Guidelines For Mountain-Lion Safety

— for Susan Edwards

I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD the first time I saw the total interconnected harmonic clockwork of the cosmos, and it happened again when I was seven or eight, and possibly once more when I was reading the great philosophers and experimenting with hallucinogens in my late teens. Since then my confidence in an omniscient reconciliation of the Apollonian with the Dionysian has gradually deteriorated to the point that, at the age of fifty-four, when explaining the most elementary concepts to my seven-year-old son, Tom, I have to admit that I don’t really know anything. A gas is . . . Wind is . . . The sky is . . . Evil and destruction are . . . Let’s just say that the capital of Florida is Tallahassee and leave it at that.

Most difficult for Tom, since he has recently been diagnosed with a learning disorder that features language and social impairment, is the concept of friendship.

“I have no friends,” he declares vehemently.

Well, you will one day. I hope. And to prepare the way, let me explain to you what friendship is. It’s another of those cherished articles of faith that I’ve recited to you with specious authority over the years, like working hard, telling the truth, and giving more than you take. I really have no idea what friendship is, or how you ever truly know who your friends are, or why friendships sometimes fizzle, or how human beings you trust and hold dear can turn out to be such resounding disappointments.

As a matter of fact, I started out very much like my son: a friendless boy with two doting parents. My father was a schoolteacher, and ours was the only white-collar household on the block. An outcast and target for all the blue-collar kids with violent, drunk, and abusive parents, I was in the habit of staying mostly indoors, living in my imagination, producing my own satirical magazines, practicing my violin, and reading Time, Smithsonian, and The New Yorker. I was sick much of the time: asthmatic, weak, and thin. I finished a book every three or four days. Children would often present themselves at my door in the guise of friendship in order to lure me out and beat me up. I invented fantasy adventure games that required no other human participants. Until Clifton Harding’s arrival on the block in the summer before fifth grade, I placed friendship in the same category as unicorns and world peace.

Cliff’s navy family moved into our San Diego neighborhood in the summer of 1966. Cliff was athletic, first pick of any playground team, a proven fighter, a big, healthy, outdoorsy, good-looking fellow with a turned-up nose and a Dudley Do-Right grin — the opposite of me in every respect. He had a paper route and was a member of the Boy Scouts and the secret Order of DeMolay (a sort of junior Masons). On the weekends he cut lawns.

At first Cliff did not deign to meet any of the other children in his new neighborhood. Perhaps he was upset about being uprooted or was too busy, or maybe he had somehow divined their cruelty. Nevertheless he came to my rescue several times when the other children tried to bully me. Once, I was being taunted while carrying my violin home from school. Another time a boy faked a cough and launched an egg-yolk-sized blob of mucus onto the back of my jacket. Both times Cliff intervened, demanding not only restitution but apologies. He was not afraid to fight; on the contrary, he enjoyed it. His defense of me seemed to derive more from some mid-twentieth-century tv-cowboy code of honor than from anything personal.

To my surprise Cliff and I became friends. I believe it owed to the fact that we were two of only a few children on our block who lived in sane households. Our lower-middle-class neighborhood had recently crumbled under the license of the times, and many families were divided, parents divorced, children drowning under waves of chemical pleasure like flies in syrup. Why were the mom and dad drunk? Why did they not seem to care? Why did they molest and beat their daughters and sons or, at best, leave them unattended? Why didn’t someone clean the kitchen, fix the heater, mow the lawn, have that broken-down car towed away? Why did everyone give up? What was the source of all this anguish and despair? Why, in every house, was the television always on?

My friendship with Cliff had a salubrious effect on me. I was drawn out of my house and onto a bicycle and a basketball court. Cliff insisted that we learn how to surf. He brought me into his lawn-mowing enterprise and split his earnings with me. He took up the cello and joined me in the school orchestra. On Sundays I’d get up with him before the sun — often after staying overnight at his house — to help him deliver his morning papers. Even my asthma began to subside. My parents were pleased at my progress and choice of friends. At their urging, as much as I distrusted groups, I almost joined both the Boy Scouts of America and the secret Order of DeMolay.

Cliff had tall, coal-eyed parents who drank Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee, laughed a great deal, and smoked cigarettes like the movie stars of their day. Though they had moved there from Illinois, the Hardings were originally from the South, evinced by that slight interrogative lilt in their speech and the “Jo” embedded in the first names of all the women in the household. The youngest was Heidi Jo, the next was May Jo, and the mother was Bobbi Jo, and they were not ashamed to be addressed thus in a neighborhood devoid of feminine Jo’s. Mr. Harding was a navy commander and looked the part, with his broad build, tightly buttoned jackets, and severe slab of a forehead. Mrs. Harding was a homemaker and a Girl Scout leader who gave us rides to the beach and the pool hall and the Helix Theater — our church — where we worshiped our idols and saints: the misunderstood outcasts of the movies. Mrs. Harding had once had throat cancer, Cliff told me, and she had been given only a few months to live, but here she was, still reading Valley of the Dolls, doing the cha-cha in her chartreuse cocktail pants, and loading up a picnic basket with peaches, Cokes, and chicken-salad sandwiches.

Cliff idolized his father and imitated everything from the way he walked and the cut of his hair to the angle of his cap and the black peacoat he wore in winter. Cliff quoted the old commander as if he were Bartlett and was content to spend the day doing whatever his father did: working in the yard, lounging in the recliner in front of a John Wayne movie, or changing the spark plugs in the Chrysler Town and Country Estate.

Then, one summer day after I’d helped Cliff mow Mrs. Davidson’s lawn, we were lounging barefoot in my front yard, sucking on cherry Slurpees from the 7-Eleven, when a sharp crack tattered the air. We sat up.

“What was that?” Cliff asked.

“Firecracker?” I said.

Cliff shook his head. “More like a backfire.”

“There’s no cars,” I said.

“Somebody shot someone.” He scrambled to his feet.

Cliff’s younger sister Heidi Jo came sprinting down the street in a red bikini, flip-flops clacking. “Dad shot himself!” she cried, panting. “You better come. Oh, God, Cliffie. He shot himself!”

I pictured brains splattered across walls, the unthinkable loss of a parent. Cliff threw aside his drink and tore off after his sister. I sat there in disbelief, afraid to move, the shadows from the tree limbs spreading like cracks across the earth. A few minutes later the white ambulance came yowling around the corner.

That afternoon I sat in my house on the gold couch, looking up at the dark oil paintings and the dust collecting on the piano. My mother wrung her hands. A neighbor knocked on the screen door and declared Mr. Harding dead. She explained that Mr. Harding had had a problem with narcotics. Also his wife drank and slept around. (“Oh, you mean you hadn’t heard?”) But perhaps the neighbor herself had been drinking, because we found out a few minutes later that Cliff’s father would live. He’d only shot himself in the shoulder.

“The shoulder?” the children gleefully chimed after word got around, because they understood well enough the difference between an honest and virile suicide attempt such as John Wayne might make and a feeble and unforgivable plea for help.

For a while Cliff was like a boy who’d stepped on a land mine: dead gaze, zombie gait. The children of our neighborhood, accustomed to hero failure and thinking this a fitting comeuppance for a young man who’d had the audacity to presume that his home life might ever be happy, tittered behind his back. I’d go down to visit a morose Cliff and see a thin Mr. Harding sitting on his island of a beige couch, surrounded by newspapers, arm in a sling, the smoke from his cigarette veiling his face.

But Cliff rebounded. Men, after all, were allowed to get knocked down, as long as they got back up. Even when his father moved to an apartment on the other side of the interstate, Cliff took it in stride, hitchhiking over there every weekend to visit him. When his father got a new honey-pot girlfriend, a perplexed and disheartened Cliff made room for her. When his parents finally divorced (the last time I ever saw Cliff cry), he faltered but bounced back. When Mr. Harding and his new bride moved to Delaware, Cliff brooded for a time but then put the matter away. When his mother began to bring home strange men from the bar, he bore down and made adjustments. Bad things kept happening to him, but he kept popping back up, each time a little more disoriented, a little stiffer and glassier of eye, a little more like a jester in a ruffled silk blouse on the end of a broken spring.

The year of his parents’ divorce Cliff grew six inches and put on thirty pounds. A General Custer mustache sprouted under his nose, and his personality hardened like a blob of amber sap. The taunting children, cowed by his metamorphosis and eager fists, quickly learned to leave him alone. Cliff abandoned his paper route and his lucrative lawn-mowing business. He quit the cello and said bye-bye to baseball, Boy Scouts, and DeMolay.

I’M AWARE THAT seven-year-old Tom is watching me every second, integrating what I’ve become into what he will be. I am, whether I like it or not, his original god. It would behoove him to find a better one soon, especially before he begins to read the detailed accounts of my blundering escapades. At the same time, all my peregrinations and transgressions have given me a few practical insights. I at least know the difference between a child who is loved and one who is not.

Because of my work schedule I’m able to spend a good deal of time with Tom. I rouse him in the morning, cook his breakfast, walk him to school, pick him up again at three. He accompanies me on my weekly tavern trips, sits at the bar with a lemonade while I have my wine or beer. When he is not in catechism class (his mother is Catholic) or at the college swimming pool, leaping otterlike through the blue, he enjoys coming with me to the rural school two miles east of town where I clean the desks, floors, and toilets. Recently, to his utter and terrified fascination, there have been several mountain-lion incidents at this school. Once, the place was locked down because of a sighting, and another day a lion was shot dead. An expert on the animals came to speak with the children and posted on the classroom walls this advisory:
   
    Mountain Lion Safety
   
    If you encounter a mountain lion:
    • Don’t approach it.
    • Never turn and run.
    • Face the lion and stand upright.
    • Try to make yourself look as big as possible.
    • Some ways of looking bigger is [sic] to open your
       jacket, hold up your pack or bicycle.
    • Throw rocks or sticks at the lion. Yell and make
       lots of noise.
    • But if you are ever attacked, your best chance is to
       stay on your feet and fight back. These tactics will
       usually convince the lion that you are not prey
       and make it run away.
    • Leave the animal an avenue of escape.
    • Report any mountain lion observations.

By the time we leave the schoolhouse, it is usually dark. Tom has done his homework in Miss Schmid’s room, and we are miles from home, all alone upon the prairie under the stars, the owls hoo-hooing and the raccoons rustling in the trees. Tom asks the same wide-eyed questions over and over: Do mountain lions eat people? Do they eat children? Can they knock over our car?

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