter exploring all those twists and turns inside me. But I had become frightened by possibilities that I did not want to think about, and I was surprisingly willing to have the "procedure" done, if only to allay my anxiety.

A close friend of mine shed some light on all this. “Cancer is so out there now,” she said. “It used to be in the closet, and nobody ever mentioned it. Now it has jumped out like a jack-in-the-box and is in our faces every minute." Not only that. . . since there’s money in it, it’s being exploited – no, people’s fears are being exploited right, left and centre. Cancer has become an industry. 

Just this morning, my husband’s favourite magazine, Consumer Reports, arrived in the mail, with a cover story called “8 Cancer Tests You Don’t Need”. It was quite a revelation and reflected the fact that the medical community performs diagnostic tests on patients, not because they need to or the patients need them, but just because they can.

They have all this expensive equipment, for God’s sake, so how can they let it gather dust in the corner? So people are terrified into thinking they have cancer just because the technician (never a doctor) performs a test on them which is meant to screen for cancer.

Like “going through menopause”, it’s a backwards sort of thing. You’re having a “cancer test”; therefore you either have cancer, or MIGHT have cancer and should be worried, if not terrified, that you do.

Anyway, the hardest part of the procedure was the prep, which I’ve already written about in another post.  Fasting has never been my thing, and I don’t remember ever feeling that hollow. I won't write about the dreaded Pico Salax, which I kept calling Pico Iyer in my mind, though they don't look much alike, do they?

The day of the procedure was sort of dreamlike. I found, to my surprise, that I wasn't nervous, or not particularly. Like a dog at the vet's, I had relaxed into the inevitable. The hospital had been torn to pieces for some unknown reason, the inevitable turmoil that afflicts airports and other such public facilities so that you can never get anywhere on time. Then there was the massive water leak that had flooded the emergency ward a few days before, and was threatening to start up again.

For all that, I got there early (husband in tow: I was not allowed to leave the place without an escort to carry me in case I fainted from an anaesthetic hangover), and they let me go in right away. “In” meaning another snaking tunnel of corridors and “little rooms” with big machines in them. People came and went, either nurses or technicians, but none of them doctors. Doctors don’t belong in a hospital any more.

I was asked to take everything off except my shoes and socks, which seemed very odd, and put two gowns on, fore and aft. This was much better than the old idea of one gown which was open all down the back, a ludicrous and completely avoidable policy that was in place for 50. . . oh, skip it.

I was expecting a long wait, the “hospital wait” that seems to put you into another sort of time zone, but pleasantly enough, it didn’t happen: very soon, people started bustling around me and doing things. I sat next to a friendly elderly woman with a European accent (we were in a sort of waiting area for some reason, perhaps because the “little room” was flooded) and chatted about this and that while the nurse (technician?) draped a warm blanket over my arm. Pleasant, though I had no idea why it was there. Then she came back and said, “I’m putting the IV in now."

IV?! Oh God. Sqeam, went my guts, squeam. I remembered all the times that technicians couldn’t get blood out of me and sometimes became almost hysterical, blaming me for having “difficult veins”. So what would happen with something this intrusive, this horse needle? 

“Do you faint when you have blood taken?” 

“No.” I lied; it had happened once when I was pregnant a million years ago and they couldn’t find a vein.

She began to work on the back of my hand, which worried me even more. I didn't watch, as I never do: I don't see why I should. Strangely, after the usual one-second jab, there was no pain at all. Another nurse (technician?), who seemed to be just sitting around with a clipboard, said something like, “Good one!”, so I felt better. I also felt something running down my hand. “Oops, better wipe this up in case a patient sees it.”

Ye gods.

While all this happened, the lady with the European accent told me that she had a very low threshold for pain. I had the impression she had been ill for a long time. Her husband, who was French, sat across from her, looking much more nervous than she was and biting his nails.

Then it was time to go clomping into the room with the weird machine in it.

I lay back on a bed which seemed to be constructed of chrome bars. There followed a surreal few minutes in which I felt like Whitley Streiber in that Alien novel: several people were swarming busily around me, putting an oxygen thingie in my nose, sticky things for a heart monitor (heart monitor? For a colonoscopy??) on my chest, putting a blood pressure cuff on my arm and connecting my hand to the tube-thingammy for the anaesthetic. I felt a weird, cold, creeping sensation on the back of my hand.

Speaking of Whitley Streiber, they wasted no time on the “probe” which quickly went to its mark. The first few minutes were not pleasant at all, and the hard, almost violent pokes made me jump and even yelp a bit. “Breathe”, the technician (nurse?) said.

I breathed. After a while I sort of lost track, went into a dreamy state. This is not total anaesthesia, but a sort of twilight state in which you can still answer questions (“Is God real?”), but can’t just jump up off the table and leave. It seemed that only about five minutes had elapsed before I heard a “There,” and was “unplugged” swiftly in all five places with no pain at all.

Those aliens really know their stuff.

Then I was wheeled out of that little room into a sort of curtained-off place (which is what hospitals are now reduced to: not long ago the media discovered that Vancouver General Hospital was placing beds full of emergency patients in a doughnut shop adjacent to the hallway). It was nice, nice. I was just lying there, thinking, it’s over, then someone put Bill in a little curtain-y place beside me (he had stayed out in Reception, thinking he wasn’t wanted, which he wasn’t until I needed to go home). He said hi, then went back to where he was supposed to go.

I just lay there thinking, it’s nice.

Then I guessed I had to walk, and it was strange because all that up-and-downstairs, across parking lots, more up-and-downstairs, muddy roads, etc. etc. which I had dreaded on the way back didn’t bother me one bit because I was two  feet off the ground trailing vapor like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

So that was it, pretty much straightforward, assembly-line medicine, and I was very glad to be told (before I left!) that they hadn’t found a thing that was out of the ordinary. All clear. My guts were clean as a whistle.

But there is another part to this story that I sort of remembered retroactively. While I recovered in the little curtain-y place, I heard moans and cries. Then I realized the elderly lady with the European accent was having her colonoscopy in the same room that I had just come out of.  I now understood why her husband had been chewing his nails. The cries went on and on. At one point a nurse (?) went in there, and I heard her say, “Instead of screaming, breathe.” And that was the last I heard of her.

Total abstinence: I won't last a day without food

I can’t remember the last time I went a whole day without eating.

I used to go on extreme diets, but that was a long time ago. When I look at pictures of how thin I was BEFORE the diet, I plotz. In some photos I look like a ghost: it was at that point that I felt I was “thin enough”, at least until I put back 5 pounds or so.

I have had an uneasy relationship with food, with eating.  Whole industries have sprung up around it, billions of dollars’ worth. Buying food, preparing food, eating in restaurants so we won’t have to put out any effort at all.

I remember feeling a little shocked when a friend of mine (quite obese, and apparently going to a nutritionist because she said she had no interest in food ) said to me, after we’d finished eating in a restaurant, “So what's so great about it? It’s in one end and out the other.”

Well, it’s true, but we don’t think about that, do we?

Why make such a fuss about food? Everything turns to shit anyway. Kind of like a metaphor for life.

I’m thinking about all this, as I sit here already feeling hollow and groany in the stomach. I’ve been doing “prep” for a colonoscopy for several days now, first with a restricted diet (no this, no that), and today with a liquid diet restricted to anything I can see through.

Meaning limited Jell-o, limited chicken broth (these consumed as “meals”), ginger ale, apple juice, and water and water and water. And water.

Already I am feeling unmoored. For food isn’t just something that keeps us going, as in "calories in". It’s a way of marking the day, of orientation. “Haven’t you had lunch yet?” “You mean you don’t eat breakfast? It’s the most important meal of the day.” (Why?) “Let’s have dinner some time.” Etc. Not “let’s get together and talk trash", but “let’s get together and stuff food into our mouths”.

I won’t write about the obesity crisis which seems to be blowing people up like balloons. My theory (one that I have never seen anywhere else) is that people are responding to the emotional stress of a harrowing, violent, climate-damaged world by stuffing things in their mouths. They’ve been doing it since they were babies.

It’s self-comforting, and the thing is, when you walk into the average store, I mean a drug store or department store like Walmart or Target or one of those, one of the first things you see is a WALL of junk Sometimes walls and walls of it. None of it is really edible and most of it consists of sugar, fat and other empty calories. All of it is within easy reach and does not cost very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, here’s your pacifier! Come stuff it in your mouth, and a few hours later, shit it out in your diaper. Or wherever.

But I set out to write about this strange fast, this abstinence, fortunately only one-and-a-half days long. Later this day I must purge, and I’ve heard this stuff is a Roto-Rooter to your insides. It scares me half to death  because the whole reason I am having this procedure is that I’ve been having abdominal pains. Might they be made infinitely worse by this liquid Draino I have to drink tonight?

I am not one of these people who wants to “watch”, by the way. I don’t know why they let anyone watch the procedure. The whole reason it’s done is to screen for cancer, tumors and other abnormalities of the colon. Who wants to be lying there staring at the screen and suddenly hear the technician say, “Oh my God, that’s the worst one I’ve ever seen"?

It’s seven minutes after eleven, and all I’ve had today is coffee (black) and water (clear). I thank the Lord I can have coffee at least. When I have my fasting glucose test every few months, coffee is not allowed, and by the time my arm is stuck and bled, my head is pounding. After the siphoning I run for Starbuck’s or, even better, McDonald’s, which has surprisingly good coffee that is just loaded with caffeine.

As I sit here listening to my stomach make noises like a grizzly, my mind bounces back and forth. I’ve been doing this for weeks now, but it has intensified over the past few days. Of course everything will be all right. I’ve “passed” every medical test I have ever had. Nothing is ever wrong. EVER.

Then why am I having this?

There’s no cancer in my family. Anywhere. But that turned out to be a lie, or a “mis-truth”, a form of selective amnesia. My Dad was indeed treated for bladder cancer and completely cured and went on to live another 30 years. My mother had her uterus removed, but no one ever told me why (and in fact I did not find out she had a hysterectomy until many years later. At the time, she was just “in the hospital”.)

So it is quite possible that BOTH my parents had cancer. A strange sort of flip-flop from what I believed until quite recently. I wasn’t lying to myself. I just didn’t “know”, though in fact I knew very well. I was protecting myself from the truth.

So how do I feel without the anchoring effect of food, the three meals a day that prevents everything from blurring together into “blunch”, “linner” and “dupper”? I find I’m already forgetting and almost grabbing something to eat. Just a banana. (God, I had a lot of bananas yesterday.) I am holding off on my feast of peach Jell-o and Knorr chicken broth (“Made from real chicken!” Hell’s bells, what ELSE would it be made from?) until I am truly desperate.

I don’t want this “procedure” to happen, but at the same time I want it over with. I know the most likely result: no phone call, which is good news, isn’t it? Better than the other kind.

I can’t help but remember, though, all the friends I used to have, the ones who fell to disease: cancer, heart attack, AIDS, more cancer. . . Oddly enough, the one that bothered me most was the recent death of someone I could only call an acquaintance. I had not seen her for years – she was once a member of my former church and had just been ordained as a minister – and then suddenly I’m getting a Facebook message inviting me to her memorial service.

MEMORIAL SERVICE?

When you leave a place you’ve been part of for years, it sort of freezes in time. If you meet someone you knew years later, you can’t help but think, God, they look old. But when someone dies at 50. . .  Someone you admired, liked, even though you weren’t really friends. Someone whom you knew would make an outstanding minister because of her soaring spirit and vibrant faith.

And now she’s dead. Dead?

I am still having trouble getting my head around it, don’t really believe it, can’t associate her with death at all. And it was cancer, that looming shadow, perhaps the main thing we are trying to rule out tomorrow, which is why I have to be so cleaned out. If she could die like that, just vanish, so that I’ll never see her again. . .

I can’t finish that sentence.

This is just a procedure. Millions of people have it. I haven’t had any real symptoms. At least, I don’t think they are symptoms. I don’t know what they are, just things that have been bothering me. I only know I am not allowed to eat, and the peach Jell-o quivering in the fridge is beginning to look like coq au vin.

Not eating, fasting, is like missing a step in a dance or a skipping rhythm. Or maybe stepping back from everything. It feels weird, hollow. It leaves you clutching at the air. And oddly depressed, your pacifier snatched out of your mouth, so that you are forced to see, and feel, all the things that you would really rather not.

Family photos: with a twist

When I stumbled upon a program that would make a photo look sort-of-like a drawing or painting, I was quickly hooked. Spent hours on these, trying to get them just right. Some of the really promising ones just turn to mud, don't work at all. They look sort of grainy and lithographic, like certain illustrations in children's books. 

Pictures are weird and spooky and have all sorts of depths in them. While cleaning up some very old family photos for my mother-in-law's memorial get-together, I played with brightness and contrast, and lo - out popped details that no one had ever seen before. These were mostly black and white photographs that were about 2 1/2 inches square. You could only see faces and partial bodies. But after I tinkered and enlarged a bit, POP! 

Sometimes whole people emerged, ghostly. Or just a face, a face of someone I never knew but whose DNA runs in my kids' and grandkids' veins. A telephone appeared, probably the first one ever made, with no dial on it. You didn't dial phones in 1930. You had to yell "operator, operator" and jiggle the cradle if the connection broke off, a habit which persisted until about 1998 (especially in the movies). Right, so pushing down on it will bring the person back. 

I found my husband's first stuffed animal, a ghastly thing that looked like it had gone bad. In the picture he was maybe three years old and clutching it like there was no tomorrow. Until I highlighted it, it was just a grey wash. Maybe I should've left it that way?

A story of lust and unspeakable sin

The Snow Hen of Jostedal

A story of lust and unspeakable sin

Part 1: GENESIS

Once there was a little legend walking about, that we will name Jostedalsrypa.

Why such a long handle, you may ask? when it would be a lot easier to name him (her!) Junie or Jolie or some such other two-syllable name?

Because Jostedalsrypa is a myth.

Jostedal, as we will now call her (given that the other name is just too long to remember) is sometimes called the Snow Hen of Jostedal. I first encountered her yesterday, though her myth (reality?) goes back to the 1300s, when the Black Plague was harvesting Europe with a scythe as lethal as the Reaper’s.

When all was said and done, when all the ploughing up to make graves and the burning down to make sanitary lodgings had passed, when the few people left on the earth were breathing little sighs of relief here and there,  Nordrik walked the sylvan glades and frosted peaks of Scandinavia. He looked up with tears of gratitude at Scandy’s burning skies and thanked the Norse gods that he had been –

But enough of this, it's getting in the way of the story.

Back to Jostedalsrypa. While this Nordrik (or Norhan, or Norvasken, depending on which scholar you quote) was beating the bushes for edible mushrooms, he heard a stirring sound.

Not like you’d stir your coffee, but more of a feather-on-leaf stir, very frail, a shaking of the bushes so minute that it might just be the stirrings of a bug.

With his ailegaard (walking pole), he gently parted the bushes. Nothing.

Then he kicked the quivering bush with his foot.

This provoked a whooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhoosh

sound, akin to the whirring of doves spiralling upwards, of partridges flushed from the bush.

But the wings of this creature (if creature it was!) did not carry it far, as just a few feet off the ground it fell with a dismal thud.

He looked at the strange thing.

It was shaped like a hen. It looked like a hen. It flapped like a hen. It was partially camouflaged by snow, dirty snow that was half-melting and had formed around the hen as a sort of protective covering, an ice nest.

“I will call her Jostedal, after Lake Jostedal and the City of Jostedal and Jostedal Canyon," said Norrdka, lifting the terrified bird from the snow and marvelling at how heavy she seemed in his arms.

Her head jerked this way and that. A snow hen!  Imagine that. So those silly legends must've been true after all. She seemed to have the intelligence of a – well, of a hen. Her feet paddled the air. Still Norrdka trudged, wondering how she would taste stewed up with a side dish of mushrooms.

The Black Plague had left its survivors with a keen appetite.

Nothing that moved was ever wasted,  but because the Snow Hen was displaying nesting behaviour, the family  held back on eating her.  Everyone clucked with joy when  Jostedal produced her first egg. “But do not eat it yet!” cried Gromkin, the snow-crowned patriarch of the family and the one who had suspiciously survived the Plague by hoarding quail eggs in his pockets.

“Why, old man? Why not eat the egg as a side dish with the chicken and mushrooms?” cried Norrdka.

“I have a recipe for Chicken Eggskongg,” Mama chimed in.

“Hatch this egg. Nurture it. It will be extraordinary.”

Even those who did not agree with Gromkin decided they had better listen to him (he would whack them on the side of the head if they didn't), and keep the Snow Hen around as a renewable resource for food.  Meantime, they had this egg, which seemed somehow magical in their sight.

 They could not sit on the egg, so after a meagre dinner of wood fungi they coaxed the chicken to sit down and incubate it. It took a lot of shoelaces to tie her down.

But something very strange happened in the night.

PART 2: PARTHENOGENESIS

Norrdka wasn’t the first to discover what had happened to her.  It was the old man, Gromkin. He saw the two of them over in the corner. The old man had a stick in his hand and was poking at her.

Squatting in the corner with not a stitch of clothing on her comely body was a beautiful young maiden!

Could this be the Snow Hen of  ancient  tales and stories? How was that possible?  Were they all seeing the same apparition?

The beautiful naked maiden whom they soon dubbed Shnowen had grown a sort of covering of white feathers over its body. And to think they had nearly eaten her the night before!

“ARE YOU HERE TO GRANT US THREE WISHES?” shouted the old man to the perplexed-looking chicken-lady.

She turned her head this way and that and made low, barely-perceptible clucking noises.

“ARE YOU HERE TO LAY THE GOLDEN EGG?” he shouted.

“Do be quiet, Father,” Mother cautioned him. “She is perplexed. Besides, she has already laid an egg which may be of inestimable value to us.”

And lo, it was.

As Shnownen walked around the bare cottage pecking the floor and flapping her arms. a crack began to form in the egg. The whole family, all seventeen of them, gathered around it in anxiety and hope.

The crack was very slow to form, and Grandfather Gromkin wanted to whack at it with his splinggboln, but the rest of them held him back.

And just as they were all about to give up and serve up this egg with a side dish of roasted fowl, lo!

Out popped, not a genie or a monster or an apparition or a dybbuk or a djinn. It was a child.

It was as child so tiny and radiant that no one could believe it. “That’s a chick,” declared Seventeenth Brother.

“It’s never a chick. It’s a homunculus.”

“An automaton, I’ve seen one of those, it was an old monk that could walk around.”

“Silence!” cried the magical child, who seemed to be made of purest gold.

“State your business,” bellowed the old man, who was very direct.

“I have come here not by accident, but by design. I am here to refine human nature. I see cruelty everywhere, I see grabbing at food that belongs to others, I even see people eating each other’s flesh.”

“NO! It never happened”

“How can you even think such a thing!”

“You must be evil. How can you abuse us like this?”

But the family felt a deep and secret shame.  The Black Plague had certainly brought out the worst in everybody.

“Here is the test,” the magic child replied. “For forty-seven days, you shall have no food. The doors of your humble cabin will all be locked. This is a test of your character and of your ability to be selfless, and will redeem you for the black sins you committed during the Time of Pestilence.”

“Forty-seven days? Whover heard of THAT? Why not forty days and forty nights?”

“Shhhh, Grandpa Gromkin, maybe he’s joking.”

“No. It’s not like that,” broke in one of the many anonymous brothers.  “It means forty days, like Noah's rain in the Scriptures, PLUS the seven days it took for God to create the Universe.”

“Ohhhhhhhh.” They all relaxed a little.

The first few days were rather exciting, as the tiny golden child talked non-stop about many amazing things while Shnowen, now called Shwenon, picked and plucked and made hen noises. A few times Eldest Brother pursued her around the cabin, and no one could tell if it was for food, or some other purpose too dark to mention.

After a while, that bird began to look better and better.

Grandfather nagged the magic child day and night. “Are you sure you really meant FORTY-SEVEN days?” he asked him. “Maybe you only meant seven.” There was a faint clinking sound in the background as the family tightened their belts.

On the thirteenth day, they decided to kill the chicken.

Why not kill the chicken? They would not survive unless they did. But the axe and the knife and the other implements of cold-blooded murder were all outside, so they would have to corner and strangle her. This was a nearly-impossible task with a human-sized bird.

So they began to tame her. Here, chicken, chicken, chicken! Nice chicken. Because she was starving to death, she would do just about anything they asked of her, including the unspeakable act I mentioned before.

But I shall draw a veil over such evil.

One day, however, in spite of the brain fog of famine, one of them had an idea.

“Wait!” Sixteenth Brother cried. “If we can last out this wretched forty-seven days, imagine what this bird will be worth for us.”

“We can put her on display.”

“Make her do tricks!”

"All sorts of tricks." 

”And she’s beautiful, and naked. So you know how people will respond.”

“But forty-seven days. . . “

“Listen,” said Grandfather. “I’m close to a deal.”

For along with greed and pride and lust, and anger and envy, and all those other things we’re not supposed to do, Grandfather excelled at crooked wheeling and dealing. Soon he had bargained the child down to twenty-four days. With his mother held hostage, about to be roasted on a spit, he was in no position to argue.

The force-field around the cabin began to waver.

The family wondered if they could hold out much longer, as the chicken was getting skinnier and skinnier and sat listlessly in the corner pulling her feathers out. She looked bad and would not enchant or even scare anyone.

“Goddamn you, Snow Hen,” cried Norrdka, cursing the day he had ever found her. “You started this. You’ll finish it.” He rushed at her with every intention of strangling her.  But she was too feeble to resist, and collapsed with a drawn-out cry.

“NOW have we passed the test?” asked Fourth Brother hopefully. They had, after all, not KILLED the chicken. They had resisted killing the chicken, who had obviously died of natural causes.

“You failed it a long time ago,” the child answered. “What is more, there is no spell. You could have left the cabin any time you wanted to. So you committed yet another sin."

"What could that be?"

"Stupidity."

”Mountebank!” cried Grandfather.

“Look at your Snow Hen, once so beautiful and so full of promise. She has died of hunger and despair. Not only that, there is no meat on her bones to sustain you.”

“I could make a good stock,” Mother suggested.

“I could stuff her, you know, put her on display.. . . “

“Silence!  You people do not deserve to be in the presence of magic, because your souls are dark and selfish and full of corruption. You abuse the thing you claim to love the most and keep her captive in terror.”

“No one will know.”

“YOU will know. The knowledge will suck the strength from your soul and blight all your days, and continue for seventeen generations."

“But this is why they made Jesus.! If we repent, he will take all our sins away."

“Not this one.” Disgusted, the child burst into a ball of flame that grew and grew and grew until it consumed the entire cabin.

There was but one person spared. As white smoke surged up from the chimney, a bird with dazzling white feathers emerged and grew larger and larger until she seemed to fill the whole sky. The Snow Hen of Jostedal had freed herself from the prison of human darkness, never to return.

POSTLUDE. The provenance of this piece is strange. Years and years ago, I saw a NOVA program on PBS about a girl named Genie, a "wild child" who had been tied up in a dark room for an incredible thirteen years by her sadistic brute of a father.

The girl couldn't speak, could barely walk, and was the size of a seven-year-old. While the public may have seen a horribly damaged child, the scientific community saw a blank slate - that is, blank except for a lot of dollar signs.

The documentary recounts the stampede of interest from scientist, linguists, neurologists, sociologists, and many other ologists who scrambled for research grants to "study" Genie. This was in 1972, and NOT ONE person believed that it would be preferable for Genie's welfare to be placed in loving foster care until she gained enough stability to work with the scientists. 

It did not even occur to them.

I can't recount all of this heartbreaking story because it's too complex, except to say that the girl was eventually abandoned by the scientists who had so greedily fallen on her when she was released from her thirteen-year prison. When she was finally de-institutionalized, she was taken home by two of the research scientists like some sort of shelter dog, then abandoned a few years later when the grant money ran out. 

At the end of this wretched story, Genie is "put away" in a nursing home, and that's the end of it. Since she's younger than me, she is probably still there, in another sort of prison. I did find a reference from some time in the '90s, when an observer insisted she was "happy and content" in the home she had never chosen. Certainly she has no power to object.

 I recently watched the NOVA program again - I'll try to find a link to it, it's riveting - and then acquired a book called Genie: A Scientific Tragedy by Russ Rymer. I was sure this book would be spellbinding, but 50 pages in I began to wonder whose side he was on.

He spent pages and pages on the work of Noam Chomsky, a pop icon and pseudo-linguist who believes there is only one language in all of human experience. As far as I can see, this demented idea has nothing at all to do with Genie and her difficult, halting acquisition of language, but it helps the author distance himself from all that mess and align himself with someone trendy.

But there's something else here, and I have to admit when I first read it I groaned. "I've been diddled," I thought. He listed various "feral" children that had been found roaming the woods over the centuries, and the farther I got into the list the more sure I was that he was having us on, making the whole thing up as a way of disrespecting his readers and jerking the leash.

“Among the cases of wild children discovered over the last seven centuries, more than fifty have been documented. The list includes the Hesse wolf-child; the Irish sheep-child; Kasper Hauser; the first Lithuanian bear-child; Peter of Hanover; the second Lithuanian bear-child; the third; the Karpfen bear-girl; Tomko of Zips; the Salzburg sow-girl; Clemens, the Overdyke pig-child; Dina Sanichar of Sekandra; the Indian panther-child; the Justedal snow-hen; the Mauretanian gazelle-child; the Teheran ape-child; Lucas, the South African baboon-child; and Edith of Ohio.”

I think it was Edith of Ohio that did it. This HAD to be a mean form of satire designed to jerk the reader around. But like the diligent little Googlist that I am,  I did a search for each and every one of these names, and lo, they WERE mentioned somewhere, even if briefly, as part of a list of "wild" children. Most of them are considered myths, an extension of the ancient story of Romulus and Remus who were suckled by wolves.

I'm not sure quite how that led to the story of the Snow Hen, except that the name really grabbed me: it really seemed like something out of Hans Christian Andersen.

The arc of the story is pretty crazy, because there IS no arc: I literally took it word by word with no forethought at all, no sense of what might come next. At various moments you have to stop and try to shape the story a bit, and then of course edit it later for inconsistencies. But I did very little of this.

It occurred to me while making my lunch today that perhaps the Snow Hen is Mary, Mother of God, and the golden child is her son  Jesus Christ, holding those wicked people in the cabin accountable for their sins. He doesn't let them get away with anything, not even throwing the Bible back in his face.  I hope Jesus would approve.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcIyXQ20Z1o