TRAILER 13

As published in Transition Magazine

I am not the person I used to be. 

I am someone who bears scars from an internal hell, scars no one can see, just as no one could see the battle that raged within me. 

And I am thankful.

I was a university kid, full of verve and ready to take on the world. A summer job recording bird populations in the middle of wine and fruit country was exactly the adventure I was searching for, so I packed my bag and headed west, excitement bubbling over.

Overstuffed pack hoisted on my shoulders, I ambled up the walk of a cute bungalow in the center of a friendly town. Susan, my roommate and the graduate student I was working for, welcomed me with open arms. The kitchen smelled of fresh buns, my bedroom had a fluffy duvet, and in the yard, nestled amongst a dozen rose bushes, stood a magnificent cherry tree. A cherry tree! Having always ravaged saskatoon berries along prairie roadsides for my fresh fruit fix, plucking cherries from my own tree was like the Holy Grail. Sweet juices tingled my tongue, and it did not take long for my fingers to bear a permanent red stain from my daily forage.

Each morning, I awoke in the dark and spooned cereal into my mouth while the rest of the world slept. After breakfast, Susan and I would drive down deserted highways and through waking pastures, arriving at our site just as the birds stretched their wings and prepared their cacophony of calls for the day ahead. 

The morning sun would peek over the trees and paint the hills in swaths of orange and yellow as our truck lumbered up a steep gravel road. Sharp switchbacks that forced us into a dangerous tilt were common, and Susan always kicked me out of the truck so she could ease through the turn, not willing to risk plummeting us both down the hillside. 

We’d make sure to leave the overworked truck in the shade of an aspen grove, and I would traipse into the rolling landscape stretched before me while Susan vanished over a hill behind. Birdsong and the crunch of lonely boots on parched grass and sage filled the air as I scrawled down sightings of sparrows, hawks, quail, and curlew—pages of data I would transcribe in the evenings. By nine-thirty each morning, my stomach would rumble for lunch, and I would picnic on a hillside overlooking snaking rivers or sandy bluffs while wildflowers danced in the breeze. 

Weather patterns were predictable. Like clockwork, the temperature climbed to nearly forty degrees daily and the sun beat down, scorching everything that could not take cover. My floppy hat and long-sleeved shirt strained to keep the sun at bay, while my pants and gaiters cinched around my legs in vain as they failed to hold back the onslaught of cactus needles and ticks.

I tracked woodpeckers and grouse on mountain summits where cloud formations transformed from gentle cotton balls to menacing anvils that darkened the landscape and brought the scent of rain; I did not always make it back to the truck before lightening sliced the sky. 

On those rare days when we finished our counts near a pond, we stripped away sweaty, dusty layers and donned swimsuits behind the sparse cover of sun-bleached sage. Mountains hugged us and the lush pine and cedar forest released a sharp, sweet scent, transporting our senses from a dusty mountain meadow to the most luxurious of high-end spas. We played hopscotch over cow patties, pebbles gouging our feet, until we reached the edge of the pond where cool water lapped our toes. After a short wade and a few strokes past the floating remains of yesterday’s cow buffet, we reached clear water and floated in the still landscape. Gentle moos lulled us as ripples whisked away sunscreen and soothed our sore muscles.

After-work downtime was peppered with potluck meals and guitar strumming sessions with our new friends, the bat researchers, before they headed out into the dark and we headed to bed. We fell asleep to the laughter of kids playing in the streets and I dreamed of the birds I would meet the next day. 

As June faded into July, the clean, spacious bungalow with my cherry tree was sold, so we moved out of town and into the hills where a derelict geology camp waited for us in the middle of nowhere. 

With regrets of leaving my comfortable bedroom still lingering in my mind, I stepped from the truck and dumped my oversized pack onto the forest floor. The woods were dotted with tin cans discarded on their sides, masquerading as camp trailers, each with a red number painted on its door. I breathed in the piney air and smiled at the prospect of spending the rest of my summer camping-style. 

The chatter of the bat researchers cut through the forest air. Excited to catch up with my campmates, I followed the voices toward a long building poking out from the trees, but as I crossed the threshold, I stopped cold. The stench of death was an unseen barrier that sent me stumbling backwards. Only through sheer force of will was I able to push myself into the room. The bat crew visited around a table and was seemingly unaware that the mess hall was haunted by a stomach-turning nightmare. Stuffing down rolling nausea, I turned from the foulness and headed for my assigned trailer.

A red 13, bright but faded as though it had long before been painted with blood, marked my new home. I rattled the door open. Fresh forest air entered the stifling metal box while stagnant air that had not moved in months rushed out to the freedom of the woods. 

I cracked the windows and, unzipping my pack, fished out the dozens of postcards and letters that my boyfriend Ryan had been mailing me every day, and I brought the bare walls to life. I found a fractured outlet for my stereo system, stacked my CDs, tucked my sheets around a mattress the consistency of lumpy Jell-O, and turned on my portable fan. My tin can dumpster was transformed into a home.

The sickening scent of the mess hall worsened with each passing day until entry was futile. Hiding behind the false security of a bandana and rubber gloves thick as cow hide, bat-crew Paul entered olfactory hell. The rest of us paced the pine-needled forest floor, convinced the stench had ensnared Paul into an untimely tomb. Eventually he emerged, green but victorious, and brandished a hunk of raw meat, gray and maggoty, that had fallen behind a freezer weeks before. 

If only the rotten meat was the worst part of my home, but a deeper threat was lurking, ready to cast its dark magic and torment my mind. 

Deer mice inhabited the forest and had started to spread into the camp buildings like a plague-infused army. To say we had a mouse infestation was being polite, and keeping the kitchen clean was a battle not even a four-star general could hope to win. Tiny black pellets were a constant. They were smudged on countertops, peppered on dishes in the cupboards, baked on the element in the oven, and nestled amongst my precious cherries inside the fridge. The mice had left their mark – their resolve to flush me out of their annexed territory. 

While the walls of my tin can celebrated my relationship with Ryan, the rest of the camp was decorated in “Mouse is Gonna Getcha” posters. Warnings were plastered on the walls of the mess, taped on the doors of bathroom stalls, and tacked below my blood-red 13. Everywhere I turned, posters told a story of the real threat that lay inside the droppings. 

Hantavirus. 

Illness. 

Death. 

The tiny black pellets, ammunition of an unbeatable army, were going to kill me.

To reduce our chances of contracting the virus, we scoured our dishes and stacked them in a giant stock pot on the stove, yet it served only as a reminder of what lingered, invisible, in the air. I stopped using dishes as my mind convinced me that disease had stained every plate, bowl, and cup. I could no longer stomach the thought of ingesting something that a mouse had chewed on, then crapped on, then chewed again, and so the fridge and all that it contained, including the last of my cherries, were lost to me. I cut all dairy, fruits, vegetables, and meat from my diet. The unplugged deep freeze that forever reeked of death sequestered our dry food. I crammed my portion of the freezer with boxes of crackers that were to become my only sustenance in the weeks ahead. 

The lack of nutrition ravaged my body and mind. The world became a giant funhouse with tilted floors, moving walls, and undulant lighting. The scientist inside me lectured about the need for vitamins and protein. With her whispering in my ear, I wrapped my fingers around the fridge handle, held my breath, and pulled the door open. Hantavirus wafted over me, coating my skin and clothes, yet I forced myself to take a boiled egg. After swallowing the poison, I wandered to my metal tomb and waited for the symptoms of death to creep in and take me. 

Waking up each morning became a surprise.

Clipboard clenched in my hand, I hiked mountains in forty-degree heat under the Okanagan sun. 

Antivenom at the ready in my pack, my eyes darted between grass and shrub as I kept watch for rattlesnakes and black widow spiders. I picked off ticks and prayed that Lyme disease would not kill me before Hantavirus. 

My mind began to fog, but one thought remained clear: I was dying. If Hantavirus was not killing my body, it was winning the battle against my mind. I spent my days clambering up and down those hills as I obsessed about ways to escape. If I could find my way to a town, could I get on a plane? 

But I had to work. And I wasn’t a quitter. So I stayed.

My heart rate settled on a new hummingbird beat. My lungs lived in constant constriction as though a giant rubber band was squeezing my ribs while I strained to pull in oxygen to feed my starving body. 

While marking the distinctive sound of a California quail on my survey log one particularly warm morning, my fingers began to tingle as though my blood was carbonated. I felt the wave of panic coming for me like a tsunami on the horizon that I could not outrun, and I braced myself for the assault that marked the onset of my final battle. My muscles seized, the landscape blurred, and a cold sweat swept over my skin. Terror gripped me, suffocating me, as the tidal wave consumed my body and mind.

Each attack shattered me, leaving only a lifeless rag.

At the camp, I became a recluse. I ate lonely dinners of crackers while the birders and batters, whispering and stealing glances, huddled together on the other side of the mess. Paul occasionally came over to check on me.

My sweltering tin can was a prison but also my haven as it was the one defence that the mice had not yet breached. Until the bat crew trailers became infected. 

Bernadette awoke to a mouse inside her pillow. Nicki emerged from trailer 8 swearing at the forest, incensed that she had found black pellets scattered on her covers. A mouse army brandishing death was knocking on my door.

Fingers weak and trembling, I picked up the camp phone and reached out to my parents, half a continent away. I needed their voices to calm the evil influences in my head. My dad heard the rattle of death in my lungs and, before I got a full sentence out, he told me to come home. My escape was set.

I told Susan I was leaving that night. She stormed off, sputtering words about finishing her graduate research. We never said goodbye. 

I packed up my trailer. Postcards and letters came off the walls. I shut off my fan and packed my CDs while my dad and Ryan coordinated my rescue. Ryan started the twelve-hour drive while my great uncle who lived an hour away planned to meet me at the nearest town’s ice cream joint. 

I stood in the middle of the geology camp, backpack clinging to my war-ravaged frame, while birders and batters watched and whispered. As I stared down the long, gravel road that led out of this hellhole, I calculated the time it would take to walk to town. I would not make nightfall. 

Paul wandered over. “Do you need a ride?”

Thank goodness for Paul. He left me on the curb outside “The Extra Scoop” where I waited for my great uncle to collect what was left of me. With sun-bronzed skin draped over sinewy muscles and slight bones, my body had lost fifteen pounds from a figure that already had no extra to spare. I waited for the great exodus of anxiety from my body, but it sat inside and burrowed deep, infecting me like Hantavirus. 

I had escaped from hell, but the war the mice had started was not over. 

Days later, I wandered through my parents’ house in a daze. My mind had been altered by mouse feces and posters warning of my death; my mind did not understand that the threat was gone. I was a ghost that watched the world happen around me.

Panic attacks continued to thrash me, so my doctor pumped me full of antidepressants and ushered me out the door. Drugs took the edge off and pulled me from my daze, but the world had shifted and would not straighten. 

Although my doctor had abandoned me to a life of medication, I refused to believe this was my new normal. I weaned myself off the meds, but the world remained shifted. Anxiety sat inside like a bear in deep hibernation, stirring to an unpredictable schedule of springs. For ten years I whispered lullabies to that sleeping bear in hopes that I could keep her asleep. She would roll over occasionally, but I would stifle her with a pillow every time. 

A sleeping bear can only lie for so long before she awakens with an insatiable hunger. I saw a new doctor and, unable to hold on any longer, broke down in his office and begged for meds. Deeply concerned, he sent me to a therapist. I had been drowning for over a decade and felt lost but, slowly and delicately, my therapist pulled me from the slurry.

I could finally breathe again. 

Reawakened, I look back on my experiences with a new understanding of my own psyche, and I am now able to empathize with those suffering from anxiety or depression in a way I never could before. I will always have my sleeping bear with me, but I have learned how to live with her. I have visited – have been a front row guest to – the terror of my own mind. 

And I am thankful for the experience.

Fuck you, mice. I win.