Incognito

Sam was a tall, wiry boy with close-cropped blond curly hair who wore tight Wrangler jeans and flannel shirts. Sam wasn’t too into team sports, but he was an outdoorsman. He liked camping, fishing, kayaking and bow hunting. He was country, and he was one of the boys I hung out with in middle school. I never exactly crushed on him, but I did appreciate him. He and his friends took me in when other kids had shunned me. Being in his lunch crowd provided some protection from bullies, and I didn’t feel so alone and unwanted when I was with them. Sam talked about sex in a crass way, and he sometimes bragged about his conquests. I took him at his word at the time, but now I suspect much of what he said about his experience was exaggerated or fabricated. However, he was a sexy boy. If he had asked me for a blowjob, I would have dropped to my knees in front of him without hesitation. I would have been happy for the opportunity, but no such invitation was ever extended.

Sam and I had gym class together in our freshman year of high school. I was relieved to see him that first day, but he never looked in my direction. I got the sense he was deliberately avoiding me. We didn’t do anything on the first day. The coach assigned us lockers and told us what we were required to wear during his class. Then he left, leaving us with nothing to do for about twenty minutes. Sam stood near the door waiting for the bell to ring. I went over and stood beside him, but he didn’t say anything. In fact, he seemed kind of nervous. Finally, I spoke to him. I made some kind of silly joke hoping to break the ice. But he didn’t laugh. Instead, he glanced sideways at me and said in a low voice as if he didn’t want anyone else to hear, “Cottle, if you talk to me again, I’ll kick your ass.”

Of course, I was hurt and shocked, but I wasn’t mad at Sam. It was just further confirmation that I had nothing to offer. I didn’t know why anyone would want to talk to me, so how could I hold Sam’s snub against him? Years later, I realized Sam was afraid. He always seemed confident and assured. He exuded masculine toughness in my eyes. I never imagined he would have his own insecurities. But high school was new to us, and gym class was a hyper-macho environment. Boys strutted and postured in an attempt to establish dominance. And since I didn’t play that game, I was the lowest in the pecking order. Sam didn’t know where he stood yet, and he didn’t know if he could afford to take me in as he had done in middle school. Befriending a weaker, less popular kid might be viewed as a sign of strength, but it was risky. If the boys who didn’t know Sam saw him being chummy with me, they might assume he was a faggy outsider, too.

I abided by Sam’s wishes and didn’t bother him anymore. Oddly enough, a couple of years later, we passed in the hall, and he waved and said hello as if nothing had happened. But that was way into the future that first day of high school. After gym class, I knew I was on my own again.

High school wasn’t as dangerous as middle school, generally speaking, and that’s because many of the worst bullies, the ones who were potentially violent, had quit before making it to the ninth grade. Some were probably even locked up. However, there was a sharper division between the supposedly cool, popular, usually rich kids, the not so popular kids and the untouchables. I was aware of this stratification system from the start, but I didn’t know how to navigate it. I was shy, introverted and socially awkward, and I had a huge secret. I wanted and needed some kind of validation, but I knew I couldn’t let anyone get too close. It was a balancing act that was beyond my skill set.

Just as in middle school, lunch was one of the most unpleasant periods of the day. While in class, we were expected to sit quietly. That came easily enough for someone who didn’t like to be noticed, but that stricture didn’t apply to lunch period. You could socialize during that hour, but for me, that was like jumping off the high dive at the swimming pool. The windowless lunch room was small and crowded, so I couldn’t sit by myself. I had to wander around until I found an empty chair and hopefully some friendly faces. I must have looked like a lost puppy. Once I sat down, the others at the table would continue talking as if I weren’t there. I didn’t know how to insinuate myself into the conversation, so I didn’t say anything. I felt conspicuous and unwanted. Everyone was chatting and laughing while I was being ignored. The situation was often so stressful it caused intense headaches. My temples throbbed. To this day, anything that remotely resembles a school cafeteria will bring on flashbacks and a sense of panic and dread.

I think I was on the edge during my freshman year. I was friendless. School did nothing but reinforce my sense of utter worthlessness, and Mother’s mental health was deteriorating, too. As soon as I got home, I’d grab some junk food, lock myself in my room and watch my little black and white television until it was time to go to bed.

Within a few weeks, I stopped trying to eat lunch at school. I couldn’t stand the rejection. So I began passing that period leaning against the wall near the office. That’s where many of the misfits gathered. We were too damaged to trust or reach out to each other, so we remained imprisoned in our private torments. I don’t know how we survived. We were like flowers trying to grow in the shade. We were too timid to complain or act out, so our distress went unnoticed, but make no mistake about it, many of those kids standing alone with their heads bowed were in terrible danger. Many of us were potential victims of suicide, but in the world we inhabited, there was no safety net for us. Quiet kids were easy to overlook.

Perhaps it was for the best that my behavior didn’t ring any warning bells at that time. If Mother’s condition had come to the attention of the wrong authority figure, I might have been sent to a foster home. That, more than likely, would have only made things worse. There was also the prevailing belief that troubled boys should have a heaping dose of discipline thrust upon them, which usually meant rough contact sports and a drill sergeant type getting up in your face and telling you to “man up.” But boot camp was the antithesis of what I needed.

I could have used some counterexamples that challenged the deeply ingrained attitudes about sex and what boys and girls were supposed to be like. Knowing other men and boys like myself would have been nice. Knowing an older gay couple would have been wonderful. Dating an older boy, maybe a college boy, would have been like a dream if he were patient and good to me. Someone with a little more knowledge and a willingness to impart it in a gentle way. Someone who could have made me feel wanted, esteemed, respected, desired. To this day, I sometimes daydream of meeting such a prince when I was fifteen. Ah, to have had some sweet, lanky kid pick me up in his decrepit Gremlin, take me to a secluded spot—there are many in West Virginia—and have him say, “What do you want to do with me, Gary? We can do anything, just ask.” I would have wet myself with glee if I had seen a magazine photo of two cute guys holding hands. Even seeing some gay porn would have been revelatory. If only I could have been magically transported to New York City to watch the Pride Parade. I knew there were boys like me in the world. I knew there were at least a few more besides myself in my hometown. I at least was aware of that much, so I was a little better off than gay boys who came of age before the 1980s. But I didn’t know how to make contact. I was like a spy who needed to come in from the cold. Potential friends were around, but they were allusive and invisible, incognito…like me.

Dark Score Dreams

My favorite Stephen King novel is Bag of Bones. That’s what I took with me to Yosemite. After dark, you can’t do much in the park, so I’d head to my tent-cabin and immerse myself in the story until I got sleepy. Bag of Bones doesn’t seem to be a favorite of many King fans, but I love it. Like so many of King’s best stories, Bones is much more than merely a supernatural thriller. At it’s core, the story is about real human problems: dealing with bullies, loss, facing mortality, moral ambiguity, the dark side of human nature and finding out surprising, even shocking and disturbing things about someone you’ve loved for years. Bag of Bones is wistful and elegiac from beginning to end, and it is deeply emotionally honest.

A big part of the appeal for me might be the lifestyle of the protagonist. Mike Noonan is a successful novelist, but not too successful. He’s sold enough copies of his books to make him independently wealthy, but not conspicuously rich. He can still walk around in public without many people recognizing him. He’s comfortable and hasn’t been seduced into wasting his money on private jets, mansions and designer clothes. He drives an ordinary car, wears a Timex and enjoys eating cheeseburgers at greasy spoons. He lives in a Victorian in Derry, but most of the story takes place at his woodsy summer home on Dark Score Lake. I can do without the ghosts, the heartache and the run-ins with a psychopathic billionaire, but I’d take the rest of it in a New York second, especially the lake house, Sara Laughs.

I’ve heard that many of the fictional communities in King’s novels are inspired by real places in Maine, so I wondered if Dark Score Lake had a factual counterpart. According to one article I came across, Dark Score is really Flagstaff Lake, a 20,000 acre body of water in Summerset and Franklin counties. I’d love to visit.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

I looked for fire damage on the way to Yosemite on Tuesday, and I did see patches of scorched earth and dead trees here and there. Surprisingly, there were signs of recent fire on the hills above Yosemite View Lodge. This motel shouldn’t be confused with Yosemite Lodge inside the park, but it is right outside the park entrance. Apparently, the Ferguson fire came horrifyingly close to Yosemite Valley.

It was sunny all the way to Yosemite, which isn’t unusual for this time of year, but as soon as we got to the park, I noticed storm clouds were rolling in. I intended to check in, drop my bag in my tent-cabin and spend the rest of the afternoon walking around. But it started raining, and then the shower turned into a thunderstorm. At first, I was annoyed, but then I remembered I hadn’t experienced a true thunderstorm in years. So I decided to appreciate it.

I hadn’t eaten. That morning, I was nervous about the trip, and I was afraid food would upset my stomach, but once I was in the park, my nerves settled, and I realized I was starving. So I ordered a single serving pizza at the Pizza Deck at Half Dome Village. I ate it under a patio umbrella as the sky flashed and grumbled. An employee told us we could eat our pizza in the bar even if we didn’t order alcohol due to the weather, but I elected to finish my early dinner alfresco.

It stopped raining by six, so I decided to walk down to Yosemite Village with my camera. The light was spectacular. I had never seen that kind of light in the park. The sky was still fairly dark, but rays of sunshine were highlighting the granite walls, including Half Dome.

I wanted to take the El Cap shuttle to the El Cap picnic area and walk around on that end of the park on Wednesday. I haven’t spent a lot of time down there. But the El Cap shuttle is a “summer service.” They used to keep it going until October, but this year, they shut it down the day after Labor Day. So I decided I would walk as far as the El Cap Bridge and come back on the other side of the Merced River. That would be about four miles down and four miles back.

I’ve been walking here at home, and I thought I was up to it. I thought I’d take it really slow and make a day of it. It wasn’t a race after all. I wanted to enjoy being in the park. And I did enjoy it…half of it, anyway, but I neglected to take a few things into consideration. When I’m here at home, I’m walking in air conditioned comfort. I don’t do all my walking at once. I walk for a few minutes six times a day, and I can drink as much water as I want.

On Wednesday morning, I took two bottles of water with me. I didn’t want to be weighed down, and I didn’t want to spend too much money, but I ran out of water by the time I got to the bridge. So there I was, a soon-to-be fifty-three year old man, considerably over weight out in the hot sun and four miles away from Yosemite Village. There is no place to get water down there, and because the El Cap shuttle wouldn’t be running again until next June, I couldn’t hop on a bus and head for the Village Store. The altitude may have been getting to me, too. 4,000 feet isn’t that high, but I’ve been living pretty close to sea level for over ten years.

I was already tired, but I thought surely I can go another four miles. I tried to convince myself it wasn’t that far even without water. I ran into a few people in the same predicament. An Indian couple in their sixties stopped me and asked where they could catch the shuttle. I told them I didn’t think there was a shuttle. I got the impression that the outing had been the husband’s idea, and the wife was not very happy. She told me in a sharp voice that they had been walking for five hours. After that, two English women asked me about the shuttle, so once again, I was the bearer of bad news. One said in her English accent, “They didn’t tell us that,” and the other said in her English accent, “No, they didn’t tell us that a-tall.”

Well, I trudged on, but I could only go a few feet before I started panting. I was sweating a lot, too. I was so thirsty. I don’t think I have ever been that thirsty in my life. The trail wasn’t packed, but people would pass me going in one direction or another about ever five or ten minutes, mostly young, fit people. I knew I should ask someone if they would give me some water. I tried to force myself to do it, but my shyness and social anxiety just wouldn’t let me. So I kept going. And I kept getting weaker, and I started feeling funny in my head. I also started stumbling, which isn’t good because there are big rocks everywhere in Yosemite. If you fall, you could hit your head on one of them. When I tried to sit down on one of those rocks, I completely missed it and ended up sprawled out on the ground. Luckily, I landed on a bed of pine needles.

I thought I was going to faint, so when the trail got close to the road, I cut through the woods, stood on the shoulder…and I stuck out my thumb. A few minutes earlier, I couldn’t bring myself to ask anyone for water, but now I was hitchhiking for the first time ever. I did my best Blanche DuBois impression and depended on the kindness of strangers. And it worked! It worked!

Within minutes, a couple stopped. They asked me where I needed to go. I said the nearest bus stop would be fine. In their car, I told them that I had run out of water and began feeling ill. They gave me a bottle of water and a piece of fruit. The lady explained that she had bone cancer, and this was their first trip to Yosemite. I got the impression she was checking off her bucket list in case the end was nigh. I thanked them profusely when they dropped me at the stop near the chapel. I wish I had thought to ask their names and maybe take their picture. This time it wasn’t my anxiety that prevented me from doing that. I was still feeling a bit disoriented. That was a scary episode, but it taught me a lesson. When you need it, ask for help. There are a lot of good people out there. Not everyone is a monster. It almost makes me cry thinking about how these people I had never seen before stopped for me when I was so afraid and feeling sick.

On Thursday, I was still a bit weak and rundown, but well enough to walk around a little. However, I stuck to the more developed side of Yosemite Valley. I was never far from a shuttle bus stop, so I could always head back to my tent-cabin if I needed to rest or a store for more water. I walked up to Mirror Lake, and then I walked along the stream back to Happy Isles.

When I’m in the park, part of the fun for me is people watching. I don’t get out much, so being around my fellow humans is quite the experience. And there are people from all over the world in the park. I hear all kinds of languages…French, Spanish, German, and many I can’t identify. Yosemite is woodsy but also cosmopolitan. I overheard one woman say she could tell the difference between grain and grass fed beef. I overheard a group of friends talking about ancient Greece. No one goes to Yosemite for the people, but they’re interesting nonetheless.

I had a memorable time, and enjoyable for the most part despite my little crisis. I’m glad I went, but it’s good to be home. I always sleep better in the park. The bed in my tent-cabin was comfortable, but the tent-cabin isn’t like home. The park is so expensive, too. The bill for my tent-cabin was sixty dollars more than expected, and even a peanut butter and jelly sandwich costs five dollars. I guess I should start saving for my next trip soon.