Don’t worry, pee happy
There’s no way to vanquish a monster made of nothing but shadows, but that doesn’t mean that Mom can let it go. “We can pack extra snacks if you’re worried,” I suggested.
“The reviewers said they kept losing the trail,” Mom told me. “We could get lost.”
“Why worry about getting lost? You get lost all the time without even trying. You’re an expert.”
“Getting lost is so stressful and tiring!” Her fingers curled tighter around the driving wheel. “Don’t you remember all the times we’ve been lost before and how awful it was?”
“Getting lost is the part you do without even noticing,” I said. “How can you be scared of something you don’t notice? It’s finding our way back that’s a pain. Let’s just avoid trying to make our adventure be a certain way and nothing can possibly go wrong.”
“Yeah, but I use my phone to find our way back to the trail whenever we get lost. If we’re out for a long time, it could run out of juice. Then we could get really lost.”
“But you keep an extra juice box for the Witch in the packpack just like you keep extra snacks for us,” I reminded her. “Here, why don’t you plug in the juice box now? That way you know it’ll be full tomorrow so you don’t have to worry.”
“But what if my phone battery gets low and I need to actually use the power pack?” Mom asked triumphantly, like it was the impossible question that would win the argument.
“Then you give her a snack. What’s so hard about that? Snacks solve most problems, you know.”
“If we use the emergency backup power, that means it’s an emergency,” she said, like she couldn’t believe she had to explain something so obvious.
“Doesn’t that just mean we’re late? I thought it was called emergency backup so it would prevent an emergency.”
“Running late is an emergency!”
It’s no use arguing with someone who prefers to rack up points rather than solve problems, so I looked out the window. The Wagon crunched the last few miles to the car kennel. “What do the signs say?” I asked, hoping the distraction would throw Mom off her worry game. “I bet they say YOU’RE IN THE WOODS NOW, SO IT’S TIME TO CHILLAX.”
The leashes in her neck strained to keep her head from blowing off as she read, “They say there’s a fee area ahead and permits are available at the ranger station. There’s no cell service out here to buy one online, and I’m not driving 15 miles back to town for a permit.”
Now why did they have to go and say a thing like that? I thought. They should know that Moms don’t carry old-fashioned money.
“The ranger station would be closed by the time we got there anyway,” Mom went on. “The reviews said that the parking lot is always full. Tomorrow’s Sunday, which means that backpackers already took all the spots on Friday and Saturday. We’ll have to park far away, which will only add to the distance.”
“The sign said all that?”
“No, but isn’t it obvious?”
Mom is a parking expert after years of practice in the City, where parking is a professional sport. She picks up on meter maid traps that lesser parkers would never notice. I looked around for a parking meter or street sweeping sign, but all I could find were trees. “Where will all the people who arrive in the morning because they didn’t sleep at the trailhead leave their cars?” I asked. “We can copy whatever they do.”
“I guess they’ll park behind a tree somewhere.” She looked confused for a second, like everything she knew about the world might be wrong. She caught herself. “But there might be rules against parking in unauthorized areas. Cars can’t break rules with impunity like we can, remember?”
“Do they have meter maids in the wilder-ness like they used to in the City?”
“There are rangers. I think they do parking enforcement.”
“Are the Rangers gonna take the Wagon to the pound if its technique is wrong?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But you forget, we might already be in distress because we got lost.” Mom looked like she was in distress already. “It would suck to be lost all day and come back to find the van is gone with my wallet, all of our water, the chargers, and the rest of our stuff inside.”
I tried to imagine it, but the situation Mom was describing sounded more like the middle of a story than the end. “Then how will we get out?” I asked.
“I guess we could ask someone for a ride.” She shuddered at the thought. “But then what? I’m already having a bad day, and you want me to ask a stranger for help?” She made her lips disappear and shook her head like someone was trying to make her swallow a pill without peanut butter. “And it wouldn’t end there. I’d have to act like I’m okay, when clearly I’m not.”
“Why would you lie about that?” I asked. “Especially to someone who’s already offering to help?”
“Because it’s rude to tell someone they can’t fix your problems when they’re just trying to help. You’ve got to act like whatever they’re doing is helpful even if it isn’t, until you feel like you’re the one doing them a favor. So obviously I’d have to escape as soon as possible by asking them to drop us off once we got back to town, even if the van is somewhere else.”
“It wouldn’t be so bad to live in the mountains. I like it here.”
“You don’t understand!” she wailed. “I’d probably have to make a bunch of phone calls to find out where the van is…”
“Not phone calls! They’re the only Witch torture you can’t withstand.”
“… And obviously I can’t ask a stranger to wait that long. They’re not a taxi service.” Another wave of hopelessness spread over Mom’s face. Her nails went back to picking at the bee sting, which seemed to soothe her. Her whole arm was bigger than its twin by now, and the hole she’d dug in the skin looked ragged and angry. “And they don’t have Uber all the way out here. So we’d be stranded again, and I’d have gone through all of that angst for nothing.”
“Not for nothing,” I reminded her. “It’s much better to be stranded in a town than way out in the middle of the wilder-ness. In a town there are plenty of Friends to meet. Maybe one of them will invite us to a cookout.” Mom gave me a look and I remembered that Friends were what got us into this imaginary mess to begin with. “Never mind.”
Satisfied that the story was back under control, Mom picked up where she’d left off. “How can they take away your transportation back to safety like that? It’s unethical!”
“They did?” I looked around the Wagon, which still seemed to be in the woods with both of us inside.
“Okay. I suppose the rangers wouldn’t tow someone’s car since they’d also be the ones who had to pick them up at the trailhead if they were stranded,” she decided. A scab came off and she held up her fingernail to inspect it before wiping it off on her shorts.
My mind was tied in knots from trying to keep up with it all and I couldn’t remember what the problem was if the Wagon wasn’t kidnapped. “So how will they punish you for leaving the Wagon under the wrong tree?” I asked. “Will they have to kill us to get us out of the way before they kidnap the Wagon?”
“They’ll make me pay money,” she said, like it was a very vile thing.
“Oh no! And not having money is what got us into this fix to begin with!” I whimpered, starting to see what she was so worried about.
“I mean, we have money. It just says that the person I’m supposed to give it to is 15 miles away.”
“They’re definitely going to eat us now!” I trembled.
“They’re not going to eat us,” Mom said as if I were overreacting. “The fine probably only costs about 20 bucks more than the permit fee. But money is like battery life, you want to keep as much of it as you can.”
“And it’s not like you can call them and explain about the bank hiding all your money from you,” I said, looking helplessly at the silent sky. “Even if the Witch would let you, they’d never believe you!”
“I could probably talk my way out of it.” Mom was starting to turn right-side-out again as her need to be right won over her need to worry. She sounded annoyed that I didn’t think she could handle a trifling thing like paying for things. “But it wouldn’t be right to ask them to waive the fee when we knew we were breaking the rules all along. I don’t want to shortchange the Park Service.”
“You’re right. You’re premeditating your crime right now,” I said. “There’s no way to win in this rotten situation!”
The Witch butted in, “In a quarter mile, you will arrive at your destination.”
Our time was almost up. Impossibility was closing in.
“We could park here, just in case,” Mom said. I followed her eyes to a flat patch of dirt under a tree that looked suspiciously like a Wagon hitch.
After the Wagon shut down, Mom remained at her station for a few scratches, listening to the blaring silence left by the engine. “This is perfect. Why doesn’t California have more of these? Come on, you needa go potty?”
While Mom leaned against a tree to use an imaginary potty, I sniffed around a suspicious circle of rocks. The middle of the circle smelled like cold fire and the bottoms of all the trees smelled like people pee. “Are you sure it’s not a trap?” I asked. “This doesn’t smell like a real illegal parking spot at all.”
“It’s one of those designated wild camping spots, you ninny. They’re everywhere up here. When did you become such a worry wart?”
Later that night, Mom absently dug holes in her soup as she studied the mapp. “Should we drive to the main parking area first thing in the morning or hike from here?” she asked.
“Mmmhmm,” I agreed, not really listening. I was too pooped to follow her around her thought bubble for another lap.
“We won’t have to worry about parking if we go from here, but it’ll add ½ a mile to the total distance. That’s not so far… or is it?”
“Yip-pee. Extra ’sploring,” I sighed, too pooped to follow her around her thought bubble for another lap.
“I guess we can walk half a mile if our lives depend on it.” She closed the Witch’s screen and the Wagon went dark. “Come on, you needa go potty before bed?”
We dismounted and I sniffed around the clearing for a good spot while Mom went back to the same tree she’d used the night before. Suddenly, the howl of a wounded animal filled the darkness. It sounded close. I froze mid-sniff to listen.
When I turned to listen the other way, I saw Mom’s teeth glowing in the moonlight. Her snarl could only mean one thing—The sound came from her.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, puffing up my hackles and trying to decide which way to run.
“This tree is covered in sap!” she moaned. “Now I have sap all over my butt and my shorts are stuck to my skin. When I pull them down it’s like ripping off a giant Band-Aid. Why is everything so much more complicated than it has to be?”
I’d told Mom so many times that pants were an unnecessary burden that there was no sense in telling her again. She’d tried to ’splain privacy before, but I never understood the point in hiding such useful body parts under pants and underpants. Especially if taking off your disguise feels like ripping open a wound. Despite all the lessons I’d given her about proper potty technique, now that the people potties were open again she still preferred to do it her way, with doors to hide behind and store-bought toilet paper.
I left her peeling and hissing in the moonlight and jumped back into bed. When Mom returned, she tucked the Witch under the pillow, put her feet up on the spare tire, and we both tried to sleep through the restless twitching left over in her mind.
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
