COLORADO WELCOMES YOU!
DELUGE
Life at age eight was a confusing time for me. I’d finally mastered expressing myself sufficiently in sign language, and I could now read English at a level beyond my current grade. Yet there was so much I didn’t understand and so little explanation. The few people in my life who could sign to me seemed to know so much more than I did. Idioms, jokes, general knowledge, mathematical concepts that were incomprehensible and unknown to me seemed to be second nature to my classmates, my sister, my cousins. My family made every effort to include me in conversation, to teach me these things. But I remember that they often would take a quick deep breath before explaining, translating or interpreting, as if they needed a little more energy to help me keep up. Did they not see how exhausted I was from trying to read lips, body language, any correlating text nearby, and desperately dredging every corner of my mind to recall anything that might help me?
At eight, I knew I was Deaf, that I needed to know English to get by in the world around me, but that a large portion of it was beyond the maximum volume on my hearing aids receiver microphone. I also knew my family loved me, but they also struggled with this missing portion as well and the challenges of trying to visualize for me a language that is so heavily reliant upon lexicon.
I recall in the summer, when my family was on a vacation in Colorado visiting some of my father’s siblings, we were at my Uncle Roy’s house. Uncle Roy was a symbol of the times- his parted hair slicked just so, his grin shining beneath a mustache, and the requisite light colored leather coat with lapels the size of toasters. His sharply pleated polyester bellbottoms- I cannot remember the color- my visual cortex has long since blotted out the hideous hues- swishing and rasping together- a sound unknown to me for many more years beyond 1980.
Uncle Roy suggested we head out into the desert to hunt for arrowheads left behind by Indians. I was excited by the idea of hunting for treasure, but no one else seemed interested except my cousin Jason, Uncle Roy’s son, and my father who I think more or less agreed to come along to make sure I wasn’t without any means of communication. Or to make sure I behaved. It really could be one or the other, to be honest.
We drove out to someplace- I have no idea where on the map- but then we came to a mesa- a raised plateau, and Uncle Roy said the likelihood of finding an arrowhead up there would be better. So he drove carefully up the narrow dirt path that wound around and around the entire perimeter of the plateau. We finally skidded to a stop atop the top. As far as the eye could see- small brush plants, sand, and- yeah that was about it. We wandered around, trying to discern tiny sand-colored pieces of rock amidst the sand, and to discern particularly these that were shaped by human hands, not carved by time. Come to think of it, that day could well be the reason we all wear glasses now, the four of us.
After perhaps an hour of completely unrewarding searching, a storm broke upon us out of nowhere. It was not a heavy rain, not a downpour, but a deluge. My dad, my cousin, and my uncle all shouted to each other, and gestured to me, that we should get in the car. I moved slowly, because I to this day love being in the middle of a rainstorm. But then I realized this wasn’t a rainstorm but a lightning storm, so I started running towards the car.
Inside the car, the steaming moisture rising from our bodies and clothes turned the glass of the windows and windshields into hard panes of fog. My uncle crept slowly towards the path leading down the plateau, squinting through the tendrils of vision he constantly swiped through the fogged glass, which closed up just as quickly as he made them. After only a few minutes of inching down the incline, he stopped. He spoke urgently to my father. Everyone, except me began to argue, discuss, converse rapidly, pointing all over and speaking so fast, I was clueless. I began to doodle faces on the fogged glass, but then I saw that everyone was exiting the car. A moment later, my dad pulled the door on my side open and told me to get out and help.
"We have to lay down a protective barrier alongside the edge of the road, a sort of retaining wall. So we don’t slide in the mud and go over the side, plunging to certain injury and probable death." He told me, wiping his glasses constantly. If pressed to swear to this in court, I might admit he actually signed something like this, "we need to put rocks down so the car won’t slip in the mud, whoosh-over cliff." But being bilingual is all about translating concepts, right?
So over the next half hour, my mood darkened in synch with the sky as I struggled to keep my Roos mud-free and failing miserably while I picked up rocks the size of my head, which was pretty considerable at the time. Half the rocks I placed, my uncle or my dad would pick up and reset in another location in some pattern that baffled me, yet made sense to my cousin and both adults as they worked in a rhythm I could not perceive. I stopped looking at them, stopped watching their mouths, stopped trying to listen with my eyes. But I didn’t stop moving. The rain beat on, relentless.
Relentless, too, was the anger and frustration within my boy’s mind as I pondered once again this hidden body of information that seemed to always be out of my reach, but so easily shared amongst my relatives that could hear. Petulantly, I dropped a rock right on top of a carefully placed row, and immediately a dozen or so promptly slid off the edge of the road. Unthinkingly, I lunged forward to grab what I could, and the treacherous mud propelled me towards empty air at a breakneck speed, and no pun there- we were still several hundred feet above the ground.
But I was jerked back to secure footing at the expense of the seams on my velour shirt’s shoulder and collar. No loss there- it was a hideous shirt. And it looked a lot worse wet. I turned my head up to look at my dad. He was grinning, chuckling even. I was aghast. A quick scan informed me that my cousin and uncle seemed equally amused. I’d almost died, and they found that funny?
I began to cry. Not obviously, there were no sobs or squinched face. The salt simply poured down my face, hidden by the skywater washing down everything around us. My dad pointed down at my feet; with the expression I had come to learn that he wanted me to follow his direction. I looked down and saw the wonder; neatly placed stones imbedded in the earth beneath in approximate rows, now exposed by the diminishing mud to provide traction. "We don’t have to worry about the rocks anymore," he said, already gently propelling me back towards the car. "We’ll get down just fine." As I squished in my seat, dripping all over the seat and my cousin as he lay back exhausted as only a teenager can be exhausted after being indentured into service for one’s parents, I had a revelation.
My family’s mirth had not been at my near-mishap, but rather, more of relief at the sudden reprieve from a dangerous trouble. Also, my dad had taken the trouble to explain to me right after saving me from my own foolishness, rather than just stuffing me into the car without a word, which I realize now would have been far more common for a parent of a Deaf child. And as I watched my cousin and my father and his brother chatting with broad smiles that seemed to dispel the storm clouds above, the tears started to come forth again. My dad glanced at me and concern crossed his face.
"Are you crying?" he asked, but I just quickly ran my hand through my hair, causing more water to run down my face before I wiped my face, to give the illusion of just rainwater. It was much easier to perform this subterfuge than try to express, with my confused eight-year old mind and my still fledging language skills, that I had learned something just then, something new and profound that was probably not news to the others.
I now knew one could cry from happiness and produce tears of joy just as easily as deeply as the salt of despair.
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