1988
No streetlights.
A dirt road.
Packed like sardines in a Dodge Caravan.
We’re on our final stretch towards our family’s summer getaway. It’s a trailer park but no one calls it that any more. Prescott’s Trailer Park has become just “Prescott’s” or “The Park.” But in 1988, we’re on our way to the trailer. My father is driving. It is late. The youngest of his children are asleep but the oldest three are awake listening to his story. It is brief. It is just a list of instruction. He slows down the car. We can feel the tires ride the pockmarked road. The sound of pebbles crunching under our weight becomes background noise. He rolls down his window and turns off the air conditioner and the radio. He says listen. And we do. He tells us to listen to the sounds of the outside. The wind he says. The leaves he says. The animals he says. We try to hear it all. He tells us to look through the dense woods. He tells us to looks up at the stars. We try. And then he turns off the headlights. The tires still surf the dirt road like a surfboard on a choppy wave – dropping in and out of craters. Our torsos bob sideways as our hips steady our pelvises. I imagine this is what horseback riding feels like. He does not push on the brakes. Our eyes adjust to the dark. We put our noses against the windows of the caravan, those windows that don’t roll down. We can see the outline of trees. We point at the shadows of trees against the night sky. He tells us to look straight ahead. In front of the moving car. Where he is looking. We can’t see anything. My mom says, please be careful Freddie. Yep he says. Imagine being in the jungle like this he tells us. Imagine the silence. Listen. Can you hear an animal stepping on branches? The crackle? Do you know how many animals are watching us drive down this road? They know we are here. You just can’t see them. But imagine if they lit a cigarette, he says. Way out there in front of us if someone lit a cigarette a mile away. You’d be able to see it. You might not be able to see your hand if you held it in front of your own face, he says, but if you lit a cigarette an animal could see you from a mile away. We wonder about animals and cigarettes and if smoking cigarettes provokes animals to attack. This is how it was in the jungle he tells us. This is how quiet it was. How dark it was. How hot it was. None of us breathe for several seconds. Well, he says, it was hotter than this. He doesn’t tell us that there were human beings in the jungle darkness - other people who were waiting. In New Hampshire, on this summer night, it is only about the animals. Freddie, turn the lights back on, my mom says. And he does. We all sit quietly and stare out into the beam of the headlights. We begin to see what he sees.
