The Door Is Ajar: A Melodramatic Life Essay

The door is ajar; shall I fart in it to save gas? Or is the boat afloat, festooned with flowers and slowly waving princesses? No, indeed no. My leg is aflame. Aflame with the howling passions of invisible poisons, poisons excreted by one of the most pernicious plants on the face of the planet.

I went down into the hollow Saturday to rip out a fence. The hollow is terra almost incognita, a depression in the corner of the lot County-defined as part of the 80-year flood plain, thick with brambles and downed branches, concrete rubble, an old hot rod tire under thirty years of leaves. It’s where chickens are thrown after they die. I built the fence in 1999 when we first moved in and needed a place for the dogs: Horse fencing wired to t-posts, out from the barbed wire along the property line and back again, anchored to oak trees where convenient. It never worked. The younger dog found ways out no matter what I did to prevent him climbing over or digging under. The older dog nodded sagely and chuckled at my frustration. We built a better dog run behind the house, and let this one come down piecemeal as the use of the lot evolved. Finally after many years there was only one section left, obscured by long grass and curling blackberries, down where no one goes. I chanced to see it under the light winter vegetation and thought, hm. Clean-up time.

I waded in with gloves and pliers. Last year’s blackberries cracked underfoot and whipped around me. Thorns left red trails on my arms and embedded themselves in The World’s Best Pants. Obscure natural objects, twigs and leaves and spiked seedpods, crawled into my socks and flew down my shirt. I cut the mounting wires one at a time and wrenched the fencing away from the t-posts, struggling against eight years of jungle. It was all dead and dry, brittle in some places, strong as rope in others. I stomped my way over dead branches to where long ago I had foolishly nailed a section to a tree, felt the teeth of a long-dead vine, and watched a dark red stream wind its way through the hairs on my forearm. How picturesque, I thought: Blood artfully splattering along the back of my hand. A warrior of the garden am I.

I didn’t want it to get on my clothes but the next thing I did was inadvertently lean on my leg and put a great dark stain on The World’s Best Pants. Fuck, said I, and walked briskly to the house, stripped in the laundry room, threw the mess in the washing machine, cleaned off my arm, saw to its healing, found an old pair of shorts, and went back to work. This was the inflexion point exposing the great error and with it, I exposed my legs to a monstrous botanical. In correcting a bloodstain on The World’s Best Pants, the wisdom of the choice of wearing them was forever rendered as wrong.

What are they, these World’s Best Pants? A product of REI, light and washable, quick-drying, dark in color. They are the Best because they are perfect for everything. I have worn them to Home Depot and in pleated style on professional visits. They have dried themselves quickly after getting caught in tropical Shanghai rainstorms. I have worn them on a fifty-mile backpacking trip nine thousand feet above sea level, and on a hundred mile canoe trip in a Utah desert. They’ve walked past fog-enshrouded ruins by San Francisco Bay and past the sun-drenched Duomo of Milan. They’ve been to restaurants and concert halls and never, at any moment, were they anything less than the perfect selection of attire.

Excepting, perhaps, that dark day I exposed them to blood and thorns and, thus crucified, to the dark whirling depths of Maytag, whence, here on this the third day, I do not yet know if they have been resurrected. In hope my faith clothes me.

Just punishment, perhaps, are the angry red rashes now crawling along my left leg. Poison oak is an invidious thing. In wintertime her telltale three-lobed leaves are not in evidence. Her seasonal shootings are dead, lost amongst the dead of a hundred other plants. But her oils, her flaming treacherous oils, lie in wait on random branch and twig. One slight brushing, one microscopic introduction, and infection is assured. Itching and burning, she dares me to rub it, scratch it, tear it away! but I know I must not, I must resist, I must bear it lest the slightest disturbance set it to spreading. I’ve had worse before: At nine or ten I was enveloped in Webelos campfire smoke rolling from burning deadwood that had lain nigh a small shrub of poison oak, and missed a week of school for a swollen burning face and half-closed lungs. The experience left me unable to approach a three-lobed leaf without activating triple levels of instinctual alarm. But with those leaves in abeyance, there were no alarms, there was no warning, and now there is no relief. It crawls along the entire back side of my leg, itching and tickling and burning. A hundred nibbling termites, a thousand hungry ants, twelve hundred dozen tiny needles inscribing the tiniest little circles under the first layer of my skin. Every step tickles the infected area with light brushings of cotton pants-leg, disturbs the leg-hairs, awakens the nerves, encourages the poison to bump up the agony one more notch. Nor can I touch it: Any disturbance will send it into my bloodstream, and it will pop up in some other part of my withering carcass. Already I itch on the inside edge of my kneecap, and the underside of my left arm, and the back of my neck; and a dozen imagined discomforts from eye to ankle call out to my shaking, quaking fingernails. The night is young, and the door is indeed ajar – the door … to Hell!