Ice Blocking by Megan Collins
“How do you open your mouth and speak the unspeakable?”
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I’ve always known I was born an untamed She-thing and that my wildness was the most sacred and valued of my possessions, even as a child. My mom would chirp chuckle my name when I came in with the sun on my back, all business, through the back yard. A pudgy child-fist full of her well-manicured flowers, bare-chested, with silt covered toes and branches in my hair. “Oh my wild thing,” she would say proudly. Before I knew woman or man or sex or pain I understood the wilderness that bloomed like rainforest flowers inside me. My heart beat warm and strong inside a chest containing swirling currents; worlds of imagination. Breathing was easy; each soft, delicate, flurry of moth wings against my ribcage a new experience while insect-like legs, mechanisms of motion, kicked it back up and out, clean and free; out, out, to the great blue beyond. I was just that girl, but a girl loved; rocked in a cradle of security where wonder and possibility lay right outside in the rich soil by the lemon tree. A girl raised wild, with dreams, is a powerful thing.
It was the summer of my senior year when Grief came to destroy my wilderness with his knives, poison, and charm. I was seventeen and certain with Thoreau’s Walden in hand, lips rouged with Wet and Wild’s #6, and a full ride ticket in my back pocket; a precious thing. My heart was a hive. A girl buzzing, in my tight cropped t-shirt and unblemished Chuck Taylors. A wild thing; a girl untouched by man.
We moved to a tiny town in the upper northwestern region of the United States where tall pines scrape the Canadian border. In the summer, the country is an exotic and intoxicating landscape of lush forest and open sky. In the winter, the town is landlocked in the tenacious grasp of the Sherman Pass; a frozen fortress where lives are lost annually when travelers do not respectfully navigate the deceptively treacherous passage.
I went to a church youth activity at the urging of my mother in order to meet people and as the sun set I saw their silhouetted shadows vanishing one after the other over a dark hill. They were “ice blocking,” a summer activity where you flirt with disaster and usually end up badly bruised or worse–in the emergency room. If preparation has been put into the making of the ice blocks you have a nice handle, a little security, to hold onto while you careen, downhill. At this event full of teenagers, no special preparations had been made–we were in swimsuits having swum in the river just before. Fresh vulnerable youth, half naked with fevered sunburns; we sat at the top of a golden hill on ice.
Grief approached me from the bottom of the hill where the flaxen sun had punched one last hole into an increasingly black and blue sky. His lip was bleeding and his dark eyes looked crazy with experience and pain. In his tanned and outstretched hands, he held a huge beat up block of ice covered in dirt and grass, as if in offering to me. My throat froze and I felt the ice beneath me melt. I wanted, and the buzzing in my heart grew so loud that I barely felt my feet float over wet blades of grass as I began my descent.
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How do you open your mouth and speak the unspeakable? A pain so sharp, so all encompassing, so total, as to annihilate a life? You go numb. You swallow the words so deep within your breath that you feel yourself being buried by it.
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A couple of months into my high school year, Grief took me out. There wasn’t much to do in no man’s land; the town closes early. The movie theater was thirty minutes away so we did that. He said he’d drive me home, but instead he parked the car in an abandoned church parking lot, sliding to a stop on the slick, frozen ground. Gone was the warm summer sun and with it the hum of those that bask in it. Dark and cold piled against the car door while a shiver of nerves raced down my spine. A crisp autumn leaf rattled, caught against the frame.
I’d hoped he would hold my hand, maybe a kiss. I just wanted a taste of love, life’s excitement, but when I turned toward him in those cheap splintered pleather seats of his parent’s car he had drawn a small weeping icicle, from nowhere, that he held like a dagger in his hands. He said he was so cold and I was so warm while we sat and I felt time turn, sickly and frail. He held the ice differently this time than when I had met him on the hill, and with a glint in his eye he made the object disappear inside me. There was no offering made, only taking–and, to his defense, I didn’t say no–at least not very loudly. A whisper of wind across the mountain range of me and him escaped my lips and the ice calved and broke off inside me. That night I fell asleep with a scream caught in my throat, flooding my pillow with tears, and dreamt of a She Beast–all arms and legs swinging, skating on thin ice.
When I woke up and saw the frost coming to hard crystals outside my bedroom window I committed myself to marrying him. I had been taught that when you “gave yourself away,” it was for life. So I dug my nails like crampons into the slippery sides of faith and trust and sold off my independence, like it was a parcel of land, for a bread-tie ring and dreams.
And I prayed.
The marriage had its good and bad days, at first. Grief was incomprehensibly damaged, but street smart, and he knew that to inflict too much pain in the beginning would destroy all the fun. I didn’t feel the lies like poison that seeped across our bedclothes, nor did I realize the loneliness and estrangement his words built up around me. He would disappear late in the dead of night and return in the morning stinking of skunky smoke mixed with the metallic scent of blood and sex. I wanted none of it. I wanted to dig my jagged nails into the wooden floor boards. To lay my head down in the dark, damp crawl space beneath the bed and never get up.
Strange numbers appeared on the caller ID while on the other end of the line I heard only the sound of trees in my wilderness snapping; screaming in an electrical storm. Violent wind in my ears while I sat in a lifeless room. Toxic air hung so thick I couldn’t see the sun rise while starry nights were spent in hiding under mountains of covers. Alone. His moods made the seasons swing in extreme and unnatural ways.
So I had a couple of kids. Two squalling Wild Things of my own, to warm the cold that crept ever closer. To not feel so desperately, alone. Their hungry baby fists dug into my Mom flesh and I fed them, happily. On their breath I smelled a fresh, unbridled river; their eyes swirling nebulas of hope and possibility and I protected them, for a time, from the ravagings of Grief.
The first time Grief laid physical hands on me in the form of violence was on a family vacation. We were back in Washington staying in a themed hotel, like a glorified truck stop off I5 North, where the children could sleep on bunkbeds held up by trunks of painted fake trees and frolic for hours in a magical park full of chlorinated water slides and simulated wave pools. “Come stay in the Kids Kamp Kabin” the advertisements said. “Your wolf pups will enjoy a respite from the hotel’s water park inside their own Kozy den with TV!”
Grief was angry about something and waxing between brooding and hysteria. “You aren’t giving up enough of your land; yourself,” he complained. “Your selfishness is the cause for my late night voyeurism and self-medication,” he said. His mouth opened and closed as I stood there and stared in fascination at his rage. I was so tired.
His hand came up as I switched my gaze to the blue sky outside the hotel window and he slapped me hard against my cheek. I heard the crack before I felt any of the pain, like the felling of a giant redwood and I sighed as I saw what looked like birds, hundreds of them, flock to the sky as I fell; my wooden body to the bed. His huge hands wrapped around my neck and I felt a gorge open up inside of me. Like struggling to swim up to the surface of water from underneath a powerful waterfall. Kicking was futile so I lay still. I would be the glacier sliding through rock. Somewhere in the back of my mind, as my consciousness ebbed and flowed came the image of the She beast, a flame of wild auburn hair, and the scraping sounds of blades on ice.
Bad, worse, severe, extreme, pain. Words fail to move Grief.
Between my devotion to the kids and trying to survive Grief I had lost so much weight. I knew I wasn’t eating right, wasn’t sleeping right, and I was cold all the time. I was trapped in a relentless blizzard. Lost in a desolate landscape. Preserve, outlive. I walked the hollow halls of our house by the lake wearing a full length down J. Crew jacket my mother had bought me several Christmas’s before. I never took it off, even for bed. I knew it looked ridiculous to wear with summer approaching, but it felt like my limbs were fed an intravenous drip of liquid nitrogen. Skin stretched over bones and freezing air. The rigor of what felt like lifetimes settling into joints much too young to be feeling so much pain. My heart flopped in odd rhythms inside its boney cage. An alien object of collapsed ventricles and flesh. He locked me in the bedroom, told me not to come out. Thankfully I had put the children to bed. Sweet child beasts dreaming of lands of their own.
Trapped. In grief, in my marriage. He told me to stay in the bedroom, stay put with a shove, but I heard noises outside the door. Unnatural noises, pained noises that oozed their way through cracks in the doorframe. I was afraid. I wanted a way out. I slid a nail file through the lock and crept out quietly. I hoped he wouldn’t hear me, too caught up in his own craziness to notice a bird take flight; but the old house with its cantankerous noises was tired of pretending to be strong and gave away my footstep. As the floor groaned, I felt a tear freeze mid-fall down my cheek and Grief came raging down the hall in psychotic fury. His shrill screams were so loud that the hall lights flickered like flames while light bounced off a knife he held shaking, ready to inflict the final blow. My heart? My gut? He swiped it towards me and I felt a tug of cloth as feathers flew out with the wind.
Somehow I found the strength to push him away and he crashed to the floor, weeping. He held the knife to his own throat, its blade releasing a river of blood.
I grabbed the children and ran.
It is now many years later. I have remarried. Together we planted trees in our backyard and built a garden. Last I heard Grief was locked up in Idaho. Put away for threatening to murder his most recent ex and dismember her body. He told her he’d hide her body so well that her family would never be able to identify her.
There are times I find myself looking over my shoulder. Times I’ve wondered if I will ever be free. Grief lives but freedom is a word for Wild Things. With my feet steeped in rich earth, I wear a mantel of sunshine, plant seeds, and I breathe.
I am a Wild Thing.
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Header image courtesy of Kelcey Morette. To view more of her work, go here.
Megan Collins is a real life Wild Thing living in the suburban jungles of Portland, Oregon. She loves art, deep rich earth, free flowing forms of water, suckling her babes, her husband, two mini schnauzers, not wearing pants and all things corporeal. She writes to explore and understand the wilderness inside herself, to turn over and examine the soft parts she had buried on foreign shores, and to let go of those things that do not feed her soul. She is a student of the nature that drives us all into the ground and a substitute teacher.