Nonfiction by Thomas E. Strunk
Growing up in a trailer park, one rarely feels significant. But we still had the bugs to look down on. I don’t know what went wrong with me, a boy from the forest bothered by bugs. Sure I was fascinated by the water-skaters that danced over the crick out back. I stood in awe at the ant hills we’d come upon in the woods, but had no desire to poke them. At best I ignored the daddy-long-legs that crawled over the hillside in summer. Yet at some point in my youth a fear crept in at things that crawled, perhaps it was a late-night movie, but more likely the katabasis I endured when I was twelve, my descent multiple times beneath our siding-enclosed trailer.
A real man of the woods my father, not frightened to inch his way along the length of the trailer and then creep to the other side where with flashlight and wrench he could turn off and on again the water. He wasn’t the kind of man to worm his way out of his responsibilities.
“We’ve got to crawl under there so I can show you how to deal with the water.” But I was not that man and begged off the mission.
“Can’t you just do it before work?”
Until my father made it clear, “And leave you with no water all day? There is no choice.” For the workers were coming to the trailer park when he was at work, and I was at summer bored and idle and able to go inching my way under the trailer.
And so I followed him on my belly the long way – the door through the siding at the back left of the trailer, our journey’s destination, the water pipes at the front right, so I could learn, like him, how to turn the water off and then on.
The next day, alone and reluctant, I entered through the siding door and left the daylight behind me. I held the flash light before me but did not look at what it illuminated for fear what I might see; rather I wriggled in the light’s general direction. I crawled with all that was under there in the darkness, sweeping cobwebs as I went. I made it to the water pipes and plied the wrench hurriedly, hoping I had twisted it enough to choke off the water. And then the return, always harder than the descent. I turned myself around on the dirt and made my way towards the light peeking through the siding door, far in the distance at first. Yet I hastened and did not turn to see what I left or what followed behind me. I came at last to the exit and crossed the threshold.
When I emerged from beneath the trailer into the light, I did not come forth braver or with new knowledge that I gained along the way, but joyful to see the blue sky and its birds free to fly above the ground. I feverishly shook off the dirt and whatever bugs had found me, never wanting to know their wisdom.
Thomas E. Strunk explores nature and working class life and strives to express the longing for spiritual, emotional, and political liberation. His literary work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pinyon, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Northern Appalachia Review and East Fork Journal. Thomas blogs at LiberationNow.org and lives in Cincinnati.
